LAST OF THE VICEROYS
SIR,-1 have read your review on February 23 of Leonard Mosley's book The Last Days of the British Raj, and have now read the book. As your reviewer, Mr. Philip Mason, criticises me by name, I would ask that you allow me space for a short reply.
From his seclusion at Delhi he would not have known that there were many experienced and capable officers of the Indian Army who, from early 1946, would have betted heavily, as I would, that there would be a decision to partition the Indian sub-continent. Chapter II of my book, While Memory Serves, written in 1947/48, states our case, the basic factor being that if the Indian Army was passed with its mixed units to an integrated India, that Army would break to pieces through com- munal strife among the civil population. If it fell to bits, so would India. if is nonsense to write, as he does, that the army could not be 'classed' into Hindu and Muslim 'until everyone in Britain and India accepted the idea of Pakistan.' Good reason for the classing already existed in the Report of the Frontier Committee of 1945. Under that Report the N.W. Frontier garrison and its reserves were to be all-Muslim. Thus the bulk of the Indian Army could during demobilisation in 1946 be methodically
classed into Hindu and Muslim and sited in good time where collisions were to be anticipated in the Punjab. These were our basic recommendations. Our so-called plan was written in swarming, politic- ally conscious Calcutta before the arrival of the Parliamentary, let alone the Cabinet, Mission in early 1946.
That Mr. Philip Mason and his friends were opposed to this classing is now apparent. He and those at Delhi wbo thought like him bear an un- enviable responsibility for the suffering and fearful carnage in the Punjab in 1947 and for the near- collapse of the scratch military force (itself sud- denly thrown into the confusing process of class- ing) summoned after the eleventh hour to mitigate the results of complacency and short-sightedness. Calling names at this present hour will not make their case. If they were so tragically wrong over the main recommendation, is it not possible that they may be a little bit astray over much of the rest? We don't know because they strangled it at birth.
Rosaliac, Alawnan Smith, Falmouth, Cornwall
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