WWII’s colonies had no independent, official, position on whether to be Axis, Allied or Neutral

Canadians are continuously surprised to learn that Newfoundland never declared war on Germany in 1939.

Newfoundland had given up its independent Dominion status, as equal to Canada or Australia, during its terrible version of the Great Depression. It was a British Colony, an odd legal form of a colony, but a colony nonetheless.

So when Britain declared war, all her colonies were automatically at war.

That is a huge chunk of the world without an official say so on the moral course of the war.

But wait ! There is more, lots & lots & lots more.

In 1939, most of the world was a colony of some major or minor nation.

France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Italy all had  huge colonies & protectorates overseas. As did the USA and Japan.

Colonies overseas are always the clearest cut : colonies that are contiguous with the colonial power are less so. But Russia and Germany also had (contiguous) colonies, unofficially if not officially. China too.

I have probably let out some other colonial powers circa 1939 : comment below to correct my errors and to add other colonial powers to the list.

If we get into the weeds, large (& small) ethnic minorities often feel they are left out in their nation’s majority’s rush into war or neutrality : Quebecers or Afrikaners for example differed wildly from their nation’s official position.

I believe that Canada’s first nations, like Australia’s aboriginals, were generally pro the decision to go to war. But all ‘darker peoples’ had plenty to complain about as the war proceeded and they always got the short end of the stick, without any real say in the matter.

But more importantly, each and every adult individual, as some point during the six year old world war, had their own personal opinion on the course their nation/colony was officially taking on the war.

For this war was intensely ideological : many people were (semi) privately more or less pro or anti Fascism, broadly defined, than their own government.

WWII was thus a globally, albeit generally civil, civil war.

By this, I mean many Americans quietly approved of the way Germany mistreated Jews, but were not willing to put on a brownshirt and openly rebel with arms against FDR’s government.

Both the Free French and the French units that served in Hitler’s campaign against communist Russia, for an example, were a tiny fragment of the entire French population at home and abroad.

Resistance was often reduced to ‘going through the motions’ on whatever course your government wanted you to do. People generally went to war because they felt they had to : no rush to the flag in this war, anywhere.

WWII, in this sense, was totally unlike WWI....