by Adam Cruise
Published by Zebra Press
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Reg. No. 1966/003153/07
The Estuaries No. 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
www.zebrapress.co.za
First published 2015
Publication © Zebra Press 2015
Text © Adam Cruise 2015
Cover photograph: Museum Africa
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer
MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer
EDITOR: Bronwen Leak
PROOFREADER: Jacinta Nunes
COVER DESIGNER: Michiel Botha
TEXT DESIGNER: Jacques Kaiser
TYPESETTER: Monique van den Berg
MAPS: Ryan Africa
INDEXER: Sanet le Roux
ISBN 978 1 77022 752 1 (print)
ISBN 978 1 77022 753 8 (ePub)
ISBN 978 1 77022 754 5 (PDF)
For Amanda
Contents
Foreword
Preface
1.The Empire writes back
2.Groundwork
3.The Sandfontein reversal
4.Insurrection
5.Interlude
6.Central Force
7.Eastern Force and McKenzie’s pursuit
8.Northern Force
9.The hippodrome
10.Counterattack
11.Closing in
12.In for the kill
13.Kilo 500
14.Reverberations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
A VISITOR TO modern South Africa could be forgiven for knowing nothing about Louis Botha. Prominent statues of him may still stand in front of the Union Buildings up on the Highveld in Pretoria and the National Assembly at the other end of the country in Cape Town, but today they are mostly ignored. They have about them more than a whiff of ‘Ozymandias’, Shelley’s lament to the passing power of a leader who once styled himself King of Kings and yet whose broken stone likeness lies askew in the desert, the forlorn, double-edged invocation still legible on the pedestal: ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
And what works did Botha achieve? The turbulent history of South Africa’s fight against racial inequality can rightly make uncomfortable the lauding of senior white figures from the ancien regime, but in Botha perhaps an exception can be made.
From humble, rural Afrikaner beginnings that seeded in him a connection with the land of South Africa as pure as any, he rose to prominence fighting the British during the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Famous for out-thinking their better supplied, funded and equipped enemy, it was guerrilla commanders such as Botha who helped establish the myth of the resourceful, dogged – indeed, noble – Afrikaner commando outwitting the flat-footed British soldiers on the remote South African platteland.
Then, in an act of remarkable statesmanlike transformation, just twelve years later he raised an army to fight alongside the British when the First World War broke out in 1914. He would die a committed Anglophile.
It was an evolution that would win him huge respect in Europe, where he was invited to take part in the Paris peace negotiations following the Armistice, and the eternal respect and friendship of Britain’s great wartime leader, Winston Churchill. Yet it was an act that would tarnish him forever with the traitor’s mark of Cain in the eyes of many anti-British Afrikaners back home in South Africa, the so-called ‘bitter-enders’ unwilling to come to terms with Britain’s eventual victory in the Boer War.
It is this ‘betrayal’ that has led in part to his story being largely forgotten today. The narrative of the struggle against apartheid tends to put all whites in the same single, homogenous, racist block, yet the reality of history is that single blocks rarely exist. There are fault lines, margins, places were subtlety and nuance agglomerate, and this is perhaps why a richly complex South African figure like Botha is passed over today.
Adam Cruise goes a long way to putting that right with his excellent new book, Louis Botha’s War. It is in part a work of military history, an account of the 1914/15 campaign by South African forces led by Botha that dislodged German troops from the arid, thirsty wastes of what was known in the colonial era as German South-West Africa, but is today called Namibia. But it also gives new life to our understanding of a key and complex international figure from the start of the twentieth century.
That some of Botha’s views can today be regarded as reactionary, even racist, should not be forgotten. It was under his premiership that the Natives Land Act of 1913 was passed, a law that stopped black South Africans from owning land in all but very limited areas. It was a keystone to ensuring white minority rule in the country long before apartheid was legally codified in the 1950s and 1960s.
But to pillory one man for an attitude that seeped through entire social cohorts would be wrong. It is much more important to understand what a difference he made in the context of the time in which he lived, and this is where Cruise’s book really comes alive.
South Africa as a united nation was just four years old when Botha, now serving as prime minister, took the momentous decision to invade South-West Africa on behalf of Britain. Many outsiders doubted whether such a new entity could even field an effective army. Many of the soldiers were Afrikaners who had fought against Britain in the Boer War and who did not possess quite the same magnanimous mindset of forgiveness as Botha. Cruise relates how the invasion brought anti-British republicanism to the fore, leading to a rebellion at home that had to be put down by Botha’s loyalists before the war could be successfully prosecuted against Germany across the border.
This led to the first – and last – time South Africa was invaded by a foreign power, when a German detachment managed to cross the frontier, egged on by a minority of Afrikaners with such strong hatred of Britain they would later embrace Nazism. But, as Cruise argues convincingly, this was more a case of an incursion in search of water and supplies, rather than a serious attempt to seize territory.
Botha was not the sort of prime minister to run a war from his office, forward deploying into German-held territory to such an extent that his bodyguards gave up trying to rein him in. At one point, he came within a whisker of being captured, insisting on taking operational command to an extent that would be inconceivable in our modern age of pampered world leaders.
Through careful culling of all the best sources on the campaign, Cruise tells of the many ‘firsts’ associated with the 1914/15 South-West Africa campaign: the first time South Africa deployed armoured cars, the first time aeroplanes were used to bomb enemy positions, the first time motorbike outriders replaced horsemen, the first German target to be successfully taken by the Allies in the Great War (a consular building on the Caprivi Strip).
This is a story of derring-do, of troops trekking for days on a diet of biltong and biscuit, of Botha’s indomitable wife rushing north to nurse her husband back to strength during the campaign, of forces who dared to traverse the Kalahari desert in full battle order.
But mostly, this is the story of a man who, rather like Nelson Mandela later in the century, was willing to adapt, compromise and change, all in the name of peoples putting their differences behind them. Botha’s name may no longer be revered around the globe, but after reading this book with its account of his tactical brilliance and political courage in the deserts of Namibia, one could be inspired to think how lucky South Africa has been to sir
e the greatest of leaders.
TIM BUTCHER
AUGUST 2014
Preface
AS A SOUTH AFRICAN I learnt about Louis Botha at school, but only in passing reference to other, ‘more important’ issues. We were taught that he was a successful young general in the Anglo-Boer War, where, together with his close friend Jan Smuts (always in association with Smuts), he persuaded recalcitrant Boer generals like Christiaan de Wet and Koos de la Rey to accept the terms of defeat offered by Britain. Sometime later, Botha became the first prime minister of South Africa. We learnt about his controversial Natives Land Act of 1913, his split with J.B.M. Hertzog and, almost as an afterthought, his campaign in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) at the beginning of the First World War.
I unearthed my old high-school textbook to double-check. There was, in a wordy 700-page treatise on South African history, nothing more than a passing reference to the campaign; a single sentence stating it was brought to a successful conclusion by July 1915. That was the last we scholars heard about Prime Minister Louis Botha. We were not taught anything else about him, or his war. Our school history curriculum had more important things to negotiate, leapfrogging to Smuts and Hertzog’s protracted rivalry between the wars, which would result in apartheid, an ideology history texts in those days went to great pains to justify.
Botha, it seemed, was at best unimportant in the larger scheme of South African history; at worst, a traitor to Afrikanerdom for his repudiation of republican sentiment. He was, and still is, practically ignored by the official compilers of South African history, even though his statues take pride of place outside both Parliament in Cape Town and the Union Buildings in Pretoria, where successive governments have resided in the very rooms in which he, as the first prime minister, took office. And let us not forget Durban, where he stands side by side with his old Zulu friend, King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo.
There is simply not a lot of information available on Botha and his invasion of South-West Africa in 1914/15. While a few international historians, most notably Hew Strachan, have written extensively about the campaigns in Africa during the First World War, most of their attention goes to the East African Campaign, in which Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, the indomitable German imperial commander of a largely African force of askaris, led the Allies on a protracted goose chase across the vast savannahs and forests of East Africa. Admittedly, Strachan deals with the other campaign, in the German South West, with a fair amount of diligence, but while the information is useful, it is not detailed. His account covers how the campaign affected the broader war, rather than the finer details, and it certainly does not explore the long-term consequences other than mentioning that the South Africans, despite Botha’s claim to Winston Churchill that he would throw them out for good, did not deport the resident German population, a group that is still evident in Namibia today.
I find it puzzling that Botha’s war has been swept under the carpet, because, as insignificant as official history has deemed it, this was the first war that South Africa fought as a united country. It was also the first campaign to be brought to a conclusion in the Great War. Contrast that with the East African theatre of war, which was the last campaign to be brought to an end, and only because there was no longer a kaiser for von Lettow-Vorbeck to fight for.
It has always seemed clear to me that Botha’s decision to accept Britain’s request to invade South-West Africa had tremendous consequences on the direction and course of both South Africa and the former German colony’s history, and that both countries today, a century on, are still struggling to shake off the colossal repercussions generated by this ‘sideshow’ of the Great War.
Only recently, after trawling the internet, did I discover more about Botha, the personality, and his war. I managed to purchase an old, dog-eared copy of Johannes Meintjes’ long out-of-print General Louis Botha: A Biography. The only published account of Botha’s life, it is a fascinating read, especially as it sheds light on the character of the larger-than-life man. But still, there is not quite enough about the war.
Meintjes’ references, however, led me to other, even older texts, such as Deneys Reitz’s Commando and Trekking On, books still popular with modern readers. Reitz, now a part of South African folklore, is an intriguing character, a true adventurer. He fought in the Boer War as a teenager and took part in the great battles under generals Botha, De la Rey, C.F. Beyers and Jan Kemp. He was also one of the last Boer fighters in the field, having followed Smuts into the northern Cape to carry out a protracted campaign of guerrilla warfare against the British garrisons there. After the war, Reitz exiled himself in Madagascar, but returned just before Botha became prime minister of the Union of South Africa. As Botha’s staunch ally, Reitz volunteered for the 1914 campaign and his personal account of German South-West Africa, as well as of the preceding rebellion, was invaluable to my quest.
Then I found something even better, and lesser known: Brigadier General J.J. Collyer’s The Campaign in German South West Africa, 1914–1915, published in 1937. This was and remains the official military account of the campaign. As Botha’s chief of general staff at the time, Collyer was as well placed as anyone to produce an accurate write-up of the operations and South Africa’s involvement.
I also managed to source the unabridged diary of Eric Moore-Ritchie, a policeman from Pretoria who volunteered to become a member of Botha’s mounted bodyguard, a small force of highly skilled soldiers that was formed at the outset of the war after rumours surfaced of a plot to assassinate the prime minister. The bodyguard shadowed Botha’s every move throughout the campaign and Moore-Ritchie’s account provided me with a window onto events as they unfolded 100 years ago.
To supplement my reading, I found titbits here and there on the internet. The online portal of the South African Military History Society has unique first-hand accounts of various aspects of the campaign, including the German use of airpower, which was hitherto a novelty in war. Other valuable websites include one maintained by the Imperial Research Circle and which has a blow-by-blow account of the opening battle of the campaign at Sandfontein by a certain J.E.M. Atwell, who took part in it. Then there is ‘The Soldier’s Burden’, an excellent online resource for first-hand accounts of relatively unknown events. It contains the kind of history I am interested in: texts written during or shortly after the war by the men who saw and experienced it.
Other information came from unexpected sources, such as The Anglo-African Who’s Who and Biographical Sketchbook of 1907 and a recent academic paper by Dr Anne Samson titled ‘South African mining magnates and World War One’. I even managed to find a website dedicated to German colonial uniforms. The site, www.germancolonialuniforms.co.uk, was useful in that it also gave accurate information on German and South African ordinances used throughout the campaign.
Perhaps the greatest contribution to my understanding of the subject, however, came from my own travels to Namibia to unearth the faint tracks left by the campaign. Although I had been to Namibia many times before, this time I had to step off the well-worn tourist paths, and even those of the locals, to discover the scenes of battles. As with the literature, there is not a lot of evidence of the war on the ground. Unlike in Europe, the only physical memorials are a few graves, small headstones lost in the bush announcing the date when hostilities ended, and discreet museums of the era’s artillery in Tsumeb and Windhoek.
I did, however, discover plenty of circumstantial and incidental evidence, like bits of rusty ammunition cartridges along the bed of the Swakop River, and the crude stone breastworks and redoubts or schanzes of defenders on the battlefields. Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of the war is the indelible mark left by the South Africans on the Namibian social and cultural psyche. The Namibia of today is similar to South Africa; save for border control, one would be forgiven for thinking it is the same country. For seventy-five years it was treated as a fifth province of its southern neighbour. Many South Africans settled here, their languages, a
ccents, cultures and racial policies infusing into Namibian society, culminating in a national makeup that originated with Botha’s decision to invade.
My own personal exploration, as well as the texts I managed to uncover, ultimately helped shed considerable light on what has essentially become a forgotten war.
I would like to thank Amanda, my wife and fellow travelling companion in our month-long exploration of Namibia’s backwaters while I was doing research on the ground. Not only did she give me the initial prod to write this book for the centenary of the First World War, but she provided the necessary goading to follow my instincts when eventually I did commit to it.
In Namibia, the congenial owner-managers of Sandfontein Lodge, Rodica and Willie Agenbach, allowed me free reign to ferret about their backyard looking for clues of one of the more significant battles of the campaign.
At Zebra Press, managing editor Robert Plummer played an unflappable role in getting this book ready for print. Special mention also to his editorial team, who had to meticulously cross-check the historical references as well as pore over the endless stylistic quirks of the antiquated texts I cited, and particularly to Bronwen Leak, who suggested some important additions and even did a bit of valuable research of her own.
I would like to show my deepest appreciation to Tim Butcher for his epigrammatic foreword. Tim is a friend and an author I greatly admire, who himself has just written a penetrating work on the Great War.
At the time of the war, South-West Africa was commonly spelt with a hyphen, and this is the style I have used when referring to that period. South West Africa is spelt without a hyphen when referring to later periods.
ADAM CRUISE
NOVEMBER 2014
1
The Empire writes back
SOMETIME DURING THE last week of July 1914, two men had a brief exchange in the courtyard of the House of Commons shortly after question time.
‘What’s going to happen?’ one asked anxiously. On receiving the answer he left looking grave. That evening he cabled Pretoria with the following message: ‘Tell Botha, Churchill thinks it’s war and Britain is involved.’