Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II Book

I give this book an unqualifiedly enthusiastic recommendation. Here is excruciatingly documented proof that Winston Churchill is truly one of the last century's greatest war criminals and genocidal, racist autocrats. In the case of the terrible famine that swept the Indian state of Bengal during World War II, we have a clear instance of a mass extermination that could, at multiple times, have been prevented by the actions of the British government under Churchill, but that was consciously allowed to take place purely for reasons of colonial/imperial convenience and, just as plainly, out of an abiding racialized hatred of South Asians (and all nonwhites really) on the part of Churchill, his closest advisers, and the British rulers and governors of Britain's Indian colony. We hear endlessly about the famines in the Ukraine in the USSR under Stalin and in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward, but not often about the historical factors that cast doubt on the allegation that these were catastrophes that the USSR or the PRC somehow refused to prevent. It's not at all clear that these famines, however much mistaken policies contributed to them, could have been prevented. But the famine in Bengal in the 1940s, which claimed millions of lives, clearly could have been prevented, at no great cost to Britain or its war effort. It was, Mukarjee's book convincingly shows, allowed to take place because it served British imperial interests, among them the desire to discredit Gandhi, the Congress Party nationalists and anyone else who opposed British rule. No wonder Hitler admired the British Raj so much and aspired to do the same in Russia and Eastern Europe as the British had done in India. Indeed, as this book also relates, Hitler would have jumped at the chance of a separate peace with Britain if only it had been willing to give him free rein in Russia and Eastern Europe--even offering military aid to the British for the defense of its empire. That the British imperialists refused this offer can be chalked up purely to their own imperial greed.