While Libya has dominated media reports over the past months, the remaining handful of an almost extinct generation of South African old soldiers might still reflect back to the end of 1941 seventy years ago, to the Battle of Sidi Rezegh and the hundreds of South African prisoners of war who after the battle were to suffer the deprivations of the "thirst march" to the enemy prison cages. But that it a story for another time; what happened at Sidi Rezegh is an event worth relating to generations of contemporary South Africans of all languages and cultural groupings, ignorant of the sacrifices made by their grandparents and great-grand parents in the global struggle all those years ago against Nazism and fascism. For South Africans Sidi Rezegh was a bloody clash between Union Defence Force (UDF) troops and the German Afrika Korps in North Africa.
For South Africans Sidi Rezegh was a bloody clash between Union Defence Force (UDF) troops and the German Afrika Korps in North Africa. Take yourself to Sidi Rezeg via Google Earth; the general area is located about thirty kilometres south-east of Tobruk and labelled with a few war-related place marks. From afar technology depicts the area as featureless and remote as it would have appeared for the 5th SA Brigade seven decades ago. Except that those 5 700 South Africans, all men but with our familiar cultural diversity: white English and Afrikaans, coloured and black, were not entirely alone; they constituted one component of the Commonwealth forces attempting to relieve their besieged garrison at Tobruk.
The bigger ambition of the Commonwealth 8th Army was to use numerical armour, aircraft and men power strength to overwhelm German General Rommel's crack African expeditionary force. 8th Army plans went awry early after a series of inconclusive clashes between Allied and Afrika Korps led to the near annihilation of the British 7th Armoured Division. Rommel's tank commanders made skilled use of their technically superior vehicles employing effective tactics of operating in large formations.
Manoeuvring his massed armour into a counter-attack, Rommel's path was blocked by the static 5th SA Brigade. The South Africans were only partly dug in on rocky ground where sparks flew off picks and spades during digging. They waited in a defensive box approximately five by two and a half kilometres, while from the south west a German mass charge was launched consisting of nearly one hundred tanks with mechanised infantry behind in support.
While their nineteen artillery guns fired solid armour piecing shells the infantry fought back from slit trenches with rifles and light machine guns. Within three hours the battle was over. At least seventy knocked out German tanks littered the desert; but after the artillery had run out of ammunition, infantry small arms were little use against tanks.
But Rommel's armour had been severely hammered - a critical outcome for it temporarily precluded the Afrika Korps from further haranguing the 8th Army. Though the South African cost was high: 224 men killed and nearly 3000 taken prisoner. The trauma and desolation of the Sidi Rezeg aftermath is poignantly captured in writer Uys Krige's short story Death of a Zulu - an account of a battlefield mercy-killing recorded by the author who was amongst those captured.
In recent years school history textbooks have been preoccupied with one detail of South Africa's participation in World War Two: That the Union government declined for black and coloured troops to bear arms. While officially correct this has obscured the battlefield reality that these troops not only faced the same dangers as white troops, but that then contemporary South African racial culture and policy aside, black and particularly coloured troops were at times armed and fought alongside their white comrades, earning the same service medals while some were decorated for bravery.
Sidi Rezeg was the first major engagement South Africans were to fight in North Africa. For the two under strength divisions of volunteers committed by Prime Minister Jan Smuts there would be many more battles, casualties and prisoners.
Across schools, universities, churches, cenotaphs and other public places, plaques and memorial commemorations of South Africa's 11 000 World War Two dead exist from the 334 000 men and women who volunteered. Then as now, racially based population statistics were kept and these broke down roughly into 221 000 whites, 77 000 blacks and 46 000 Coloureds and Indians. Two weeks ago another 11 November pasted by marked traditionally by ceremonies and the handing out of poppies for donations to organisations such as the SA Legion and MOTHS.
The poppy symbol originating from the poem In Flander's Fields and is part of Remembrance Day solemnities in most Commonwealth countries who participated in the World Wars. Where "Armistice Day" as it is also known tends to be remembered in this country, it is usually in terms of this First World War imagery and if one single place name marking South African involvement in war resonates it is Delville Wood from 1916. In contrast to military heritage endeavors in Britain, Australia, the United States and elsewhere, Second World War significance for South Africans has virtually faded away over the decades.
Despite these annual Remembrance Day obsequies and the significant South African involvement, our World War Two contribution has battled to penetrate even the educated South African collective consciousness.
Where did this dearth of popular historical knowledge of our World War Two involvement originate? The white South African political conflicts of the twentieth century's second half provides part of an explanation. Afrikaner nationalist politicians called for South African neutrality in 1939 and the National Party (NP) maintained this stance throughout the war.
More sinisterly, while our troops were fighting for their lives at Sidi Rezeg and elsewhere, the neo-Nazi Ossewabrandwag (OB) claimed hundreds of thousands of members. They were well represented in the South African Police. a potentially highly dangerous fifth column considering thousands of loyal policemen were serving as a brigade of infantry in the far off North African desert.
The OB's armed wing of stormjaers committed numerous acts of treason through sabotage while regular members occasionally attacked off-duty soldiers in city streets. The War Veterans Torch Commando organization shook the NP government during the early 1950s with impressive torchlight city demonstrations, before tailing off in the wake the United Party's comprehensive 1953 election defeat.
Other non-politically driven veterans' organizations like the MOTHS were filled with World War Two ex-servicemen during 1945 to the 1990s - but these have shrunk dramatically since. The MOTHS remain visible but today are just partly replenished by Border War veterans. Their ‘shellhole' locations often abound with memorabilia, but much of the World War memory rekindled thorough bar room discussion has passed away with the old veterans.
From 1948 the new NP government cautiously distanced itself from the disintegrating OB but still gave South Africa's war exploits the minimum attention or exposure. Only one NP MP had served in the military and he was used by notorious Defence Minister Frans Erasmus as a parliamentary sniper to denigrate the supposedly Anglo-dominated UDF. The government-sponsored Union War Histories project, originally commissioned by Smuts was wound up by 1961 due to official lack of funding, interest and obstructive red tape.
Of the three meticulously researched volumes that appeared in the late 1950s, including one entitled The Sidi Rezeg Battles, none were translated into Afrikaans despite at least half of the white volunteers being Afrikaners. In state school syllabi the government education departments made scant place for World War Two in history teaching. If it had been a war the National Party had not supported, it was not worth recording, teaching or recalling. The pattern has been perpetuated post-1994; for example, when the SA Navy received its four "Valour-Class" frigates, three were named after battles from nineteenth century South African history. Not even Delville Wood got a mention.
South African politics in the twenty-first century is unrecognizable from the white political conflicts of the 1940s and 1950s. The now-dominant black politics is embroiled in competing factions with a militant African nationalism versus socialism versus a newly advantaged black business class fronting through the African National Congress government, buoyed in turn by the black poor, many recipients of social welfare.
Alternate political parties exist, notably the DA espousing a non-racialism and democratic liberalism, a very distant heir to the most far-seeing of political leaders seventy years ago who rejected narrow, intolerant and vindictive Afrikaner nationalism. Hopefully there is no prospect of a future global conflict that as an aside might bind some of these groupings towards common nationhood.
But if we pause to re-investigate South Africa's history in World War Two and start to disseminate it more widely, there are aspects which demonstrate non-racial service and sacrifice under daunting odds. It is an historical resource still to be fully exploited - the events at Sidi Rezeg seventy years ago yesterday reminds us of such.
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