‘No Longer Required for Operations’: Troops’ Repatriation to West Africa after the Second World War, 1945–1950

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper deploys the historical method to critically examine the delayed post-war repatriation of West African troops from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. This previously neglected theme in the historiography of Africa and the Second World War is studied in detail. Delayed and slow troops’ repatriation had bred anxiety in the metropolitan capital, indiscipline, including mutiny and passive mutiny, in the Far East as well as lowered the prestige and rating of the imperial power in the estimation of the colonised. The study questions the official attribution of the delay solely to shipping difficulties. It demonstrates that the lack of shipping space was not the obstacle to the speedy repatriation of troops. Rather there was no decision to repatriate the troops up to the time of the sudden Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945. It thus views the phenomenon as a deliberate strategy to facilitate the deployment of the soldiers for post-war garrison duties and as an army of occupation in furtherance of British strategic imperial designs in Malaya and Java. Thus, slowing down the return of West African servicemen to a long anticipated, volatile post-war militant nationalist scene was part of a broader strategic, imperial objective. It was committed to driving Britain’s renewed yearning to rebuild, or at least defend what was left of its crumbling Empire.