Inferno - Max Hastings [260]
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.”
Sole, sole, sole,
We don’t know where we are going,
But we are going away,
Sole, sole, sole,
Perhaps we are going to Kenya,
We are sorry we are leaving home,
But it is the war. Time of trouble,
Sole, sole, sole.
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 prewar 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 past 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; 500 men were eventually court-martialled, of whom two were sentenced to death, though the penalty was later commuted. A further 24 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 percent of its 1943 strength posted as absent, 42 percent 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 United States until 1944, South Africa refused to deploy black soldiers in combat roles, though it recruited them