Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956

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were overcrowded, inhospitable and often unsanitary.

Above all, the

demands of imperial soldiering meant that a man was likely to have to

spend most of his colour service, ﬁxed at ten years in 1847 in exile over-

seas, far from his family and friends. Although some senior Non-commis-

sioned ofﬁcers (NCO) did serve for 21 years and so received a pension,

most men left the army in their late twenties or early thirties, often broken

in health and usually without the knowledge of a trade that would enable

them to earn more than the barest living as a civilian.

The recruiting system could barely ﬁnd the requisite number of men in

normal times. It failed ignominiously in an emergency. This became

apparent in March 1855. The demands of the Crimean War meant that

the army needed 90,000 men, but it could only raise half that number,

and that too only by taking the unusual, and expensive, step of offering

recruits a large bounty and thereby attracting men from the militia into

the line. But this was tantamount to robbing Peter to pay Paul. The expe-

ditionary force sent to the Crimea may have been ﬁlled up but only at the

price of denuding the home defence army. Between 1861 and 1867, two

Royal Commissions investigated the shortcomings of the existing system

but failed to recommend more than tinkering with it. It took the shock

administered by Prussia’s victories over Austria in 1866 and France during

1870–1, together with the advent of a Liberal government determined to

reduce the army estimates and ensure that the taxpayer got value for the

money, to open the way to major reforms.

The Liberal’s reforms came in two tranches; the ﬁrst was introduced

between 1868 and 1874 by Edward Cardwell and the second between 1880

and 1881 by his Liberal successor, Hugh Childers. The Cardwell–Childers

reforms created an army that was designed to garrison the British Empire,

to be cheaper than its predecessor and to have the capacity to expand

rapidly on the outbreak of a major war. Short service, for seven years with

the colours and ﬁve in the Army Reserve, and the reduction in the

number of soldiers serving overseas were intended to attract more recruits

by removing the fear that soldiers would spend most of their adult lives in

colonial exile. Henceforth, the white settlement colonies would have to

raise their own militia for local defence. The Army Reserve was intended

to reduce the estimates by cutting the size of the pension bill, for most

men left the army in their mid- or late-twenties, still young enough to take

up another occupation. And it also gave the army the power of expansion

it had lacked in the past. If reservists were recalled to the colours and used

to ﬁll up the establishment of home service battalions, the War Ofﬁce

could have at its disposal a rapid reaction force that could be sent overseas

in an emergency. The success of this innovation was shown in 1882 when

the War Ofﬁce succeeded in despatching a force of 35,000 troops to Egypt

between June and August. But even that was dwarfed by its ability to

despatch 112,000 regulars to South Africa between October 1899 and

January 1900.

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In more normal times, the provision of trained soldiers for units serving

in colonial garrisons was solved by linking regular battalions in pairs. Each

pair of battalions was then giving a permanent depot where its recruits

enlisted and were trained. One battalion was supposed to serve at home and

would supply trained drafts for its linked battalion overseas. After 1881, bat-

talions usually did not spend more than 16 years overseas, although indi-

vidual ofﬁcers and other ranks would not normally serve abroad for more

than eight years. The regulars were also linked through their depot with the

part-time soldiers of their local militia and Volunteer (after 1908 Territorial

Force) battalions, the whole forming a single regiment.

The Indian mutiny had revealed similarly serious shortcomings in

Britain’s military arrangements in India. On the eve of the mutiny, the gar-

rison of British India was composed of a handful of British regiments and

a much larger number of regiments of the East India Company’s Army.

Although the Company had raised a handful of purely British units, most

of its regiments consisted of locally recruited sepoy soldiers led by British

ofﬁcers. On the eve of the Mutiny in May 1857, there were only 40,000

British troops stationed in India compared to about 300,000 Indians.

Although the mutiny was largely conﬁned to the sepoy regiments of the

Bengal army, the mutineers seemed to come so close to expelling the

British from India that, after the Mutiny, the Crown felt that it had no

option other than to take direct responsibility for the governance of India

and control of India’s military resources. In 1858, the Viceroy of India and

the India Ofﬁce argued in favour of raising a separate European army for

service only in India. But their case was fatally undermined when many of

the European troops of the Company’s army mutinied when they were

compulsorily transferred to the land forces of the British Crown. Hence-

forth, European troops in India were drawn from amongst ordinary British

line regiments posted on a temporary basis to India. Command authority

in each Indian Army unit resided in the hands of British ofﬁcers attached

to the Indian Staff Corps, men who expected to serve with the Indian

Army throughout their careers. Indians could rise to non-commissioned

rank as Viceroy’s Commissioned Ofﬁcers, but it was not until after the First

World War that they could hope to hold the Queen’s Commission.

In theory, India offered Britain an almost limitless supply of soldiers

that it could employ in Asia. In practice, however, Britain’s ability to

mobilise India’s military resources was constrained by several factors. The

ﬁrst was that the British were determined that the costs of military occupa-

tion should fall upon the Indian taxpayer, not upon his British counter-

part. But the government’s ability to raise taxes in India was not limitless.

If it pressed too hard, it knew that it would provoke unrest which would

require an expensive increase in the forces of law and order. Second, after

1858 the British were determined that they would always have enough

British troops on hand to suppress another mutiny. Consequently, they

ﬁxed the ratio of British to Indian soldiers at approximately one to two.

The British Army and the empire 93

The size of the Company’s army was drastically reduced, and by the mid-

1860s there were 120,000 Indians in the three Presidency armies of

Bombay, Calcutta and Madras and 60,000 British soldiers.

The third measure that the British took to minimise the chances of

future large-scale mutinies was that they deliberately raised Indian regi-

ments on a local basis and from amongst a variety of caste and religious

groups. Doing this, they hoped to ensure that their sepoys felt loyalty to

their regiment and to their caste, but not to the army as a whole, in the

hope that this would reduce the possibility that large numbers of soldiers

would combine around a common grievance. The British developed an

elaborate theory of ‘martial races’ that dictated that certain social groups

and religious minorities, usually from amongst the least-westernised groups

in Indian society, were better ﬁtted than others to the profession of soldier-

ing. In particular, they recruited from amongst Gurkhas, Sikhs, Rajputs and

Dogras in preference to any groups from Madras, Bengal or Bombay.

After the initial period of conquest, which was concluded by 1918, the

British maintained no European troops in Africa other than their garrison

in Egypt and a couple of infantry battalions in the Sudan. Elsewhere in

Africa, they raised local forces and used them as gendarmerie to impose

and maintain their control. Just as in India, they developed and applied a

‘martial race’ theory, preferring to recruit peasants from groups outside the

mainstream of indigenous society.

Such men, they believed, could be more

easily moulded into loyal, obedient and disciplined soldiers, because they

were unsullied by European education. The largest of these forces were the

RWAFF and the King’s African Riﬂes. The RWAFF was established in 1898.

In the interwar period, it maintained one company in Gambia, two com-

panies in Sierra Leone, one battalion in the Gold Coast and four battalions

in Nigeria. The King’s African Riﬂes, formed in 1902, operated in the East

African territories. It had one battalion in Kenya, two in Tanganyika, one in

Uganda and another divided between Somaliland and Nyasaland. Following

the mutiny of Egyptian Army regiments in Khartoum in 1924, the British

formed a separate small army in the Sudan, the Sudan Defence Force.

in the Indian Army, units were led by British ofﬁcers. But unlike in India,

ofﬁcers were seconded from British regiments and served for only a com-

paratively short time before returning to them. The climate and the threat

of disease in tropical Africa made prolonged service with African units unat-

tractive to Europeans, but the offer of higher pay, greater responsibility and

generous leave meant that African units were rarely short of British ofﬁcers.

The African rank and ﬁle were attracted by the promise of regular wages, a

uniform, and at times, the possibility of loot. Formal discipline was probably

more draconian than in Indian regiments, and ﬂogging was not ﬁnally abol-

ished in the British African army until 1946.

But it would be wrong to suggest that the British relied solely or even

largely on formal disciplinary sanctions to keep their soldiers in line. The

basic building block of the British army, and its Indian and colonial

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counter-parts, was the battalion. A battalion consisted of about 1,000 ofﬁ-

cers and men. This structure created communities in which everyone was

likely to know each other, probably by name, and certainly by sight. Such

a structure promoted strong unit cohesion and esprit de corps and it was

that which the military authorities really relied upon to maintain discip-

line and morale. They did so by deliberately going out of their way to

promote a distinctive identity for each unit by conferring upon it all of the

trappings of special standards, badges, uniform, embellishments, cere-

monies and traditions.

The community feeling that they created was

immensely valuable when units were stationed for many weary years in

uncomfortable cantonments thousands of miles from home. It was further

enhanced because most regimental ofﬁcers and the rank and ﬁle they

commanded could expect to serve their entire career with the same regi-

ment. This bred a close sense of identity between ofﬁcers and other ranks

that did something to soften the harsh edges of the army’s formal discipli-

nary system, particularly when ofﬁcers exhibited, as they usually did, a

sense of paternal concern for their men.

Both before and after the

Crimean War, regimental ofﬁcers took the lead in trying to create well-

behaved soldiers less by the imposition harsh physical discipline and more

by providing an environment that encouraged their men to avoid the

temptations of vice and diverted their surplus energies and time into

organised team games and ‘rational’ recreations.

Regimental life in colonial cantonments was also characterised by an

obsessive concern with cleanliness and order, and soldiers spent many

weary hours each week cleaning their kit, clothing and rooms. This had a

severely practical purpose, for disease killed far more soldiers in the

empire than bullets or shells ever did. The military authorities were deter-

mined that soldiers would live in small islands of cleanliness in that they

believed that it was the general ﬁlth that characterised so many of the

colonies.

In India, this had been achieved by the late 1880s. Garrisons

usually inhabited their own, isolated cantonments, near, but generally

outside of major centres of civilian population. Great attention was paid to

ensuring a clean water supply and adequate sanitation to take away waste

products. Attention to such matters paid dividends in terms of safeguard-

ing the health and well-being of colonial garrisons.

At Gibraltar, for

example, the health of the garrison and their civilian neighbours, as meas-

ured by the local infant mortality rate, was roughly comparable until the

mid-1880s. Thereafter, the military authorities began to improve the sani-

tation of the cantonment. In particular, they improved the quality of

drinking water provided for troops and their families. The civilian popu-

lation did not enjoy similar beneﬁts. The result was that whereas the

infant mortality rate for soldiers’ children fell sharply, that of civilian

population fell much more slowly.

Commanders in the ﬁeld were slower to learn these lessons. Until the

Boer War, many remained convinced that losses from disease were an

The British Army and the empire 95

inevitable consequence of going on campaign. The results of their insou-

ciance were starkly revealed shortly after Lord Roberts’ army occupied

Bloemfontein in March 1900. The readiness of many regimental ofﬁcers

to ignore even elementary sanitary precautions meant that the army was

crippled for several weeks by an outbreak of typhoid fever.

But, lessons

were learned. Forty years later, at the battle of Alamein, the British army’s

sanitary discipline was so superior to that of the Axis armies that its sick

rate was less than half that of Rommel’s German troops.

Between 1872 and 1899, the British and Indian armies took part in

about three dozen major campaigns and many more minor ones. Most

were fought to break down resistance to British hegemony or to punish

indigenous groups living on the fringes of the empire and who had the

temerity to challenge it. Space constraints make it impossible to provide a

comprehensive account of them here, and indeed, many still await good

modern studies based on the extant archival sources.

But certain

common features do stand out. The most obvious problem that the

British confronted was that the enemies they fought were often wildly dif-

ferent. One result of that was only in 1896, with the publication of Sir

Charles Callwell’s Small Wars that the British army acquired its own

manual explaining how to conduct operations on the periphery of the

empire. The British were also frequently handicapped because their

enemies usually had a better knowledge of the local terrain than they did.

Given the variety of enemies they confronted and the topographical dif-

ﬁculties they encountered, intelligence gathering was supremely import-

ant. But, winning the information war was often difﬁcult, for the War

Ofﬁce’s Intelligence Branch was under-funded, and so ﬁeld commanders

had to improvise their own arrangements. Just how they did this remains

a question that requires further study, but they seem to have relied upon

local spies, scouts and informants. Because they often lacked accurate

maps, they also had to employ numerous reconnaissance parties to dis-

cover the position of waterholes, rivers and crossing points.

Forces ﬁghting on the edge of the empire usually did so at the end of

long and tenuous lines of communications. They also often had to battle

against dangerous climate and unfamiliar diseases. These factors in turn

shaped how the British conducted their operations. In Ashante, during

1873–4, for example, Sir Garnet Wolseley knew that he had to advance

quickly to the enemy’s capital, for if he tarried, his European troops would

succumb to disease.

Long lines of communications also had to be

guarded, which could make colonial soldiering a manpower-intensive

undertaking. During the Boer War, the British deployed a maximum of

450,000 men, but only 10 per cent were available for mobile operations

chasing Boer Commandos. The rest were employed protecting the army’s

supply lines.

The British were not invariably successful in their colonial wars. The

Zulus defeated a British column at Isandlwana in 1879, and the Boers

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defeated another at Majuba Hill in 1881. The enemy often held the stra-

tegic advantage, for it was sometimes difﬁcult for the British to identify

their centre of gravity, the location or capability from which they derived

their strength and will to ﬁght, and whose destruction and capture would

persuade them to make peace on British terms. The British often opted

to direct their offensive against their enemy’s capital. If they defended it,

the British might then be able to make them stand and ﬁght and use their

superior ﬁrepower to destroy them. It worked for Wolseley when he

advanced on Kumasi, the capital of Ashante, just as it did a decade later

when his army landed in Egypt and threatened Cairo. On both occasions,

his enemies offered themselves up to a quick defeat when they fought in

front on their capitals. It also worked in the Sudan in 1898, when Kitch-

ener’s advance on Khartoum, and his decision to bombard the tomb of

the Mahadi, was sufﬁcient to persuade the Mahdist army to immolate

itself by mounting a frontal attack on his army.

But it did not work in

South Africa when a portion of the Boer forces continued to wage a guer-

rilla war for nearly two years after the capture of Bloemfontein and Preto-

ria in 1900.

But if their enemies sometimes had a signiﬁcant strategic advantage,

the British often, but not always, had some tactical advantages. Their

discipline was at the least equal to that of their enemies, and often supe-

rior. And more often than not, they possessed superior ﬁre arms. Indeed,

one of the distinguishing features of the British army was its eagerness to

make use the latest products of western technology to compensate for its

numerical inferiority. These included the heliograph (ﬁrst used in the

Second Afghan War), the ﬁeld telegraph, hot air balloons, railways and

steam gunboats. They also took advantage of the latest developments in

modern medicine to overcome tropical diseases such as malaria that

would otherwise have decimated their ranks.

After 1919, they added

armoured cars, motor vehicles and aircraft to their inventory in the hope

that they would enable them to carry out their preferred policy of striking

at their colonial enemies relentlessly and swiftly even more effectively.

The result of the army’s reliance on high technology was shown most

starkly at the battle of Omdurman in 1898. Kitchener’s forces were trans-

ported to the city by a combination of railways and barges drawn down the

River Nile by steam-powered gun boats. They then expended half a

million rounds of ammunition, some of it from maxim machine guns, to

kill 11,000 of the Dervish army of 52,000. Kitchener’s forces lost 48 dead.

However, occasionally, the British did not have it quite so much their own

way. The fact that the Boers were excellent marksmen armed with modern

European riﬂes is well known. But what is less well known is that during

the Tirah campaign on the North-West Frontier of India in 1897, the

British were disconcerted to discover that their Pathan opponents were

equipped with breech-loading riﬂes that were every bit as good as their

own and that they knew how to use them.

The British Army and the empire 97

The morale of the British troops engaged in these small wars of empire

was sustained by a mixture of patriotism, regimental loyalty and a deep

sense of their own racial and moral superiority. Ofﬁcers had been imbued

at their public school with a shared code of beliefs and values that one his-

torian has called a ‘self-sacriﬁcial warriorhood’.

Both ofﬁcer and other

ranks were usually convinced that the indigenous peoples they were ﬁght-

ing were their moral inferiors and were liable to become unnerved by the

spectacle of British troops advancing steadily on them.

They rarely had

many qualms of conscience when ordered to raze the society they were

bent on conquering. In 1879, Lord Chelmsford, for example, justiﬁed his

policy of burning Zulu kraals, killing their cattle and allowing his soldiers

to kill Zulu prisoners by insisting that ‘I am satisﬁed that the more the

Zulu nation at large feels the strain brought upon them by the war, the

more anxious will they be to see it brought to an end’.

However, the guerrilla phase of the Second Anglo-Boer War, perhaps

because their opponents were white and so could not be easily dismissed

as racial inferiors, evoked a different response from some soldiers. In

South Africa, some ofﬁcers became increasingly uncomfortable when

ordered to burn Boer farms to prevent the commandos from using them

as sources of food and intelligence and to herd their unfortunate inhabit-

ants into concentration camps where many died from epidemic diseases.

They saw the Boers as epitomising the same rural virtues whose disappear-

ance from British society they so much regretted.

But many of their col-

leagues had fewer qualms about imposing a scorched earth policy on the

Boer republics. They shared Lord Roberts’ conviction that unless the

Boer people as a whole were made to suffer for the depredations of those

still under arms, the war would continue. By the spring of 1902, it had

worked. The remaining Boer guerrillas surrendered, ﬁnally recognising

that they faced the stark choice of either continuing to resist the impos-

ition of British rule or seeing the very society that they were ﬁghting to

preserve utterly crushed.

Colonial soldiering took its toll on the British as well as their oppon-

ents. In the late nineteenth century, the suicide rate amongst soldiers in

the United Kingdom was about three times higher than that amongst the

civilian population and four times higher if they were serving in India.

1909, a War Ofﬁce spokesman told the House of Commons that an

average of 50–60 soldiers committed suicide annually.

Although it was

not until the First World War that army doctors began to recognise what

they would then label ‘shell-shock’, it is likely that many soldiers who were

discharged from the army suffering from diseases diagnosed variously as

‘disordered action of the heart’, rheumatism, neurasthenia and general

muscular debility were suffering from what today would be called battle

exhaustion.

Once the empire had been conquered, it had to be garrisoned. The

largest of these garrisons was in India, where about one-third of the British

98 D. French

army was normally stationed. Together with the Indian Army, these troops

existed to perform two functions, to assist the civil power when called upon

and to constitute a ﬁeld army that could repulse any threats, either from

Russia, the Afghans or the tribesmen on the North-West Frontier who

acknowledged no higher authority. The British administration in India was

usually conﬁdent that they could deal successfully with one of these

threats. What gave them nightmares was the possibility that tribal unrest on

the frontier, or a threat from India or Afghanistan, might coincide with

unrest in the interior of India and stretch their exiguous forces beyond

their limits.

It was this possibility that became the focus of an intense

debate amongst British military planners about how best to defend India.

By 1884, the Russians had occupied Turkestan and were building the Tran-

scaspian Railway. When it was complete, Russian troops could be brought

directly to the border of Afghanistan. In Delhi, British staff ofﬁcers calcu-

lated that the Russians might soon be able to invade India with 95,000

troops and that the British would have to reinforce India with 100,000

more men to stop them. How to stop them became the focus of a vigorous

debate in the late nineteenth century. Options considered included

amphibious operations in the Black Sea, a counter offensive through

Persia or an advance into Afghanistan to hold a line inside Afghanistan

along the Hindu Kush mountains. These arguments became powerful

tools in the hands of successive Commanders-in-Chief of the Indian Army

when they tried to extract more money from the clutches of the Treasury

in the late nineteenth century at a time when it was also under pressure

from the Admiralty to increase naval spending.

Outside India, the British army maintained garrisons at no fewer than

20 overseas stations by 1898. They spanned the globe from Halifax, Nova

Scotia, where 1,800 men were stationed, to Hong Kong, where 1,167 men

were based.

When soldiers were not busy training, or cleaning their can-

tonments, uniforms and equipment, they were probably on parade.

Parades were not merely intended to occupy the time of idle soldiers.

They also served an important imperial purpose. Colourful uniforms,

ﬂying ﬂags and all the panoply of military ceremonies were vital factors

underpinning the British Empire. By projecting an image of strength, they

hid its slender reality, for there was always an enormous discrepancy

between the population of a colony and its British garrison.

On the eve

of the First World War, for example, India had a population of about

300 million and a British garrison of 77,000 soldiers, Egypt had a popu-

lation of about 12.5 million and a British garrison of between 4,000–5,000

British soldiers, and the Gold Coast, with a population of about 1.6

million, had a locally raised garrison of about 1500 troops and a handful

of British ofﬁcers.

The British Empire was administered on a shoestring

and the military was no exception. The British were always reluctant to

raise large numbers of troops because an expensive garrison could make a

colony unproﬁtable. Each colony was required to meet the cost of its own

The British Army and the empire 99

local defence, and consequently, the forces at the disposal of a colonial

administration were always the smallest and cheapest that could still offer

an impression of security. Colonial government only worked because a

minority of the indigenous population in each colony was willing to coop-

erate actively with the usually tiny cadre of British administrators sent to

govern them and because the remainder were willing to acquiesce in

British rule. If the tax burden needed to support the administration

became too heavy, acquiescence was likely to melt away.

Whenever possible, the British extracted obedience by trading on their

reputation for invincibility. But when local cooperation and acquiescence

did break down, troops were summoned to act as a reserve force of last

resort to assist the civil power to maintain law and order.

As the some-

times savage British reaction to the Indian Mutiny showed, when their rule

was threatened by serious revolt, they could act ruthlessly to reassert their

domination. The idea that swift and decisive military action was the only

practical response to outright rebellion was embedded in British colonial

thought remained a constant long after 1857. But given their exiguous mil-

itary resources, it could not be employed on an everyday basis. And if the

British were to maintain at least the facade that their rule was based on

justice, force had to be employed within some kind of legal framework.

Duties ‘in aid of the civil power’ were rarely popular with the troops, not

least because it confronted them with uncomfortable tactical and legal

conundrums. Ideally, the military preferred to deploy troops in such large

numbers that their very presence would overawe rioters and prevent

further trouble. But in practice, that was not always possible. In Britain, if

unrest became violent, an ofﬁcer in command of troops on the spot was

faced with the decision as to whether or not he should open ﬁre to restore

order. If he did not, and the riot got out of hand, he could be court-mar-

tialled for neglecting his duty. If he did order him men to open ﬁre and

civilians died as a result, he could be tried before a civil tribunal for

murder.

The law in India and elsewhere gave soldiers more protection

from civil prosecution. But, as the fate of Brigadier-General Dyer, who

ordered troops to open ﬁre on a peaceful and unarmed crowd at Amritsar

in 1919, showed, an ofﬁcer’s career and reputation could still be forfeited

if he made a mistake.

During the two world wars, the land forces of the empire made a

signiﬁcant contribution to the British war effort. During the First World

War, the British raised about 1.5 million soldiers and non-combatant

labourers in India and one million soldiers and auxiliaries in Africa.

During the Second World War, about 2.5 million Indians served overseas,

a ﬁgure roughly comparable to the manpower contribution of the white

dominions combined.

However, these bare statistics conceal important differences in the ways

in which the British employed imperial ground forces. Before 1914, the

cardinal principle of British military policy in Africa was that, although

100 D. French

Africans could be used on the lines of communication, they should not be

used as combat troops in ‘white men’s wars’. Armed and disciplined black

soldiers might threaten white supremacy once they returned home. Thus,

when the governor of Nigeria offered Nigerian troops for service in South

Africa in 1900, his offer was ﬁrmly rejected. In the First World War, large

numbers of African soldiers from East and West Africa took part in the

operations to conquer the German colonial empire. But so serious was the

imperial crisis that confronted the British in both the world wars that in

1914, the colour bar against using non-white troops in Europe was broken.

In 1914, India sent a mixed force to East Africa to protect the

Zanzibar–Mombasa–Nairobi railway, a division to Mesopotamia, and for

the ﬁrst time it also sent troops to France, a force of two infantry and two

cavalry divisions arriving at Marseilles in September and October. But the

Indian Army had been designed to ﬁght small colonial wars, not the kind

of mass industrial warfare the Indians encountered when they arrived in

France. Within a matter of months, the heavy casualties that were insep-

arable from the war on the Western Front threatened to destroy the intric-

ate clan and family networks and the paternal relationship between British

ofﬁcers and the sepoys upon which the army’s discipline and morale was

based. By the end of 1915, the Indian infantry had been withdrawn from

France, although the cavalry, who had been less heavily engaged,

remained. For the remainder of the war, most Indian soldiers served in

the Middle East and Africa where they were unlikely to suffer the kinds of

catastrophic casualties that threatened to wreck their morale.

Initially, in both Africa and India, men enlisted because of the attractive

wages they were offered. But the supply of willing military labour soon

dried up. This was unsurprising. By 1915–16, news had reached India of

the high casualties suffered by the Indian Corps in France. At the same

time, the death rate, largely due to disease and malnutrition, amongst

African soldiers and members of the various Carrier Corps employed on

the lines of communication in East West Africa rose by between 10 and 20

per cent. Consequently, by 1916–17, the British administration had to use

every bit of their inﬂuence with local notables to persuade them to encour-

age more men to come forward. And when cajoling and persuasion failed,

as it did increasingly in East and West Africa, they increasingly resorted to

forced conscription and methods to raise the men they required.

Having seen the African troop’s ability and loyalty during the First

World War, the British had less hesitation about using them outside their

own colonies in the Second World War. Between 1940 and 1941, they

employed troops from East and West Africa to conquer the Italian Empire

in East Africa. Similarly, Indian troops again saw service in Africa, where

they too took part in the conquest of the Italian Empire and also in Italy

itself, where three Indian divisions were deployed between 1943 and 1945.

But it was in Burma that African and Indian soldiers made their most

signiﬁcant contribution to the imperial war effort during the Second

The British Army and the empire 101