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h i s t o r y When Germany attacked Russia in 1941, Churchill refused to withdraw any of his denunciations of the communist leadership, but he did famously remark, ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’ His wartime association with Stalin was a strange, contradictory affair: Churchill the romantic liked to see it as a heroic partnership of anti-fascist crusaders; Churchill the pragmatist knew he was allied with a bloodstained tyrant. When, towards the end of the war, Stalin’s tyranny was made hideously manifest in Poland, the freedom of which Britain was in theory fighting for, Churchill contemplated Operation Unthinkable. This was a revitalised version of his former ambition to kill the Bolshie and kiss the Hun. Yet Jonathan Walker, who has now produced the first full-scale study of the 1945 proposal, says nothing about its post-Great War predecessor. This is a pity because it illustrates the fact that Churchill was tenacious as well as impulsive, wedded to long-held ideas yet the champion of daring improvisation. His willingness to commission a feasibility study of a new conflict before the current one had finished also needs to be seen in a wider and still more paradoxical context. Churchill found war irresistibly ‘delicious’ while acknowledging its unbearable barbarism. Moreover, the cold warrior of the ‘iron curtain’ speech of 1946 was the prime mover of détente with the Soviet Union during the early 1950s – he even had to answer charges of appeasing Stalin. If Walker is thin on the big picture, he uses original documents to excellent effect in his detailed portrayal of Operation Unthinkable itself. Reporting to Churchill on 24 May 1945, just over a fortnight after Germany surrendered, the Joint Planning Staff confirmed his view that it comprised ‘the whole machinery of negation’. Admittedly the planners reckoned that in any conflict with the Soviet Union Britain would have air and naval superiority. But they concluded that the battle-hardened Red Army would enjoy a decisive advantage on the ground, fielding twice as much armour and four times as many troops. Even if the British mounted a surprise attack, reinforced Lure of the Arcane The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy Theodore Ziolkowski Fascination with the arcane is a driving force in this comprehensive survey of conspiracy fiction. Ziolkowski traces the evolution of cults, orders, lodges, secret societies, and conspiracies through various literary manifestations— drama, romance, epic, novel, opera—from Euripides’s Bacchae to Umberto Eco to the thrillers of the twenty-first century. £26.00 cloth • £26.00 ebook Distributed by John Wiley • Tel: 01243 843291 • press.jhu.edu by remnants of the defeated Wehrmacht, it was likely to meet the fate of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. The odds would be quite overwhelming without American support, said the planning staff, and it was obvious that this would be withheld. Harry Truman was not told about Unthinkable (though Stalin probably knew about it thanks to his spies), but he shared Roosevelt’s suspicion that Churchill would fight to the last GI in defence of the British Empire. In any case the new president wanted peace, even if it meant conniving at Russia’s rape of Poland. The dominions, especially Australia, would almost certainly have agreed. So would the British public, recently exposed to the horrors of Belsen and long fed on propaganda about the heroism of its Soviet ally – Clementine Churchill was on a goodwill tour of Russia even as Operation Unthinkable was being conceived. No wonder Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, dismissed it as ‘fantastic and … unthinkable!’ In response to this opposition Churchill carried out an abrupt volte-face. He now demanded a plan to defend Britain against a Soviet Union that would have the power, after American withdrawal from Europe, to advance to the North Sea and the Atlantic. But the code name Unthinkable should be kept to indicate that it remained ‘a precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency’. It became less hypothetical in July 1945 when the atomic bomb was successfully tested. This more than compensated for the might of the Red Army, as Churchill was quick to appreciate. If the Soviets misbehaved ‘we could just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev,’ he remarked jubilantly. ‘And now where are the Russians!!!!’ Mercifully Churchill had no opportunity to exercise such nuclear blackmail and when the Soviet Union got the bomb in 1949 he settled for a balance of terror. Three years before that, however, America developed its own edition of Unthinkable, a plan for a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union with conventional weapons codenamed Operation Pincher. It too proved abortive and the Third World War was postponed – for the nonce. To order this book for £13.59, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38 Literary Review | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 8
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h i s t o r y a n dre a s t ua r t Trading Places Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture By Gaiutra Bahadur (Hurst & Co 274pp £20) The exigencies of sugar have shaped the modern world. This ‘noble condiment’, which was virtually unknown in the West before the Crusades, became by the 15th century as valuable as pearls and as sought after as musk. Over the next couple of centuries desire for the commodity dubbed the ‘white gold’ grew exponentially across all social classes; and so thousands of adventurers from the Old World ‘took ship’ for the New in order to cultivate sugar cane and become rich. Their migration precipitated another mass movement of people, this time a forced one in which millions of African slaves were transported to territories as varied as Brazil and Barbados, Cuba and Louisiana to labour in the cane fields. By the 18th century sugar was as significant to the geopolitics of the age as oil in the 20th century. most menial work and had the lowest status on the newly rejuvenated sugar plantations. Over the following eight decades the British would ferry more than a million of these maligned workers (a quarter of whom were women) across the globe to places as varied as British Guiana, Trinidad, Surinam, Mauritius and Fiji. Bahadur is clear to note that ‘indenture ships were not slave ships’, but they were certainly bad enough to be going on with. On vessels with innocuous names such as Hesperus and Whitby, servants who had committed themselves to labour in the New World for up to seven years in the hope that they would return home enriched Arrival, too, was a terrible letdown. Instead of ‘the land of milk, honey and gold’ that the recruiters in India had conjured up to ensnare their desperate victims, many of the places were unspeakable. Indeed Demerara, where Bahadur’s ancestor was destined to disembark, was rightly known as a ‘white man’s grave’ because of its high death rates. Whatever the newcomers’ race, however, they perished extravagantly – as a result of long hours labouring under the unforgiving tropical sun, terrible housing, poor food, floggings and other punishments. It is no wonder that only a quarter of the Indians who left the subcontinent ever returned to their homeland, or that some historians have retrospectively described indenture as ‘a new form of slavery’. Someone once said that migration is a bit like murder: if you have done it once, it is easier to do it again. So it is no surprise that later generations of the author’s family chose this option. In 1987 they fled the troubled realities of British Guiana, The history of sugar after emancipation is almost as tumultuous and bloody as the centuries that preceded it, as Gaiutra Bahadur explores in her remarkable book, Coolie Woman. She chronicles the extraordinary but neglected saga of indentured labour that evolved when the British began to replace slavery on their sugar plantations worldwide. But the book is more than this: it is also a highly personal account that traces the history of the author’s maternal line to the present day. As Bahadur clambers down the generations, she provides the reader with a meticulous and lushly detailed family memoir. It is no wonder that she comments, ‘Colonialism and migration are inextricably joined in my family history. Colonialism caused us to migrate, first to British Guiana, then from independent Guyana still struggling to emerge from its colonial past.’ The story begins when Bahadur’s greatgrandmother, a high-caste Hindu woman, leaves India on an indentured contract to cultivate sugar across the globe. Workers like her from the Indian subcontinent were known as ‘coolies’, a term that swiftly became a derogatory one, referring to those brown-skinned people who did the The men and crew of an indenture vessel recently arrived in Georgetown, Demerara, c 1890 were allotted a space of just five square feet per person, only twice what most slave ships traversing the Middle Passage had allowed. Although conditions were not as diabolical as those endured by the slaves, the journey was three times longer and they still had to survive wormy rations and shipboard diseases. The situation was particularly bad for women, who often travelled alone and were vulnerable to frequent sexual exploitation, as well as still births, seasickness, homesickness and profound depression. still haunted by its slave past, and moved to New Jersey. There the new migrants would find the conditions almost as hostile as those that their ancestors had once encountered elsewhere in the New World. A group of local citizens who had dubbed themselves the ‘Dot Busters’, a nom de guerre that was a riff on the film Ghostbusters and referred to the bindis that some married women wore on their foreheads, decided to terrorise this new wave of immigrants. Their manifesto, distributed around d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 9

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h i s t o r y

When Germany attacked Russia in 1941, Churchill refused to withdraw any of his denunciations of the communist leadership, but he did famously remark, ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’ His wartime association with Stalin was a strange, contradictory affair: Churchill the romantic liked to see it as a heroic partnership of anti-fascist crusaders; Churchill the pragmatist knew he was allied with a bloodstained tyrant. When, towards the end of the war, Stalin’s tyranny was made hideously manifest in Poland, the freedom of which Britain was in theory fighting for, Churchill contemplated Operation Unthinkable.

This was a revitalised version of his former ambition to kill the Bolshie and kiss the Hun. Yet Jonathan Walker, who has now produced the first full-scale study of the 1945 proposal, says nothing about its post-Great War predecessor. This is a pity because it illustrates the fact that Churchill was tenacious as well as impulsive, wedded to long-held ideas yet the champion of daring improvisation. His willingness to commission a feasibility study of a new conflict before the current one had finished also needs to be seen in a wider and still more paradoxical context. Churchill found war irresistibly ‘delicious’ while acknowledging its unbearable barbarism. Moreover, the cold warrior of the ‘iron curtain’ speech of 1946 was the prime mover of détente with the Soviet Union during the early 1950s – he even had to answer charges of appeasing Stalin.

If Walker is thin on the big picture, he uses original documents to excellent effect in his detailed portrayal of Operation Unthinkable itself. Reporting to Churchill on 24 May 1945, just over a fortnight after Germany surrendered, the Joint Planning Staff confirmed his view that it comprised ‘the whole machinery of negation’. Admittedly the planners reckoned that in any conflict with the Soviet Union Britain would have air and naval superiority. But they concluded that the battle-hardened Red Army would enjoy a decisive advantage on the ground, fielding twice as much armour and four times as many troops. Even if the British mounted a surprise attack, reinforced

Lure of the Arcane The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy Theodore Ziolkowski Fascination with the arcane is a driving force in this comprehensive survey of conspiracy fiction. Ziolkowski traces the evolution of cults, orders, lodges, secret societies, and conspiracies through various literary manifestations— drama, romance, epic, novel, opera—from Euripides’s Bacchae to Umberto Eco to the thrillers of the twenty-first century.

£26.00 cloth • £26.00 ebook

Distributed by John Wiley • Tel: 01243 843291 • press.jhu.edu by remnants of the defeated Wehrmacht, it was likely to meet the fate of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.

The odds would be quite overwhelming without American support, said the planning staff, and it was obvious that this would be withheld. Harry Truman was not told about Unthinkable (though Stalin probably knew about it thanks to his spies), but he shared Roosevelt’s suspicion that Churchill would fight to the last GI in defence of the British Empire. In any case the new president wanted peace, even if it meant conniving at Russia’s rape of Poland. The dominions, especially Australia, would almost certainly have agreed. So would the British public, recently exposed to the horrors of Belsen and long fed on propaganda about the heroism of its Soviet ally – Clementine Churchill was on a goodwill tour of Russia even as Operation Unthinkable was being conceived. No wonder Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, dismissed it as ‘fantastic and … unthinkable!’

In response to this opposition Churchill carried out an abrupt volte-face. He now demanded a plan to defend Britain against a Soviet Union that would have the power, after American withdrawal from Europe, to advance to the North Sea and the Atlantic. But the code name Unthinkable should be kept to indicate that it remained ‘a precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency’. It became less hypothetical in July 1945 when the atomic bomb was successfully tested. This more than compensated for the might of the Red Army, as Churchill was quick to appreciate. If the Soviets misbehaved ‘we could just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev,’ he remarked jubilantly. ‘And now where are the Russians!!!!’

Mercifully Churchill had no opportunity to exercise such nuclear blackmail and when the Soviet Union got the bomb in 1949 he settled for a balance of terror. Three years before that, however, America developed its own edition of Unthinkable, a plan for a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union with conventional weapons codenamed Operation Pincher. It too proved abortive and the Third World War was postponed – for the nonce. To order this book for £13.59, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38

Literary Review | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 8

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