Men of the RAF training at Windsor Field

Living memory in the culture of the Ancient Greeks was seventy years, the limit of past knowledge. Similarly the West African had a language that distinguished between sasa, the realm of the here and now and zamani, the realm of the ancestors and spirits, going back the biblical three score and ten years.

Remembrance Day reminds us that we are celebrating the sacrifice of our ancestors during World Wars 1 and 2.

During World War 2 seventeen men left the Bahamas to work in the munitions factories in Great Britain. Between two and three hundred Bahamians, men and women, served in the armed forces of Britain, Canada and USA. Fourteen men lost their lives in active service. And of course since then many veterans have died of war wounds or natural causes.

I found this poem in the Bahamas Historical Society Museum that is a dedication to Bahamian Airmen and their part in the Second World War.

One such pilot was Lester Brown:

Tribune 2nd October 1944 – Men of the Future: Squadron Leader Lester Brown arrived in Nassau this week to be an instructor at the RAF Base.

Brown was one of the first to volunteer in 1940. His active service has mainly been in the Middle East and he has more than a 100 raids on his score card. Congratulates his family on his safe return and with such an incredible record of service and rapid promotion behind him.

But the Bahamas also played a role in training men for the war theatre as this paragraph from Islanders in the Stream by Michael Craton and Gail Saunders:  

Fighter plane flown by Bahamian Pilots

To the small garrison of Cameron Highlanders (later superseded by Pictou Highlanders from Canada) and army engineers and other servicemen manning the US bases, three thousand personnel were added by the end of 1942 to man the Operational Training Unit (OTU) stationed at Oakes Field and the 113th Wing Transport Command unit based at the Satellite (Windsor) Field. Somewhat later, once the Florida Strait and other Bahamian channels were regularly prowled by German U-boats, Windsor Field became the base for two squadrons of antisubmarine patrol planes. At the Oakes Field OTU, some five thousand pilots already qualified for single-engined planes were trained to fly twin-engined Mitchells and four-engined Liberators, along with about six hundred bomber crews-another five thousand men - while untold further thousands of airmen passed through New Providence in ferrying aircraft from American factories to North African and European war theaters, by way of South America.  

All these sacrifices were in the service to humanity.  

The poppy is the symbol of our appreciation of the courage and suffering of those ancestors, who sacrificed their life in both world wars.   

There are many more stories that can be told about the Bahamas during World War 2 - a period just on the edge of living memory.

The Bahamas Historical Society (BHS) is a non-profit organization dedicated to stimulating interest in Bahamian History and to the collection and preservation of material relating thereto. Its Headquarters, the former IODE Hall, was a gift from the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (IODE). BHS is on Shirley Street and Elizabeth Avenue in Nassau. www.bahamashistoricalsociety. com