African Troops

This scheme was intended to be a major contributor to the world's protein resderve by turning huge tracts of Tanganyika's plains over to the production of groundnuts. It was deemed useful as a source of employment to many recently demobilized troops and was also intended to put to use many of vehicles, diggers and so on that had been shipped to Africa during the war in the expectation that they would be needed in the Far East when the war against Japan was expected to last for a lot longer than it did.   The Groundnuts scheme was something of a magnificent failure as, what had worked on a small scale, failed badly on a big scale due to pests, drought and other catastrophes. Image courtesy of Paul Jackson