Rodney Warwick on the forgotten war heroes of the Afrikaans community

Contemporary Afrikaners should re-inform themselves about South Africa's military contribution during the Second World War and specifically Afrikaner involvement therein. This is based upon my contention that the Afrikaans community of the post-war years, never appropriately accorded their own veterans; the surviving of whom are now in their mid-eighties or older, their deserved dues for honourable services performed on behalf of the Allied cause.

It also needs to be recalled that a section of Afrikaners, who protested their being anti-British, espoused in both word and deed the Nazi-Fascist philosophies of the 1930s-40s period. But it is also imperative to firstly introduce something of the historical contexts pertaining to Afrikaners and the formal military structures of South Africa during the last century.

This might help explain why Afrikaners as a cultural entity never bestowed proper recognition upon their own veterans compared with the depth of acknowledgment accorded by white South African English-speakers, regarding their community's ex-servicemen. There remains no justification for Afrikaner veterans once being treated with less than respect by their own community for over seven decades.

The Afrikaner reaction to World War Two partly resulted from a particularly complex convergence regarding different aspects concerning Afrikaner history, politics and social demands. But for Afrikaner nationalists of yesteryear, the harsh reality is that their hostility to South Africa being involved in World War Two has tainted them with perceptions, still held to this day, that they were pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi anti-Semitic or pro-a German victory.

In some cases these perceptions are not entirely fair. But concerning the Ossewabrandwag's political kinship with Nazi philosophy as with its equally ugly descendant, the Afrikanerweerstandbeweeging besides other more recent extreme right-wing organisations, these accusations stand entirely solid regarding their accurate verification.

Historically Afrikaners had an unsettled relationship with formal military formations. Most particularly because the longer legacy of uniformed soldiers within South African affairs were the British Imperial and colonial forces in conflict with nineteenth century Afrikaner nationalist and republican aspirations. When the Union Defence Force (UDF) was established in 1912 - 100 years ago this year, Afrikaners demonstrated some acceptance for it; but upon deeper reflection, probably also considerable antipathy.

The UDF was originally designed along predominantly British Army cultural and organisational lines. For example, its khaki uniforms and pith helmets could for many in the still war-shocked Afrikaner community, easily have simply represented the garb of Lord Roberts and Kitchener's triumphant forces. But an Afrikaner Boer War hero Jan Smuts was the author of the 1912 Defence Act and he also served as the South African Party (SAP) government's first defence minister. The UDF's 1912 permanent force's fighting core consisted of five SA Mounted Riflemen regiments, drawn from the four post-1902 South African British colonies mounted police forces, plus the Cape Mounted Rifles - the Cape Colony's only regular military unit.

The SAMR officers and men were predominately British or English-speaking South Africans and their duties involved, besides border defence during war, the containment of potential internal threats, including black insurrection, violent white and black labour disputes and potential Afrikaner republican rebellion.

My own grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Algernon Sparks who started his military career firstly as a Natal Mounted Police trooper from 1906, was one of these SAMR men. He transferring to the UDF in 1912 and was commissioned in 1915 after active service in German South West Africa and the Afrikaner Rebellion.

Sparks served as an SAMR artillery officer in German East Africa and continued his military career, reaching to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel before reaching retirement age in 1943. Sparks was a first generation South African and one of his colleagues and friends was Major-General Dan Pienaar; who was in turn one of the UDF best known and highly popular officers and Afrikaner to the core.

Pienaar was born in the Free State and spent formative years in a concentration camp during the Boer War; receiving his commission around the same time as my grandfather. Afrikaners and their former enemies could merge into a common nationhood and military; but Afrikaner nationalists kicked against this; probably to their common long-term detriment.

Back in 1912, despite prominent English-speaking appointments such as Major-General Timson Lukin to head the UDF's permanent force component (Lukin was the former Commandant of the Cape Colony's military forces), some Afrikaner Boer War veterans also accepted senior and middle-ranking officer positions.

Examples were Christiaan Beyers, Manie Maritz, Jan Kemp and Jopie Fourie, all of whom were to depart from the UDF at the onset of the 1914 Rebellion and all formally resigning except Fourie. He was court-martialled and unsurprisingly executed for killing government troops while under the pretext of surrendering. But other younger Afrikaners were to rise up through the UDF ranks becoming prominent South African soldiers in World War Two.

Some of these continued to senior SADF careers in the 1950s-early 70s: Lieutenant-General Pierre Van Ryneveld (UDF Chief of Staff to 1948); Major- General Daniel Pienaar; Major- General Frank Theron; Major- General George Brink; General Piet Grobbelaar (SADF Commandant-General 1960 - 65); Major-General Nic Bierman; and Admiral Hugo Biermann (SADF Chief 1973-1976) are some notable examples. But "Slim Jannie's" UDF was also tailored to promote the SAP's reconciliation approach concerning unifying the white community's Afrikaner and English-speaking components.

Within defence force structures Afrikaners retained and served within their traditional commando formations. These citizen soldiers, regardless of individual politics, responded in their thousands to the SAP government's call up for active service during the 1914 and 1915 campaigns in German South West and East Africa respectively; during the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion and later still, during the politically polarizing 1922 Witwatersrand Uprising by white workers.

But Afrikaner republican and National Party (NP) suspicions towards the UDF grew after the NP's formation in 1914. Afrikaner nationalists tended to link the UDF to Smuts's Martjie Louw (Martial Law) during the 1913 and 1914 Witwatersrand industrial strikes, for these events impacted negatively upon the emerging Afrikaner proletariat who were potential NP supporters.

Afrikaner antipathy to the military co-existed with NP accusations of government ‘militarism' being a covert strategy threatening to endorse Hoggenheimer capitalism through state coercion. There was also the alleged SAP misuse of the UDF for it serving perceived British rather than "South African" (read Afrikaner nationalist interests).

Such was particularly manifested during the heated parliamentary debates surrounding the Union Government acceding to a 1914 British request to invade German South West Africa. During the Afrikaner rebellion, Prime Minister Louis Botha attempted but failed to use only Afrikaner UDF personnel to crush the dissidents and the UDF gained further Afrikaner detractors. The defeat of the white (majority Afrikaner) workers by UDF forces during the 1922 Rand Revolt undoubtedly ensured the SAP's loss during the 1924 election to JBM Herzog's NP/Labour Pact.

But one issue most strongly contributed to Afrikaner nationalists' hostile perceptions of the UDF by 1939. It was the parliamentary defeat of Prime Minister Hertzog's call for South African neutrality in September 1939. This had been orchestrated by MPs supporting Smuts, followed by the new Prime Minister resultant decision for South Africa to enter the war without calling a general election.

Smuts as the new prime minister had acted correctly from both legal and moral vantage points; for Nazi Germany was a global threat which had to be faced. But the Afrikaner nationalist denigration of the UDF moved to a new level of hysteria. The "kharkis" and "rooilussies", as Afrikaner nationalists derogatively termed South African soldiers, reflected the old Boer term for Imperial troops, while "rooilussie' was a mocking jibe towards UDF members issued with red tabs for their epaulets.

These items were given only to those in the military and police prepared to take the Africa Oath and signalled the wearers willingness to fight anywhere in Africa. Yet despite this political antagonism towards the UDF, thousands of Afrikaners still volunteered for war, taking the "derided" Rooi Eed and serving with UDF contingents in the East and North Africa campaigns of 1940-1943. Nevertheless there were some UDF permanent force members of Afrikaner background who refused point blank to take the oath. Like Major Rudolf Hiemstra of the SA Air Force who even attempted to remain in the UDF after declining to fight in the war - see below. Later scores of the same Afrikaner volunteers and other Afrikaners took the General Service Oath pledging to serve anywhere in the world. For the majority, this was to be the Italian campaign of 1944-45, where they served as part of the 6th SA Armoured Division.

Of course Afrikaner motives for choosing war service deserves careful scrutiny: Some academics have concluded that pay and adventure were strong draw cards for those from impoverished backgrounds. It is a statistical reality that the larger grouping of poor whites were Afrikaners; P.G. du Plessis‟s 1971 play "Siener in die Suburbs" captures a literary essence of poverty stricken Afrikaners still struggling nearly three decades after the war, at a time (1960s and 1970s) of supposedly triumphant white republicanism.

The play involves an absent father from a now dysfunctional family reported missing in 1945 "somewhere in the North". This soldier's war pension is paid to his widow but is also coveted amongst her extended family and their hangers-on, including the violent "Jakes" who ultimately destroys the family. Stellenbosch University historian Albert Grundlingh has suggested that to a greater extent than white English-speaking South Africans, Afrikaners volunteered with markedly mixed reasons, with economic needs competed favourably against any political identification with Smuts's political goals.

Historically it is conventionally accepted that the NP's 1948 election victory was partly a consequence of disgruntled ex-soldiers, mostly of Afrikaans background, expressing their discontent at the United Party (UP) government's alleged tardiness over demobilisation, rationing, shortages and other post war grievances, along with these veterans supporting the NP's absolute commitment to protecting white workers through baaskap apartheid laws.

But there was also a darker ideological component to the story of Afrikaners and World War Two. Thousands of particularly young Afrikaner males joined the neo-Nazi Ossewabrandwag (OB) which reached its peak by 1941, claiming a membership of hundreds of thousands. OB leader Hans Van Rensberg envisioned a Nazi future for South Africa; former Springbok boxer Robey Leibrandt, a committed Nazi who remained in Germany after the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was landed off the Namaqualand coast with German instructions to contact local Afrikaner extremists and assassinate Smuts.

This treasonous mission was almost successfully followed through by Leibrandt who was arrested, sentenced to death for treason, with this penalty being commuted to life imprisonment by Smuts. Leibrandt was then happily and outrageously freed by the NP government shortly after their 1948 election victory.

The OB's "armed wing" of stormjaers committed numerous acts of sabotage against government installations and private property, while regular OB members and their hangers on attacked off-duty soldiers in city streets. OB members intimidated and assaulted individual NP members who condemned the neo-Nazi organisation's methods and philosophy.

Evidence has virtually indisputably linked OB killers to murdering George Heard in August 1945. Heard was a SA Naval Forces lieutenant, but in civilian life, he was a newspaper editor who had particularly condemned Nazi components within wartime Afrikaner politics. Heard was the one of two known English-speaking South African fatalities of OB violence, the other being a soldier, Corporal Gillham killed in late January 1941 during military versus OB riots in Johannesburg.

Many OB members were justifiably interned by the Smuts government at Koffiefontein; two prominent individuals being future Prime Minister John Vorster and the later Bureau of State Security (BOSS) head, the sinister Hendrik Van den Berg who brought his Gestapo - type methods into security policing during the 1960s and 1970s.

OB members were well represented in the wartime South African Police Force and they formed a potentially highly dangerous fifth column force, considering thousands of loyal policemen were serving as a brigade of infantry in the North African desert. By mid-1943 the war had swung against Germany and the OB steadily lost both its members and ideological impetuous. Although the OB did not fade away until the early 1950s, its ghost rose up in 1973, symbolism and all, in the form of the obnoxious neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstand Beweeging; courtesy of its one-time leader Eugene Terreblanche, Prime Minister John Vorster's one-time police body guard.

After the war, UDF active service experience as a war time volunteer remained unapproved within the cultural and political citadels of Afrikanerdom. Of course after 1945, most peace-time UDF permanent force member were war veterans and it is not the purpose here to exhaustingly detail the traumatic changes in the UDF during the 1950s, as occurred under notorious NP defence minister Frans Erasmus. But certain Afrikaner and English-speaking officers were specifically targeted by Erasmus and his lackeys. Their victims included men such as Brigadier Bronkhorst and Colonel Gideon Jacobs, both of whom later became UP MPs.

While these many highly regarded professional soldiers and airmen were hounded out on political grounds, some other Afrikaner war veterans who remained in the armed forces experienced prosperous careers. For English-speaking UDF members who did not voluntarily resign, their reality was to grimly accept that promotion opportunities would be slow or non-existent.

Of course Erasmus had little choice but to use the men available to manage the peace-time UDF, but by 1960 the General Staff were all Afrikaners as opposed to a nearly balanced spread in 1948 between both language groupings. Some Afrikaner war veterans who rose under Erasmus's patronage included desert campaign veterans Generals De Wet (Matie), Du Toit, and Hendrik Klopper who both served short terms as Chief of Staff; while Piet Grobbelaar, the SADF Commandant General during the early 1960s and a decorated 7 Reconnaissance Battalion wartime commander, was clearly from the early 1950s already earmarked for a higher things.

SA Navy Services war veteran Hugo Biermann leapfrogged from captain to rear-admiral (missing commodore) to become Chief of the Navy in the early 1950s. He was one of just four Afrikaans-speaking naval officers in 1945; but unlike some Erasmus-inspired promotions in the army particularly, Biermann was a highly competent professional navy man and respected by his fellow officers.

Of course in furthering their professional ambitions these men adapted successfully to the new Afrikaner nationalist political dispensation. Indeed it can be safely assumed that Erasmus's top appointments in the 1950s had to ingratiate themselves to "prove‟ that despite their wartime loyalties to Smuts's government, they were Afrikaner patriots first and foremost. And some of them certainly did just that.

Between 1948 and 1972 the future SADF Commandant General Rudolf Hiemstra (CG 1965-72) was the most important Afrikaner nationalist figure within the military. He had been one of the air force's top pilots during the 1930s, but he stood firmly by the NP party line in refusing to take the Africa Oath.

By 1941, in view of the massive hostility directed towards him by his brother officers who were preparing for war, Hiemstra resigned from the UDF and transferred to the Department of Transport. Here Hiemstra remained until after the 1948 NP election victory, returning to the military immediately the NP cabinet took office.

Firstly, as an advisor to Erasmus Hiemstra was imbued with an embittered determination for vengeance for he never forgot the slights directed against him. Hiemstra was instrumental in assisting Erasmus's 1950s political witch hunts within the air force and army particularly, successfully driving out numerous competent officers who had been strong Smuts supporters and also overtly critical of the NP.

In his autobiography Die Wilde Haf Hiemstra alludes to lingering Afrikaner discontents towards the military, describing how the ballot system introduced from 1953 was intended to transform the citizen force from being "English". It was Erasmus's intention, supported by Hiemstra, to create "single-language" regiments which came into existence for a while, with often ludicrous results, along with Boer-originated ranks resulting in sometimes laughable consequences such as "Sea-Cornet" and "Air-Cornet" (from the Boer: "Veldkornet").

Hiemstra spoke of the defence force needing to personify a Volk's highest ideals and spiritual values. He claimed (in the late-1950s) that Afrikaners had during the war kept to one side regarding the military because for them the "English-orientated UDF" was an alienating experience. By the mid-1950s Hiemstra was Adjutant-General and apparently oblivious to how such utterances effectively insulted Afrikaner war veterans by stressing rather his (Hiemstra's) own decision and experiences as a politically-orientated war objector. Hiemstra thereby reducing Afrikaner veterans to invisibility, including many still serving within the SADF; the UDF term had been dropped in 1957.

Hiemstra's unchecked and utterly inappropriate politicking, as a civil servant from a public service platform, was a manifestation of the government's drive for Afrikaner unity during a period marked by a confident surge within Afrikaner nationalism. Thousands of Afrikaners who had not volunteered for the war discovered their own "culturally congenial" military camaraderie within SADF rural "skietkommando" structures, which received generous government funding.

This integration of Afrikaner nationalist rank and file into the defence force, was considered by the NP government to be far more important than any recalling, let alone lauding, those who had fought in the UDF during the war.

By early 1960, in a bid to promote white republican unity under Afrikaner nationalist leadership, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd shifted the controversial Erasmus from the defence portfolio, appointing the markedly more diplomatic Jim Fouche. The new defence minister presided over damage control efforts to restore the SADF's operational effectiveness and repair polarized relations between Afrikaans and English-speaking members, besides also, between Afrikaners who had served in the war and those who had been objectors.

Fouche was welcomed by serving SADF war veterans and English-speaking members who had joined the military in the post-war years; they waved good-bye to Erasmus with both relief and enthusiasm. But even in the early 1960s antipathies still lingered towards the military amongst some Afrikaners; even though by this decade the SADF (with the exception of the navy and to a lesser extent the air force) was very Afrikaner-dominated after having undergone such an aggressive and in many ways destructive Afrikanerisation.

This prompted reassurances from figures as diverse as Hiemstra, Afrikaner nationalist historian G.D. Scholtz and Professor Thom, the Stellenbosch University Vice Chancellor, that the SADF was now "their own" and Afrikaners needed to both feel this and believe it.

We have no way of accurately quantifying how many Afrikaner war veterans voted National Party in the 1948 election, nor of the assumed increases in veterans support for the NP during the 1953 and 1958 general elections. Neither for that matter can we determine the extent to which these men contributed towards either the "yes" or the "no" totals during the 1960 republican referendum. But within predominantly Afrikaner forums, despite numbering in their thousands, Afrikaner ex-servicemen were never properly honoured.

This was in stark contrast to English South African society where in schools particularly, former pupils who were amongst the Second World War fallen, remain to this day prominently commemorated regarding buildings, various structures and inscribed plaques. This consistent pattern at many English South African schools is appropriately replicated within Anglican and other churches, traditionally English universities, sports clubs and other community structures.

Virtually nothing of similar features can be located today at Afrikaans schools existent during 1939 to 1945 or traditionally Afrikaner universities, churches or community entities which historically had been controlled by Afrikaner nationalists. With the Broederbond influences looming everywhere after 1948; Afrikaner nationalists ensured no discussion ever occurred concerning any localised remembrances of Afrikaner war dead.

Certainly many Afrikaner veterans joined the generally English dominated Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTHS). Indeed the explicit credo of this veterans' grouping was and today remains strictly to ignore political differences, let alone distinctions between the home languages of members. But in origin and culture this and other veterans organisations reflected Smuts's "South Africanism". After 1948, Afrikaners political support swung almost exclusively to the NP and away from the UP with many Afrikaner veterans shifted their own politics accordingly.

Dwelling upon war service could cause embarrassment in post war Afrikaner nationalist circles and potentially remained a highly divisive issue; which NP politicians wanted to avoid amongst the volk. Triumphalist nationalist historical accounts of the 1948 election victory through to the 1961 Republic became part of the mythology taught throughout Afrikaner educational institutions and cultural societies; facilitating the socialization, mass mobilisation and effectively the brain-washing of Afrikaners behind the NP, a process which extended still even beyond the coming of republic.

The Union War Histories section of the SADF, originally launched on the initiative of Smuts, received only tepid NP government support during the 1950s and in June 1960, the government announced its closure.

Appeals from various military associations, assisted through retired Lieutenant-General George Brink efforts, succeeded in delaying this closure until July 1961. But during that year, even requests from Commandant-General Grobbelaar for the transfer of all war documentation to his authority and for permission to complete the work were officially rebuffed.

It was advised that relevant documentation would be transferred across to the national archives for usage by researchers. Afrikaner divisions and bitterness over the war ensured that NP politicians obstructed and hindered the completion of an official South African war history.

Of the three volumes eventually published, none were translated into Afrikaans. As Grundlingh has stated elsewhere, both the war and the Afrikaans veterans' experiences thereof, were as far as Afrikaner nationalist politicians and historians were concerned, at best simply to be forgotten. The NP believed that the motives and political attitudes of Afrikaner World War Two veterans had simply equated those of the British Commonwealth and Smuts supporting English-speaking South African troops. If the war was not worth fighting, it was also not worth recording and teaching. Such has remained the situation today in SA schools.

Therefore a conflicting legacy regarding war participation emerged and still arguably remains amongst the larger two white South African language groupings. For "English South Africans" their World War Two participation represented honourable participation in a necessary struggle against fascist totalitarianism.

For Afrikaner nationalists of yesteryear and perhaps amongst still many of their kin today, World War Two service was connected to Afrikaner nationalist political accusations of South Africa under Smuts lending support to a perceived former oppressor. And also to the 1939 UP government for allegedly ignoring the will of an Afrikaner majority by rejecting and defeating Hertzog's call for South African neutrality.

The shameful history of the OB, its philosophy and the extent of its criminal actions, also needs to be re-opened for today's Afrikaners to scrutinize. But above all, the stories of Afrikaner soldiers like Major-General Dan Pienaar who was so loved by his troops; Captain De Villiers Graaff who as a prisoner of war did good work on South Africa's behalf; Adolf Gysbert "Sailor" Malan, the brilliant Royal Air Force Afrikaner ace of Britain's darkest hours of 1940 and one of Churchill's "few"; the legendary Lieutenant-Colonel "Papa" Britz of the 1st Special Service Battalion during the Italian campaign and thousands of others need to be retold and recognised.

Indeed, perhaps it is now time for the Afrikaans schools along with traditionally Afrikaans medium universities, churches and cultural organisations, to consider the placement of suitable memorialisation artefacts, commemorating the sacrifices of these men seven decades ago.

Dr Rodney Warwick

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