ABSTRACT
For a conflict as monumental and devastating as the Second World War, nothing was certain to be spared to ensure absolute and crushing victory. Both the Allied and Axis Powers committed not only their entire human and material resources to the war effort but also introduced at the dying stages of the war dangerous and newly-improved weapons that dictated the final end of the war with attendant consequences for the international political system. As a major actor or power dragged into the War by Germany’s aggression in Poland, Britain found itself in need of personnel to prosecute the war. It did not have to look too far. Her colonies in West Africa became a very important and rich source of both manpower and raw materials. This region alone supplied over 300,000 soldiers and laborers for military service in the East and North African campaigns and after 1943, in Asia. Of this number, however, 121,650 Nigerian soldiers were demobilized after the war (this is with the possibility of more than the above figure would have been recruited), surpassing any military mobilization in all of the British colonies. Such massive recruitment to fight for Britain would seem to have been unproblematic. This was, however, not so. Based on the above, this chapter examines the series of recruitment strategies used by Britain in preparation for the Second World War. It categorically identifies three major modes or forms of recruitments which includes awareness and different form of advertisement; propaganda and recruitment agents via traditional rulers and other government related agencies; and lastly, conscription. The paper concludes that despite these seeming strategies to lure Nigerians into joining the colonial armed forces, not many were receptive to it, a situation which led to untoward practices like forceful conscription to compel colonial peoples to join the war effort.
