This book is concerned with African soldiers who served in the British colonial forces, and the South African Defence Force, during the Second World War. These men, and a very few women, have not been given the attention that they deserve in the historical literature. Indeed, there are many who will be surprised to know that large numbers of Africans served in the war in the armies of Britain, South Africa, France, Italy and Belgium. To cover all of those African soldiers in one book would be a Herculean task, so the focus here is on those who were black and who came from what rather crudely can be called ‘Anglophone’ Africa. This ignores white South Africans who fought in the war, but their literacy and the racially discriminatory nature of that country until the 1990s means that they have been documented, with their experiences detailed in numerous chronicles and also by official histories. In contrast black soldiers throughout the whole of Africa have been largely ignored. Official documentation tended to treat them collectively, as units, battalions, regiments and brigades, and as most were nonliterate few individuals produced memoirs or accounts of their war experiences.

The attempt in this book is to tell in their own words the story of African soldiers who fought for Britain and South Africa. Thus the account rests heavily on oral evidence, soldiers’ letters, and other sources in which the African rank and file were noted or recorded their experiences of the war years and after. This is ‘history from below’, a ‘people's story’, an account of men who so far have been largely forgotten. There are many books by and about ordinary soldiers in European armies in the Second World War, and there are several accounts by Africans who served with the French colonial armies. A good deal has been written on the campaigns in which African soldiers were involved, in Abyssinia, North Africa, the Levant, Italy, and Burma, and although African units are often mentioned their experience has been largely ignored. One or two novels have dealt with African soldiers in the Second World War, the latest being Burma Boy.