Britain's "Forgotten Army" in Burma has been commemorated, filmed and written about for eighty years. Far less is said about the fact that roughly one in six of its soldiers came from Africa. Around 90,000 of them were West Africans from Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. They came home as the "Burma Boys", and some of them helped start the end of empire.
Japan invaded Burma in December 1941. By the spring of 1942 the British had been driven out in the longest retreat in their army's history, and India itself was under threat. The campaign to win Burma back, from 1943 to 1945, was fought by Field Marshal William Slim's Fourteenth Army. It was made up mostly of soldiers from India, together with British troops and, from 1943, two divisions from West Africa and one from East Africa.
Figures vary with the counting method, from around 73,000 West Africans in Asia to about 100,000 Africans in Burma overall. Most historians use a figure of about 90,000 West Africans, more than half of them Nigerians. For most of them it was the first time they had left Africa. They fought in some of the hardest country of the whole war, the jungle hills of the Arakan on the border with today's Bangladesh, and they were highly regarded for it.
At the start of the Second World War the Royal West African Frontier Force was small, about 8,000 men across British West Africa. Its first task was defending the colonies against Vichy French territory next door. West African brigades then helped drive the Italians out of Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia in 1940–41, often alongside the King's African Rifles of East Africa.
Late in 1942 General Archibald Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief in India, asked the War Office whether West African troops could be used in Burma. General George Giffard, who had commanded in West Africa and knew African troops well, pushed for whole West African divisions. Twenty-eight battalions were raised during the war. For the first time, units of the force were sent to fight outside Africa.
The recruitment was officially voluntary, and the men were proud of that. In practice "voluntary" covered a wide range, from young men who ran away from home to enlist, to those sent by chiefs under pressure from colonial officials to supply quotas. The idea that every man was simply defending the empire he believed in doesn't match what many veterans later said.
The 81st Division was formed on 1 March 1943 and reached India on 14 August 1943. Its sign was a black tarantula spider on a yellow disc, and its men were known in the force as the Spider men. The 82nd Division was formed in August 1943 and sailed for India in 1944. Its sign was two crossed spears through a carrier's head-pad, a reminder of how much the division depended on carrying.
Their structure was unusual. In the hills of the Arakan there were few roads for lorries, and many mules could not cope with the terrain or the disease. So each division had its own auxiliary groups of unarmed carriers, who moved ammunition, food and equipment on their heads, as their grandfathers had done in East Africa in the First World War. When air supply was cut back in 1945 to feed the main advance on Mandalay, the 82nd Division's carrier battalions carried everything the division needed.
As in 1914, the officers and most senior NCOs were white. Africans could rise to sergeant-major. Very few were commissioned. One of the first was Seth Anthony of the Gold Coast, who trained at Sandhurst and is often described as the first Black African commissioned into the British Army. He served with the 81st Division in Burma and marched in the London Victory Parade.
The 81st Division went into Burma in December 1943 under XV Indian Corps. During the second Arakan campaign, from February to May 1944, it was sent down the Kaladan valley on the corps' eastern flank. The idea was to threaten the Japanese rear while the main force advanced down the Mayu peninsula towards Akyab. The division was supplied by air, and the men cut their own tracks through jungle with machetes.
The Japanese hit back hard. Their counter-attacks pushed the division back up the valley, and it withdrew towards the Indian border. There were ambushes and losses, and the official accounts of the time gave the division little credit for having held Japanese forces away from the main battles. In late 1944 the 81st came back and advanced down the Kaladan a second time, in the dry season, this time successfully.
One West African brigade fought apart from the rest. The 3rd (West African) Brigade, made up of the 6th, 7th and 12th Battalions of the Nigeria Regiment and nicknamed "Thunder", joined Orde Wingate's Special Force, the Chindits. In March and April 1944, during Operation Thursday, about 4,000 Nigerians were flown by glider and Dakota deep behind Japanese lines in northern Burma.
They were originally meant to garrison the jungle "strongholds" (Broadway, White City and Aberdeen) for the raiding columns. They ended up fighting as raiding columns themselves, alongside British and Gurkha battalions, for months longer than any Chindit force had been planned to stay in the field. Casualties and sickness were high. The Nigerian Chindits are among the least known of all the units in a campaign that Britain already calls forgotten.
When the dry season came in late 1944, XV Corps launched its final offensive in the Arakan. The 82nd Division drove through the tunnels on the Maungdaw–Buthidaung road and took Buthidaung. It then crossed a steep, jungle-covered range to join the 81st Division at Myohaung (Mrauk U), the old royal city near the mouth of the Kaladan, in January 1945.
From there the 82nd pursued the Japanese south towards Kangaw, where British commandos had landed from the sea, and then across the An Pass and on towards Taungup. Caught between the landings and the West Africans, the Japanese suffered heavily. So did the 82nd. In the third Arakan campaign it took 2,085 casualties, the highest of any division in XV Corps. Its fight kept Japanese forces tied down in the Arakan while Slim's main army crossed the Irrawaddy and took Mandalay and Rangoon.
Most of what Britain knows about the West Africans in Burma was written by their British officers. One soldier wrote his own account. Isaac Fadoyebo was born in Nigeria on 5 December 1925 and enlisted at about sixteen. He served as a medical orderly with the 29th Casualty Clearing Station of the 6th West African Brigade, 81st Division. In early 1944 his unit was ambushed by the Japanese on the bank of the Kaladan River.
Badly wounded, he was left for dead with a Sierra Leonean comrade, David Kagbo. A Burmese Muslim family sheltered them, at great risk to themselves, and hid them for about nine months until British forces returned. After the war Fadoyebo went home, became a civil servant and wrote a short memoir, A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck. In 1989 he posted the only typed copy to the BBC World Service in London. The journalist Barnaby Phillips found it decades later, tracked Fadoyebo down in Nigeria, carried his letter of thanks to the family's descendants in Myanmar, and told the story in the documentary The Burma Boy and the book Another Man's War. Fadoyebo died on 9 November 2012.
For fiction rooted in the same war, Biyi Bandele's novel Burma Boy follows a young Nigerian Chindit.
The Burma Boys knew they were paid less than British soldiers doing the same job. Nigerian newspapers said so during the war. In 1941 the West African Pilot argued that death knows no colour and pay should reflect that. Documents found in British archives in recent years confirm that African soldiers were paid as little as a third of what white soldiers received. War gratuities, the lump sums paid on discharge, were also set by race. In 2019 a former head of the British Army publicly backed compensation for surviving African veterans of the Second World War.
Memory followed pay. Victory parades, films and books about the Burma campaign, until very recently, rarely showed African soldiers. Many veterans felt forgotten by their own governments too. The "Forgotten Army" label, which British veterans used about their own neglect, applies twice over to the Africans who served with them.
The men came home to price rises, unemployment and promises of pensions, jobs and land that went unpaid. On 28 February 1948, ex-servicemen of the Gold Coast Regiment, many of them Burma veterans, marched peacefully through Accra to present a petition to the Governor at Christiansborg Castle. At the crossroads police stopped them, and a British officer opened fire. Sergeant Nii Adjetey, Corporal Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey were killed.
Days of rioting followed in Accra and other towns. The British arrested the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention, the "Big Six" including Kwame Nkrumah, and a commission of inquiry concluded that the colony needed constitutional change. Nine years later the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first of Britain's African colonies south of the Sahara to win independence. The shooting at the crossroads, by and on soldiers who had fought for the empire, is where that road began.
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The same regiments a generation earlier, from Togoland to East Africa.
The man who turned the anger of 1948 into a movement.
The meeting that set out the demands for independence while the soldiers were still in Asia.
An honest guide to Britain's national war museum.
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