Horn In Enemy Hands

South Africa's POWs in World War II
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-86842-652-2
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

'To all intents and purposes I am as sexless as a block of wood. To eat is the extreme fundamental of living.' - South African POW, 1942 Books on World War II abound, yet there are remarkably few publications on South Africa's role in this war, which had such an influence on how we live today. There is even less written about those who participated on the margins of the war, especially those who were physically removed from the battlefields through capture by enemy forces. South Africa's prisoners of war during World War II, their experiences and recollections, are largely forgotten. That is until now. Historian Karen Horn painstakingly tracked down a number of former POWs. Together with written memoirs and archival documents, their interviews reveal rich narratives of hardship, endurance, humour, longing and self-discovery. Instead of fighting, these men adapted to another war, one which was fought on the inside of many prison camps. It was a war against hunger and deprivation, at times against ever-encroaching despondency and low morale amongst their companions in captivity. In their interviews, all the POWs expressed surprise at being asked to share their experiences of almost 70 years earlier. The author found it astonishing that almost all of them claimed not to be heroes of any kind. Perhaps this is not surprising when one considers that they returned home in 1945 to a country which soon afterwards tried its utmost to promote national amnesia with regard to its participation in the war. With great insight and empathy, Karen Horn shines a light on a neglected corner of South African history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Horn, Karen

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

FOR DR SMUTS, NOT FOR DR HERTZOG

We were playing bridge with some New Zealanders, and this New Zealander told us beforehand how they skin rabbits […] There was hardly any food left in camp at all, but we were still playing bridge and in came a cat, walking from I don’t know where, […] and I think Percy said to the New Zealander, ‘how do you skin a rabbit mate?’ And he picked up the cat […] we cleared the table of cards […] and it was in the pot cooking in about ten minutes. And they asked for contributions, you know, somebody had a potato, somebody had a turnip, somebody had a piece of mangel wurzel, somebody had a piece of bread, and this was all cooked up and dished out. It was a remarkably good stew.

The men who feasted on the cat stew together with the story-teller, Fred van Alphen Stahl, were all Allied prisoners of war in Stalag VIIIB near Lamsdorf, one of the largest prison camps in German-occupied territory during World War II.1 During the early months of 1945, desperate deeds were ever more common as it became apparent that the Germans were about to be overpowered by the Allied forces. Millions of refugees, prisoners of war and fighting forces found themselves fighting more for survival than for victory.

Among the Allied captives were thousands of South Africans who had volunteered their services to the Union Defence Force (UDF) a few years earlier. Each man’s decision to join up was based on a unique set of circumstances, resulting in an army made up of an assortment of cultures, languages and political beliefs. However wide their differences, the UDF volunteers all had one thing in common. None of them had ever contemplated spending most of the war in a prison camp.

Bernard Schwikkard was one of these men, and although Schwikkard is a German surname, he was ready to join the Transvaal Scottish Regiment to fight alongside the Allies when the war started. After the war, Bernard was still the only member of his family who spoke German – and not because of the ancestral connection, but because of the long time he had spent in Germany as a POW. Bernard volunteered along with his brothers, and his sisters volunteered for the nursing corps.

For Fred Geldenhuis, the decision was made long before the war actually started. His reason for volunteering his services was not so much to join the UDF as to get away from home. His stepmother had made it very clear that he was not wanted, and so in 1937, when he was 16, he joined the Special Service Battalion. The day before Fred left home, his father gave him a Valet razor, and he shaved for the first time. Fred started his career in the battalion as a bugle player, but from day one he considered himself an army man who ‘took to soldiering like a duck to water’. Fifteen months later Fred was promoted to corporal, but thanks to his skill on the parade ground and in making a favourable impression during inspections, he was promoted to sergeant a month later. This promotion led to him being the lead bugler at the ceremony of the laying of the foundation stone at the Voortrekker Monument in 1938.

Fred took great pride in his accomplishments, especially when he thought about how miserable he had often felt while he was dependent on his stepmother and her family. By the time he celebrated his eighteenth birthday, he reckoned it was time for a career change, and he joined the South African Police as a trumpeter. The work of the SAP appealed to his adventurous spirit because their ‘mobile units with mule carts used to patrol for about 3 weeks at a time in the rugged country of the Transkei’. The SAP also offered higher pay than the Permanent Force. His meteoric rise up the ranks meant that by the time he was 19, he was lance sergeant drill instructor in the SAP Training Depot. When the Union declared war, Fred volunteered and took the oath with many others in the SAP, although he remembered how one man whom he hero-worshipped resigned and apparently joined the right-wing Ossewabrandwag.2

Fred Geldenhuis. COURTESY ILSE GELDENHUIS

The letter in which Fred Geldenhuis’s father gave permission for his son to join the ranks of the South African Police Force. COURTESY ILSE GELDENHUIS

In the Free State, Wessel Oosthuizen faced his own problems. He and his three brothers had been trying to make a living on their farm, Koppieskroon, but Wessel realised that he would have to find another form of income because, as he put it, they were going to ‘stagnate’ on the farm. He unsuccessfully tried to find work on the railways and in the post office and in the end he was forced to join the SAP, but ‘he didn’t like it one bit’. When the war started, Wessel was not eager to volunteer. He remembered very well how his older brother used to tell stories of how the family was transported in cattle trucks to British concentration camps during the South African War. His mother survived the camps, but his grandmother died there. Wessel clearly did not view Germans as ‘the real enemy’, but apparently he was told by a recruitment officer that he had already shown, by joining the SAP, that he was loyal to the state and therefore had to wear the red tabs – contemptuously referred to as ‘rooi luisies’, or red lice, by Afrikaner nationalists – donned by all volunteers who took the oath to fight anywhere in Africa.3

Although Fred and Wessel were both Afrikaans-speaking, they obviously felt differently about the Union’s decision to support Britain. From their recollections, however, it would seem that the UDF was desperate for volunteers and may perhaps have tried a bit too hard to convince some to join its ranks. During an interview in 2010, Fred stressed that although, in his experience, some men signed the oath voluntarily, others had taken the oath against their will.4 The issue of strong-arming volunteers in the SAP was investigated by the National Party government in 1950. According to the Police Commissioner of the time, there were no written instructions on the taking of the oath with regard to the SAP. He explained that those SAP members between the ages of 21 and 24 were called to the Police College in June 1940 where some took the oath while others did not. Wessel Oosthuizen was only 19 in 1940. The Commissioner declared that those who did not take the oath were not pressured into doing so and were used as guards in Pretoria and later sent back to their different areas where they performed normal police duties.5

In Durban, the life of the Brokensha family was considerably more comfortable than that of many others struggling with the economic depression that had been prevalent since the late 1920s. David, the youngest of the three Brokensha brothers, described his childhood as happy and ‘full of satisfyingly rich memories’. Four of his uncles served in World War I, but his own father was rejected for medical reasons. In 1937, his eldest brother, Guy, joined the Fleet Air Arm in Britain. Two years later, when the Union declared war on Germany, David was so inspired by Guy’s adventures that he too wanted to become a pilot. Both he and Paul, the second brother, volunteered – but they ended up as dispatch riders, not pilots. Many years later, David recalled that their motivation for going to war was based more on romantic ideas of war than on reality. For them, to miss out on the action was simply unimaginable: as he said, ‘There was a war on and I didn’t want to miss it, you know it was sort of this boy’s adventure story.’ This enthusiasm was not necessarily matched by other English-speaking South Africans at the end of the 1930s: as David remembers, shortly after he and Paul volunteered, their father mentioned having told a friend at the elite Durban Club that he was worried because all three of his sons had joined up, and that the other man had confessed to being worried because not one of his three sons had.

Durban at that time was ‘very provincial’ and David admitted in his memoirs that the first time he came into contact with black South Africans and Afrikaners was when he joined the Army. It was especially his friendship with Piet Pieterse that led him to new insights:

[Piet] was completely different. He was a year older, I was 17, he was about 18; he’d spent some years at a reformatory; we kidded them that they hadn’t worn shoes till they joined the army, which may have been true, he was from you know, an arme blanke background and yet he and I, he was my buddy, I mean …

Thereafter, he seemed to reserve his scorn for those who had been too slack to do their duty. Many years after his decision to join the UDF, David still held the same opinion of those who stayed at home, saying ‘even now I rather look down on those who didn’t [volunteer]’.

The Air Force played a part in Dick Dickinson’s decision to volunteer. At the time, Dickinson was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand and when a classmate and good friend of his was shot down in East Africa, it convinced him to enlist. Dick grew up in the Eastern Cape town of Queenstown and attended Queen’s College, whose buildings remind one of a miniature Oxford or Cambridge. His father was a Gilbert and Sullivan singer and as a result Dick became a lover of opera, so much so that he spent his £5 blazer money on opera tickets. His father, apparently sympathetic to his dilemma, immediately sent another £5.

In 1940, while still busy with his Honours year in Botany and Geology at Wits, ‘the war had begun to pull’ at Dick, and when...