I lived in Jamaica as a child and completed my first three years of school there, and over the past ten years I’ve become fascinated by the role of Caribbean men and women serving in Britain in World War II. I first became aware of them when I was writing Code Name Verity. I’d wanted to include a black airman at the end of that novel (and I did), because I hoped to paint in a little diversity among the mostly European and white cast of characters. My original plan was to make that airman American. But when I started digging, of course I discovered that the only black Americans to fly in World War II were the Tuskegee Airmen. They didn’t fly in France and they didn’t fly in bombers and they didn’t fly in integrated crews, and I needed my airman to do all those things, so I made him Jamaican instead of American. Out of some sixteen thousand men and women from the Caribbean serving in the military in World War II, about five hundred were enlisted in the Royal Air Force. The United States segregated their armed forces back then; the British, however reluctantly, did not. (When the US entered the war, the British bent over backward to accommodate American Jim Crow regulations, resulting in frustration and resentment from servicemen and local populations all over the United Kingdom.)

It wasn’t just Caribbean men who volunteered to join the war effort. Considering themselves to be British subjects and motivated by patriotism, about six hundred Caribbean women joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service to support their “mother country” in World War II. Another eighty served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They felt that they were fighting against the more ferocious institutionalized prejudices of Nazism—despite the ironic and infuriating prejudices they faced from their own governing bodies. For example, when the British sent two hundred Caribbean servicewomen to work in Washington, DC, only white women were eligible for the assignment, so as to avoid offending the Americans.