and West African volunteers is particularly interesting.
A lot of the West Indians that I've spoken to
and who've written accounts of their service
make it very clear that they understood
that a Nazi victory in Europe,
particularly a victory over Great Britain,
could have had very serious consequences
for them in the Caribbean.
You have to remember that they'd only been liberated
from slavery a hundred years or a hundred and one years
before they outbreak of the second World War,
and that means for example, my grandfather
on whose knee I sat as a child,
sat on the knee of people who'd been born in slavery.
So it's that close, that immediate.
So he knew former slaves.
I knew a man who had knew former slaves.
It's a very very important facet of our makeup.
