60 years after WWII, but why did we fight?

By Timothy Kitundu
As the world is commemorating the 60th anniversary since the end of World War II, the Tanzanians who fought in the war in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) still reflect on the near misses, hardships and sometimes moments of success they experienced.
For soldiers from the African continent, the war was a different experience. Although this week in May marks the end of the war, fighting continued especially in Asia where many of the African soldiers were posted.
Pascasi Gamba, a Mara Region born veteran, fought in the war. He did not fight is Burma as many of his fiends did but met the frontline in Egypt.
Gamba remembers that it was in 1940, while aged 25 that he enrolled in the army (KAR). By that time serving the army was a ‘forced labour’ but Gamba enrolled himself voluntarily.
Gamba claims that his long journey to the battlefield commenced in 1940 at Musoma where they were taken to Maseno in Kenya via Kisumu. Maseno had a secondary school which served as a training ground for soldiers and the main training was on signals.
However, due to lack of enough education Gamba and other 49 colleagues were sent back to their home regions. He was recalled again after one week and this time he went to a place known as Kereni camp in Kenya (Kenya was the stronghold of KAR in Africa), where training was carried out in parade and how to handle arms including marksmanship. That was where they were commissioned as fully fledged soldiers ready to go to the frontline.
In 1941 he and his colleagues were asked to choose what trade they wanted to learn. At a training centre at Kabete, Gamba was astonished to see African Aircraft Engineers.
“I had in mind that aircrafts were handled by white men and no one else,” he said. He chose to train as a Fitter and Turner for six months before he was posted to the 48 East Africa Engineering coy. However, before sending him to the frontline he was allowed to go back home and say farewell to his parents.
Returning to Nanyuki in Kenya, Gamba was assigned a fleet of 300 trucks that had to take soldiers to Somaliland. They travelled through Shoro and reached Mogadishu after six days.
After a week’s rest, they proceeded to Hargesha only to stop at a tower at Daridawa. Here they had to spend the night and early the next morning, all soldiers were told to surround the tower and offer prayers in their beliefs. “It is not clear to me to date, the reason why we were requested to pray,” he said.
The day he would live to remember occurred in 1942 when he was travelling with a convoy to Egypt. Not only that they had a senior white commander in the convoy. Reaching Soroti, in Uganda, one of the truck’s brakes failed. He was confronted with the toughest challenge of his life.
“The white man wanted me to repair the truck so that the journey commenced. I had to use my skills as a turner to make modifications of the brake lining hence the journey continued,” he said. The white commander was very pleased with the job and this earned Gamba the rank of a full corporal.
The journey took them to Egypt where there was fierce fighting between the Germans and the Italians. It was in 1942 that they were taken hostage by the Germans. He witnessed a sad incident when one of his close colleagues was shot dead after defying the order to drop down his gun.
“This man was very tough… I remember way back when we were being trained, he used to tell me that he would never yield to any enemy… he said he was a fearless soldier,” Gamba recounted.
They were lucky to escape during the night after encountering with the English Red Cross. After being promoted to a sergeant, he proceeded to Ethiopia, and then to Seychelles via Asmara, that was in 1942. That year the war in Africa ended although it continued elsewhere. By 1945, he was reposted to Nanyuki in Kenya.
Gamba still does not see the relevance of fighting in the war from those who fought in Africa and Asia. He says that apart from learning the trade of fitter and turner, war has taught him no good lesson – “we were trained to kill and self defence which is not a very pleasant experience in life,” he said.
Reflecting on the life at the battlefield, he says the white men had a high degree of discrimination towards Africans. But he remembers one important thing: while soldiers were fully armed, the white men pretended to be friendly to them, fearing the guns in the hands of the African soldiers and nothing else.

Who won World War II?

The Nazi regime collapsed in May 1945, squeezed ever more tightly between two fronts - the Soviet Union on one side and the Western Allies on the other.
But which of these fronts was the most important?
Throughout the Cold War, and ever since, each side has tended to see its own contribution as decisive.
"In the West, for some time... public opinion has taken the view that the Soviet Union played a secondary role," says the Russian historian Valentin Falin.
On the other hand, opinion polls show that two-thirds of Russians think the Soviet Union could have defeated Hitler without the Allies' help, and half think the West underestimates the Soviet contribution.
Richard Overy, professor of contemporary history at King's College London, notes that after the war, Hitler's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop listed three main reasons for Germany's defeat:
Unexpectedly stubborn resistance from the Soviet Union
The large-scale supply of arms and equipment from the US to the Soviet Union, under the lend-lease agreement
The success of the Western Allies in the struggle for air supremacy.
Mr Overy says that for decades Soviet historians underplayed the significance of US and UK lend-lease in the Soviet Union's success, but that Russia has recently shown just appreciation.
Mr Falin, however, says Russians never forgot the help they received from their allies.
Mr Overy accepts that the Western powers played a smaller role on the battlefield itself than the Soviet forces but says their bombing campaigns made a huge contribution.
"Because Britain and the US had to invade Europe by sea [Italy in 1943, and France in 1944] they have more of a sense of 'liberating' a German-conquered Europe," he says.
Mr Falin, meanwhile, argues that the war could have been brought to an end more quickly if the second front, in France, had been opened before 1944.
"How many millions of people would have remained alive?" he asks.
"Many death camps reached full power precisely in the second half of 1943 and in 1944."
Mr Overy says that the West has a view of the war as a global conflict, because of its fight against Japan, for example, whereas the Soviet view is of a "national crusade to repel the invader".
Mr Falin cites figures suggesting that German forces suffered 93% of their casualties on the Soviet front and argues that this shows the Soviet contribution was decisive.
But he adds that every single US, UK, Canadian or other Allied soldier who died "made a big, important and necessary contribution to the victory, which was a shared victory".



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