Good, now look at what he actually did.
//The true facts about food shipments to Bengal, amply recorded in the British war cabinet and government of India archives, are that more than a million tons of grain arrived in Bengal between August 1943, when the war cabinet first realised the severity of the famine, and the end of 1944, when the famine had petered out.
This was food aid specifically sent to Bengal, much of it on Australian ships, despite strict food rationing in England and severe food shortages in newly-liberated southern Italy and Greece. As detailed in Andrew Roberts’s brilliant biography, far from seeking to starve India, Churchill and his cabinet sought every possible way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort.
The truth about food shipments
On 4 August 1943, when Churchill’s war cabinet first realised the enormity of the famine, it agreed that 150,000 tons of Iraqi barley and Australian wheat should be sent to Bengal, with Churchill himself insisting on 24 September that “something must be done.” Though emphatic “that Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war,” he agreed to send a further 250,000 tons, to be shipped over the next four months.
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.”