The Union of South Africa in the First World War

The Union of South Africa, a British dominion formed in 1910 from former British colonies and the defeated Boer republics, entered the war together with the whole Empire on 4 August 1914. Its government was led by two former Boer generals, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, who after the Boer War had chosen reconciliation with London. The Union’s forces conquered German South West Africa, waged a campaign in East Africa and fought in France. The war, however, laid bare the country’s deep divisions: some of the Boers rebelled against the government, and black South Africans could serve only as unarmed labourers.

War and rebellion (1914)

The Union had no foreign policy of its own, so the British declaration of war on Germany covered it automatically. Botha at once agreed that the British garrison should sail for Europe and that the Union’s forces should take over the defence of the country. On 7 August London asked Pretoria to put out of action the wireless stations in neighbouring German South West Africa. Some ministers feared that a war against Germany, which had sympathised with the Boers during the Boer War, would reopen old wounds. Botha won them over by arguing that if the Union refused, Australians or Indians would do the job. After news that a German detachment had crossed the border near Nakob, parliament approved the expedition on 8 and 9 September, and the Senate ratified it on 14 September.

Many Afrikaners thought otherwise. On 15 September the commander of the Union’s forces, Christiaan Beyers, resigned, and General Koos de la Rey, who was travelling with him, was killed by a policeman’s bullet. In October Lieutenant-Colonel Manie Maritz went over to the Germans with his unit and the rebellion broke out, joined by Beyers, Jan Kemp and Christiaan de Wet. According to the historian Rodney Warwick, 11,372 men rebelled, mostly impoverished farmers from the Orange Free State. Botha refused the help of imperial troops and led some 30,000 soldiers against the rebels, two-thirds of them Afrikaners. De Wet was captured, Beyers drowned in the Vaal River, and the last rebels laid down their arms in February 1915, after the failed attack on Upington. In the fighting 132 government soldiers and 190 rebels were killed.

The conquest of South West Africa (1915)

The war against the Germans began badly. In September 1914 the Union’s forces landed at Lüderitzbucht, but on 26 September the Germans routed one of their detachments at Sandfontein. The rebellion halted the invasion for several months. In February 1915 Botha took command in person and led the forces in from several directions, while from April Smuts commanded in the south of the colony. Botha’s Northern Force pushed across the Namib Desert and on 12 May entered Windhoek. On 9 July 1915 at Khorab Governor Theodor Seitz signed the surrender.

The Union put more than 70,000 men into this campaign, including 45,000 white soldiers and 33,000 black, Coloured and Indian men employed as labourers, drivers and railway workers. In the fighting 113 men were killed, and 153 died of disease and in accidents. For the rest of the war the colony was administered by the government in Pretoria, which began building roads and railways there compatible with the Union’s network.

East Africa and the Middle East

The Defence Act forbade sending the Union’s forces outside South Africa, so in July 1915 a separate overseas force of volunteers was formed, which formally counted as imperial troops under British command. Most of the volunteers went to East Africa. In February 1916 Smuts took over the supreme command there; in the Kilimanjaro offensive and the march south he occupied most of the colony but could not destroy the forces of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Malaria and dysentery wore down the white regiments, so at the end of 1916 Smuts sent thousands of sick men home. From May 1917 another South African, Jacob van Deventer, was in command there, and Lettow-Vorbeck laid down his arms only on 25 November 1918.

At the beginning of 1916 the 1st South African Infantry Brigade fought the Senussi brotherhood in Egypt, among other places at Agagia. From August 1917 the South African field artillery and the Cape Corps, units made up of Coloured men, fought in Palestine, through to the Battle of Megiddo. More than 3,000 South Africans served in the Royal Flying Corps.

On the Western Front

In April 1916 General Henry Lukin’s brigade landed in France and joined the 9th (Scottish) Division. On 15 July, during the Battle of the Somme, it was ordered to take and hold at all costs Delville Wood near Longueval. For six days and five nights it beat off counter-attacks under relentless shelling. Before the battle the brigade numbered 121 officers and 3,032 men; when it was relieved on 20 July, about 750 men assembled.

The rebuilt brigade fought at Arras and Ypres in 1917. In March 1918 it was shattered again on the Somme; in April, made up with recruits, it counter-attacked at Messines; and before the end of the war it fought at Kemmel and Cambrai as well.

Behind the front, black South Africans laboured. In 1916 the government formed the South African Native Labour Contingent, which recruited 25,000 men, of whom 21,000 were sent to France to work in ports, on railways and in depots. They were not given weapons, because the authorities feared that armed black men would demand equal rights after the war. On 21 February 1917, in thick fog off the Isle of Wight, the steamer Darro rammed the troopship Mendi, which was carrying them. The ship sank in about twenty minutes, and 616 South Africans died, including 607 black soldiers of the contingent. According to tradition, the Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, the contingent’s interpreter, called on the drowning men to meet death with courage and dignity, as brothers.

The home front

The war deepened the rift among the whites. English-speaking South Africans volunteered in large numbers, while Afrikaner nationalists saw it as someone else’s war. In August 1915, 7,000 Afrikaner women marched in Pretoria demanding an amnesty for the rebels. In the October election General Barry Hertzog’s National Party won 27 seats, while Botha’s South African Party won only 54 and lost its majority. Until the end of the war the government relied on the pro-imperial Unionists, and conscription was out of the question.

Black and Coloured South Africans hoped that their loyalty would be rewarded. The South African Native National Congress, the forerunner of the African National Congress, suspended its protests against the Natives Land Act in August 1914 and backed the war, and in Cape Town crowds of Coloured men came forward for the Cape Corps in October 1915. After the war nothing changed for them. Economically the Union mattered to the Empire: it supplied two-thirds of its gold output, and the ports of Cape Town, Durban and Simon’s Town guarded the route round the Cape of Good Hope.

The end of the war and its cost

The war in Europe ended for the Union with the Armistice of Compiègne on 11 November 1918, although in East Africa the shooting went on for another two weeks. From 1917 Smuts sat in London in the Imperial War Cabinet, and then in David Lloyd George’s British War Cabinet, where he drew up the report from which the Royal Air Force grew.

On 28 June 1919 Botha and Smuts signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of the Union, and the former German colony passed under Pretoria’s rule as a mandate of the League of Nations. In Paris Botha also chaired the commission which in the spring of 1919 tried to bring about an armistice between the Poles and the Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia.

According to the figures most often given, more than 146,000 whites, 83,000 black Africans and 2,500 Coloureds and Asians served in 1914–1918, and more than 7,000 were killed. Thousands more enlisted directly in the British Army, and eight South Africans received the Victoria Cross.

The memory of the war long remained as divided as the country itself. Whites revered Delville Wood as their army’s finest hour, while from 1920 black South Africans commemorated the sinking of the Mendi every year on 21 February. Only after the fall of apartheid did the state begin to commemorate both sacrifices together.