ABSTRACT
During the Second World War, confronted by the need for more personnel to sustain the war effort, the British War Office and service chiefs found themselves obliged, reluctantly, to accept volunteers from the Caribbean. Their reluctance stemmed from what the service chiefs perceived to be the troublesome and difficult nature of the Caribbean troops who had served Britain in the previous world war. (There had been a mutiny among Caribbean troops who were left neglected in southern Italy at the end of the 1914–18 war. Something of the broader context of this mutiny may be gleaned from the fact that, of twelve battalions of the British West Indies Regiment who served in the First World War, only two saw substantial active service. This was in Palestine, where they were deployed against the Turks, the authorities having explained that it was ‘against British tradition to deploy aboriginal [sic] troops against a European enemy’.)
