History/Politics
South Africa’s Gallipoli
As Australians
remembered the centenary of the darkest day in our history, 20 July 1916, when
the fledgling nation sustained 5533, at Fromelles, there was also time to reflect
on another dreadful toll taken on our South African Allies.
South
Africa’s six days of torment ended on the day Australia’s began at a place
called Delville Wood by name but rightly called Devil’s Wood or Nightmare Wood
by character.
Like scenes
from Dante’s Inferno that charnel
house in France was where brave young South African soldiers, fought suffered
and, in most cases, perished.
It was to
the Springboks what Gallipoli was to the Aussie Diggers. It was South Africa’s
baptism of fire.
On July 20
at the WA War Memorial in beautiful Kings Park, Perth the South Africans were
remembered in ceremony of recognition long overdue to Australia’s
comrades-in-arms. The State Governor led
those laying wreaths in remembrance of the fallen and a strong contingent of SA
Border War veterans honoured their compatriots of an earlier era.
In six
dreadful days of fighting, commencing on July 15, a century ago, some 3155
South Africans entered the gates of Hell, being ordered to take the wood at all
costs against a German force of over 7000.
When
relieved at 6pm on July 20, only 143 left the wood, including three officers. The
following day as the remnant of the brigade reassembled the casualty figures
made for grim reading: only 750 men and five officers were at the assembly,
some 80 per cent having been impacted on. Of the 123 officers, 104 were killed,
wounded or missing.
Outnumbered
and attacked on three sides the South Africans were, however, not out fought in what British
historian, Basil Lidell Hart, described as the “bloodiest battle hell of 1916.”
The
artillery shelling had destroyed the forest and the South Africans were under
horrendous fire throughout with the wood reduced to a splintered wasteland
apart from one tree that still survives to this day. For every second there
seven shells reined in on the Springboks. For every one South African wounded
four were killed.
The
importance of Delville Wood for South Africa has changed over the years.
Initially,
it was important because it produced a situation where the two white tribes,
Afrikaners and English fought side by side, although the Dutch-Afrikaans
speakers only represented 10-15 percent of the Union army they were the
majority of the white race (60-40%).
The race
question in that era pertained to the two white tribes, not the blacks, and
there were potent historical reasons for bitterness between the two.
The
destruction of two independent Boer Republics, Orange Free State and the South
African Republic (Transvaal) had led to great bitterness, during the South
African War of 1899-1902. British concentration camps had resulted in the death
of some 28,000 of Boer women and children, in Lord Kitchener’s utter failure,
as British Commander- in-Chief, to ensure
proper duty of care.
Boer
resentment was shown at the start of World War 1 when two former Boer generals,
Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, as PM and Deputy PM of the Union (1910-19), had to
put down a rebellion by Afrikaner elements who wanted no part of that conflict.
As historian
Bill Nasson noted Delville Wood was, in a fashion, an emulation of the unrelenting
resistance of the bittereinders or
die hards who refused to capitulate in the earlier Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).
The great
Boer general, Christiaan de Wet, had ‘found his empire bittereinder equivalent in
the pugnacity of Private Andrew Hoatson.’ The Natal private had remained at his
Lewis gun post while the rest of his platoon perished.
For Botha, Smuts,
and men like Deneys Reitz (a former Boer Commando), Delville Wood commemorated
the beginnings of a national fighting spirit rather than just factional tribal
loyalties but Nationalist pro-republicans
still remained scathing of the British Generals incompetence and
callousness.
Smuts, as PM
(1919-24), favoured South African soil for a commemoration of Delville Wood but
eventually a remembrance place on the Somme, was chosen. Thus, like Galipolli
for Australians, the foreign soil where blood was spilled became the shrine of
remembrance for both fledgling nations.
The first
Nationalist Prime Minister, was Barry Hertzog who succeeded Smuts after defeating him
in the 1924 election. Some of his supporters urged him to refuse to participate
in the opening of the Delville Wood Monument, in France (1926).
However, Hertzog
determined he would attend, declaring that there was no room for division in
honouring South Africa’s fallen, although he could hardly be called an appeaser
to Empire sentiment.
The outbreak
of the Second World War saw Smuts as Prime Minister for the second time due to
divisions in the government about being involved in another global conflict. Smuts
was eventually defeated, again, in 1948.
As in the
Great War there had been an element of Afrikanerdom that was strongly
pro-German and Nasson notes, following
the return of the National Party, (and the start of a rule that would last
until 1994), Delville Wood ‘swiftly became converted to serve other visions of
a national past.’
Linkage was
made with the Voortrekkers of the 1830s and battles that established Christian civilization
in the hinterland. Thus,the first post war PM, Daniel Malan, stopped at
Delville Wood in the early in the 1950s to pay tribute to the future of
democracy. Three decades earlier, as minor Interior Ministry official, he had
been reprimanded for spurning a request for assistance from the Delville Wood
Memorial Committee.
In moving
from a tribute to Empire loyalists, (the Anglo-Afrikaners), the Nationalist
attempt to incorporate the monument into a larger stage ran into problems
caused by apartheid policies at home.
State
president PW Botha paid a low-key visit to Delville Wood, in November 1986, as
South Africa, became increasingly denigrated and isolated by a West that was no
longer interested in honouring any contribution made by South Africa.
However, under
the National Party’s long tenure in office, South Africans had seen action in
Korea and later the Border War in Angola, the latter preventing 55,000 Cubans
from marching to Windhoek SWA (now Namibia). But it was never enough for some.
As Bill Nasson wrote, ‘Instead of acknowledging the loyalty of a nation which
identified fully with the West and had sacrificed in wars for its causes, in
pushing South Africa out in the cold, Western conduct had become shameful and
dishonourable.’
Western
liberals increasingly and unfairly saw everything through the prism of their
own anti-apartheid cause célèbre.
On July 12
this year, the current RSA President, Jacob Zuma, visited Delville Wood to
honour, in particular, the 260 fallen of the non-combatant SA Native Labour
Corps.
Some 25,000
black South Africans served in that role and they are now fully honoured at the
Delville Wood museum with no division between them and their white countrymen.
That, at
least, was an irony of Delville Wood that attracted no criticism.
