by Hew Strachan
Moreover, the dualities of the Defence act carried a further threat. The act embodied both voluntarism and conscription. The intention to rely on the former could not be effected without providing expectations as to the latter. Botha declared in 1912 that he wanted ‘a real Army, not only capable of coping with a little Kaffir war, but also able to defend South Africa against any odds, wherever they came from’.117 His readiness in 1914 to dispense with the imperial troops stationed in South Africa displayed his resolve—an ambition which suggested that Smuts’s four volunteer regiments would not be enough.
The ambiguity in Smuts’s actions may have been the product of genuine confusion. The South African forces had no central staff and no command organization; Smuts and the civilian officials in the ministry of defence did everything. The minister’s own command experience in the Boer War, although distinguished, was restricted: he had handled only small bodies of troops, with limited logistical needs. Furthermore, the outbreak of war found him without contingency plans, either for the defence of the Union or for the seizure of German territory.
On 14 August Smuts held a meeting of senior officers to make good some of these deficiencies. He endeavoured not to reveal the objective of the proposed arrangements, a manoeuvre that displayed his naivety about military planning as much as his sensitivity as to what he intended. However, C.F. Beyers, the commandant-general of the defence forces, having elicited that an invasion of South-West Africa was proposed, expressed his opposition. Beyers was not alone; many of the commandants had been appointed on his recommendation, not Smuts’s, and two in particular, J.C.G. Kemp (the district staff officer of Western Transvaal) and S.G. Maritz (the district staff officer of the northern Cape, adjacent to the German frontier) made no secret of their sympathy for Beyers. Nobody resigned; nobody was dismissed. Smuts reasoned that to have such men in the service, and under oath, was better than to have them out.
Without an effective planning organization, and with what there was split as to what to do, the weakness of Pretoria’s initial proposals for offensive action is unsurprising. But the major cause of confusion in fact arose from the difficulties of co-ordination with the Royal Navy.
The spine of German South-West Africa, running through the relatively fertile tableland in the north and centre of the colony, was the main railway. Beginning in the north, with spurs from Tsumeb and Grootfontein, it ran south-west to Karibib, and then south to the capital and main wireless station at Windhoek. From Windhoek it progressed through Keetmanshoop as far as Kalkfontein, about 95 kilometres short of the Orange river. Two lines ran to the coast, one in the north from Karibib to Swakopmund, and the other in the south from Keetmanshoop to Lüderitz. These two breaches apart, the perimeter of the colony was well-endowed with natural defensive barriers. The Atlantic coastline was bordered by a waterless strip, between 65 and 95 kilometres wide. The eastern frontier was bounded by the Kalahari desert. The obvious landward route for invasion, therefore, lay to the south, from the Cape across the Orange river. But the supply problems presented by this approach were considerable. The South African railhead at Prieska was about 225 kilometres from Upington, the base for offensive operations across the frontier. The territory north of the Orange river was arid. Furthermore, any advance from this direction would simply push the Germans back up their railway line, onto their own resources and lines of communication. It would not strike directly at the maritime objectives so important to the CID subcommittee.
By contrast, control of Swakopmund promised to bring decisive results in short order. Britain owned a small slab of territory alongside it, at Walvis Bay. It gave onto the most direct route to Windhoek, and seizure of these points would cut off any German troops facing south. Swakopmund was therefore Smuts’s initial preference for a landing. But it was abandoned for lack of sufficient shipping to transport and escort expeditionary forces to both Swakopmund and Lüderitz. The fact that, given the choice, Lüderitz was selected over Swakopmund reveals how muddled the thinking had become. An offensive from Lüderitz carried many of the disadvantages present in the advance across the Cape frontier. The idea that it could be co-ordinated with the latter was far-fetched: the forces so deployed would describe an arc of up to 950 kilometres, without lateral communications, and would be attacking an enemy that would enjoy the advantage of the central position and the use of the railways in order to effect local concentrations.118
This, nonetheless, was the scheme adopted by Smuts on 21 August. Naval bombardment was to account for the wireless station and jetty at Swakopmund. The land forces were divided into three groups: Force A at Port Nolloth, on the Atlantic coast south of the Orange river; Force B at Upington; and Force C at Lüderitz. The total strength of all three groups was 5,000 rifles and fourteen guns, and in isolation each was insufficiently strong for offensive operations.
MAP 20. SOUTH–WEST AFRICA
On 19 September Force C landed at Lüderitz. With three aircraft to their opponents’ none, the Germans were able to track the movements of the South Africans. They decided not to defend the harbour, concluding that the guns of the Royal Navy would give the British artillery superiority. Instead, they concentrated their defensive efforts on the Orange. The river, although ford-able in a number of places, was a sufficient obstacle to provide good opportunities for local counter-attacks before the South Africans could establish bridgeheads. Force A pushed north-eastwards from Port Nolloth, reaching Raman’s Drift on the Orange by 14 September. On 24 September Pretoria knew that the Germans were moving south to Kalkfontein, not west to Lüderitz, but they relayed this information to Force A by post, with the result that it did not reach the force commander, Henry Lukin, till 7 October. Lukin’s problems at Raman’s Drift were considerable. The strength of his column was 1,800 rifles; he reckoned he had sufficient transport for 800. He pushed an advance guard of about 300 men and two guns forward of the Orange, but unsupported and without the wagons to carry their reserve ammunition. On 26 September the Germans, with 1,200 men and three batteries, encircled Lukin’s advance guard at Sandfontein and killed or captured the entire command.
Both Lukin and Smuts shared a measure of responsibility for the Sandfontein disaster. Moreover, neither the conduct of the reconnaissance nor the resilience of the fighting (when they surrendered, the South Africans’ ammunition stocks were far from exhausted)119 reflected well on the new Defence Force. But the reputations of both commanders and commanded were saved by the action—or lack of it—on the part of S.G. Maritz, commanding Force B.
Lukin argued that the success of his advance was vitally dependent on the support of Force B progressing from Upington. But Maritz had refused to move, pleading that his forces were insufficiently trained, that some of them were conscripts and therefore could not be obliged to cross the frontier, and that many of his officers would refuse to obey. By failing to act against such dissent earlier, Smuts had now left it too late to act at all. If Maritz resigned or was dismissed, Lukin’s column would be even more exposed. Smuts asked Maritz to come to Pretoria. He refused, and on 2/3 October instead moved his command out of Upington to Kakamas. Smuts, under pretence of reinforcing Maritz, moved fresh units to Upington on 4 October and gave the overall command to Coen Brits. The latter’s loyalty was unthinking: he was alleged to have told Botha (in Afrikans, for he spoke no English), ‘My men are ready; who[m] do we fight—the English or the Germans?’120 On 7 October Maritz made contact with the Germans along the border, and on the 9th went into open rebellion, promoting himself to general and declaring South Africa’s independence and war on Britain. He threatened to attack Upington unless he could speak to Christiaan De Wet, Beyers, Kemp, and Hertzog.121
Maritz’s summons to the Afrikaner nationalists for support confirm that, from his perspective, the rebellion was a planned coup against Botha’s government and not a spontaneous uprising by diehard Boers still carrying on the war of 1899–1902. After the commandants’ meeting with Smuts on 14 August Maritz had initiated a plot to install
Beyers as president of a provisional government, J.H. De La Rey as commandant-general of the defence force, Christiaan De Wet as head of the Orange Free State, and himself as head of the Cape. The rebellion was timed for 15 September. But in reality the uprising collapsed into a series of ill-co-ordinated movements, with diverse objectives, its execution characterized by compromise and indecisiveness.
Maritz himself was relatively junior, an unpleasant personality, and—in his station at Upington—remote from the centres of power within the Union. Potentially far more influential was De La Rey, a venerable hero of the Boer War and a close friend of both Botha and Smuts. De La Rey, fired by the apocalyptic visions of a crazed seer, was convinced that the return of the republic was imminent and that the outbreak of the war provided the opportunity to act; he also seems to have believed that Botha remained wedded to a declaration of Afrikaner independence if the opportunity arose. At any rate, De La Rey was persuaded by Botha and Smuts not to go into open rebellion on 13 August, and at a meeting on 15 August told his followers to disperse. At the Nationalists’ first congress, held in Pretoria on 26 August, De La Rey’s public position was akin to that of Hertzog: his loyalty was to South Africa, not to Britain or Germany. For Hertzog, neutrality promised success for South Africa whoever won in Europe; commitment to one side could prove fatal if the other proved victorious.
On 15 September, the day appointed for the rebellion and the day after parliament had been prorogued, Beyers, Kemp, and others resigned their commissions, protesting their opposition to the proposed invasion of South-West Africa. But Maritz was not ready. Moreover, that same afternoon Beyers and De La Rey failed to stop at a police roadblock, and the latter, mistaken for a member of a murderous gang, was shot dead. Beyers and Kemp felt that the opportunity to rebel had passed. At a meeting following De La Rey’s funeral they confined themselves to protests against the invasion of South-West Africa, and to the organization of further meetings. When Botha, who had replaced Beyers as commandant-general, asked the commandants to volunteer for service in South-West Africa they did so without exception.122
But for Maritz’s move to open defiance, therefore, Boer discontent might have fizzled and crackled without explosion. Maritz’s declaration prompted Beyers, De Wet, and Kemp to renew contact with each other on 13 October. Even now they tried to cajole Botha rather than to topple him. Botha refused to listen. Moreover, on 11 October, in response to Maritz’s rebellion, Smuts declared martial law, thus definitively moving from voluntarism to conscription for the recruitment of the defence force and so forcing Boers to decide where they stood. On 22 October the rebel leaders took a rather lukewarm decision to act, leaving the initiative to Beyers in the Transvaal and to De Wet in the Orange Free State. The fact that they did so hardened Maritz’s resolve as he began to consider surrender after suffering defeat at Brits’s hands at Kakamas on 24 October. Thus a series of ill-co-ordinated risings gained an outward appearance of cohesion and conspiracy. Thus too, ‘strong speech and rash action went hand in hand with compromise’.123
Most rebels saw their action in a Boer tradition of ‘armed protest’ against a government policy of which they disapproved. Their motivations embraced opposition to conscription, resistance to the invasion of South-West Africa, and a sense of betrayal by Botha and Smuts. But they tapped into other grievances as well. Their strength was greatest in the regions which drought had ravaged and where indebtedness had increased, and among the landless, ousted by the farmers’ preference for cheaper black labour. Landless Afrikaners were confronted by ‘encroaching urban proletarianization’.124 It was a process which threatened the familial and familiar values engendered by a society of pastoralists; their political values were egalitarian and republican. Into these they injected millenarianism, foretelling not only the end of British rule but also of capitalism. The Dutch Reformed Church, which at the outset supported the war, refused to decide whether the rebellion was treasonable or not. The fact that Hertzog, though appealed to by Maritz, stayed silent through-out—neither condoning nor repudiating the rebellion—increased the ambiguity as to the rebels’ main aims. But it also ensured that, although Hertzog was its major beneficiary, the rebellion never assumed an exclusively national character. Opposition to the British, although present, took second place to the domestic dispute among the Boers.
To avoid Boer killing Boer in South-West Africa, Boer proposed to kill Boer within the Union. For Botha this was a better outcome than for either British or (as was offered by London) Australian troops to suppress the rebellion. By using Afrikaners rather than Englishmen, Botha hoped to preserve his policy of conciliation between the white races. Manoeuvre and negotiation, not battle and bloodletting, were the key features of the conduct of the rebellion on both sides. The total government casualties were 101 killed and wounded for 30,000 engaged. The rebels, whose maximum numbers may have reached 10,000, had 124 killed and 229 wounded.125
De Wet’s personal dominance of the Orange Free State, allied to the central position of the province, gave his rising the greatest significance. Furthermore, his son’s death in action envenomed his motives more than those of the others. With a following of about 5,000 men, he was attacked by Botha in Mushroom Valley, south of Winburg, on 12 November. Botha’s plan miscarried: he hoped to have Lukin’s and Brits’s forces from the west in position to encircle De Wet. Nonetheless, the rebel force was broken and De Wet himself forced to flee into the desert, where he was captured on 2 December.
Botha’s influence in Eastern Transvaal limited the dangers in that quarter. In Western Transvaal Beyers’s efforts to negotiate with the government while still resisting it were an open confession of the weakness of his following and of his own uncertainty as to the correct course of action. Efforts to link with De Wet came to nought after Mushroom Valley, and on 16 November Beyers’s own force was broken in an attack near Bultfontein. Beyers fled, first east, then west, and finally north. On 8 December he was drowned in the Vaal river while trying to escape capture by government forces.
Only Kemp was still in the field, and he—together with 500 men—had been dispatched by Beyers across the Kalahari to link with Maritz. After an epic trek, that defied the elements as well as the government, Kemp entered German territory to effect a junction with Maritz on 2 December. Kemp’s report on the state of the rebellion within the Union was optimistic. But the exhausted condition of his men and horses prevented immediate offensive action. He himself was sick. Maritz did not inspire the confidence of the Germans. Conflicts between Maritz and the commander of the ‘free corps’ formed by the Germans from Boers within South-West Africa deepened the distrust. A thrust across the Orange river on 22 December that achieved both surprise and envelopment failed owing to the problems of Boer command. Kemp refused to subordinate himself to Maritz, and wanted to cut back to the Transvaal. Maritz in his turn felt he could not be seen to attack in direct co-operation with the Germans. When the Boers crossed the frontier once again, on 13 January 1915, with 1,000 men, they were only accompanied by four German guns; the main German thrust was intended to be over a 160 kilometres away to the west, on Steinkopf via Raman’s Drift. Maritz’s attack was directed at Upington but was not delivered until 24 January, and even then scattered its efforts over an 8-kilometre front. Reports of the rebellion’s defeat increased the bickering. In a bid to revive the rebellion, the Germans abandoned their attack on Steinkopf for one closer to Upington, at Kakamas, on 31 January. But the attack miscarried, and they were in any case too late. The Boer rebels, including Kemp, had surrendered on the previous day. Only Maritz, the ‘free corps’, and the artillery which the Germans had allocated to the rebels returned across the frontier.126
Botha’s policy of conciliation, begun during the course of the rebellion with an amnesty, continued after its conclusion with clemency. Only one rebel was executed: an officer who had not taken the precaution of resigning his commission before turning against the government. Of the leaders, 281 were put on trial, but by 24
March 1916 only fifty were still serving sentences and by the end of that year all had been released. Nonetheless, Botha had failed. The split between his South Africa party and Hertzog’s Nationalists, between self-government within the empire and republicanism without, was confirmed. The threat of Boer rebellion persisted throughout the war. In the elections of October 1915 the Nationalists made a net gain of twenty seats, pulling in Afrikaner support from the South Africa party and the Labour party. Botha’s power rested on the votes of English Unionists.
What had not prompted the rebellion was a pre-war German conspiracy to destabilize the British empire. Superficially the connections existed to confirm such a theory. The Kaiser had rattled his sabre in support of the Boers in 1896; Hertzog had been educated in Europe and not in Britain; Beyers had visited Germany just before the outbreak of war; Maritz had served in the campaign against the Hereros and was alleged to have been negotiating with the Germans since 1912. But not until the outbreak of war itself, and Britain’s entry to it, did the Germans see the exploitation of British vulnerabilities at the Cape as an appropriate means of warfare. Furthermore, even then the perspective in Windhoek differed from that in Berlin. On 2 August Moltke included a Boer rebellion in a catalogue of indirect means by which Britain might be distracted from Europe.127 But Dr Theodor Seitz, the governor of South-West Africa, realized that his support for rebellion must be measured and limited if its effects were not to backfire on Germany. Anything that smacked of a German-sponsored invasion of the Union from South-West Africa was in danger of reuniting South Africa’s fractured peoples in a war of national defence. Contacts with the rebels were initiated on 26 August 1914, but because of the practical difficulties of communication could only be sustained with Maritz. On 17 October the Germans were prepared to recognize the formation of an independent South African republic in exchange for Walvis Bay, but left its achievement in the hands of the Boers themselves. Seitz was therefore punctilious in limiting German aid to the Boers to food and equipment. In this he was supported by the commander of the Schütztruppen, von Heydebreck, who shied away from the problems of direct co-operation in the field.128