Ulric Cross was born in Trinidad and served as an officer in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Later he explained that he enlisted because he was ‘young, adventurous and idealistic’. He also said that, in addition to defeating Hitler, for him ‘the whole idea of being in the RAF was romantic’. Until 1941 many black colonials from West Africa and the Caribbean who volunteered for the RAF were rejected, but after the Battle of Britain in 1940, the RAF realised they had to move with the times. In 1941, with 250 other Trinidadians, Cross was accepted into the RAF and made the journey to Britain. Of that group, fifty-two were killed in action. In 1944, for his bravery, Cross was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DSO) and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), two of the RAF’s highest honours. He said,

I did almost eighty operations. I was lucky...I crash landed I think five or six, seven times...the strange thing is that when you’re really young you feel immortal. That may well be a defence mechanism, but you do feel immortal, and you knew that obviously the possibility existed, that every time you got up in an aeroplane and flew over Germany you wouldn’t come back. That possibility always existed. But the young feel they will live forever...And I felt I was doing the right thing in trying to stop Hitler. I never felt I was going to the aid of the mother country. Some people did but I would say the majority of us didn’t. Reasons differ, but certainly for myself, you’re young, this was a tremendous adventure and you were doing it for the right reasons.