Did you know that during the Second World War the British West Indies contributed over £1,575,000 to Britain for aid in the war against Nazi Germany; close to £400,000 was raised for war charities to aid war-torn Britain, and more than £425,000 towards aircraft for the Royal Air Force? Did you know that during the World War II 236 Caribbean volunteers were killed or reported missing and 265 were wounded?
Who asked them to fight?
Nobody had to ask them to fight. It was their sense of duty that led them to enlist. The Second World War was not the white man's war, and it was not European war. The Second World War was a war that held the fate of the entire world on a fragile string. The war was fought against a psychopath and his maniacal cronies bent on taking over the world. This may sound like the plot of an action movie or a comic book, but in the 1930's to 40's it was real life: and Adolf Hitler was a real man and a real threat.
The West Indian men and women who joined the military services volunteered to fight for freedom; to stop the Nazis and to prevent them from achieving their dastardly aim. They fought to keep the West Indies from becoming the Caribbean branch of the German concentration camps. They fought to retain the rights and freedom surely have been taken away had the Germans won. They fought to prevent the Holocaust (the Nazi mass murder of Jews) from spreading to the rest of the world. Dominicans were part of the Allied forces fighting to maintain the freedoms that we in the present day so gallantly enjoy. That is why they fought.
The war
On the eve of the 1st of September 1939 the German Navy calmly entered the Polish port of Danzig, under the guise of a goodwill visit. The next morning the SMS Schleswig-Holstein, a WWI-era battleship, fired the first shots of the war. The SMS Schleswig-Holstein had only days before been in port in Dominica.
Cecil Clarke Sr.: The crew, which were on holidays, visited many sites on island. They even took time to play a game of football with a team of local boys at Newtown, whom they soundly beat.
On the 3rd of September Britain along with France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany. At the outbreak of war the Dominica Volunteer Force was set up. Men, teenage boys and Boy Scouts were organised and sent to camp at Morne Bruce where they were trained to drill, to present arms and to handle and shoot a weapon. The Volunteer Force patrolled the Bay Front and ensured that the black-out rules were enforced.
Cecil Clarke Sr.: A teenager and Boy Scout at that time, Cecil Clarke Sr. was drafted into the Volunteer Force. On his first time on the shooting range he got a very high score for marksmanship.
In 1942 enlistment for the Windward Islands Battalion started. Many Dominican young men joined and were sent for battlefield training in St. Lucia. Not everyone who trained was sent off with South Caribbean Forces to the action; those who remained in the Caribbean served in the different islands maintaining law and order. A contingent was stationed in Dominica when the number of French refugees coming in grew too much.
French invasion
June 1940 saw the Fall of France. The Nazi entered Paris forcing the Third Republic (the French government at that time) to the safety of the South in the unoccupied part of France. On the 16th of June the Nazi-controlled puppet government (the Vichy) was installed; six days later France signed an armistice with the Nazis, where France was divided into the Nazi-occupied and the unoccupied zones. They also surrendered all French Jews to the Nazis. In the West Indies the Vichy branch in Guadeloupe and Martinique translated into the almost complete abolition of universal suffrage for French citizens, especially the black and mixed race French.
Soon after the Vichy government set up in the French islands there began a trickle of French islanders seeking refuge in Dominica. They stole away on small crafts across the channel. The trickle grew into a torrent which by the end of 1942 there were 1,018 men on island. Six months later the numbers swelled to 2,367 men, 330 women and 83 children: some of the refugees were able to get the families over.
In May of 1941 representative of the Free French under General de Gaulle came to Dominica to set up reception centre for the refugees. Dominican became training for the Free French Forces who were often then sent off to Europe and North Africa to fight.
In 1943 15-year-old Franz Fanon, famed French author, left Martinique in an open boat for Dominica to undergo military training with the Free French. Later on he was sent to Algeria.
The Allies liberated Paris in August 1977, dissolving the Vichy government. Subsequently the refugees were repatriated to the respective islands.
Making silk out of a sow' ear
On the 8th of January 1940 Britain declared rationing which further tightened belts already tightened since September the year before. Within the declaration of war the colonies had been immediately placed under the Defence of the Realm Act. Under the Act the Governor was responsible for regulations to control the price of commodities, to prevent profiteering, to control foreign exchange and to censor press, mail, telegraph and cable messages. Offices were set up including the War Emergency Office, the Censoring Office, and the Emergency Food Control office.
Items like salt, sugar, butter, flour and other food stuffs, kerosene, cloth and petrol became scarce. Only licensed bakers were sold flour to bake bread for the public.
Ingenuity meant that Dominicans weren’t completely for want. To replace bread roasted breadfruit and dasheen was eaten at meal time, and cassava flour became a substitute for wheat flour.
A.S.: In the mornings before she left for school they would put cooked breadfruit in the coal fire to roast it, and then they had it for breakfast. Also they would put ripe bananas into the hot ashes to roast.
Without imported butter, the yellow cream was collected and churned with salt to make butter. Coconut oil was used when cooking oil was scarce and sugar cane juice replaced sugar.
Reynold St. Hilaire: The problem of no salt was solved by extracting in from sea water. Four to five gallons of sea water was boiled down in a large iron pot, producing half a pound of fine salt. The only problem was that the process would soon corrode the pot, so that the pot had to be replaced often.
Louisa Benoit: The shortage of white cloth for underclothes forced people to use the white flour bags. The bags, bought from bakers, were washed, placed in the sun and sprinkled repeatedly with ash water until the cloth turned white. The ash water was the result of coal pot ashes which was put in a basin of water and the water from the top was collected after the ashes settled.
This worked as an effective bleach.
With blackout conditions and no torchlights, bouzyes were used to give light. Basically it was a bottle with kerosene and a wick made from a strip of crocus bag. A slice of lime wedged at the mouth of the bottle: it kept the bottle from cracking from the heat of the flame.
Dangerous waters
The situation of shortages was exacerbated when the ships which would normally bring in goods came with drastic infrequency. Although some were being diverted to Europe for use in the war, the main reason was the German submarine threat. This was the two-prong German tactic against England. The British West Indies produced oil, petrol, bauxite and sugar which was desperately need in Britain. In turn the colonies relied on food and other necessities. Apart from negatively affecting Great Britain, they hoped to starve the colonials, breaking their spirit and ending their support for the Mother Country.
German submarines (called U-boats) attacked cargo and passenger ships in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea with boldness and impunity. In March 1942 German submarines torpedoed the Lady Nelson and Umtata in the Castries harbour, St. Lucia, six months later in the Bridgetown harbour, Barbados, the Cornwallis was torpedoed. They would even lie in wait outside of the Port of Spain harbour to pounce on departing vessels. That same year a U-boat, thinking it a British ship, sank a Spanish ship (Spain was neutral) sixty miles east of Dominica. Sixteen bodies from that tragedy washed up on shore at the Carib Reserve and were buried at the St. Marie cemetery in Salybia. This would not be the only time U-boat victims, civilian or military or German, would wash ashore in Dominica. On 18 May 1942 eight survivors from the U.S. freighter Quaker City which had been sunk by a U-boat reached safety on Dominica. Washing upon the shore was also flotsam for the torpedoed vessels including rubber latex, and sometimes food rations including a white salted meat that was named "boudin German".
London calling
News about the war came mainly from the radio, primarily the BBC. Radio sets that were able to pick up the signal from the BBC became very valuable. Radioed households were a rarity so every shop where a working radio was located became very popular spot come news time. In Roseau the population would gather around the available radios, all ears glued to the set listening for news of the war. Activity came to a standstill and woe to the person who disturbed the concentrated silence.
E. B.: News of an Allied set back would elicit a collective sigh from the crowd.
A. S.: Her mother owned a radio. Daily at 6 p.m. it was A. S.'s duty to hook up the wires of radio to its rather large battery and tune in so that they could listen to the news.
The end at last
With the Russian forces battling it out against the Nazi army in the streets of Berlin in April 1945, on the last day of the month Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker rather than concede defeat. Seven days later all German military surrendered unconditionally. The next day on the 8th of May VE day was declared. In Dominica the bells of the three major churches—the Roman Catholic the Anglican and the Methodists—were rung announcing the joyous news.
Reynold St. Hilaire: In Laplaine the residents came out into the streets blowing the conch shell, playing the tambour and jumping up. Upon learning the news Ferdinand Athanaze wrote the song which roughly translated from Creole "Churchill kill Hitler".