The Influence Of Colonial Troops On The Western Front

Colonial troops or colonial army refers to various military units recruited from, or used as garrison troops in, colonial territories.

It all started on a callous summer day, on June 28th 1914, the Austro-Hungary Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princep, in Sarajevo. Shadowing this dreadful incident, commiserations were given from all over the world. In the background, a pull towards combat began in the peaceful month of July. Austria-Hungary sent a deplorable ultimatum to Serbia with Germany in support on July 23. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28. Consequently, Russia assembled its troops for the war to assist Serbia. Subsequently, three days
French West Africa provided palm oil and peanuts to the French correspondingly. Colonial empires in Africa and Asia first realized the evils of their European colonial “masters” when they got transferred to the Western Front. This bitterly changed the views between recruited troops and their “owners” eternally. For labor purposes used behind the army, Great Britain drafted approximately 330 thousand civil workforces from the Fiji Islands, the Union of South Africa, West Indies, Mauritius, and Egypt. France similarly utilized 185 thousand troops for labor use from colonial empires in Algeria, Indochina, Morocco, Tunisia and Madagascar. Colonial troops also prepared the war for Western front. For example, Chinese men exhumed trenches to shape them for battle. In fact, the majority of colonial troops were drafted more for the use of European territory than for troops of military status at the Western from. Great Britain sent only 150 thousand of the 1.5 million troops they conscripted from India to the Western Front. The rest of the 1 million Indian
The British selected troops solely based on volunteers. The policy in France was based on both will and forced mobilization from their empires in North and West Africa. There was only forced conscription if there weren’t enough people who undertake the enrollment of troops. France was dependent more on conscription the longer the war lasted. For example, in 1915 only 2,500 out of a total of 14,500 new recruits in Algeria were conscripts, this ratio changed dramatically in the second half of the war. In 1917, the army enlisted 6,261 volunteers and 25,925 conscripts, in the following year there were 13,942 volunteers and 34,173 conscripts. France once sent their colonial troops at Germany (Reichswehr) in the European mainland, even when they were proscribed to do so. Along with the use ofcolonial troops in war zones, France also used them in factories and forced them to do work that would be essential for their warfare strengths. Just in a matter of a few weeks after this incident happened with the German Reichswehr, Great Britain refrained the usage of colonial troops in this manner. The reason why Britain intervened was because Winston Churchill, First Lord of the