By Princewill Ubani · Published
Research ID: PA-ART-african-soldiers-british-empire-world-war-ii
More Than a Million Africans Fought for Britain in World War II
More than 1 million Africans served in British Empire military forces during World War II, according to the historical research publication History Workshop, in what became one of the largest movements of African men overseas since the transatlantic slave trade. Most went to fight a war whose causes and stakes colonial recruiting officers had explained to them only in the vaguest terms.
West Africa’s Royal West African Frontier Force drew soldiers from Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. East Africa’s King’s African Rifles recruited from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nyasaland and the two Rhodesias. Both forces expanded rapidly once the war began, filling their ranks with volunteers, conscripts and, in some documented cases, men pushed into enlisting by local chiefs under pressure from colonial administrations.
The heaviest African involvement came in the Burma campaign against Japan, where roughly 100,000 African troops served, more than half of them Nigerian, alongside soldiers from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. They fought through monsoon rains, dense jungle and disease that killed nearly as many soldiers as combat did, in a theater far removed from anything colonial recruiters had described to them beforehand.
The single deadliest day for African troops came Feb. 12, 1944, when the Japanese submarine I-27 torpedoed the troopship SS Khedive Ismail in the Indian Ocean. The ship sank in roughly three minutes. Almost 1,000 soldiers of the 301st (East African) Field Regiment drowned, a loss the Commonwealth War Graves Commission describes as having essentially wiped out the unit; more than 660 of their names are inscribed on the East Africa Memorial the commission maintains.
Killingray’s research puts Africa’s total wartime death toll at probably exceeding 50,000, a figure that, like most of the continent’s contribution to the Allied war effort, went largely unacknowledged in Britain for decades after 1945.
Sources
- “African Soldiers in World War II”, History Workshop.
- “Tragedy in the Indian Ocean: The Sinking of the Khedive Ismail”, Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
- “The all but forgotten contribution of African soldiers to the Allied victory in World War II”, This Is Africa.
Books & Further Reading
David Killingray with Martin Plaut, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (James Currey, 2010, ISBN 9781847010476)