A Mission
The great expansion of recruitment of West African troops with the view to their serving in combat arenas around the world put a great strain on British resources because the submarine campaign off the coast and further north was inflicting heavy casualties.
Signals were regularly being received, 'Supplies notified as shipped to you will not now arrive.' The loss was particularly severe because almost all food shipped to West Africa was initially imported with great difficulty into the U.K. Processed there, it was then re-exported. Paradoxically, even imported tinned pineapple chunks into Britain were re-exported to West Africa where fresh pineapples were available in the local market for sixpence each!
Seeing this, Edgar Whitehead went through all the items for which the R.A.S.C. were requisitioning, particularly foodstuffs from brandy to jam. Based on his economic knowledge on South Africa and Rhodesia he found almost everything except military transport spares could be obtained from them.
He sat down and wrote a thirty page full report of his findings. His O.C. wrote a covering letter and sent it through the proper channels to G.H.Q., saying he had no personal knowledge of the subject but considered it sufficiently important to forward.
Twenty-eight hours later a staff car arrived with orders to fetch Edgar from Accra to G.H.Q. at Achimota. He was grilled by the Brigadier in charge of Administration and a team of senior officers for about two hours to assess how much actual knowledge he possessed. He was asked about other stores apart from those needed by the R.A.S.C.: ordnance requirements, medical stores including snake bite serum and full sets of webbing equipment for the thousands of African recruits.
He managed to pass the cross-examination with some competence thanks to his training on the Commission on Distributions from 1935-1937 where he had learned exactly what commodities Rhodesia obtained from South Africa.
Up the chain of command, the General decided to send Edgar by sea to Cape Town so that he could practice what he had preached in the memorandum. In addition, there was a desperate shortage of certain 'warlike' stores including .303 ammunition. Given acting rank of Major, he was dispatched in early May 1941, on the SS Calabar with a mission to Field Marshall Smut's Command.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
- Sir Edgar Whitehead's Unpublished Memoirs, Rhodes House, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, by permission.
- Photo credit: www.ssmaritime.com/Semiramis.htm
