Background

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History of the JDF

The Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) was formed just a few days prior to Jamaica becoming a sovereign independent state within the Commonwealth of Nations. Although the Force itself is still young, it has a long history of descent and traditions stemming from units raised in the West Indies since the mid-seventeenth century.

Early Origins

Its original predecessor was the ancient Jamaica Militia of 1662, the immediate successor to Oliver Cromwell’s troops which had taken Jamaica from the Spaniards a mere seven years earlier. In 1694, in the only invasion of Jamaica other than the English one of 1655, the French landed a force of over 1,400 men at Carlisle Bay in southern Clarendon. Here they were met by militiamen, initially only some 250, who alone – without support from any naval or regular army units – repulsed the French with about 100 men killed or wounded. Estimates of the French losses were between 150 and 350.

The various cavalry and infantry regiments of the Jamaica Militia remained on call, at first for fear of further French attack; although after Carlisle Bay there was none. Thus those early part-time soldiers spent most of their time in uniform in an internal security role, which largely meant dealing with slave disturbances.

Later however, with justified fear of Napoleonic incursions the Militia reached its maximum strength at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with 10,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry divided between 3 regiments of horse, one for each county, and 18 regiments of foot, one for each of the then eighteen parishes of Jamaica – and commanded at one time by no less than four major generals. 

In 1906, at a time of established international peace, and after nearly two and a half centuries of existence, the Jamaica Militia was finally disbanded. Some of its members formed themselves into the semi-official St Andrew Rifle Corps and when war came to the world in 1914 its members were re-embodied as the Kingston Infantry Volunteers. At the start of World War II in 1939 these part-time soldiers were renamed, this time as the Jamaica Infantry Volunteers (JIV). Towards the end of the war, in 1944, in recognition of its then unit status the JIV was retitled ‘Jamaica Battalion’, and finally eleven years later – ‘Jamaica Regiment’.

The regional link

Between 1795 and 1919, elements of the former renowned West India Regiments fought in every British campaign in the Caribbean, in the West African Ashanti Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, and in the First World War in which they were joined by eleven battalions of the wartime British West Indies Regiment. In all these campaigns and through all those many years Jamaicans – probably more than other West Indians – served with distinction. 

Birth of the JDF

With the formation of the (British) West Indies Federation in 1958, the original West India Regiment, which had been disbanded in 1926, was re-formed in 1959 with some 400 soldiers of the Jamaica Regiment as its nucleus. The politically unsuccessful Federation was dissolved two months before Jamaica’s Independence on 06 August 1962 and – with the freshly disbanded West India Regiment as the core of the new Jamaica Regiment – 31 July 1962 saw the creation of the Jamaica Defence Force.