Background
Units belonging to the Ceylon Defence Force (CDF), including the Ceylon Garrison Artillery (CGA), the Ceylon Light Infantry (CLI) and the Ceylon Volunteer Medical Corps, were mobilised on 2 September 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. The CGA was equipped with six-inch (152 mm) and nine-inch (227 mm) guns. Several of them were posted to the Seychelles and the Cocos Islands, accompanied by contingents of the CLI and the Medical Corps. The full contingent to Cocos Islands of the CDF was around 75 personnel and was under the command of Captain George Gardiner, an accountant of an export firm in Colombo at the outbreak of war, he had obtained an emergency war commission. Two six-inch guns were deployed on Horsburgh Island, Cocos Atoll, as well as a platoon of the King's African Rifles.
The fall of Singapore and the subsequent sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse did to British and Imperial forces what Pearl Harbor had to the Americans: compromised their ability to defend their interests north of Australia and east of India. The Japanese raids into the Indian Ocean, resulting in the loss of two cruisers and the aircraft carrier Hermes, threw Allied war plans in the entire Southwest Pacific Area into chaos.
The feelings of the Sri Lankan troops had been excited by the work carried out by the pro-independence Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), both before and during the war. They had volunteered to fight the racism of the Imperial Japanese but had found institutionalised racism in their own British Imperial regiments. Even the Burghers, who were of European ancestry, found themselves discriminated against.
With the Japanese successes, public sentiment on Ceylon turned in favour of the Japanese; encouraged by successful Japanese-trained and directed rebellions in Indonesia and support for Japanese forces in Thailand, Sinkiang and the Philippines, many Ceylonese hoped that the Japanese there too would serve as liberators. At this time a young J.R. Jayawardene, later to be President of Sri Lanka, held discussions with the Japanese with this aim in mind, however this was immediately stopped by D S Senanayake who would lead Ceylon to independence in 1948.
Read more about this topic: Cocos Islands Mutiny
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