Caribbean Beat — November/December 2018 (#154)

ange of the German front line. Some battalions were sent to the
Middle East, Egypt and Palestine in particular, and here they saw
some direct action, participating in driving the remaining Ottoman
forces from the region after the Battle of Jerusalem in 1917.
Two men won the Military Medal for valour, and the commanding
officer of the BWIR, Major General Sir Edward Chaytor, wrote:
“Outside my own division there are no troops I would sooner have
with me than the BWIs who have won the highest opinions of all
those who have been with them during our operations here.”
High opinions aside, many in the regiment nursed
grievances, sensing they were being treated as secondrate
personnel, useful for hard physical work but not for
real combat. There were many instances of discrimination and
poor treatment, as in March 1916, when a troop ship carrying
recruits from Jamaica was diverted into a freezing blizzard
near Halifax, Canada, leading to five deaths and more than a
hundred amputations due to frostbite among men who had been
given no cold weather clothing. BWIR personnel were routinely
discriminated against in terms of pay, accommodation, and
promotion. As the war drew to a close, resentment simmered,
leading to an episode in November and December 1918, exactly
a century ago, that was more or less unprecedented in the
history of the conflict.
It occurred in the southern Italian port city of
Taranto, where eight of the BWIR’s battalions were
gathered together after their time in France, or having
been shipped back from the Middle East and Mesopotamia
prior to demobilisation after the Armistice of 11 November.
While other troops were allowed to rest, the Caribbean men
were ordered to work, loading ships, moving supplies, and even
digging latrines for white soldiers. They were also forbidden to
enter Taranto itself. To make matters worse, word spread that
other regiments had been awarded a pay raise, but that the
BWIR had not, on the grounds that it was a “native” regiment.
At this point, tempers boiled over. A previous polite petition
complaining about discrimination had been sent to the authorities
by men of the First and Second Battalions in August, but
was flatly ignored. Then on 6 December, soldiers from the Ninth
Battalion simply refused to work, followed three days later by
the Tenth. Another petition to the Secretary of State, signed by
180 sergeants, outlined the men’s grievances and demanded
equal treatment. This was nothing less than a mutiny, though
it was mainly peaceful, except when several officers, who were
trying to maintain discipline, were assaulted. One private was
shot dead by an NCO, allegedly in self-defence.
With the protests threatening to escalate, the top brass
at Taranto sent for help, with the Worcestershire Regiment,
armed with machine guns, answering the appeal. In the ensuing
imposition of order, writes Steven Johns, “Approximately sixty
soldiers were later tried for mutiny, and those convicted received
sentences ranging from three to five years, but one man got
twenty years, while another was executed by firing squad. The
BWIR itself was disbanded in 1921.” In the process of demobilisation,
the battalions were repatriated under armed escort. With
a revealing taste for vindictiveness, the authorities banned them
from any victory parade, especially in London.
But the genie was out of the bottle, and the experience of
the BWIR fed directly into a wave of militancy and nationalism
across the Caribbean in the 1920s and 30s, which would eventually
lead to greater self-determination and independence. Better
organised and more confident after their wartime experience,
ex-soldiers returned to every Caribbean colony with a new sense
of mission. And, as Johns points out, their erstwhile superiors
now understood that something would have to give:
A secret colonial memo from 1919, uncovered by researchers
for a Channel 4 programme on the Taranto mutiny, showed
that the British government realised that everything had
changed, too: “Nothing we can do will alter the fact that the
black man has begun to think and feel himself as good as the
white.”
By the end of the war, 185 BWIR personnel had been killed
in action, and 1,071 of disease. It was not, as we know, “the war
to end all wars,” but it was certainly a defining moment in the
English-speaking Caribbean’s quest for independence. n
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