Lest we forget: British wars were fought by foreigners too

_{TetleysTLDR: The Summary} 

Each November, Britain repeats its  ritual of remembrance: poppies, parades, and politicians pretending to care.  But behind the patriotic pageantry lies wilful amnesia. Britain didn’t win its wars alone. From the Indian Army’s million-plus volunteers to Caribbean airmen, African labourers, and Polish pilots, victory was built on the courage of those the Empire exploited and later erased.  While foreigners bled for Britain, homegrown fascists like Mosley cheered Hitler, today echoed by the likes of Farage, Braverman, and Reform UK.  Their xenophobic posturing desecrates remembrance itself.  The poppy was meant as protest, not propaganda. Real patriotism isn’t flag-waving; it’s solidarity, the miners, Sikhs, nurses, and refugees who fought for humanity, not empire.  Britain’s greatness, such as it was, came from diversity and sacrifice across continents.  To honour them properly is to confront fascism at home. Lest we remember and never again let the cowards of hate claim their glory.

_{TetleysTLDR: The long bit} 

In recent years, the far-right has tried to hijack our shared heritage, wrapping themselves in the Union Jack as if patriotism were their private property. They’ve turned heritage into farce, raising the colours like they own them, splashing roundabouts in red, white and blue, and bellowing outside hotels in the name of ‘our boys’ while knowing nothing of their sacrifice.  But the blood that soaked the fields of Europe was not just English.  The destroyed generation that survived as a shell of their former self reliving horrors for the rest of their lives din't just have white skin.  The lifeblood of an empire’s poor, sent to die in another man’s war.   On the 11th day of the of the 11th month at 11.00am in 1918, the guns fell silent, and that silence belongs to all of us. The right to remember the fallen: whoever they were, wherever they came from does not and never will belong to those who march under the banner of hate.

Every year, the same ritual unfolds.

The poppies are pinned, the brass bands tune up, and the politicians, those same grinning hypocrites who’d privatise the very NHS that treated our wounded bow their heads for the cameras. “Lest we forget,” they murmur, while forgetting everything that ever mattered about who fought, who died, and who built the country they’re now busily flogging off to their donors.  But let’s be honest: we have forgotten. Not just the slaughter, not just the futility but the truth.

Because the truth is that Britain didn’t win its wars alone. Not in 1918 and not in 1945.

Our victories were bought not only with lost generations of our young men but with the blood of men who in most cases had never set foot in England before the war . With the sweat of Empire troops, the courage of refugees, the sacrifice of men and women whose names are never carved in English stone.  And if you listen carefully, over the empty clatter of patriotic soundbites, you can still hear them, the Punjabi rifleman in the mud of Flanders, the Caribbean pilot in the skies over Kent, the Polish ace who out-flew the Luftwaffe, the Sudanese stretcher bearer in El Alamein.

They fought for a Britain that treated them as expendable.  And now, a century later, their descendants are told to 'go home' by men who couldn’t fight their way out of a Wetherspoons queue.

In Westminster Abbey there is the tomb of the unknown soldier.  This was supposed to be a leveller.  So many men were missing in action in the mud soaked meat grinder of Flanders.  The Unknown Soldier stands as a symbol of every life lost in war, chosen not for who he was, but for what he represents. After the First World War, from the countless unidentified bodies recovered from the battlefields, one was selected at random by a blindfolded officer, ensuring no one could ever know his identity. He was brought home to rest with full honours, a single figure embodying millions who never returned. Yet in truth, he could have been anyone, a farmhand from Yorkshire, a miner from Wales, a Sepoy from India or a schoolteacher from the Caribbean. Beneath the uniform, nationality no longer mattered - he was the shared grief and sacrifice of all nations torn apart by war.  Women all over the world knew that there was a possibility the man in this tomb could be their husband, son or sweetheart that never came home.  His religion, colour, the language he spoke or the place he called home was irrelevant. 

_{The Forgotten Armies}

So lets start with the First World War, that industrialised bloodbath, that monument to class arrogance.  Between 1914 and 1918 over 2.5 million men from British colonies fought for the Empire.

The Indian Army alone contributed more than 1.3 million volunteers, yes, volunteers, who served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Over 74,000 Indian soldiers died in that war.

At Ypres, at Neuve Chapelle, at Gallipoli, they fought in trenches and yet they weren’t allowed to enter London after dark. Sikh regiments charged German lines with bayonets fixed, Muslims and Hindus buried together under the same grey skies. Their letters home spoke not of glory, but of cold, hunger, and a longing for dignity.  From the Caribbean came the British West Indies Regiment over 16,000 strong, serving in Palestine, Egypt, and Italy. They were segregated, underpaid, and often denied promotions yet they fought on.  When they finally mutinied in Taranto in 1918, demanding equal treatment, they were imprisoned, whipped, and branded as traitors.

So much for 'the grateful Empire' and from Africa came more still, nearly a million East and West Africans who served as soldiers, porters, and labourers.  Many were coerced, many starved, and thousands died unrecorded in the colonial shadows. Their contribution, like their names, was erased but without them, there would have been no British victory. 

The idea that plucky little Britain stood alone is a fairy tale for flag-waving fools.

_{The Battle of Britain Wasn’t British Alone}

Fast-forward to 1940: the year of our supposed 'finest hour'

The year Nigel Farage and his Reform Party acolytes love to invoke, as if they’d been up there in the Spitfires themselves instead of snivelling in the bunker of xenophobia.  Well, here’s the thing: the Battle of Britain wasn’t won by Britain. It was an international affair.  Of the 2,927 pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, 595 were not British. That’s over 20% of Fighter Command.

And the fiercest, most deadly of them all were the Polish 303 Squadron, flying out of Northolt. In just two months, they shot down 126 German aircraft: more than any other squadron. Their commander, Witold Urbanowicz, once said: “We came to fight for England, but we fought for humanity.”

Meanwhile, back home, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists were cheering on Hitler.  Let that sink in.  While Poles and Czechs were dying in British skies, English fascists were saluting the man who was bombing London.

And Farage: that gin-soaked poundshop echo of Mosley’s bile now dares to strut about claiming to speak for 'real patriots'.  Even Churchill, a man whose statue the right love to polish but never read, knew the truth. He called the RAF’s defenders 'the few', but he meant all the few: Poles, Czechs, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, Jews from Palestine, even Free French pilots who refused to surrender.

Without them, the Luftwaffe would have owned the skies, and Hitler’s flag would have flown over Downing Street.  So when you hear Farage or Reform Party ghouls blathering about 'taking our country back', remember: it was foreigners who saved it in the first place.

_{Empire in Uniform}

Throughout the Second World War, the British Empire again mobilised millions.  2.5 million Indians served, the largest volunteer army in history. They fought from North Africa to Burma, from Italy to the Pacific.  Over 87,000 died.

Indian pilots flew Hurricanes and Spitfires; Sikh regiments retook Kohima: the 14th Army in Burma 'the Forgotten Army' was majority Indian.  Yet when they returned home, their pensions were slashed, their service ignored, and the empire they fought for doubled down on racism. Caribbean troops joined too, not just soldiers, but engineers, medics, and aircrew.  Over 6,000 West Indians served in the RAF and Merchant Navy. The likes of Ulric Cross from Trinidad, one of the most decorated airmen in RAF history, risked his life for a nation that would later tell the Windrush Generation they didn’t belong here.

African troops fought in every theatre: the King’s African Rifles, the Nigerian and Gold Coast Regiments, the Somali Camel Corps. The East African campaign alone saw hundreds of thousands of African soldiers and porters. Yet their stories are buried under the rubble of imperial arrogance.  Even Irishmen, officially 'neutral', crossed the Irish Sea to enlist in British forces, around 70,000 of them.

And when the war was done, Irish and Caribbean labour rebuilt the bombed-out cities of Britain, staffed its hospitals, and drove its buses.  And still they were told they weren’t British enough.

_{The Shame of Mosley}

Now, let’s talk about the other side.

While empire troops fought fascism abroad, fascism festered at home.  Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists strutted through London in black shirts, shouting “Britain First” long before Farage ever picked up a fag and a pint.

Mosley courted Hitler, praised Mussolini, was over=platformed by the BBC and Daily Mail and built a movement of thugs who hated Jews, socialists, and immigrants in equal measure.  

He claimed to defend Britain’s honour while undermining its democracy and when war came, he and his followers were rightly interned.  And yet, here we are again.

Eighty years later, a new generation of demagogues: Farage, Tice, Braverman, the Reform crowd, the GBeebies chorus line, a Rothermere...again, peddle the same poison. The slogans are recycled, the targets updated, but the stench is the same.

Mosley blamed 'foreigners' and 'Bolsheviks'.  Farage blames 'migrants' and 'woke lefties'.  Same shit, different century.

Both wrap themselves in the flag while spitting on everything it’s supposed to stand for.And let’s not pretend this is some fringe nonsense. The rot has crept deep into mainstream politics. When a Tory Home Secretary calls asylum seekers an 'invasion', when politicians sneer at refugees crossing the Channel, they’re not defending Britain. They’re desecrating the memory of every foreigner who died defending it.  When a Labour Party takes the same hard line stance as the Tories, it isn't fighting the far-right, it's endorsing and emboldening it. 

_{The Hijacking of Remembrance}

Armistice Day should be sacred.

It should be a day for reflection, humility, and solidarity not nationalist cosplay. But every year it’s hijacked by the same hollow patriots who can’t tell the Somme from Stalingrad.

They talk of sacrifice, but they mean obedience. They talk of 'our heroes', but only if those heroes are white, male, and silent.  Even the British Legion still struggles to acknowledge the scale of Empire sacrifice.  School textbooks still treat colonial troops as footnotes, if mentioned at all.  When the African and Asian graves of Commonwealth soldiers were found neglected in Kenya and India, the Ministry of Defence quietly muttered apologies and moved on.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission admitted in 2021 that up to 350,000 African and Middle Eastern soldiers were never properly commemorated because of 'pervasive racism'. That’s not forgetting.  That’s erasure.  Meanwhile, Farage and his ilk parade through town squares with paper poppies the size of dinner plates, claiming ownership of remembrance. They sneer at anyone who questions war, and treat the poppy like a party logo.

If remembrance means anything, it’s remembering all of them, the forgotten, the colonised, the ones who never got statues or medals or parades:  because remembrance without honesty is just propaganda with a trumpet.

There’s always someone ready to say, “Don’t make Remembrance Day political.” But that’s nonsense, it’s inherently political.  It always has been.  War is politics by bloodier means, and remembrance is how we decide whose blood we remember and whose we erase.  The poppy itself is a political symbol, born out of protest and grief, not obedience.  When working-class lads from Sheffield, Glasgow, Delhi and Kingston were sent to die in the mud, that wasn’t 'apolitical'.  It was the direct consequence of political failure: of greed, empire, and nationalism.  The men (and women) who came home in 1945 built the welfare state because they understood that 'never again' meant changing the system that fed them into the slaughter.  To say remembrance isn’t political is to pretend those lessons don’t matter.  It’s to hand it over to the flag-wavers and revisionists who want to turn mourning into marketing.  Real remembrance means confronting the politics that caused the dead to die and refusing to let their memory be hijacked by the same kind of bastards who’d have sent them there in the first place.

_{The Real Patriots}

The real patriots weren’t the Mosleys or the Farages or the sneering public-school parasites who sent millions to die.

They were the miners from Wales, the Sikhs from Punjab, the nurses from Jamaica, the Jewish refugees who joined the commandos, the Polish pilots who slept in cockpits between sorties.  They were the working class, the colonised, the dispossessed fighting not for empire or crown, but for the hope that fascism might not win.  They weren’t 'illegal migrants'. They weren’t 'invaders'.

They were our defenders.

And now, their grandchildren work in our hospitals, drive our ambulances, clean our offices, serve in our armed forces while the descendants of the cowardly rich sit on TV moaning about 'too many foreigners'.  What would a Polish pilot make of Farage’s Reform Party sneering at 'immigration'?

What would an Indian sepoy say to Suella Braverman calling refugees “a threat”?

What would the West Indian RAF engineers say to the Windrush scandal?

They’d say what millions of us already feel: shame.

And then there’s the far right in this country the Union Jack fetishists, the flag-draped frauds who call themselves patriots while cheering on war crimes abroad. They can’t shut up about 'respecting our veterans', yet they’re deafeningly silent when Commonwealth war graves, possibly the most sacred space in our culture, are desecrated by Israeli bombs   Graves that hold the bones of British, Indian, African, and Arab soldiers who fought and died under the British flag. The very men they claim to honour, fallen in the soil they once defended, and not a whisper from the poppy-peddlers or the GB News patriots. You won’t hear a word of outrage from Nigel Farage or his Reform Party clones because their loyalty isn’t to the dead, it’s to the powerful. They’ll weep crocodile tears over the Cenotaph while looking the other way as our allies obliterate the graves of those fallen on a foreign field.  These are the same people who scream about 'disrespecting the troops' if you don't wear a poppy, yet sit on their hands when the resting places of those troops are reduced to rubble. The hypocrisy is nauseating. My grandad, a steelworker, a socialist, a man who served on Lancaster's at RAF Scampton would have been sickened to see what they’ve become: cowardly apologists for state terror, mistaking nationalism for honour. You can’t claim to love Britain while staying silent as the descendants of our wartime allies bomb the graves of the men who died for Britain. That’s not patriotism, it’s moral rot wrapped in a flag.

Shame that Britain’s memory is so selective. Shame that the people who did the least for freedom claim to love it most. Shame that those who hate diversity owe their existence to it.

^{A Commonwealth War Grave in Gaza shelled by the Israelis.}

_{Lest We Remember Properly}

If Armistice Day still means anything, it’s this: remembrance isn’t about nationalism, it’s about humanity.

The poppy should never be a badge of obedience to flag and crown.  It should be a symbol of grief and defiance, a reminder that war is hell, that peace is precious, and that the world was saved not by defiant Little Britain standing alone, but by a union of peoples who believed in something better.  When you see the Cenotaph this year, remember who’s missing.

Remember the Indian regiments in the trenches, the African battalions in Burma, the Polish and Czech pilots over Dover, the Caribbean sailors on Atlantic convoys, the Palestinian Jews and Arab volunteers who fought fascism before Britain would even grant them a home.

Remember that they fought for a Britain that barely fought for them, and remember, too, the enemies within, the Mosleys then, the Farages now, who cloak their cowardice in patriotism.

They claim to honour 'our boys', but despise the very diversity that made victory possible.

They talk about 'sovereignty' but surrender our moral soul to racism.

They speak of 'freedom', but want only the freedom to hate.  Well, here’s the truth: Britain’s greatness, such as it ever was, wasn’t born in purity.  It was born in solidarity. In the joining of hands across oceans and languages and faiths.

The fascists want us divided. The real patriots bled together.

_{Conclusion: The Enemy Within}

So on this Armistice Day, let’s stop letting the far right own remembrance.

Let’s reclaim it  for the millions who were never thanked, for the foreigners who died for a flag that never flew for them.

Let’s tell the truth:

That Britain’s wars were won not on the playing fields of Eton but by the Empire’s children.  That the 'enemy within' wasn’t the migrant or the socialist, it was and still is the fascist in the Saville Row suit.  That Mosley’s ghost still haunts the benches of Reform and GB News and our billionaire tax avoiding media moghuls, peddling the same lies in better lighting.  Farage and his ilk are not patriots. They are parasites feeding off the corpse of Britain’s moral memory.

They’d have been the ones booing Polish pilots in 1940, calling Indian troops 'foreign labour', sneering at Caribbean airmen. They’d have been Mosley’s audience, not Churchill’s pilots.  So wear your poppy, yes please do, red or white, but wear it with knowledge. With anger. With gratitude to those whose names were buried under empire.

Say it loud, and say it true: Lest we forget our wars were won by foreigners, and we dishonour them every time we let fascists speak for Britain

Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK.  A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.

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