Military Migrants: British Service Personnel in Ceylon during the Second World War

Abstract

Across the territories that comprised the British Empire, the Second World War caused many migrations, some great and some small, but all traumatic and formative for the people involved. Civilians, both local and expatriate, fled in great numbers from the threat of German or Japanese invasion; in some colonies civilians were evacuated from cities threatened by bombing or deemed militarily important; hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women moved around the world and spend significant periods of time in foreign lands – African troops resided in Asia, Indians in the East Indies and Middle East, and British servicemen and women found themselves billeted all over the Empire. Also, forming a fascinating subcategory, were the many thousands of American service personnel who served in British colonial territories. After reviewing the phenomenon of migration within the British Empire during the war, this article focuses on a case study – the experience of British (and some Australian) service personnel based in Ceylon for a range of military purposes, including office work, jungle training, and naval operations. It examines the methods used to acclimatize young service personnel, often going abroad for the first time in their lives, to the strangeness of a foreign, ‘exotic’ land. It describes the impressions the people and environment left on these wartime immigrants, before considering the recreational provisions made for them, and the sexual opportunities that sometimes arose. The article concludes that the experience of these European migrants deserves study as much as the experience of non-European servicemen and women, which has received significant attention in the scholarly literature relating to the Empire at war.