Tommy's seafaring brother in arms, Jack, experienced much the same problems as Kipling's archetypal British private, particularly when he was a Jack of African descent. As the Second World War loomed in 1939, it seemed incredible that an even worse global conflict than the First World War was about to take place. Once again, the indispensability of the sons of empire would be felt in times of need, and towards the end of the opening year of the war an unprecedented wave of strikes by Indian and Chinese seamen took place, indicative of a growing awareness among colonial seamen of their own value and their insistence that they would no longer tolerate what had become habitual and institutionalized indignities. The difficulty ships’ officers and employers had in adjusting to such assertive behaviour on the part of Chinese crews in particular led to a Chinese crewman being shot during a dispute in New York in April 1942. The ship's master was arrested, but a Grand Jury found that there was no case to answer. Outraged employers responded at first by having entire crews imprisoned, but the mass desertions and subsequent strikes forced the realization that these sources of seafaring labour were absolutely critical to the manning of Britain's wartime merchant fleet. Back home, the strikes and protests were dismissed as the actions of people who, unlike the ‘manly’ Europeans, were simple and incapable of facing danger; many viewed Indians, Chinese, Africans and Arabs in crude racial terms. At the outbreak of the war, seamen from the empire accounted for almost one-third of the shipping industry's labour force, having been recruited not only in their thousands from East and West Africa and the Caribbean islands, but also from Britain's ‘informal empire’ on the coast of China. Now that the North Atlantic route was literally Britain's lifeline, recruiting teams were put to work in the West Indies and Aden in 1941, and again in 1943, to crew ships sailing on voyages in winter, seamen such as those from India and warmer climes having previously been spared the unaccustomed hardship.