Another Man's War Read online

  Meanwhile, Isaac and his friends talked excitedly of joining the Allied armies in North Africa, for an eventual push into Italy or France. This, after all, was the war front the recruitment officers had described when they scoured the villages looking for young men. And they were sure they would be travelling soon. Their conviction only hardened when they were suddenly granted a month’s leave, and advised to go home and see their families.

  For the first time since he had run away to join the Army, Isaac was on his way to Emure-Ile. He was greeted in the village with delight and relief by his parents; it seemed that some relatives had worried that he might already be dead. Instead, Isaac found himself to be something of a local hero. He had tales to share. He knew the workings of the great British Army from the inside; he’d seen the sea and travelled on a ship all the way to Sierra Leone.

  After three weeks at home, Isaac was called into his father’s bedroom late one evening. Joshua sat in the dark room, with a candle on the bare table in front of him. He had heard the stories that Nigerian soldiers would soon be shipped abroad, and this worried him. The British were going to send his eldest son far away, to an unknown place, to fight a war the meaning of which he still did not understand, let alone care for. No other boy from Emure-Ile had enlisted. What was his son playing at?

  Never mind, thought Joshua, he did not wish to berate the boy. For he was about to make him an offer that he was confident would be accepted. Joshua explained that he’d saved enough money to pay for a secondary education, should Isaac gain admission to a good grammar school. Isaac was speechless. He’d always wanted to complete his education, but, faced with his father’s offer, he realised that he had changed in the time he’d been away from home. He felt the pull of a new loyalty, one that he had scarcely been aware of before, to the officers and colleagues that he’d been training with for more than a year now. Soon, he believed, they would be setting off together on a great adventure. He sensed the shame and disgrace that would come from deserting the Army almost on the eve of their departure. He’d be branded a coward, and would spend months in prison if he was caught. No reputable school would want to admit him after that.

  ‘Me, not go back to the Army, to my unit, to desert?’ he said. Isaac surprised himself with how he was talking to his father. His voice grew louder. ‘I’m not going to desert. I’m going with my unit!’

  A few days later, Isaac left Emure-Ile to go back to his barracks. Joshua, deeply saddened, did not go to the edge of the village to say goodbye.

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  ‌A calabash in the wind

  Since the day we left Lagos, we saw nothing but long stretches of water like the wide world, we saw no living creatures except ourselves on the steamship. Although the ships were such big ships, they were tossed about like a piece of calabash in the wind of the water.

  Letter from a Nigerian soldier

  on board a troopship*

  July 1943

  Lagos

  In the early hours of 10 July 1943, Allied landing craft ploughed through heavy seas towards the beaches of Sicily. In the skies above, American paratroopers and British gliders from the 8th Army were blown badly off course by the strong winds, and many landed miles away from their intended destinations. But, for all the confusion, the Allied invasion of Italy had begun, and the initial resistance by German and Italian troops was not as fierce as Eisenhower and his generals had feared.

  That same morning, in Lagos harbour, another chapter of the Second World War was opening. It was a damp grey day and a convoy of six troopships and four destroyers cut through the leaden waters of the lagoon and out towards the sea. The men on the troopships would take part not in the war against fascism in Europe, but the one to defend the British Empire in Asia. They were the very first West African troops to set sail for Burma.

  The Royal West African Frontier Force’s 81st Division comprised some 28,000 men. To move them around the African coast and across the Indian Ocean was an enormous operation, involving three additional convoys and several weeks. As Isaac and his colleagues set off that Saturday, there were no military bands on the Apapa docks playing jaunty tunes, no reporters or photographers to capture the scene, no cheering crowds waving little Union Jacks. They were slipping out, unannounced and uncelebrated, after a couple of nights in a transit camp by a swamp on the edge of the city.

  When they had left for Sierra Leone a few months earlier, the soldiers on board Isaac’s ship were boisterous and full of bluster. This time, they were quiet and pensive. Everyone understood that this was a journey of a different magnitude. Many lingered on the decks, gazing sadly back at the shore. The cathedral, the red-brick secretariat, the square white façade of the governor’s mansion and the other handsome buildings along Lagos Marina were growing smaller and smaller by the minute. They glided past the mouth of Five Cowrie Creek, and the mangrove swamps of Victoria Island, and the little fishing villages where men squatted by canoes, mending their nets. Maybe the ‘fish mammies’, the stout ladies who sat under the palms sorting through the catch, looked up and saw the ships go by. If so, they must have wondered where all those young men were being sent, and how many would come back. Then the convoy was past the mole, with its barbed-wire cover and the little machine-gun post at its end, and into open water. Already Lagos had all but disappeared, the coastline a vanishing smudge of green on the horizon. There was no turning back now.

  During their final days in Nigeria, the pace of training at the camp in Ede had quickened. More troops poured in, not just from Sierra Leone but also from the Gambia and the Gold Coast. They slept in long marquees, their bunk beds closely packed. The Sierra Leoneans, unhappy at the absence of their preferred staple, rice, complained of ‘belly palaver’ as they struggled to adapt to garri, the Nigerian cassava flour. The rain came down in buckets. The bullfrogs kept up a ferocious chorus throughout the night, and the recruits were up before dawn, setting off on a series of route marches wearing full battle dress. The infantrymen spent days on the rifle range, being taught to clean and fire their weapons. The soldiers spent their precious few off-duty hours in nearby Osogbo. British officers turned a blind eye to the trucks that came back from town carrying women as well as men. The officers themselves were known to spend evenings in Osogbo’s Syrian Club, enjoying beer and chicken, before retiring behind a curtain, where there was said to be dancing, sometimes more.

  The men of the 29th CCS ran for hours through forests and up steep hills, carrying mock casualties on stretchers. They practised putting up and taking down their bulky ward tents, and assembling the portable operating theatre. They packed, and unpacked, their medical equipment, until the officers were satisfied that every man knew his own little role to perfection, and that every action was being done as fast as possible. To the disappointment of many in the unit, the gentle Major Moynagh was removed from the command. He was a much-loved officer, though it was also true that Isaac and the others had wondered whether he really had the qualities to lead men into war. His replacement, Major Robert Murphy, was more remote.

  The 29th CCS now belonged to the hurriedly assembled 81st Division, formally proclaimed in March 1943. The 81st Division would be the first of two West African divisions to go to Burma. It would be joined by the 82nd Division in late 1944.

  The 81st was put under the command of a forty-nine-year-old veteran of the First World War, Major General Christopher Woolner. John Hamilton wrote that Woolner was ‘known to his peers as “Kit”, to the Europeans of 81 Division as “Father” and to the Africans as “Pappa”’.* He had a reputation for being a stern disciplinarian, trim and smartly dressed and always clean-shaven. Woolner had clear blue eyes, and could deliver a cold stare of disapproval to soldiers and officers alike when he felt they had fallen short of his exacting standards.

  General Woolner had spent five years in West Africa before his appointment, but, if he appeared well qualified for his new position, in private he had many doubts and worries. He was conce
rned that his troops had had little time for jungle training, that they did not have enough equipment, and that his divisional headquarters was short of experienced officers. He fretted that many of his officers had only arrived from Britain just in time to embark for Burma, while large numbers of the African recruits had been drafted in ‘at the last moment to replace men found unfit on mobilization’. On 19 March 1943, he prepared a secret training policy document for his officers. He warned them that the Japanese soldier ‘really does fight to the last man and the last round’, and that the 81st Division needed to think of the jungle not as a hindrance, but as ‘a friendly cloak, that enables us to close with our enemy and kill him’.*

  Woolner chose a black spider on a yellow background as the divisional badge, and one of these was sown onto each soldier’s uniform. The spider represented Ananse, from Ashanti mythology. It was a cunning animal spirit that could change form, and used its wits to achieve apparently impossible feats and overcome larger enemies. He hoped that his men would take his choice to heart.

  ‘Prepare for six weeks at sea’ was all Major Murphy told the men of the 29th CCS. This was not going to be another short run up the coast. When the men were issued with warm clothes, the mystery deepened. Some argued that this proved that they were going to Europe, to fight the Nazis. Others, who’d overheard talk in the officers’ mess, had a more intriguing and more accurate explanation. Everyone would need to keep warm, they said, because they would be travelling around Africa’s cold, southern Cape. From there, they would sail to India, and then march to a country called Burma. Boma, some of the Africans pronounced it. Few of them had ever heard of it before.

  They had no official confirmation of their destination, even after boarding the ship at Lagos. The officers knew it had become received wisdom, however, that the ship was going to India, and they had not denied the rumour. In the days before their departure, one British officer remembered a Sierra Leonean soldier asking the more critical question that lurked at the back of everyone’s mind: ‘Sir. Which time dis war done finish?’* Perhaps some of the men noticed an unfortunate omen as their ships moved away from the docks that July morning. A Royal Navy destroyer was coming into Lagos harbour, carrying the survivors of a torpedoed ship, gathered in weary, blanketed huddles on the decks. The soldiers’ war had just begun.

  At the docks, Isaac’s ship, the Staffordshire, had towered above the men as they waited to board, but now, out in the blue expanse of the Bight of Benin, it seemed small and vulnerable. Isaac could just make out the silhouettes of the other troopships in the convoy, spread out over several miles in front and behind the Staffordshire, as well as the Navy destroyers sailing by their side. The Staffordshire was soon dipping and lurching in the white-capped waves, and by the early afternoon many of the soldiers were overcome with nausea. The decks were full of miserable, frightened men, staggering to the railings, and emptying their guts over the side of the ship. One soldier was heard suggesting that seasickness could be cured by eating raw chilli, but most simply prayed for deliverance, to Muslim, Christian and other, older gods. As the day wore on, a few men even said they wished they’d taken the advice of friends or family, and deserted just before they’d left Lagos. But there was no more land to be seen now, only an ocean without end.

  Conditions on board the Staffordshire were basic. The officers had shared cabins. Trevor Clark, who was on the Staffordshire, remembered how his Gambian platoon came up to admire his four-berth cabin, so fine they called it ‘a house’. The Africans, for their part, slept in their hundreds in the dark hold, not in beds, but in rows and rows of hammocks. The first nights were stifling, and the men stripped down to loin-cloths or shorts. Were any of the British officers who saw that gloomy hold of near-naked black bodies struck by an uncomfortable similarity with the past? Africans had been taken from this same coast before, and packed onto ships for an unknown destination. Only this time the Africans would be fighting for the white men, not labouring to produce their wealth. Many of the men pleaded to be allowed to sleep on the deck, and, when the captain agreed, Isaac and the others took it in turns over subsequent nights. They all preferred to be out in the open. After dark, they peered over the ship’s railings and marvelled at the filigree lines of phosphorescence in the bow waves. Then they laid out their blankets, and fell asleep beneath a vast tableau of stars.

  If accommodation was wanting, at least the food was plentiful. General Woolner had ensured there were fifty days’ worth of rations on board all the convoy’s ships, more than enough for the journey. There was rice and beans, as well as garri and meat, and the occasional apple.

  It was a journey of many discoveries, both great and small. Some of the soldiers who came from more remote communities had never seen, let alone used, a flush toilet before. Shortly after leaving Lagos, an African sergeant approached his puzzled British counterpart to say that his men were worried that the wells on the ship were nearly empty, and the water inside them tasted salty.* Eventually, a British soldier had to arrange a practical demonstration of lavatory use, complete with hand gestures, which seemed to dispel the confusion.

  Another revelation was the ship’s crew. They were white men, plainly, yet they wore dirty overalls, laboured with their hands, and were even observed to give passing Africans a friendly slap on the back. Most West Africans had never seen, let alone experienced, anything like this. They had always known the white man as a remote figure, part of the small ruling class. He was a missionary, a civil servant or a military officer. He assumed, and wielded, authority, and he invariably lived in a large house surrounded by servants. He had his own club, where he socialised with other whites. If he was sometimes admired for his knowledge and apparent incorruptibility, he was also resented for his austerity and attitude of superiority. But these sailors, with their strange Cockney, Liverpudlian and Glaswegian accents, assumed no airs. They were quick to share both jokes and cigarettes with their African passengers. There may have been a few Africans on the Staffordshire who reached a startling conclusion; for the first time in their lives, they were meeting white men who were less educated than they were. And at mealtimes some of the African soldiers could not resist peering through the saloon windows, for the thrill of seeing white stewards waiting on the officers.

  As the convoy approached Cape Town, the seas grew more turbulent. On 21 July, just after breakfast, someone caught a first sight of Table Mountain. Hundreds of men rushed to the port side of the Staffordshire, which began to list. The mountain was draped in its cloth of silver cloud, but the city was laid out in bright sunshine beneath. The more distant jagged peaks of the Hottentots Hollands were capped in snow. The air was cold and fresh, the light had a piercing clarity. The soldiers could see seals plunging off the rocks of Robben Island, into water, they said, as dark as the indigo of aro.* Was this really Africa? A place that looked so fine, said one Nigerian, that ‘dis place ebe Englan, nobbe Blackman country’.*

  They spent four days in Cape Town harbour, as the convoy took on food, fresh water, fuel and other supplies. The British officers were given a warm reception onshore. Cape Town’s whites queued up at the quayside in their cars to take their visitors on sightseeing trips of the surrounding countryside, into the Winelands and forests of umbrella pines at the foot of Table Mountain. They invited the officers to their homes for dinners and parties. Months later, sheltering from the rain in the jungles of Burma, the officers would remember picnics in the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, dinners at the Mount Nelson Hotel, alluring women at Delmonico’s nightclub, and wonder if it had all really happened.

  For the African troops, the Cape was seductive, and yet also cold-hearted. Most, like Isaac, were not even allowed off the ships. Eventually, some of the men were given permission to go ashore, but the local authorities received them only grudgingly. After much negotiation, they were allowed to march in the outer suburbs, but were ordered to leave their weapons on the ship. One lady, seeing a British captain with his African men, asked, ‘But
you don’t arm these monkeys, do you?’* The captain replied that they were, in fact, frontline troops, at which the woman walked away, wondering aloud what the Empire was coming to.

  They were the first West African convoy to land at Cape Town. Some of the ships that came in later weeks were given a slightly warmer reception. A Nigerian soldier remembered parading through the streets, marching to the beat of the drums, the enthusiastic crowds cheering wildly. He saw trams, and tarred roads, and splendid houses. It was only later, back on board the ship, that he and his fellow soldiers wondered why they’d seen so few black faces on the streets of Cape Town.*

  Durban, further east on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, was generally friendlier to the passing West Africans. Here, too, the officers had a wonderful time. The white residents, of overwhelmingly British descent, embraced them with open arms. Captain Charles Carfrae would remember being ‘spoilt almost to death for ten days of eating, drinking and lovemaking. In retrospect Durban appears as a golden city, a southern paradise, the stuff of sensuous dreams: and I for one have never forgotten its delights’.* This was a city of ‘well-lit and well-stocked shops and lovely weather’,* a salutary contrast with the grim conditions in wartime Britain. Another contrast that the British officers noticed, however, was the difference between their well-built West African soldiers, and ‘the undernourished and ill-dressed native blacks’.*

  One contingent of West Africans was allowed to wander around Durban under the supervision of a British officer. They soon found themselves being chased out of a ‘Whites Only’ public toilet, and then got into a vigorous argument in the Woolworths department store over the price of oranges. Employing the skills they used at home, they could not understand why the girl behind the counter refused to be drawn into negotiations over the price. A crowd gathered to see what was happening. The misunderstanding was resolved when an older white woman intervened and bought oranges for all the soldiers.* As the troopships sailed away from Durban, Africa slipped out of view. It was too much for one soldier from the Gold Coast. He stared at the receding coastline, and was heard to cry, ‘I cannot leave my homeland.’ Then he leapt overboard. The ship did not stop, and so the Gold Coast Regiment recorded its first casualty since setting out for the war.*