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.