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The South African Offensive Operations in Southern Abyssinia, 1940–1941

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The South African Offensive Operations in Southern Abyssinia, 1940–1941 international journal of military history and historiography 38 (2018) 34-66 IJMH brill.com/ijmh The South African Offensive Operations in Southern Abyssinia, 1940–1941 Evert Kleynhans Stellenbosch University, South Africa [email protected] Abstract The Italian declaration of war in June 1940 placed the British possessions in East Africa under threat of invasion from the neighbouring Italian colonies. In July 1940, the Ital- ians launched limited offensives towards the frontiers of Kenya and the Sudan, and completely overran British Somaliland by August. By November 1940 the First South African Division (1st sa Div) deployed to the Northern Frontier District (nfd) of Kenya, ready to launch offensive operations into Southern Abyssinia against the Mega-Moyale complex. The South African belief in mobile warfare found expression in the ensu- ing operation, where Maj Gen George E. Brink, the Division’s commander, essentially manoeuvred to fight during the offensive operations. This article critically discusses the objectives allotted to Brink for his offensive operations in Southern Abyssinia. The objectives allocated to the Division are measured against the overall successes of the South African operations in the south of Abyssinia during 1941. Keywords Union Defence Force – East Africa – First South African Division – Maj Gen George Brink – Southern Abyssinia * Evert Kleynhans, MMil (Stell), is a doctoral student in the PhD (Mil) programme, De- partment of Military History, Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University. He has published a number of academic articles on the South African participation in the First and Second World Wars in relevant peer-reviewed journals. He currently resides in Potchefst- room, South Africa. This article is drawn from his MMil dissertation. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/24683302-03801002Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:10:40PM via free access <UN> The South African Offensive Operations in Southern Abyssinia 35 Introduction In a 2012 article David B. Katz argued that the quantity and quality of the military historical works produced on the South African participation in the Second World War drastically lagged behind concurrent international historio- graphical trends. He correctly maintains that the nadir of the writing up of the history of the South African participation in the war was ushered in when the Afrikaner Nationalist Party assumed power in 1948.1 A number of official and semi-official histories on South Africa’s participation in the Second World War did, however, appear. Unfortunately, the Union War Histories Section, tasked with writing the official histories, was closed down permanently in 1961 after the appearance of only three publications.2 These were: Crisis in the Desert (1952),3 The Sidi Rezegh Battles 1941 (1957),4 and War in the Southern Oceans (1961).5 From 1961 the recording of South Africa’s war effort remained rather haphazard, with both the Nationalist Government, as well as citizen force and ex-servicemen’s associations, all at one point or another undertaking projects aimed at resuscitating the memories of South Africa’s participation in the Sec- ond World War. This led to the publication of a number of historiographical works, some of which were of dubious quality and often hagiographic in out- look. There are also only a few revisionary-type scholarly works that have re- examined certain aspects of South Africa’s wartime history, despite the wealth of declassified primary archival documents available to researchers.6 The deployment of the 1st sa Div to East Africa during the Second World War has been the subject of a number of historical works. The first works published on the South African deployment to East Africa was Springbok Victory7 by Carel Birkby and Vanguard of Victory: A Short Review of the South 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 David Katz, “A Case of Arrested Development: The Historiography Relating to South Africa’s Participation in the Second World War”, Scientia Militaria 40 (3) (2012): 282–284. 2 Jeffrey Grey, “‘Standing Humbly in the Ante-Chambers of Clio’: the Rise and Fall of Union War Histories”, Scientia Militaria 30 (2000): 260–264. 3 John Agar-Hamilton and Leonard Turner, Crisis in the Desert, May-June 1942 (Cape Town, 1952). 4 John Agar-Hamilton and Leonard Turner, The Sidi Rezegh Battles, 1941 (Cape Town, 1957). 5 Leonard Turner, H. Gordon-Cumming and J. Betzler, War in the Southern Oceans, 1939–1945 (Cape Town, 1961). 6 Katz, “A Case of Arrested Development”, 284–287. 7 Carel Birkby, Springbok Victory (Johannesburg, 1941). international journal of military history and historiographyDownloaded 38 (2018)from Brill.com09/25/2021 34-66 11:10:40PM via free access <UN> 36 Kleynhans African Victories in East Africa 1940–19418 by Conrad Norton and Uys Krige, both of whom appeared in 1941. All three authors were deployed with the South African Division during the campaign, and their works thus offer a rare, in- depth, narrative on the campaign. The works are, however, propagandistic in nature, and were published to bolster wartime morale. Other wartime pub- lications which suffer from the same pitfalls include Birkby’s It’s a Long Way to Addis,9 John S.M. Simpson’s South Africa Fights10 and Andrew M. Pollock’s Pienaar of Alamein: The Life Story of a Great South African Soldier.11 These pub- lications do, however, have their merits and add to the discussion on the South African offensives operations in East Africa. In 1960, Eric P. Hartshorn’s Avenge Tobruk12 was published. The author, as the officer commanding of the Trans- vaal Scottish during the campaign, offers a unique perspective on the offensive operations in East Africa, with some rather colourful, and highly doubtful, de- scriptions of Anglo-South African relations at the operational level of war. The focus of the work is, however, only on the First South African Brigade (1st sa Bde) and its operational employment throughout the campaign as part of the 11th and 12th African Divisions. Harry Klein’s Springboks in Armour: The South African Armoured Cars in World War ii,13 which appeared in 1965, addresses the South African deployment of armour during the East African and North Afri- can campaigns. Although an invaluable source, the publication suffers from some flaws. Klein, a former armoured car company commander in East Africa, barely attempts historical objectivity in his analysis of the successes and fail- ures of the South African armour operations during the campaign. An official history of the South African deployment to East Africa during the Second World War, though planned, never materialised. Neil Orpen, work- ing under the auspices of the Advisory Committee on Military History, which was formed at the initiative of a number of veteran’s organisations, was tasked to ensure that the publication programme of the Union War Histories Sec- tion would continue.14 The Advisory Committee on Military History hoped 141312111098 8 Conrad Norton and Uys Krige, Vanguard of Victory: A Short Review of the South African Victories in East Africa 1940–1941, (Pretoria, 1941). 9 Carel Birkby, It’s a Long Way to Addis (London, 1943). 10 John Simpson, South Africa Fights (London, 1941). 11 Andrew Pollock, Pienaar of Alamein: The Life Story of a Great South African Soldier (Cape Town, 1943). 12 Eric Hartshorn, Avenge Tobruk (Cape Town, 1960). 13 Harry Klein, Springboks in Armour: The South African Armoured Cars in World War ii (Johannesburg, 1965). 14 Ian van der Waag, “Contested Histories: Official History and the South African Military in the Twentieth Century”, in The Last Word? Essays on Official History in the United States and British Commonwealth, ed. Jeffrey Grey (Westport, 2003), 36–41. international journal of military history and historiographyDownloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 38 (2018) 34-66 11:10:40PM via free access <UN> The South African Offensive Operations in Southern Abyssinia 37 to complete the history of South Africa’s participation in the Second World War. The publications which emanated from this endeavour is best classified as semi-official histories, lacking in original research, and which relies too heavily on the unpublished manuscripts of the Union War Histories Section. As such, they add very little to the general body of knowledge on South Af- rican participation in the war.15 The first volume of the South African Forces in World War ii series appeared in 1968, under the title the East African and Abyssinian Campaigns.16 Though essentially a campaign history, Orpen’s work is the most complete publication to have appeared in terms of explaining the South African operations in East Africa. The book fails to effectively place the South African operations during the campaign into context against the backdrop of the larger Allied offensive operations in the theatre. As such, it remains a rather warped and one-sided version of the campaign. In 1979 Orpen and Henry J. Martin published South Africa at War17 as a part of the aforemen- tioned series. This book helped to explain a number of aspects of the South African home front during the war, including an overview of the development of the Union Defence Force (udf) during the interwar period as well as the logistical and administrative efforts undertaken by the Union Government to supply the Allied Forces in East Africa with much-needed war materiel. In 1981, Orpen and Martin produced the first volume of Salute the Sappers,18 which covered the South African Engineer Corps (saec) deployments to the East and North African theatres during the war. The book helped to understand the important influence of geography on the offensive operations in East Africa during the campaign, as well as the strenuous efforts of the South African en- gineers to provision the Allied Forces with sufficient water. In 1987, Birkby produced a biography of George Brink, titled Uncle George: The Boer Boyhood, Letters and Battles of Lieutenant-General George Edwin Brink,19 which allowed for an interesting view on the strategic, operational and political decisions behind the South African campaign in East Africa.
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