In early 1942 the 16-year-old Isaac Fadoyebo thought he would not be able to get a suitable job in Nigeria. Many years later he wrote: ‘I simply saw military service as a good job. Without consulting my parents and caring less about the consequences I took a plunge into the unknown by getting myself enlisted in the army at Abeokuta.’ As with many other Africans who served in the Second World War, Fadeyebo was a volunteer, eager for paid work, the chance of adventure, or perhaps to wear a uniform to impress young women. There were other men who found their way into the army by means not of their choosing. ‘The chief picked out some men and sent them to Bawku … The chief told me to go and do something there and I was put in the army,’ said Agolley Kusasi, recalling 40 years after the event how, as a 19-year-old farmer in the northern Gold Coast, his chief had sent him to join the Gold Coast Regiment in late 1939. Unaware of the real reason for which he was being sent to Bawku, Agolley Kusasi found himself with other young men enlisted in the army and sent away for training and eventually war service in Burma. He did not return home to his family until 1946. About the same time as this young man was forcibly enlisted, the district commissioner recorded that ‘both Bawku market and Bawkumaba's court was [sic] noticeably affected by the recruiting campaign, people being afraid to come into Bawku’.Throughout Britain's African colonies during the war years several hundred thousand men were recruited for military service, most enlisting voluntarily but some as a result of varying degrees of pressure, including force.

In September 1939, Britain's African Colonial Forces (ACF) were small and inadequately equipped for a modern war, but only deemed necessary for use in Africa. Through the 1920s colonial defence plans for West Africa assumed any future conflict would be with France, although this was assessed as ‘very unlikely’. However, the Abyssinian crisis of 1935–36 turned the spotlight onto the potential threat from Italian policies, mainly in the Horn of Africa.