Based on this thinking, the government divided southern Africa into three strategic categories. The first was the heartland, South Africa and South West Africa. The second consisted of countries of tactical importance, and included Botswana, southern Angola, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique south of the Zambezi. The third category was the area regarded as of strategic importance, and which reached as far north as the equator.[16]
A new counterinsurgency doctrine
With SWAPO bands becoming ever more active inside South West Africa, the SADF urgently had to develop a proper counterinsurgency doctrine. The army had started a counterinsurgency training course in 1960, and was also introduced to American doctrine on the matter when then Major Magnus Malan attended a US Army staff course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1962.[17] The course taught that “[w]hile a military campaign could delay an insurgency, it could be defeated only by nonmilitary measures designed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population”.[18] Malan later introduced this approach into the SADF.
During the 1960s and early 1970s the army (and SAAF)[19] had observers attached to the Portuguese colonial forces in Angola and Mozambique. The big expert here was Commandant (later Brigadier General) Willem “Kaas” van der Waals,[20] who later wrote a book about the subject.[21] The war in Rhodesia was also studied, especially because several South African units, as well as individual officers and NCOs, had fought clandestinely on the Rhodesian side. As a matter of fact, by late 1979, two companies of 1 Parachute Battalion as well as the entire 3 SA Infantry Battalion were fighting as task forces Yankee, Zulu and X-Ray, respectively, in Rhodesian camouflage uniforms alongside the Rhodesians.[22]
Beaufre was an important source for SADF thinking on the security-strategic level, where people like PW Botha and Magnus Malan moved. But such thinking often went over the heads of practical-minded officers who had to fight a war and kill the enemy. According to General Georg Meiring, a more widely read book was The Art of Counter-Revolutionary Warfare by the American military writer John McCuen.[23] McCuen recommends that the counter revolutionary should have clear and encompassing objectives; that the masses, especially the “silent majority”, be mobilised against the insurgents; and that the efforts of all state departments be united in a single, overarching and integrated plan.[24]
In general, most officers’ interest was limited to the tactical level. The main reason was the traditional contempt for intellectually schooled officers – a quality shared with the British Army. “From the time of Union,” Annette Seegers writes, “debates about the Department of Defence held that military experience counted for more than intellectual or staff ability. Staff courses and later joint staff courses at the Defence College favoured those with operational experience . . . Even for its elite, the SADF thought theory best ignored.” [25]
There were important exceptions, though, such as Lieutenant General CA “Pop” Fraser, Chief of Joint Operations in the 1960s, who in 1969 wrote an unpublished study entitled “Lessons learnt from past revolutionary wars”.[26] Fraser had made a study of the available literature about counterinsurgency warfare at the time and had distilled the prevailing insights for his readers. His fundamental point of departure was “that victory does not come from the clash of two armies on a field of battle”. Anticipating PW Botha and Magnus Malan’s total strategy approach, he wrote that counterinsurgency warfare had to be conducted “as an interlocking system of actions, political, economic, administrative, psychological, police and military”. The revolutionary wages his war by gaining the support of the people. A government can thus be victorious only “by recapturing the support of the masses, and by the complete destruction of that organisation and the eradication of its influence upon the people”. Referring to historic examples, Fraser wrote that most counterinsurgency wars were won militarily, but lost politically.[27] Because the objective of both sides is to win over the population itself, “political action remains paramount throughout the war”. This means that the interplay between politics and military action is so intricate that the two cannot be separated. “On the contrary, every military and administrative move has to be weighed with regard to its political effects and vice versa”. The inescapable conclusion, he emphasised, was “that the overall responsibility should stay with the civilian power at every possible level”.[28] He strongly recommended (unspecified) political reforms, and stressed that the locals’ life under the government must be perceptibly better than that offered by the insurgents.[29]
Fraser’s work was widely studied in the SADF and in government circles. In 1985, President PW Botha wrote a foreword when the main study was distributed to senior officials.[30] In his memoirs, General Jannie Geldenhuys devotes considerable space to Fraser’s ideas. “I identified myself intellectually and emotionally with the contents and made the ideas my own,” he wrote.[31]
It is thus clear that the South Africans, in theory at any rate, had developed a sophisticated approach to SWAPO’s onslaught, which embodied a good understanding of revolutionary guerrilla warfare principles. The question is: to what extent did they practise what they preached?
A return to mobile warfare
The traditional South African method of warfare is based on one overarching concept: mobility. From the 18th century, three factors encouraged this: the vast spaces, a relatively small population and a heavy reliance on militias (called commandos). Individuals could never remain in the field for long periods, as they had to return to their farms to plough or harvest. Campaigns therefore had to be concluded swiftly.
Infantry and cavalry in the European sense had only a limited application in southern Africa; the infantry were not mobile enough to cover the vast distances quickly enough, while cavalry were overly reliant on their horses and could not fight on foot. Thus warfare in this part of the world naturally revolved around mounted infantry, that is, fighters able to move around rapidly and across great distances on horseback, and able to shoot from horseback, but who, having entered a battle, would mostly fight on foot.
The mounted infantry commando concept reached its zenith during the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), when the Boers mostly outclassed their British counterparts on the tactical and operational levels. It is interesting to note that the British followed the Boer example later in the war by exchanging their infantry and cavalry for mounted infantry, although in general they seldom matched the astounding mobility of the commandos.[32]
This Boer phenomenon never became the subject of military treatises or doctrine. It grew, as it were, out of the ground and simply became second nature. It is, therefore, not surprising that the South African invasion of Italian-occupied Somalia and Ethiopia in 1940/1941 was a classic example of mobile mounted infantry warfare – the horse simply having been exchanged for the lorry. The South Africans achieved great mobility by moving their infantry about in lorries and having them dismount when the need arose. It was, in fact, a sort of motorised Anglo-Boer War.[33]
Of course, after the Somalian and Ethiopian campaigns the South Africans moved to the Western Desert and Italy, where their freedom of movement and independence of decision-making were greatly constrained. South Africa had two infantry divisions in North Africa and an armoured division in Italy, which formed part of the British Eighth Army and later the US Fifth Army. These formations had to do what the senior British and American generals ordered. Moreover, the mountainous terrain of Italy was not conducive to the traditional mobile South African way of war.[34] As Brigadier General George Kruys wrote in a study, during that time “[t]he South African military thus experienced advance, attack, defence and withdrawal actions in largely set-piece operations”.[35] It was this experience that dominated the SADF until the 1960s and resulted in a Defence Force still very much in Second World War mode.[36]
Another problem was that few South African officers had practical experience of war. Most were too young to have participated in the Second World War, and the nature of that conflict was very different from the one that was about to begin.[37]
