A recruitment poster in the aftermath of Tobruk
South Africa inevitably became embroiled in the war that broke out in Europe in September 1939. The right of South Africa not to participate in Britain’s wars was one of the most burning issues among Afrikaner nationalists during the first three decades of Union. After the Statute of Westminster of 1934 was passed General Hertzog, for one, believed that South Africa’s autonomy was assured. In September 1938 he cemented this by tying the cabinet to a position of firm neutrality if Britain joined the war. Jan Smuts seemed to have gone along with this, but changed his mind after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. He believed that South Africa, regardless of the political cost, was obliged to help stop Germany under Adolf Hitler. For him South Africa’s freedom and the future of Western civilisation, even of the human race, was at stake. Yet it was inconceivable by mid-1939 that he would take the country into a war on a very small majority in Parliament, and with most of the electorate in all probability opposed to it.
Scenes from the Battle of El Alamein: Sidi Rezegh in the aftermath of battle and, below, the Gazala line.
When, just before a session of Parliament on 4 September 1939, Hertzog proposed that South Africa remain neutral, Smuts and half the cabinet favoured intervention. In the Parliamentary debate Hertzog blundered by ignoring any malevolent and aggrandising purpose in Nazi foreign policy. To him Britain and France had brought the war on themselves by imposing the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles on the Germans in 1919, much as had been the case with the republican Afrikaners at Vereeniging in 1902.
But the other part of his speech carried great force: entry into the war on a split vote would severely damage the trust between the two white communities. ‘The Afrikaner people twice tried to bring together the Afrikaans speakers and the English speakers into one nation,’ he said, referring to the formation of the South African Party at the time of Union, and fusion, which brought about the establishment of the United Party. He warned that if the second attempt also failed the shock to the Afrikaner people would be so severe that it would take years for it to recover. ‘But if it comes as a result of a war with which we have nothing to do it will affect our national life for fifty or even a hundred years.’
The Cape Times announces the war
D.F. Malan formulated his support for Hertzog in telling terms. If South Africa had no ties with Britain it certainly would not have entered into a war caused by a conflict in distant Eastern Europe. If South Africa were to be sucked into every war into which Britain entered, he would say out loud: ‘You can talk as much as you wish about freedom, but we are a country of slaves.’ Smuts was also blunt. Hertzog’s speech sounded like a justification for ‘Herr Hitler’s actions’. He had no doubt that what was at stake was the same as that at the time war broke out in 1914: the quality of the system of government, ‘the fate of humanity and the future of our civilisation’.
Hertzog’s motion was defeated by a vote of 80 to 67 that went largely along the ethnic division in the white community. The governor-general refused his request to dissolve Parliament and to call a general election. Round Table, an authoritative journal, considered it likely that the anti-war faction would have won such an election at that time. Instead the governor-general asked Smuts to form a government, and he took South Africa into the war. It was a watershed event in white politics, also destroying the middle ground with respect to the issues of race and colour well before the National Party announced its apartheid programme. Without the political polarisation brought about by 294 the the war, which from the time of the war vote in 1939 was increasingly drawn on language lines, Malan’s National Party would have been unlikely to come to power in 1948.
