"World War II, Africans, Africans in World war II

Head-line source"The Christian Science Monitor"

In 1939 Hitler's forces invaded Poland and began racing west across Europe. By 1940, France had brought in 80,000 Africans to help it stem the Nazi advance. African American reporters including R. Walter Merguson of the" Pittsburgh Courier" and William Veasey of the "New Jersey Herald News" reported on the bravery and sacrifice of African troops before the fall of France. They claimed that thousands of these soldiers were used as a rearguard to allow the mostly white troops to be safely evacuated at Dunkirk. In June 1940 when Nazi soldiers captured Captain Charles Ntchorere, a Gabonese officer in the French army, they told him to stand with the other African troops instead of with the French who were officers like himself. He demaned his rights as a French citizen. The Nazis killed him instantly. In the hectic and confused last days before Allied troops were evacuated from Dunkirk and France fell, a French soldier described meeting two Africans on a road near a town called Chatillon: They belonged to the 24th Colonials. They joined us. They too were looking for their regiment. One of them was a corporal and understood French. He asked me whether it would soon be 'over. He, too, thought Germany hadn't done anything to him. I tried to explain that France was in danger. He didn't seem to understand. "Hitler no come Senegal; he kept repeating....Hitler no come Senegal. I no come Germany. I and Hitler no enemy.

Many of the African troops used by the colonial powers had not volunteered to die in distant and unfamiliar places to aid the European country that was already oppressing and exploiting them. Many were conscripts. Some had been levied by force. Over 100,000 soldiers were conscripted from French West Africa between 1943 and 1945.

These soldiers understood full well that an Allied victory meant that no substantive political or economic changes would occur in their native countries. Despite the flowery language contained in such Allied documents as the Atlantic Charter - an eight point declaration of the principles on which peace would be based when the Allies won-or the Four Freedom mentioned by President Roosevelt, i.e., the freedoms of speech, expression, worship, and the freedom from fear and want which he said would apply "everywhere in the world," -- Africans understood that very little would voluntarily change. British prime minister Winston Churchill later made this clear:

At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind, primarily, the restoration of sovereignty to the nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke. So that is quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe their allegiance to the British crown

France was likewise steadfast in its intention to hold on to its empire. In 1944 in a speech in French Equatorial Africa, Rene Pleven, France's top colonial minister declared:

We read at one time or another that this war must be ended with what is called a liberation of colonial peoples. In the greater France which includes the colonies there are no people to liberate. There are only populations which feel themselves to be French and which wish to take a greater part in the life and democratic institutions of the French community.

And yet African troops were often the balance of victory for the Free French forces fighting under General Charles De Gaulle. For example, in the Allied landing in southern France along the Riviera in 1944 - two months after D-Day-- African troops from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia comprised the majority of Free French forces as they fought alongside the Nazis of any means of getting supplies or reinforcements from France to their beleaguered armies in Italy. There were heavy battle casualties among these troops.

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