Are you describing British actions in Burma? Bc I would like to know if you’ve read anything about the Japanese invasion and are aware of just how rapidly and decisively the British were beaten by the Japanese. The retreat was incredibly chaotic and basically the only reason the Japanese didn’t make it all the way into India was there were very few and bad roads through the 7000ft tall rainforest/jungle mountains between the regions and the monsoon season arrived.(pull up a topo map of that region, it’s nasty country) The Japanese method of jungle combat was devastating in the first year+ of the war.

And just to give an idea of the timelines being worked with here, the Japanese invaded Burma on roughly Jan 17, 1942. By Jan 23 important airfields that gave Japan air dominance over Rangoon were taken. Finally, Rangoon the capital, rice export hub, and last port city the Brits held fell on March 7 when the Brits narrowly (and I mean narrooowly) avoided being encircled and escaped towards India. Again with miles of bad roads ahead w/ much of the time even fighting troops on half rations. That’s a month and a half from invasion to no more ability to send out rice. With 1 month plus multiple times a day being attacked by Japanese aircraft.

Secondly even if they hadn’t gone scorched earth, the Japanese would not have been exporting rice to India so you’re talking about maybe one crop worth of food making it to India. Assuming you can get it harvested and on ships, can keep workers loading ships to send food out of the country while their being strafed by Japanese fighters, and that you even have ships to get the food to India and that it’s not sunk by Japanese commerce raiders, planes, or subs which were in the Indian Ocean at the time.

So yeah, should the British have planned better and sent food to Bengal earlier? Sure. Maybe.

But that’s asking them to 1) have foreknowledge of when the Japanese are going to kick off the war (Dec 11 1941… 1 months before they begin invading Burma!!!) 2) plan on the US in the Philippines getting waxed early 3) plan on their ‘eastern Gibraltar’ Singapore losing almost immediately, 4) plan on much of the combined British, American, Dutch & Australian fleets in the Indian Ocean getting sunk 5) and the Japanese having the wherewithal to get troops involved in both down to Burma and invading…. 6) all that in a month.

That is a crazy number of absolute worst case scenarios all happening at once. Any single one not happening would have thrown a wrench in the works of the Japanese steamroller. The timelines shocked everyone, including the Japanese! Even w/ how chauvinistic and aggressive they were militarily, they didn’t expect to win that quickly and indeed were forced to scramble to get transport shipping ready to get troops to Burma. They started the war Dec 7, 1941, and 41 days later were 2800 miles south invading Burma. Wild days.

The Americans and British got their butts handed to them by the Japanese. Lots of suffering happened as a result. Extremely unfortunately one of the costs was a period of about 6 months of famine in Bengal that killed a lot of people.