Chris Barron's hatchet job on Magnus Malan (Review July 24) requires a response. I would like to point out only a few of his disingenuous misrepresentations.
Dwight Eisenhower, arguably the most illustrious supreme military commander of the 20th Century, "without ever leading soldiers in combat . . . and never (knowing) what it was like to be under fire", successfully commanded the Free World's assault on the Nazi scourge in Europe, sending his troops, including thousands of 18 and 19 year-olds, into battle on the murderous beaches of Normandy.
Both Malan and Eisenhower reached senior rank during periods when there were no wars to fight and had already risen to high command when those arose. I'm sure both would have excelled at lower levels as well. There is even the parallel between Malan and Eisenhower of both having undergone staff training at the eminent Fort Leavenworth Staff College in Kansas, USA.
Barron eulogises and juxtaposes Gen Constand Viljoen, intellectually superior and wonderful soldier and human being that he is, to Malan, while omitting to mention that Viljoen had for the same reason not "faced fire" before he reached high command level.
His only combat experience was when, already a commanding general in South West Africa, he parachuted with his troops into the Swapo base at Cassinga in Angola in the airborne assault phase of Operation Reindeer in 1978, which spoke eloquently of his bravery, but was otherwise ill-considered and highly imprudent. Barron praises the one general for no other reason than to nail the other.
Barron seems in principle to be a pacifist as far as the war against the communist forces in Angola are concerned, but would he also argue that the armed resistance to Hitler's Nazi forces was wrong? If South Africa hadn't disabused the Soviet Union of their notion that the SADF would be a cheap walk-over for its surrogate Cuban and other forces in Angola, what would have been the end result? If the communist forces had prevailed militarily, why would they have negotiated at all?
Surely not to establish the liberal-democratic constitutions and systems of governance now evident in Namibia and South Africa - with their attendant free-market economies, entrenched private property and all the individual freedoms of Western-style liberalism? Stalinist systems of subjugation of the individual and command economies eventually imploding into oblivion would have been the result.
Under Malan's command the SADF, through the generally effective State Security Management System, and in the face of the infuriating indolence of some civilian state departments represented in the forums of that system, identified real needs and as a start undertook the huge task of upgrading Alexandra township by for instance tarring roads and installing street lighting.
When mobs destroyed what was being achieved there, Barron surely can't be serious in suggesting that the appropriate response would have been to go in with "spades and trowels" when that township "went up in flames?" How naive can one be! Malan was not "supposedly" in favour of a hearts and minds approach; he constantly preached this in and outside of the SADF and did his best to put action to the words. And, incongruously, Barron deplores Malan's use of his "secret funds" (again the innuendo), a facility of the security establishments of every serious country on earth to hide strategic expenditure from enemy eyes, to not only make the SADF self-sufficient but to make Armscor "South Africa's largest exporter of manufactured goods".
And how, pray may I ask, does Barron know to be able to factually report about Malan's state of mind in that "(It is ) known that he regarded the resources of the SADF as his to dispose of as and when he liked"!
The ANC at its Morogoro, Tanzania conference in 1969 declared all-out war with its "strategy and tactics" of the "four pillars of struggle" heralding the "total onslaught" in the defined areas of armed struggle, mass protest action to make the country ungovernable, underground organisation and international isolation of South Africa.
Would the South African government and Malan not have been seriously derelict in their duty if they hadn't devised a sound "total national strategy" to counter this "total onslaught"? Unfortunately, South Africa's, including Malan's, efforts at explaining this to the populace was so woefully inadequate that the impression remains in the minds of many to this day that the "total onslaught" was a figment of Malan's and others' imagination.
Barron decries the pre-emptive raids on terrorist bases in neighbouring countries, but seems to have forgotten the shocking images of people being burned, hacked and stoned to death in townships under the direction and leadership of elements in those neighbouring countries, or the sickening sight of aged black women being force-fed washing powder because they dared to defy violently imposed consumer boycotts, or the shredded civilian bodies strewn across Church Street in Pretoria after a bomb planted by elements infiltrating directly from those neighbouring countries?
International law acknowledges the right of states to pre-emptive strike when facing an imminent armed assault from across its borders, in this case the assault already having commenced and war formally declared by the ANC.
Atrocities that Barron refers to happen on all sides in all wars. The recognition of this fact does not make such actions any less deplorable, but to single out only one side is disingenuous. Even worse, it boils down to the journalistic dissemination of propaganda, surely not the intended purpose of a newspaper such as yours?
Magnus Malan was a highly intelligent, thoughtful, reformist soldier, and a highly effective commander. I did not know him well enough personally to judge whether he was a nice guy or not. What seems clear to me is that his enormous achievements, together with P.W. Botha and Piet Marais of Armscor, over a relatively short span of time in making of the SADF a self-sufficient, balanced and effective fighting force able to operate without any external support, are unlikely to have been the result only of his being a nice guy.
I would never have thought that Chris Barron, whose incisive interviews in your newspaper I try never to miss, would be capable of producing such an ill-considered, dishonest and vindictive article, for whatever reason overflowing with his personal resentment and vitriol, and that in an apparent obituary.
The most unspeakable of Barron's innuendo is to my mind his scandalously gratuitous attempt to associate Malan with the alleged paedophilia of John Wiley and Dave Allen. Is dubious journalistic ethics the sole prerogative of News of the World reporters? I and many other life-long readers of the Sunday Times will find you seriously amiss if you do not publish an apology or preferably a retraction of Barron's truly despicable article.
Maritz Spaarwater, Col (retd) SADF
The Sunday Times first published this piece as a much shortened letter on July 31 2011
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