Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War - Softcover

Killingray, Prof. David; Plaut, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847010474 ISBN 13: 9781847010476

Publisher: James Currey, 2012

Synopsis

During the Second World War over half-a-million African troops served with the British Army as combatants and non-combatants in campaigns in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, Italy and Burma - the largest single movement of African men overseas since the slave trade. This account, based mainly on oral evidence and soldiers' letters, tells the story of the African experience of the war. It is a 'history from below' that describes how men were recruited for a war about which most knew very little. Army life exposed them to a range of new and startling experiences: new foods and forms of discipline, uniforms, machines and rifles, notions of industrial time, travel overseas, new languages and cultures, numeracy and literacy. What impact did service in the army have on African men and their families? What new skills did soldiers acquire and to what purposes were they put on their return? What was the social impact of overseas travel, and how did the broad umbrella of army welfare services change soldiers' expectations of civilian life? And what role if any did ex-servicemen play in post-war nationalist politics? In this book African soldiers describe in their own words what it was like to undergo army training, to travel on a vast ocean, to experience battle, and their hopes and disappointments on demobilisation.

About this title

Review:

Sober and judicious but also thrilling and dramatic. --Africa

Will become the one-stop reference for research on Anglophone Africa and its soldiers during World War II. (...) Killingray succeeds in putting human faces on some of the nearly one million African soldiers who laboured and fought. --International Journal Of African Historical Studies

Will be the standard work on the subject for years, probably decades to come, an entirely fitting pedestal given David Killingray's leadership in this field. --International Affairs

About the Author:

DAVID KILLINGRAY is Professor Emeritus of History, Goldsmiths, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

About this edition

• Publisher: James Currey
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1847010474
• ISBN 13: 9781847010476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312