a high order in controlling the mounted troops in their long night marches and manoeuvres through unknown and extremely difficult country.”
However, Lettow-Vorbeck remained undefeated. For the next year, he sustained an amazing campaign of evasion and delaying tactics. In November 1917 he crossed into Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) to gain supplies by capturing Portuguese garrisons, and with his caravans of troops, bearers, wives and children, he marched through Mozambique for the next nine months. In August 1918 he moved back into German East Africa and then Northern Rhodesia. On 13 November 1918, two days after the Armistice was signed in France, the German army occupied its last town, Kasama, which had been evacuated by the British. The next day, at the Zambezi River, Lettow-Vorbeck was handed a telegram announcing the signing of the armistice and he agreed to a ceasefire. He surrendered his undefeated army on 23 November 1918.
Ross Anderson summed up the different personalities and styles of the two South African commanders-in-chief:
If the standard of military success is victory on the battlefield then it is difficult to judge Smuts a success. While he captured a great deal of territory, he never seriously threatened the existence of his enemy and left the theatre with their morale and fighting power unharmed. On the debit side, he had to evacuate the bulk of his army through ill health and those who were left were in no condition to carry on the advance.
Van Deventer was given the mission of ending the campaign as rapidly as possible. In this he failed, as Lettow-Vorbeck did not surrender until after the signing of the Armistice. However, he achieved a number of successes in the field, reducing his opponents to little more than a band of weakened companies and enabling the withdrawal of a large number of his own units. His policy of attacking the enemy's food supplies was a sound one and hastened the end of resistance in German East Africa. Van Deventer also occupied a considerable amount of enemy territory … and maintained a mobile and hard-hitting force until the end of the war. In the final analysis, although Smuts was well known and lauded for his exploits, Van Deventer must be considered the better general.
Early German armoured cars in the South West Africa campaign.
Battlefield destroyed: South African infantry in trenches, France
King George V (second from right) inspects members of the South African Native Labour Corps in France, 1916.
South African Medical Corps members at 1 SA General Hospital, France.
Any transport will do: SA Pioneer Battalion in German East Africa.
South African troops march over a bridge on campaign in German East Africa.
2
Overview: South African forces in the Second World War
In 1939, as in 1914, South Africa declared war against Germany in support of Britain. Once again, the Union was bitterly divided between the supporters of two Anglo-Boer War generals who had become political giants in the country. JBM Hertzog, the Prime Minister, wanted South Africa to stay neutral. Jan Smuts wanted to support the British. Smuts won the crucial vote in Parliament by 80 votes to 69, and became Prime Minister for the second time.
The Union Defence Force (UDF) had been badly run down in the interwar years, and apart from some Active Citizen Force (ACF) units and specialist formations like the artillery, much of the transport and equipment needed to be built up from scratch. Training capacity and facilities needed to be substantially and rapidly expanded. The political sensitivities aroused by the war meant that the government relied only on volunteers, not conscription. Even Permanent Force (PF) officers who were uncomfortable with the British cause were permitted to refuse to serve outside of South Africa.
At the outbreak of war, the PF consisted of just 352 officers. Of the 5 033 men in the PF, only about 1 700 were in the infantry – in the Special Services Battalion, a short-service unit that had been formed in the 1930s to help alleviate unemployment. The ACF was not much bigger, and consisted of 918 officers and 12 572 men. Only white men were considered for bearing arms, which meant that the pool available for service in 1939 was estimated to be about 320 000 men, aged between 20 and 40. However, as in the First World War, non-white volunteers were accepted and welcomed for labour and support work. Though some were armed for guard duties, none were officially allowed to go into combat.
More than 227 000 South African whites (including several thousand women) volunteered for service in the Second World War. A further 123 000 “non-whites” also joined up, including 27 000 in the Cape Corps. Nearly 9 000 of all races were killed in action. Many South Africans also served in the British armed forces.
The South African army’s main fighting contributions took place successively in East Africa and Abyssinia (1940–1941), the North African desert war (1941–1942), and the Italian campaign (1944–1945). There was also action in Madagascar. Strategically, the desert battles (known to soldiers and their families simply as “up north”) were the most important to the British cause, and tactically this was where South Africans made a contribution out of all proportion to their numbers.
The British presence in the Middle East was vital to the outcome of the war. Aside from the strategic value of Cairo and Alexandria for control of the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, respectively, British forces protected the oilfields in Iraq and Persia, and constituted “the moral and physical prop” that kept Turkey neutral. If the Germans had been victorious at Alamein between June and October 1942, or earlier, the outcome of the war could have been different: if not a German victory, then an unsatisfactory conditional peace or a more drawn-out conflict with even more devastating consequences.
For three years great battles ran their course along the coastal strip of North Africa. Following Mussolini’s declaration of war against the Allies on 10 June 1940, Italian forces invaded British-held Egypt that September, advancing just 100km inside to build a series of fortified camps around Sidi Barrani. In December, the 30 000-strong Commonwealth army under the command of Major General Richard “Red” O’Connor “cut the wire” between Egypt and Libya in December 1940 in what was supposed to be just a five-day operation. O’Connor’s troops advanced rapidly until February 1941, capturing 110 000 of Mussolini’s troops in just two months. The success of the British campaign led Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to remark to Winston Churchill: “If I may debase a golden phrase, never before has so much been surrendered by so many to so few.” But O’Connor’s force was soon pushed back following the arrival of German troops in February 1941: although Adolf Hitler had never intended to make an African campaign part of his strategy, he dispatched the Deutsche Afrika Korps (DAK, generally known simply as the Afrika Korps), under the command of General Erwin Rommel, to bail out his Italian ally.
Rommel’s progress was finally halted at El Alamein, in Egypt, between July and December 1942. There followed a rapid Allied advance into Libya and Tunisia and the surrender of the remnants of the Afrika Korps (October to May 1943). The seesaw nature of the campaign, characterised by a series of advances and retreats, was dubbed the “Benghazi Handicap”
