A lesson from World War 2

Sunday marked the 70^th anniversary of South Africa declaring war on Nazi Germany in 1939.

Few realise now how feeble was SA’s military position when new prime and defence minister Jan Smuts stood up to make the announcement in the National Assembly.

Cost cutting in the face of the Great Depression had emasculated the Union Defence Force (UDF) and although defence minister Oswald Pirow had announced the expansion and rearmament of the military in 1934 the financial means available for this was modest.

As Smuts committed a divided nation to war, his navy had no ships, his air force had a handful of modern aircraft (six Hawker Hurricane Mk1`s, in fact) and his army that mustered just over 3000 Permanent Force regulars were armed with equipment that had been state-of-the-art in 1918, at the end of World War One.

In a Military Academy research paper titled The Union Defence Force between the two World Wars, 1919-1939, Lt Col Ian van der Waag notes that Pirow faced a situation similar to that faced by South Africa today. The public was not keen on defence spending and “in spite of all its potential wealth”, Pirow told Parliament in September 1938, “South Africa has much poverty and there is a definite upper limit to what the country is prepared to spend on defence.”

Pirow also held that it was a “certainty” that SA and its nearest neighbours could never become the main theatre of a major war. “Due to the geographical position, South Africa‘s maximum effort will not have to be made until six months after the outbreak of hostilities. This allowed a period for intensive preparation…”

It turns out Pirow was wrong.

Just one month later – October – the Nazi “pocket battleship” Admiral Graf Spee sank two ships off Angola, then rounded the Cape and sank another off Inhambane before returning to the Atlantic to sink two more off Angola that November.

With its six 11-inch (279mm) guns the Graf Spee could have done considerable damage to any of the Union‘s ports, had its captain, Hans Langsdorff chosen to do so.

He did, in fact, consider a token bombing raid on the Durban oil tank farm, using a ships` plane, but was under strict, perhaps too strict, orders not to endanger his ship, and may have been somewhat deterred by his perceptions of the country`s coastal defences – and the presence, at Simon`s Town of the Country-class 8-inch heavy cruisers HMS Sussex and HMS Shropshire, tasked with hunting him down.

What if he had chosen to close with the coast and shell or bomb a port? What would have been the cost in life and property to South Africans, including those who had placed a limit on how much they were prepared to spend in their own defence?  

The lesson from this to those who want to cut defence budgets is that SA can again be caught with its strategic pants down. What then?

Afterthought: In fact, SA has subsequently been caught out: In 1974 it was taken utterly by surprise when a rightwing military dictatorship in Portugal was overthrown and the leftwing successor government handed Angola and Mozambique their independence. Its leaders were further surprised that the Soviet-leaning MPLA emerged as the dominant party in Angola and again surprised when Cuba sent a substantial expeditionary force with impressive speed to support the MPLA.

The SA Navy at the time was organised as an auxiliary to the Royal Navy (under the Simon`s Town Agreement) and sailed increasingly obsolescent ships. The Air Force was in the throes of re-equipping while the Army had available excellent World War Two vintage equipment.

Further surprises were in store during the subsequent SA intervention there, notably, on the technological front, that the Army`s best long-range gun, the 140mm G2, was outranged by Cuban-manned BM21 rocket artillery.)

The lesson from this to those who want to cut defence budgets is again that SA can again be caught with its strategic pants down. How many times should this happen before we learn that a Rand in time saves nine?