structure of the army was also changed to counter the threat both from within and without. To begin with, national service was extended from one to two years in January 1978 on the advice of a visiting Israeli officer, Colonel Amos Baran.[67] Even so, the SADF struggled with a severe shortage of manpower throughout the war.[68] Doubling the time the troops had to serve meant that they could be thoroughly trained in the first year and that more men would be operationally available during the second. With the SADF’s excellent training, this made a huge difference on the battlefield.
Secondly, two types of units were established – area protection and conventional units. The former consisted mainly of commandos (militia) and were organised in regional commands, specialised in counterinsurgency warfare. The latter formed the conventional fist and was organised into two divisions, 7 Motorised Infantry Division and 8 Armoured Division, both consisting of three brigades and other divisional troops. After 1978, these were complemented by 44 Parachute Brigade, with three battalions and other brigade support units. This conventional force was also trained in counterinsurgency warfare.[69]
These units were mostly manned by the Active Citizen Force, which would be called up only when needed or in a crisis. Most of the normal manpower needs were supplied by National Servicemen.
The army’s order of battle from the late 1970s onward, therefore, looked like this:[70]
This reinvented SADF went to war in all earnest in the late 1970s.
4
On a security-strategic level, South Africa was in an unwinnable situation by the 1970s. Both within South West Africa and internationally, it was regarded as an illegal colonial occupier. Officially, South Africa administrated SWA “in the spirit” of the old League of Nations mandate of 1919 (revoked by the International Court of Justice in 1971), but in practice the territory was run as a fifth province of the Republic. Initially, Pretoria was intent on applying the policy of grand apartheid in SWA, with self-governing and eventually independent homelands for the different black ethnic groups. Petty apartheid – segregation at a grassroots level – was applied assiduously by an army of officials and policemen. This, as we have seen, provided the main cause of dissent and gave rise to SWAPO’s insurgency.
Pretoria responded to the challenge with a pragmatism that, in hindsight, was quite surprising. Instead of the usual semi-theological arguments that apartheid was a naturally ordained way to order human relations and a blanket refusal to give up the territory, the government reacted with some flexibility. In 1973, Prime Minister John Vorster declared that the SWA population would have to decide its own future, thereby tacitly accepting that the territory could become independent. He also undertook to abandon the grand apartheid scheme of territorial separation for whites and blacks.[1]
Vorster also received the UN special envoy, Alfred Escher, implicitly acknowledging that the UN had a say in the territory’s future. Four years later, a conference between SWA political parties was convened in the Windhoek Turnhalle building, where South West Africans were allowed to decide on the political structures that would govern them. SWAPO viewed the process as a sham, though, and boycotted it. But the apartheid laws were progressively repealed: job reservation was abolished in 1975, along with the hated pass laws and laws forbidding mixed marriages and sex across the colour line, and the principle of equal pay for equal work was accepted in 1978. All of this was a rather adventurous process, seeing that it was still unthinkable in the Republic to contemplate more than just cosmetic changes to apartheid.[2]
In a top-secret assessment, signed by Dr Niel Barnard, director-general of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), it was concluded that white South West Africans had to be convinced “that they cannot demand the same as the whites in the RSA” (with regards to apartheid) and that they had to make “compromises”. The “big chasm between white and black aspirations” had to be taken into account in the formation of a united front, wrote Barnard.[3] Looking back on the 1980s, Barnard later told writer Padraig O’Malley, “[t]here is no military solution to any conflict in the world; there are only political solutions”.[4]
In the military, the changes were reflected in an ever-increasing number of blacks and coloureds fighting for the South African administration. In 1975, the South African Cape Corps (SACC) was for the first time designated a combat unit, and, later that year, sent a contingent of 190 men to the South West African operational area to take part in counterinsurgency operations. The navy followed suit, while the army established various ethnic-based infantry battalions.[5] The first unit to allow blacks to join the hitherto lily-white SADF was 32 Battalion (consisting of ex-FNLA Angolan fighters). This was followed by 31 Battalion (Bushmen), 101 Battalion (Ovambos), 201 Battalion (East Caprivians), 202 Battalion (Okavango), 203 Battalion (West Caprivians), and 911 Battalion (ethnically mixed). Both 32 Battalion and 101 Battalion were much more than ordinary infantry formations, and effectively grew into motorised infantry brigades. Many blacks also joined the police counterinsurgency unit, Koevoet.
With the exception of 32 Battalion (SADF) and Koevoet (SAP), these units became part of the fast-growing South West Africa Territorial Force (SWATF), an indigenous South West African force under South African command that was founded in August 1980. Whereas SWATF members comprised about 20% of the total South African military presence in 1980, this grew to 51% by 1985. During the 1980s, the force supplied about 70% of the military manpower in the territory – about 30 000 men. More than 90% of these were not white.[6]
The communist threat
The government’s more flexible approach in SWA did not mean that the South African government was willing to hand the territory over to SWAPO. During the 1970s and 1980s, the National Party government viewed the USSR as a major threat and Cuba as its surrogate. As Prime Minister PW Botha explained to Parliament in 1980: “The main object . . . under the guidance of the planners in the Kremlin is to overthrow this State and to create chaos in its stead, so that the Kremlin can establish its hegemony here.”[7] Botha’s Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, often used a quotation ascribed to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1977: “Our goal is to get control over the two great treasuries on which the West depend – the energy treasury of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasury of Central and Southern Africa.”[8]
As far as the USSR’s strategy towards South Africa was concerned, a 1981 analysis by Military Intelligence referred to “recent, very credible information” that Moscow expected SWAPO to “tie down” South Africa “through a protracted military struggle in SWA, while the so-called ‘united front’, of which the ANC onslaught against the RSA forms the other facet, is being developed”. Soviet activities in other southern African states, such as Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, confirmed the time scale for the subjugation of southern Africa, which the Soviet Union had shortened “from ten to five years”.[9]
These kinds of analyses were, with certain reservations, shared by the Reagan administration. In a 1984 document, the CIA determined the USSR’s objectives in southern Africa as a programme “to supplant Western and Chinese influence”. Moscow “also seeks to consolidate the emerging leftist, pro-Soviet regimes in Angola and Mozambique, to bring the South-West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) to power in Namibia, and ultimately, to undermine the white minority regime in South Africa”. Angola, the analysis stated, “is central to these objectives, because it positions the USSR to support and influence Namibian and South African insurgents . . .”.
According to the CIA, the Soviets viewed their support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and SWA “as a central element in their approach to Sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade”.[10] “Soviet long-term objectives may also include denial
