WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This is a micro-history of three Polish-Jewish-South African brothers who fought for the British in World War II, and what happened when they returned. These three brothers escape the Holocaust, joined the British army, and each had a separate experience in North Africa, Italy, Palestine, and beyond. When they returned from the war, it was to negotiate liminal but still privileged positions in the emerging apartheid state. To some degree, their experiences guided them to become critics of the racialized state, but at the same time their own struggles for whiteness and Britishness as soldiers and veterans induced them to accept positions of colonial privilege. This is a story about colonialism , the clash of class and race, and the experiences of war as part of an Empire. It is also the way we remember the Second World War, and what happens when ideas are mediated across generations.

Over 90,000 African soldiers fought in the Burma Campaign, and the men that made the journey ranged from battle hardened troops who fought in Ethiopia and Somalia to hastily assembled formations created in West Africa. Making things difficult, the British military leadership in East and West Africa (particularly the KAR and WAFF) saw little need for commissioning Africans into the colonial officer corps, As a result, African forces were almost exclusively led by British officers, limiting the ability to form new units as wartime needs arose. In particular, the lack of any African officers led the British to a novel choice – using Polish officers in exile in Britain after 1939. Operational histories and memoirs serve to shed new light on how these African, Polish, and British soldiers interacted preparing for a fight in Africa that never came before being sent to a very different one halfway across the world.

Like WWI shortly before, WWII thrust a diversity of West Africans into a global conflict of unprecedented scope and brutality. Many Anglophone West Africans found themselves fighting in distant theatres of war. Francophone West Africans often found themselves fighting closer to home, but were often confounded by the shifting loyalties thrust upon them by French politics. Civilian populations everywhere in the region were called upon to make sacrifices to support both a war and systems of colonialism that were not of their choosing. All the while, the complex movement of troops and commodities brought new and powerful ideas to the region - often with unexpected outcomes for all concerned.

Like WWI shortly before, WWII thrust a diversity of West Africans into a global conflict of unprecedented scope and brutality. Many Anglophone West Africans found themselves fighting in distant theatres of war. Francophone West Africans often found themselves fighting closer to home, but were often confounded by the shifting loyalties thrust upon them by French politics. Civilian populations everywhere in the region were called upon to make sacrifices to support both a war and systems of colonialism that were not of their choosing. All the while, the complex movement of troops and commodities brought new and powerful ideas to the region - often with unexpected outcomes for all concerned.