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Only in the last few years have major memorials to the wartime sacrifices of the British Dominions and Colonies taken their place in the ceremonial plots of central London. They are a welcome if belated tribute. Yet, following the second world war’s end, the government made a more practical gesture. The 1948 British Nationality Act confirmed that passports would be granted not only to all Commonwealth peoples regardless of creed or colour but even to those in India, Pakistan and beyond who opted no longer to be the King’s subjects. It was a generous offer. Only the great take-up rate from so many of non-British stock led to its eventually curtailment.
The closest modern equivalent is the legal entitlement to common citizenship of the European Union. Yet few today feel the tug of sentiment so keenly that they would gladly take up arms in the name of José Manuel Barroso, the Commission President, as they once did for George VI, Rex Imperator. And it was the strength of those former ties in the most desperate period of the 20th century that emerges from Ashley Jackson’s great work, The British Empire and the Second World War.
The scale of the contribution remains astonishing. Malta’s heroic endurance has passed into legend. Humble Tongans clubbed together to buy Spitfires for the RAF. From the Caribbean they enlisted in droves, even although in 1939 the West Indies had no full-time military force of their own. In the summer of 1940, Canadian troops provided a significant proportion of the front-line soldiery defending southern England from invasion. Canada also supplied nearly half the surface escorts guarding the Atlantic convoys from North America to Britain — a vital assistance to the mother country.
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