Introduction: War and Empire

Abstract

According to Captain Alfred North-Coombes, based on the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues with a company of Mauritian soldiers guarding a British cable and wireless station, the greatest war excitement came on 3 March 1942 when the Cocos-Keeling Islands were shelled by an enemy ship, causing an interruption in the imperial cable link with Australia. This caused panic in Rodrigues, and ‘at Oyster Bay was heard a humming, that was the sound of people praying aloud, even those who had never prayed before, that they would be saved from the Japanese. Rosaries were cut into pieces and shared with neighbours’.1 Meanwhile, on Mauritius, 344 miles west across the Indian Ocean, ‘one Indian widow, calling at the [Labour] Department with some copper utensils, said with pride “that she could spare them for England’s hour of need’”.2 Such minutiae demonstrate the truly imperial scope of the 1939–45 conflict, a war that generated a host of experiences common to both the people of Britain and the 60 million inhabitants of the British colonial empire.