During WWII, South Africa made very limited use of black troops and restricted them almost entirely to noncombat roles, though the number of black and other non-white troops so employed and the range of their employment expanded during the war. The South African government preferred to employ white (European-descended) troops whenever possible and used only white troops in direct combat. Black troops initially formed into separate units, then some were assigned to white units where they took on support, even servile, roles to free white troops to fight directly. Because racial categorizations in the two countries were different, I will talk about the history of South Africa's Coloured as well as African (black) communities.

South Africa's military, the Union Defence Force (UDF) was all-white when war broke out. There was political opposition to arming non-white and especially black personnel. Fighting was seen as white man's work. But domestic opposition to the war made conscription politically impossible. So this made the UDF entirely dependent on white volunteers for its fighting strength. To make maximum use of those white volunteers, the UDF created several corps of non-white troops, which were collectively known as the Non European Army Services (NEAS) starting on July 12, 1940. The NEAS corps were also filled by volunteers.

The first such corps to be formed was Cape Corps (CC), formed on May 8, 1940 as a successor to the corps of the same name which had actually fielded combat infantry battalions in WWI and won battle honors including the apocalyptic sounding "Megiddo 1918" streamer. The CC recruited among the Coloured community (mixed-heritage European/South Asian/African who would have been considered black in much of the United states), which was particularly concentrated in the Cape area.

The Indian Corps (IC) formed on June 26, 1940, aimed to recruit South African Indians. The IC received insufficient recruits and soon began to seek enlistments from members of the Malay and Colored communities. On December 19, 1940, in recognition of this expanded recruitment, the IC's name was officially changed to the Indian & Malay Corps (IMC).

Both the CC and IMC were initially focused on labor and transportation (i.e., truck) duties. Since the CC and IMC were recruiting from effectively the same populations for the same duties, on Ocrober 13, 1942 the IMC was folded into the CC.

Black South Africans (i.e., African heritage) were recruited into the Native Military Corps (NMC), formed on July 1, 1940. The NMC initially focused on labor and some rear-area guard duties.

Non-white personnel were paid less than white personnel and, although they could be promoted to non-commissioned officer ranks, were normally not given positions of authority over whites. White commissioned and non-commissioned officers were assigned to NEAS units. It appears some white units disposed of problematic individuals by reassigning them to NEAS units. Racial hierarchies were maintained in other ways as well. For example, when the front moved into Italy, NMC personnel were reminded that neither drunkenness nor fraternization with white women would be tolerated. Italian wine and women were not, of course, off limits to white UDF men!

As the UDF transitioned from the rather easy-going East Africa campaign to the sustained casualty-intensive fighting of the Western Desert and later North Africa and Italy, which we can say happened around the middle of 1941, the NEAS saw greater employment closer to the fighting. Many NEAS personnel were assigned directly the white combat divisions, brigades, and battalions, where they served in non-combat roles such as drivers, messengers, mechanics, cooks and servers, batmen (officers' servants), medical roles such as stretcher bearers and hospital orderlies, prisoner of war guards, and various office jobs. Again, the goal was to free white men to fight. This policy of assigning NEAS personnel directly to white units was called "dilution." NEAS personnel were still not assigned to direct combat roles; nonetheless, over 20 individual valor awards were made to NEAS personnel, apparently most of them for rescuing wounded while serving as stretcher bearers.

Of course, many NEAS units continued to exist. The Western Desert campaign in particular involved a mind-boggling logistical effort to bring the sinews of war from ports in Egypt and the Levant to the fighting front. This involved not only loading, driving, and unloading trucks and trains, but maintaining those trucks and trains as well as expanding or building new roads and railroads. One NMC company, recruited from gold miners, completed three major tunnel projects in Lebanon, augmented by local laborers.

CC units and personnel also saw employment in support of the South African Air Force (SAAF), where they served in many ground support roles such as airbase security and antiaircraft defense as well as the types of non-combat roles listed above. In addition, CC and NMC labor and construction units built airbases.

The CC eventually formed a handful of infantry battalions, but (unlike in WWI) they were never employed in combat, instead serving as security and prisoner of war guards.

A substantial number of CC and NMC soldiers were captured at Tobruk in June 1942, including nearly 1,800 NMC drivers. In contrast to the massacres inflicted on French West African troops in 1940 during the fall of France, the NMC personnel were treated correctly under the rules of war, possibly because their non-combat roles did not threaten Nazi racial hierarchy the way the fighting tirailleurs had.

The NMC and CC were abolished after the war after the National Party took power and reinstituted a policy of white-only armed forces.

We thus see some similarities and differences with respect to the U.S. Army. Like the U.S. Army, the UDF preferred to use black personnel in labor, transportation, and other rear-area roles and preserved racial hierarchies in its armed forces. Unlike the U.S. Army, which despite the above did in fact employ black combat units including notably two infantry divisions and several tank, tank destroyer, and artillery battalions as well as a four fighter squadrons, the UDF maintained its ban on putting black troops in combat and in fact moved backwards from its WWI practice of deploying Coloured infantry in combat. The UDF via its dilution policy did practice a limited integration of black personnel into white units, which the U.S. Army avoided until very late in the war when it was in dire need of infantry replacements. But the UDF put black personnel into servile roles to free up white troops for combat, whereas the U.S. Army simply created small subunits of black infantry to augment white units and thus more directly faced its problem.