(From John Ryan’s Spy Story)

Jan Christian Smuts was South Africa’s war-time Prime Minister and a Field-Marshal in his own right.

Although he was one of a group of visionaries who in 1920 conceived the idea of a League of Nations to monitor global peace, wars were what Jan Smuts knew best.

The Second World War was his fourth. Jannie Smuts had been a general in both Boer Wars, on the Boers’ side, and had led Allied operations against the Germans in East Africa in the First World War.

His record was not without blemish. As Minister of the Interior, before the First World War, he was ruthless in his attempts to put down Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign in Natal and the Transvaal; as Minister of Mines, he was heavily criticised for setting the armed forces against South Africa’s miners in their disputes over working conditions in 1913 and 1914.

Three years into this war, however, South Africa desperately needed someone to look up to, and Smuts was the obvious one to hand.

The campaign was beginning to lose its glamour. After the first flush of success by the South African forces against the Italians in East Africa and Abyssinia, the pendulum began to swing the other way. Late in 1941, South Africa’s Fifth Infantry Brigade had taken a battering from Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert. More than two hundred South Africans were killed, several hundred wounded and many captured.

Six months afterwards came Tobruk, where the fatalities were even heavier. More than thirteen thousand South African volunteers were taken prisoner. Most ended up in German concentration camps.

For several Transkei families, the battles at Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk were acutely tragic. Among the many young men reported “missing, presumed dead” was Neville White, the O’Briens’ neighbour who had been so proud of his red combat tabs.

The curtains in the front room of the Whites’ house were drawn for days while neighbours, including Iris, kept up a supply of meals to Neville’s father, mother and two sisters.

One of those who came to console the family was Father Roganmauser, even though the Whites were Anglican.

Digger O’Brien was about to park the Ford outside the O’Briens’ home. He spotted the priest’s battered Chev behind him, making for the Whites’ house. Hurriedly, he continued down, turned into the driveway and closed the gate. Father Roganmauser was the most menacing of all the Transkei’s bad drivers.

On one occasion, Jimmy Millard had been travelling along the Port St Johns road when he saw Father Roganmauser approaching. Jimmy turned and drove into the nearest field. The Chev followed, ploughed through the rows of maize and, with unerring accuracy, dinged the front of Jimmy’s truck. After which Father Roganmauser got out and asked Jimmy if he would mind calling around at the cathedral to check the geyser.

Despite himself, Digger O’Brien was forced to review his opinion of the Catholic priest after that visit to the White family.

In fact, Digger himself had been baptised as a Catholic, had grown up and been a member of the choir in a Catholic church in Cheapside, London. Then he and his elder brother had heard that the Church of England in the area was offering choirboys more money and they switched religions.

Nor did the tally of local casualties stop with Tobruk. Every week, the Territorial News ran a list of Eastern Cape men missing, believed dead or captured, a column that continued to grow considerably longer than another alongside it listing reports from the various fronts in which South Africans were mentioned in dispatches.

There was conflict on the home front too. One of the reasons Jannie Smuts had elected to have recruitment for the armed forces on a volunteer basis was because of the outcry after his administration declared war against Germany.

The white population was divided on the war issue. Conscription almost certainly would have led to civil unrest. As it was, the second year of South Africa’s involvement caused an outbreak of fighting around the Johannesburg City Hall that continued for two days.

Responsible for much of the dissent was the Ossewa Brandwag, a body of Nazi sympathisers who modelled themselves on the Nazi Storm Troopers. Although the OB was declared an illegal organisation after the Johannesburg violence, it continued to work underground, plotting subversion.

On Christmas Eve, 1941, a story had broken in Transvaal newspapers which shocked the nation. Robey Leibbrandt, South Africa’s light-heavyweight boxing champion who had represented his country at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was arrested on charges of high treason.

Leibbrandt met Hitler at the Games but even before that had been impressed with his ideology of National Socialism. The boxer had returned illegally to his home country earlier that year after undergoing training in sabotage and espionage in Germany. He was put ashore on the west coast from a sailing yacht and immediately began to recruit other Nazi sympathisers for an audacious conspiracy called Operation Weissdorn.

The plot sought to overthrow the Smuts coalition government, assassinate Smuts and, with German military backing, establish a National Socialist republic in South Africa. It failed, largely because the war authorities received inside information about Robey Leibbrandt’s presence in the country and his activities. After a long trial, Leibbrandt was sentenced to death but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment by the Smuts government. Jan Smuts feared there would be a huge backlash if Leibbrandt were to hang.

This inter-group tension among white South Africans had some ironic consequences. One of the O’Briens’ Kimberley cousins, Ernest Wright, was assaulted by a bunch of OB thugs late one night on a platform at Johannesburg’s Park Station because he happened to be wearing a uniform.

Ernest was beaten so badly that he spent two months in hospital and later was declared unfit for active service. Weeks after his discharge, he was assaulted once more on the same platform – this time by a bunch of pro-war zealots because he was in civvies.

Finally, Umtata’s civic leaders decided to hold a memorial service for Neville White and other young men who plainly now would not be coming home.

It was an ecumenical event outside St John’s Cathedral. Dean Stewart conducted the ceremony. Father Roganmauser echoed the dean’s sentiments about a senseless loss of young lives. A minister from the Dutch Reformed Church was also there, since two of those missing believed dead were DRC congregants.

From the cathedral bell tower, a bugler from the Umtata High School cadet band played the Last Post and Reveille. The dean quoted poet Laurence Binyon’s requiem from the Great War:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old

     Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

     At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.”

And got it wrong.

Digger O’Brien was careful to have his NRV men in position before the arrival of the more practised Native Military Corps and the school cadet band. The parade down York Road to the market square was led by the school’s drum major, Georgie Wood, tossing his mace high. A troop of Boy Scouts brought up the rear.

Patrick had wanted to join the scouts but his father flatly refused. He said there was nothing the scoutmaster, Arthur Davies, could teach anyone about anything.

After the service, Digger approached Dean Stewart to whisper in his ear.

‘It’s “grow not old”, Mr Dean,’ he said. ‘Not “not grow old”.’

‘Ah,’ said the dean. ‘Sorry about that, Digger. But then you’ve had more experience with these things.’

‘Yes,’ said Danny’s father, ‘but then I’ve heard lots of people with experience get it wrong too. It just sounds better the right way. I’m sure the poet preferred it like that.’

Dean Stewart was an eloquent man who liked to punctuate his own sermons with poetry. ‘That’s very true,’ he told Digger. ‘I won’t make the mistake again. And I fear we’ll have plenty of opportunities in the near future to get it right!’

As the year wore on, some Umtata families began to get word of relatives captured at Tobruk and Sidi Rezegh.

Whatever letters were allowed through the Italian and German censors were cryptic, sometimes ticking off statements on a prepared form, usually venturing not much more than that the writer was in good health.

One evening, however, Digger told Iris O’Brien that the Dudleys had just received a strange letter from their son, Robert, who was being held in Stalag VII, a prisoner-of-war camp near Moosburg in Germany.

George Dudley was another NRV volunteer. He said Robert’s letter was more expansive than previous letters from him but contained certain references they could not understand. ‘Robert says they wouldn’t believe who else is in the camp with him and the other Transkei chaps,’ said Digger. ‘Then, later, he asks how the family’s Ford is going.’

‘That is odd,’ Danny’s mother said. ‘Don’t the Dudleys still have that old Buick?’

Information about conditions in the prisoner-of-war camps could become distorted by the time it reached the level of the local junior school.

Trevor Clark, a new boy at the school whose mother had moved the family down from Johannesburg and taken a job in the public library, told his classmates how the Germans were using Allied prisoners to make babies for the Nazi cause.

They would suspend the prisoner and a German woman, face to face and close to each other, on contraptions like the horizontal bars in the school gym and prod the prisoner in the bottom with a bayonet until the baby was made.

As amusing, but not apocryphal, was a story Pat Lawlor was told in a letter from his son, Andrew, in Cairo.

The camp where Andrew Lawlor was billeted was surrounded by a fence. Latrines were open ditches along one perimeter. Local Egyptian farmers had been given permission by the camp commander to collect the excrement to use as manure.

One morning the young man had gone out to ablute. As he began to crouch, one of the farmers thrust a spade through the fence. Afterwards he withdrew the spade and scuttled away.

‘Andy turned around to check the result of his efforts, as one does,’ his father said, ‘and there was nothing. Nothing at all. He says he even looked in his turn-ups!’