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.
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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” by the troops, with the phase from Benghazi to Alamein (overrunning Tobruk en route) becoming known as the “Gazala Gallop”, and the long westward retreat of the Afrika Korps, the “Tripoli Gallop”.
The desert war is often portrayed as the last of the conflicts in which chivalry and comradeship between enemies played a part. This was due mainly to the mutual struggle of the two sides against the elements, the swarming flies and pervasive, invasive dust. It was as much at times a “private war” as one between foes – though it was brutal and costly. Some 100 000 men lost their lives over the three years of fighting.
The desert war was also an extreme demonstration that a modern army required a considerable and complex logistical tail. By January 1941, it was calculated that each British division in the Middle East (about 18 000 men) required another 41 000 men to maintain it in the field. Rommel had completely outrun his supply abilities by the time his army reached El Alamein, a situation made worse by the fact that only one in four of his supply ships was reaching the ports of Tripoli and Tobruk, many being intercepted by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force operating out of Malta. In September 1941, for instance, Rommel wrote: “Out of 5 000 tons of petrol which had been due to arrive by the 3rd, 2 600 tons had already been sunk and 1 500 tons were still in Italy.” Many of the supplies which did make it to North Africa “consumed themselves” in their delivery to the front.
The campaign in East Africa
The South African forces that served “up north” are remembered mainly for their part in the great battles in the Western Desert – defeat at Sidi Rezegh and humiliation at Tobruk, but also glory in the saving of North Africa at El Alamein in July and November 1942. However, the Springboks distinguished themselves in early 1941 as part of the British-led effort to drive the Italians out of East Africa, Abyssinia, Somalia and the Sudan.
Benito Mussolini’s empire in East Africa was established following the Italo-Abyssinian War of 1935–1936, when Italian forces conquered Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia). The empire incorporated this newly occupied territory as well as the colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. In June 1940, when Mussolini took Italy into the war on the German side, Italian forces in East Africa (numbering some 300 000) were seen as a threat to British supply routes along the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal.
Overall command of the East African theatre was in British hands, and this was accepted by the South African government when it raised a division for service against the Italians. By August 1940 the 1st South African Division was formed. It included three infantry brigade groups, each consisting of three rifle battalions, an armoured car company and supporting signal, engineer and medical units. By the end of the year, approximately 27 000 South Africans were serving in East Africa. That figure rose to 43 700 troops by the end of the campaign. They included just under