in the world, yet Churchill's animosity and perhaps racism toward Indians decided the exact location where famine would fall. Similarly, Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: "The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish." In contrast, Mark Tauger strikes a more supportive stance: "In the Indian Ocean alone from January 1942 to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totalling 873,000 tons, in other words, a substantial boat every other day. British hesitation to allocate shipping concerned not only potential diversion of shipping from other war-related needs but also the prospect of losing the shipping to attacks without actually [bringing help to] India at all." Peter Bowbrick elaborates further on the British government's delay in shipping food, stating that Linlithgow's request for food shipments in December 1942 was half-hearted and that it was made on the assumption that Bengal already had a food surplus but that it was being hoarded, which is why it was ignored by the British metropolitan government. Further delays after April 1943 stemmed from the refusal to divert ships away from the preparations for Operation Overlord, whose failure would have been disastrous for the world and whose success was as a result prioritised above aid to India. Historian James Holland writes that the reluctance of Churchill to divert shipping to India stemmed from his moral calculus concluding that potentially hindering crucial Allied military campaigns in Sicily and Italy and delaying preparations for Operation Overlord by diverting merchant ships to India was too great a risk to undertake; Holland further noted that "ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat." Famine, disease, and the death toll An estimated 0.8–3.8 million Bengalis died, out of a population of 60.3 million. According to Cormac Ó Gráda "the scholarly consensus is about 2.1 million". Contemporary mortality statistics were to some degree under-recorded, particularly for the rural areas, where data collecting and reporting was rudimentary even in normal times. Thus, many of those who died or migrated were unreported. The principal causes of death also changed as the famine progressed in two waves. Early on, conditions