All Hell Let Loose (68 page)

Kofi Genfi described the recruiting process in Ashanti, where the local district commissioner Captain Sinclair was charged with fulfilling manpower quotas. Sinclair, in turn, allotted each local chief a share: ‘Sinclair … had the list, he knew how many men from each village there would be. He would take the truck … and bring the men.’ In Bathurst, Gambia, in 1943 more drastic measures were employed: four hundred ‘corner boys’ – street urchins – were rounded up and enlisted on the orders of the British governor; a quarter deserted during training. In Accra, one man described how he was snatched off the street by soldiers while visiting his brother. In Sierra Leone, those arrested for illicit diamond mining were sent to the army, an option extended to some of those convicted by the courts as an alternative to imprisonment.

Many Africans became genuine volunteers for military service, however, because they wanted work and pay. Though all claimed to be eighteen, some were significantly younger. Few had any comprehension of what war might entail, and there were widespread desertions when units were ordered overseas. Nyasaland soldiers of the King’s African Rifles, destined for Burma, sang a song called ‘
Sole
’, an adaptation of the English word ‘sorry’ which can also mean ‘trouble’.

Some Africans articulated a simple kind of patriotism: ‘Our boss was involved … the colonial power,’ said a Sierra Leonean who served in Burma. ‘And when the boss is involved – or when the head of the household was in trouble – everybody had to go to his support … If we had not gone to … fight against the Japanese we would all be speaking Japanese today.’ Only a handful of black recruits were granted commissions, of whom the most notable was twenty-one-year-old Seth Anthony from the Gold Coast, a teacher and pre-war territorial soldier. He was sent to Britain for officer training at Sandhurst, served in Burma, and finished the war as a major. One of his men said later that they liked to fight under him because he had ‘powerful juju’. But Anthony was an extreme rarity in the British Army, though the RAF eventually commissioned some of its fifty West African recruits. Assumptions and assertions of racial superiority were implicit, if not explicit, in every aspect of policy. When, for instance, two companies of the King’s African Rifles reached the outskirts of Addis Ababa in April 1941, they were halted by an order from army headquarters: it was considered more appropriate for the imperial entry into the Abyssinian capital to be led by a white South African unit, which duly leapfrogged the disgruntled KAR.

Britain’s imperial forces suffered significant disciplinary difficulties and embarrassments. In December 1943 the Mauritius Regiment, provoked by poor leadership and wretchedly insensitive handling by its white officers, staged a sit-down strike at its camp on Madagascar; five hundred men were eventually court-martialled, of whom two were sentenced to death, though the penalty was commuted. A further twenty-four men received sentences of seven to fourteen years’ imprisonment, and the regiment was disbanded. Desertion rates were notably high in the Gold Coast Regiment, with 15 per cent of its 1943 strength posted as absent, 42 per cent of these from Ashanti.

There was much discontent among black Africans serving overseas about their rates of pay and conditions, much inferior to those of white soldiers. The South African forces set the pay of their ‘coloured’ – mixed-race – recruits at half the white rate, and that of black soldiers at two-thirds of the coloured rate, on the grounds that the latter could more cheaply support their families in the style to which they were accustomed. Like the US until 1944, South Africa refused to deploy black soldiers in combat roles, though it recruited them for labour service; it was thus disingenuous that early recruiting posters depicted black soldiers in uniform carrying knobkerries and assegais. Volunteers were slow to come forward, knowing that the country’s institutionalised racial discrimination would persist in the armed forces: even in besieged Tobruk, white South African army canteens would not serve black soldiers.

In India, segregated brothels were established for the British Army’s black Africans, though one Catholic commanding officer’s scruples caused him to insist that his unit’s establishment should be closed down. In 1942, there was a mutiny in 25 East African Brigade in East Africa: Gen. Sir William Platt reported ‘numerous incidents in almost all Somali units … refusals to obey orders, sit-down strikes, desertion with weapons, untrustworthiness as guards, collusive thefts, occasional stone-throwing and drawing of knives’. In India during 1944 there were clashes between black soldiers and civilians near the Ranchi rest camp in which six Indians were killed and several women raped.

The British drew comfort from the fact that these disturbances were less serious than a major mutiny by black French
tirailleurs
which took place at Thiaroye near Dakar that year, and uprisings by battalions of the Belgian Force Publique in the Congo. Commanders were dismayed, however, by the conduct of some colonial units on the battlefield, such as the King’s African Rifles battalion which broke and ran when first exposed to fire in Burma, and two battalions of 11th East African Division which refused to cross the Chindwin river into Burma, saying, ‘We will do whatever we’re told to do, but we are not going any further.’ Brigadier G.H. Cree reported that, given the widespread grievances of the African formations, ‘We were lucky to have escaped with a few flare-ups instead of a more general revolt.’

It is important to view such remarks and incidents in the wider context: hundreds of thousands of African troops performed their duty as labourers or riflemen under fire with considerable courage and some effectiveness. But it seems foolish to romanticise their contribution. They had no stake in Allied victory, and most served as mercenaries, drawn from societies schooled to obey white masters. A Rhodesian officer recorded the burial of African battlefield dead in the unyielding stony soil of Somaliland:

Here was a sentimental view of the contribution of colonial subjects, to be contrasted with that of black South African Frank Sexwale, who called the conflict ‘a white man’s war, a British war. South Africa belonged to Britain; everything that the Afrikaner did, he got the notion from the master, Britain.’ Sexwale’s perception accurately reflected the indifference of almost all his black and coloured compatriots to the struggle, but he overlooked the complexities of white South African sentiment. Among Afrikaners there was a long-standing pro-German tradition. Field Marshal Smuts, South Africa’s prime minister and a close friend of Churchill, only narrowly defeated a 1939 parliamentary motion demanding his country’s neutrality. Having dragged South Africa into the war, Smuts ensured that it made a substantial contribution to the Allied cause. From beginning to end, however, he faced domestic opposition, and never dared to introduce conscription. White volunteers remained in limited supply, and towards the end of 1940, anti-war demonstrations took place in Johannesburg. Some avowed pro-Nazis were interned for the duration, including future Nationalist prime minister John Vorster.

In Australia, support for Britain was much stronger. In 1939, tens of thousands of volunteers responded like Rod Wells, who thought, ‘There’s a war going on! The Old Country needs help … Let’s go and show them what we can do.’ Three divisions of such men fought with distinction in the Mediterranean, and a further two later joined them in New Guinea and other Pacific campaigns. But the war also revealed political stresses and divisions ‘down under’. Most of the half-million Americans who passed through Australia between 1942 and 1945 warmed to the country socially, but their commanders deplored Australian parochialism, vicious trades union practices especially in the docks, and supposed lack of energy in pursuing the war. MacArthur suggested sourly that the Australian spirit had been corroded by twenty years of socialist government. On 26 October 1942, the
New York Times
military correspondent Hanson Baldwin published a lacerating critique of the Australian war effort:

Baldwin observed that the consequence of Australian labour unions’ obstructionism was that many logistical tasks had to be performed by American soldiers. He concluded: ‘Many of us in the democracies of all countries, loving personal liberty and our casual, easy, carefree ways of life of peacetime, have forgotten that war is a hard taskmaster and that the ways of peace are not the ways of war.’ Baldwin’s remarks caused a storm in Australia, where they were deeply resented, but they were founded in harsh reality, and the British government shared the correspondent’s sentiments. Many Australians earned admiration as warriors, but a substantial number exercised their democratic privileges to stay away from the battlefield.

In Canada likewise, overseas military service remained voluntary, causing the army to suffer a chronic shortage of infantrymen. Though Canadians played important roles in the north-west Europe and Italian campaigns, the Battle of the Atlantic and the bomber offensive, most of French Canada wanted no part in the struggle. ‘A nasty evening in Montreal, where the French Canadians booed and spat at us and several of us were thrown out of bars,’ recorded an RAF flight trainee among a party in transit through the region. In August 1942, a sullen 59 per cent of French Canadians told pollsters they did not believe they would have had to participate in the war but for Canada’s membership of the British Empire.

In the Middle East and Asia, some subject peoples displayed fiercer opposition to the conflict. They paid little heed to the nature of the German, Italian and Japanese regimes, merely choosing to view their colonial oppressors’ enemies as their own prospective allies. The British exercised de facto rule over Egypt not as an acknowledged colonial possession, but through a draconian interpretation of the bilateral defence treaty. Many, indeed most Egyptians, gave passive support to the Axis; King Farouk took impending British defeat for granted. One of his army officers, Captain Anwar Sadat, the twenty-two-year-old son of a government clerk who later became Egypt’s president, wrote: ‘Our enemy was primarily, if not solely, Great Britain.’ In 1940, Sadat approached General Aziz el-Masri, the inspector-general of the army who was a well-known Axis sympathiser, and said, ‘We are a group of officers working to set up an organisation for the purpose of driving the British out of Egypt.’

In January 1942 demonstrators thronged the streets of Cairo, crying out, ‘Forward Rommel! Long live Rommel!’ British troops and armoured cars surrounded the royal palace until Farouk acceded to British demands. That summer, Egyptian army officers eagerly anticipated their liberation by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. They were thrilled by the arrival in Cairo of two German spies, Hans Eppler and another man known only as ‘Sandy’. Captain Sadat was crestfallen, however, to witness the frivolous behaviour of the two agents, whom he found living on the Nile houseboat of the famous belly-dancer Hikmet Fahmy. He wrote: ‘The surprise must have shown on my face, because Eppler laughingly asked: “Where do you expect us to stay? In a British army camp?”’ The German said Hikmet Fahmy was ‘perfectly reliable’. He and his colleague spent drunken evenings at the Kitkat nightclub, and changed large sums of forged British banknotes through a Jew who allegedly charged 30 per cent commission. Sadat wrote long afterwards, with the unembarrassed anti-Semitism of his people: ‘I was not surprised at a Jew performing this service for the Nazis because I knew that a Jew would do anything if the price was right.’ The British arrested the entire spy ring, and suppressed internal dissent with little difficulty. But they could not credibly idealise Egypt’s role in the Allied camp.