Nem, nem az ő hibája.
On 7 October, Churchill told the war cabinet that one of the new viceroy’s first duties was to see to it “that famine and food difficulties were dealt with.” He wrote to Wavell the next day: “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages.” Churchill refused a Canadian offer of 100,000 tons of food aid for Bengal because it would have taken two months to arrive, but the same war cabinet meeting resolved to seek Australian supplies instead.
By January 1944, Bengal had received a total of 130,000 tons of barley from Iraq, 80,000 tons of wheat from Australia and 10,000 from Canada, followed by a further 100,000 from Australia. Then, on 14 February 1944, Churchill called an emergency meeting of the war cabinet to see if more food aid could be sent to Bengal without wrecking Allied plans for the coming Normandy landings. “I will certainly help you all I can, but you must not ask the impossible,” Churchill telegraphed Wavell before the cabinet met. The next day, he informed Wavell: “We have given a great deal of thought to your difficulties, but we simply cannot find the shipping.”