Springboks, Troepies and Cadres: Stories of the South African Army, 1912-2012

This book is dedicated to four soldiers who volunteered

for service Up North, and played a vital role 70 years ago

in the Alamein battles between July and October 1942,

when the tide was turned in the Second World War:

Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Cochran, Officer Commanding,

SA Irish Regiment and the Botha Regiment

Company Sergeant Major (later Commandant)

Bertie Simpkins, Rand Light Infantry

Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Peter Bunton, No.

1 Gun, 1st Field Regiment, SA Artillery

Bombardier John Bunton, No. 2 Gun, 1st Field Regiment,

SA Artillery (who fell in the battle at Alamein)

.

Introduction

The South African Army was established, as part of the Union Defence Force (UDF), by the Defence Act (No. 13 of 1912). The army consisted of two main components. There was a small Permanent Force (PF), drawn mainly from British regular officers who had served in South Africa, and experienced senior men from the Boer commandos that had fought the British just a decade before. The PF was complemented by the Active Citizen Force (ACF, later simply the Citizen Force), staffed by part-time volunteers and selective short-term conscription. Many of the ACF units pre-dated the political union of the country, in some cases by decades. The Natal Carbineers, for example, served in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.

A century later, the structure of the army is essentially the same: a small professional core (now known as the Regular Force) that can be expanded substantially by part-time soldiers when necessary (now the Reserve Force, which has absorbed the area-based Commandos since 2003).

The story of the South African Army can be divided roughly into four eras, but there are several themes that run through its entire history.

The first era was the army’s contribution to the Great War of 1914–1918. This was Britain’s war, and South African interests were never really threatened. However, the army sent men to fight in three different theatres: German South West Africa, German East Africa and France. In the first two, the South African army drew on two strong military traditions. From its Boer lineage it developed an instinct for using rapid manoeuvre, light supply, mobility and marksmanship to master the disadvantages presented by large arid territories. From the British tradition it inherited a belief on the importance of artillery and regimental discipline. In the third theatre, France, the South Africans were a relatively tiny part of a massive and tactically inept British army, and sacrificed many lives at Delville Wood in a largely futile cause.

The horrendous casualties in France haunted the South African Army for a century. In its second era, the Second World War, commanders like Major General Dan Pienaar were acutely aware of the need to keep casualties down, to the point where some British senior officers thought the Springboks – as they were proudly known – were reluctant to fight. However, there was sensitivity in the Union (as there had been in 1914–1918) about sending men far away to fight Britain’s wars for her, and the number of volunteers was not limitless.

In the third era, the Border War of 1965–1990, there was also great emphasis on keeping casualties to a minimum, again because of political sensitivities and a lack of clarity even among white South Africans as to what the boys on the Border were actually fighting for. This did, however, have the beneficial effect of developing excellent tactics and a military ethos that glorified effectiveness rather than sacrifice.

Another theme in the first three eras was that the army was a white-run institution that nevertheless relied substantially on the involvement of black soldiers. In the two world wars, black, Indian and Coloured volunteers in their tens of thousands served as unarmed labourers, drivers and stretcher-bearers. In the Border War, the South African Defence Force (SADF) relied heavily on its black ally, UNITA, in the war in Namibia and Angola, and on the regular unit 32 Battalion – with black troops and mostly white officers – to do the heaviest fighting.

South Africa has produced its share of winners of awards for gallantry, including non-combatants like Lance Corporal Job Masego of the Native Military Corps. He was one of 1 200 black men captured with the South African forces at Tobruk in June 1942, and was later awarded the Military Medal for sinking an enemy ship in Tobruk harbour while a prisoner of war.

Courage under fire is always to be admired, but it is remarkable that a non-combatant was motivated to commit such an act. As General Ian Gleeson, author of The Unknown Force: Black, Indian and Coloured Soldiers Through Two World Wars, has pointed out, non-white soldiers were:

… an afterthought and a convenient reserve in the minds of those who ran the country and its armed forces at the outbreak of hostilities in both world conflicts. Because of the existing politics and prejudices, they could not be used in a combatant capacity and were relegated to the more menial tasks and unimposing functions. Simply because they were black or brown, they were told they could not fight. They were then second-class citizens and were thus considered second-class soldiers, though their record of gallantry contradicts this impression.

In the end the high hopes of the returning soldiers soon turned to disappointment and finally bitterness, as they went home with a cash payment of a few pounds, some with a bicycle; others with a new set of carpenter’s tools; and all with a simple khaki suit. Their white colleagues at least had the media, their business connections, their political representatives and, finally, the ballot box in 1948, through which they could vent their anger.

The shame of the army’s first three eras was that, like the country it served, it observed rigid segregation. One effect of this has been that there are few first-hand accounts by black volunteers. In the fourth era, the years of peace and transformation since 1990, that evil has thankfully disappeared.

In all four eras of the South African Army, most of the fighting was done by volunteers and (in the case of the Border War) conscripts, rather than professionals. South Africa has no tradition of a large standing army, but can point to a tradition of citizen-soldiers among those of British origin, the Afrikaners and warrior peoples like the Zulu and Xhosa. In the two world wars, white soldiers referred to themselves as Springboks, drawing on the national sporting identity that had developed in the early years of the 20th century. In the Border War, the term troepie – a blend of English and Afrikaans – was used more than any other as a generic term for conscripts. Cadre was the designation chosen by MK members, drawing on the terminology of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Each of these names might carry ideological weight, and therefore convey approval or disapproval depending on who was using the term.

Three times the South African Army has fought in major conflicts with distinction (though there may have been debate about the validity of the cause), and three times it has then entered a period of decline and decay as a result of being starved of resources: after the First World War, after the Second World War and then after the Border War. This is a difficulty that all armies face in peacetime, but the danger is that core capacity may be lost to the point where it cannot be restored.

This book does not pretend to be a history of the South African Army. The choice of the word stories in the title is deliberate. It is intended to indicate a highly personal selection of interests and impressions, drawing both on standard accounts and on memoirs and analyses that have not been published before. My aim is to convey something of the flavour of an army that has twice been regenerated by accommodating former enemies into one force, and that has produced more than its fair share of individual heroism, outstanding leadership and tactical innovation.

In 2012, the army is in a tough place. It has overcome massive challenges of transformation and reconciliation, yet is being starved of the resources needed to maintain it at an acceptable level of readiness, in terms of weaponry, training and exercises, and recruitment. Claims that there is no military threat against the country may be valid for now, but the world has always proved to be an unstable place. Unthinking pacifism can be as dangerous as sabre-rattling militarism.

If there is a core purpose to this book, it is to remind us that the South African Army has been built on a great and unique tradition, one that should be sustained rather than abandoned. Future security depends on the army – in particular, its Reserve Force that is manned by volunteer part-timers – being supported to the degree necessary to ensure that it is a stable, well-trained, enthusiastic army of citizens who are prepared to do their duty. The country can only benefit, in war or peace.

1

The First World War

The campaign in German South West Africa

The Great War of 1914–1918, as it was once known, was essentially a European conflict whose origins remain a subject for debate. It caused unprecedented destruction and loss of life for the main protagonists, Britain, Germany and France. But in an age when imperial relations and possessions were very much a reality, many other countries became involved – hence the later description of the conflict as a world war.

At the outbreak of war, in August 1914, Britain requested the Union government under Prime Minister General Louis Botha to render urgent imperial service and seize control of German South West Africa, thereby denying Germany access to the colony’s harbours. This was achieved in a remarkable campaign in hostile terrain by Botha, a most skilful soldier/politician, who at the same time also had to put down a rebellion by bitter men who had been his Boer comrades-in-arms just a dozen years before, during the 1899–1902 war against the British Empire.

Botha’s campaign was the first fought by the newly created Union Defence Force (UDF). It also saw the genesis of the South African Air Force (SAAF) – the second oldest air force in the world – the first use of armoured vehicles in Africa, and one of the last cavalry operations (using horses and camels). The effect of the campaign on South African politics was also profound, preserving the emotional fault line within Afrikaner politics that eventually led to the accession to power of the anti-British purified National Party in 1948.

The success of Botha’s military campaign led to South Africa being mandated by the League of Nations after the war to administer this territory of some 815 000sq km (larger than the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany combined) once it had been taken from Germany in 1919. South Africa did so for the next 70 years, with major strategic and military implications that dominated the thinking of the Nationalist government in Pretoria until the fall of apartheid.

Gerald L’Ange, in his excellent book, Urgent Imperial Service, noted that the force that embarked on the South West Africa campaign was an extraordinary army:

It was not only that every man was a volunteer that made it remarkable, nor that it was led by the Prime Minister himself – sometimes riding a large white horse at the battlefront – or even that it was setting out on the only campaign planned, conducted and completed by the armed forces of any dominion of the British Empire entirely on its own in the First World War. What was remarkable about this army was the nature of the men in it.

Nearly half of the army consisted of Dutch-speaking commandos, the same commandos that only 12 years earlier had defied the might of Victorian Britain in the Anglo-Boer War.

These were the men who, with little more than their horses and rifles, had kept the most powerful army in the world at bay for four years … the fighting farmers whose successful tactics had changed the nature of warfare; the men who had seen the British generals, unable to defeat them in the field, resort in frustration to burning their farms and locking up their women and children in concentration camps, where many died long before their time.

Some of the Afrikaners, as they came to be called, had volunteered out of personal loyalty to Botha, perhaps also because they agreed with him that they were honour-bound, following the Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the Anglo-Boer War, to help Britain in war. Some seemed to be in it simply for the love of a fight. General Coen Britz, when asked by Botha to join the war, responded: My men are ready. Who do we fight, the English or the Germans?

The campaign established a theme in South African military practice and culture: the combination of the Boer commandos’ mobility, social cohesion and initiative with the more orthodox and disciplined approach of the infantry regiments, which were made up almost entirely of English-speaking South Africans.

London gave Botha’s force two main objectives in South West Africa: to capture the wireless mast at Windhoek, which enabled communication with Berlin, as well as two other wireless stations at Lüderitz and Swakopmund, and to secure the ports of the territory.

Before Botha’s campaign could properly begin, his government had to deal with a rebellion led by several senior officers in the fledgling UDF, formed only two years earlier. They included no less a figure than the Commandant General of the UDF, General Christiaan Beyers. Others were General Koos de la Rey and Manie Maritz. The rebellion was put down, but not before some bitter encounters.

Commanded by Brigadier General Henry Timson Lukin, the 2 420-strong South African force consisted of five Permanent Force (PF) regiments of the South African Mounted Riflemen and two PF artillery batteries; a Citizen Force infantry regiment (the Witwatersrand Rifles); an artillery regiment (the Transvaal Horse Artillery); a section of engineers and an ammunition column.

The distances were huge, the land unforgiving. Movement was on foot or on horseback, with supplies transported by rail. The long treks across this God-forsaken country are like a hideous nightmare, reported the magazine of the South African Police. The country now is simply rock and sand, rock and sand … Some parts are absolutely devoid of vegetation, while here and there one sees a few cacti. A few of the horses give in occasionally, but none of the men. The latter sometimes fall off their horses while asleep.

The first major encounter with the Germans occurred on 26 September, at Sandfontein, a desolate locality mainly important for its water supply. According to one survivor of the battle, WS Rayner, it seemed like hell let loose. There was an infernal din of shrieking, splitting, sickening shells, an interminable rat-a-tat of machine-guns, a cracking of rifles that rose in waves but never died down completely. Poor intelligence had led to the South African force being surrounded and pinned down by heavy artillery fire, not least on the mounted infantry’s horse lines: The poor, helpless creatures stood in rows having their guts blown out, and it looked as if their riders would soon be treated in a like manner.

Eventually the commander, Colonel JM Grant, had no alternative but to surrender. Wounded by shrapnel, he was taken prisoner. His men, he said later, had displayed great fortitude for ten hours under most trying conditions, and I felt that to commit them the a hand-to-hand struggle in the dark against overwhelming numbers would mean their certain annihilation and a useless sacrifice of life, as no military objective was to be gained by further resistance.

Grant had lost a third of his force, and it would have been worse but for the accurate rifle fire of the infantry defenders and gunners at the koppie at Sandfontein. The German commander, Von Heydebreck, was so impressed by the bravery of the South Africans that he ordered their dead to be buried before his own.

However, Botha’s force slowly gained the initiative – in conditions almost prohibitive of military activity. If it were not for the thousands of sheep wandering around the countryside, wrote one soldier in the Natal Carbineers, we would die of starvation … Some days we get half a biscuit and other days nothing, not even salt … All this living along the rocks, sand and thorn bushes and sleeping on the bare ground under the stars behind our saddles has reduced our clothing to shreds. Nobody shaves, we have no soap; our clothes are with dried animal blood … the soles of my boots completely came off, so I got a piece of wet bull’s hide, wrapped it round each boot, laced it up with wire and let the hide dry on my boots, hair outward.

Repeatedly the Germans were taken by surprise by the speed at which the South Africans advanced, and by their tactic of outflanking the enemy. Botha’s advance on Windhuk (later spelled Windhoek) was a good illustration of how he approached his tactical options. Windhuk was an important objective because it was the colonial capital, and possession of it would bring control of the railway upon which the German defence strategy was based. The Union forces had to advance inland from Walvis Bay across a territory, wrote WW O’Shaughnessy, unparallelled in any part of the globe. It is an unqualified waste of sand and granite rocks and kipjoes [koppies], without a drop of water or a vestige of life. Across this wilderness all the food and water had to be transported … The Germans were themselves fully convinced that an advance in force into the interior was an undertaking beyond human power.

Botha had to choose whether to move slowly along the railway line, which had to be repaired after being torn up by the retreating Germans, or more rapidly along the dry bed of the Swakop River. He chose the latter. He had 4 850 mounted riflemen and eight guns. All his senior officers had served with him in the Anglo-Boer War. The German force ahead of them was entrenched in strong defensive positions on high ground – about 2 000 men with four artillery pieces. The landscape where the fighting was expected to take place was a place of utter desolation, wrote O’Shaughnessy, not a drop of water, nor a sign of life – a truly forsaken wilderness.

Botha’s men advanced before daybreak on 30 March 1915, after a 48km march through arid desert the day before. The first frontal attack was pinned down by heavy machine-gun fire. The gunners of the Transvaal Horse Artillery needed to relieve the pressure on the infantry. In his book With Botha in the Field, Eric Moore Ritchie captured what it was like for men lying flat on the ground avoiding bullets, or doing the heavy work manning the guns: All afternoon the heat strikes up at you, overpowering, like the breath of a wild animal. Then the wind rises and the sand shifts in eddies. Veils and goggles are useless. They can’t keep out that spinning curtain of grit. The horses rattle the dry bits in their mouths, trying to get some moisture.

The Germans, outnumbered and outgunned, withdrew from their positions during the night. Then the men of the Ermelo and Standerton commandos, riding fast to avoid machine-gun fire, were able to outflank the retreating Germans and occupy a tactically vital position above a gap in the hills through which the railway ran. Gerald L’Ange tells the amazing story of what happened when Botha saw guns firing from this high ground:

Botha decided that the only way to find out whose guns they were was to go down and have a closer look. Leaving his men, he climbed down the hillside through the dust and suddenly found, to his consternation, that he was in the midst of a German artillery battery.

Realising that they were more surprised than he was, Botha coolly demanded to see the battery commander and to him announced, ‘I have come to discuss the terms of your surrender.’ Looking from the solitary South African to his sweating gun crews and back again, the astonished German replied: ‘On the contrary, I think it is you who must surrender to us.’

Botha’s bluff might have ended in disaster, but a shell from one of his own guns exploded nearby and in the confusion he managed to escape back to his own position.

The South African force continued to advance in the same fashion, outflanking the slower Germans in retreat, pounding them with artillery, taking ground and seizing the railway, and forcing more and more of the enemy to surrender. The official history of the campaign summed up this phase of the campaign: The result of the day’s operations was that the pick of the German troops had, with considerable loss, in one day been turned out of strong and carefully prepared positions which topographically were ideal for their purpose. They had every advantage: interior lines, local knowledge of the intricate terrain, water and railways transport nearly to their fire positions.

By May 1915, Botha had effectively cut the German colony in half, and he then divided his forces into four contingents. The first, under General Britz, went north to Otjiwarongo, Outjo and Etosha Pan, so cutting off the German forces in the interior from the coastal regions. The others spread across the northeast, with General Lukin moving along the railway line running from Swakopmund to Tsumeb. Meanwhile, another South African force under General Jan Smuts landed by sea at Lüderitz and then moved inland to capture Keetmanshoop, where they linked up with two other columns that had moved up from Port Nolloth and Kimberley. The Germans eventually surrendered in July.

Botha returned home a hero. The British Minister of War, Lord Kitchener, who had been largely responsible for the scorched earth policy of laying waste to Boer homesteads little more than a decade before, cabled congratulations and expressed his sincere admiration of the masterly conduct of the campaign. One German observer noted sourly that the first British victory in the war was won by a Boer general.

Delville Wood

Many of the soldiers who served in South West Africa went on to fight in France, where massive British and French armies had settled into static attritional trench warfare, following the early war of manoeuvre after the declaration of war in August 1914.

South Africa, as part of the British Empire, offered to send a contingent of soldiers to fight in Europe, an offer that was accepted by Britain in July 1915, with a request for an infantry formation. Four battalions made up the 1st South African Infantry Brigade, one each from the Cape; Natal, the Border region (Kaffrarian Rifles) and the Free State; the Transvaal and Rhodesia; and a composite battalion drawn from all the South African Scottish regiments. The Permanent Force of the UDF was kept in South Africa to ensure stability following the Rebellion by some former Boer officers and men. All the 2 000 men who went to France were volunteers.

The battle of Delville Wood is etched in South African history as a display of extraordinary valour in the face of unimaginable horror. It was one of many sub-battles in the massive Somme offensive, which was intended to break through the German defences once and for all and win the war. The 1st South African Infantry Brigade was ordered to take Delville at all costs as a means of breaking the impasse that set in soon after the launch of the offensive on 1 July 1916.

The initial Somme plan had envisaged the British Fourth Army, under Sir Henry Rawlinson, breaking the first and second German lines of fortifications, first from Serre to Montauban, and then through Thiepval, Guillemont and Pozières, with the French army focusing on the southern sector around Peronne from Maurepas to Flaucourt. It soon became clear that the big push had met with only limited success especially in the southern sector, and the limited advances soon came under determined German counterattacks. It soon