World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia

On 6 November 2002, the Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated the Commonwealth Memorial Gates and Memorial Pavilion at the Hyde Park Corner end of London's Constitution Hill. The Gates are inscribed "In memory of the five million volunteers from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought with Britain in the two World Wars" and the Pavilion's ceiling is inscribed with the names of the seventy-four volunteers who won the George and Victoria Crosses, the highest military decoration awarded for acts of valor in the commonwealth. It had taken the British fifty-seven years to publicly recognize that without the men and women of the British Empire, Britain would not have survived the World Wars.