4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 381warned against the danger of encouraging unrealistic expectations in an
effort to stimulate ‘the war morale’ of the peoples of Southeast Asia.^115
Countering this warning, other members observed that if the war
aims that the United Nations had announced were ‘kept in terms so
uncertain, with so little evidence of serious attempts at their realization...
suspicion rather than enthusiasm’ would be the result; they urged ‘force-
ful propaganda’ within the terms of the charter ‘not least as a means of
binding the United Nations themselves to their promises.’^116
As was noted at the conference, several speeches made by the British
prime minister had been ‘interpreted abroad as either denying or leaving
in doubt’ the question of whether or not the charter was intended to
apply outside of Europe.^117 An Indian member of the conference stated
that he feared that Churchill’s qualifications to the Atlantic Charter put
in serious doubt the prospect of ‘immediate post-war self-determination
for India’ and that India would be offered no more after the war than
the ‘undemocratic proposals’ put forward by Sir Stafford Cripps during
his mission to India in April 1942.^118 In response to the expression of
these fears, a member of the British group declared that he could ‘say
categorically that there would not be the slightest disposition in any part
of Great Britain to object to any decision the people of India make’ in
regard to their constitutional arrangements.^119
In regard to the matter of qualifications to the Atlantic Charter,
it should be noted that the conference was particularly exercised by
a speech given by Churchill at a mayoral dinner at Mansion House on
November 10, 1942. Therein Churchill, after having declared that
Britain had not ‘entered this war for profit or expansion’ but only for
reasons honour and the duty to do what is right, stated the following:
‘Let me, however, make this clear, in case there should be any mistake
about it in any quarter: we mean to hold our own. I have not become
(^115) Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill, Atlantic Charter, August 14, 1941,
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp, and International Secretariat, Institute of
Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific, 53.
(^116) International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific,
53.
(^117) Ibid., 24.
(^118) Ibid., 87. See also Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for
Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 249.
(^119) Ibid.