I keep coming across these posts complaining about forced diversity in WW1 videogames (BF1 and V), mainly in GamersRiseUp humour etc but also some unironically angry about it.
I've never seen some actual statistics about it however and googling gives me very dubious articles only.
I reckon there must have been a fair amount of non-white soldiers considering the forces of the British empire we're drafted globally, the ottoman empire was a major fraction, the USA drafted lots of black soldiers etc.
I have not seen anything about women on the front lines however.
Maybe you could also share some information on WW2 in the same respect?
For women, the Russians were the only power to field a unit of women soldiers in combat, and they are the basis for the female recon class in BF1. I have written about them previously here, and they numbered several thousand.
For World War II, the USSR employed hundreds of thousands of women on the front lines, the largest single number being combat medics, but also including thousands as combat troops. I have expanded on this here.
Hello there, going to build upon what Zhukov stated earlier by covering the involvement of non-white troops. The Russian forces did count amongst them the "Women's Battalions of Death" in WWI (super cool and you should look them up) and in WWII saw their roles expanded (most famously as snipers).
World War is exactly what it says in the tin, a world at war. That means the all of these empires are throwing everything they have at each other, because they all knew that whoever was going to come out on top of that fight would define the 20th century.
My data is mostly centered around French and British, but keep in mind that most if not all the major powers in WWI were colonial powers and employed non-white troops. In addition, I guess you could count all Ottoman troops as "non-white" as well, and numbered around 3,000,000. To make a full list would be exhausting, and unfortunately I simply don't have the energy to do so.
The French counted on 90,000 indigenous troops, and recruited an additional 500,000 troops (including 166,000 West Africans, 46,000 Madagascans, 50,000 Indochinese, 140,000 Algerians, 47,000 Tunisians and 24,300 Moroccans). From a total of about 8,665,000 total men mobilized, which means that these indigenous troops made up at least 5.77%. Not an insignificant number.
The British recruited about 1.5 million from India alone, with an additional 1.3 million from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. If we just count Indians, out of 8,841,541 men in the British Armed Forces that makes them about 14% of all men mobilized.
In the German Empire side, I can definitely confirm at least 11,000 African askaris, which served primarily in the African campaigns due to the British naval superiority.
In the United States, about 350,000 African Americans served (7% of US Forces), mostly relegated to rear echelon activities due to the racism and segregation in the military. However, the French saw no issues and when they could, they armed these African American units and sent them into combat (most notably the famous Harlem Hellfighters). In addition, the US counted upon Filipinos to serve in the Pacific aboard Navy ships and in garrison duty in the Philippines.
That is not to say Latinos and Asians did not fight in the US military at the time, but compared to African Americans, their numbers are not as known due to racial policies in the US.
Intertwined with the inclusion of non-whites in combat in WWI, was the ideology of "martial races" or the belief that certain ethnic groups were more suitable for combat than others, which is why nations such as the British recruited heavily from the Nepalese Gurkhas and the French from Senegal and Morocco.
That is not counting the 140,000 men of the Chinese Labor Corps, hired by the French and British to perform vital rear-line infrastructure and logistics work in Europe.
So as you can see, while not an overwhelming number, minorities were a significant percentage of military the strength employed by nations who could bring them oversees. To ignore their service in the Great War, and later on in WWII is a gross misunderstanding in history and tantamount to "white-wash" history.
*Disclaimer, these are just some rough number I could conjure quickly to provide a good estimate to illustrate how diverse WWI was.
Sources:
Killingray, David; Omissi, David E., eds. (1999). Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers C. 1700-1964
Herron, J. S., ed. (November 1901). "Colonial Army Systems of the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium"
Philip Mason (1974), A Matter of Honour - an account of the Indian Army.
Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge, 2011)
India, Empire and the First World War: Words, Images and Objects
Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2005)