The South African Border War (or Bush War) and
Conscription
Wikipedia has a very lengthy entry on the South African Border War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Border_War. What follows is my own version, though I have “borrowed” some information from Wikipedia (or at least used it to check some details.
What the Wikipedia entry doesn’t state explicitly is that it wasn’t a South African border.
South West Africa (SWA) used to be a German colony. After the end of the First World War, the League of Nations gave South Africa a mandate to administer SWA. South Africa regarded this mandate as a de facto annexation, though this was never formally approved. Nevertheless, South Africa administered SWA as if it was a province of South Africa. The United Nations (UN) superseded the League of Nations after the Second World War. The UN continued to resist South African annexation of SWA. After the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948 and formalized and expanded Apartheid policies, these policies were also applied in SWA, including forced relocation of Black people.
The South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) was formed to fight for SWA’s independence. SWAPO can be thought of as the SWA equivalent of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC). Similar to the ANC, SWAPO has been the governing party since SWA achieved independence as Namibia. From 1966 until Namibia’s independence in 1990, there was a conflict/war between SWAPO’s armed wing and the South African Defence Force (SADF). The war was fought mostly on either side of the border between SWA and Angola (which is why I wrote above that it wasn’t on a South African border). At the same time, there was a civil war in Angola between the Soviet/Cuban-backed MPLA (from the Portuguese for The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and the South African-backed UNITA (from the Portuguese for The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). UNITA also had at least covert support from the US. Cuba not only provided support for MPLA but also Cuban troops.
The South African government put strict limits on what the media could report about the war. I think the media were not allowed to mention any South African incursions into Angola, or at least I don’t recall reading about any. Reporting of (South African) casualties was also very limited. Before reading the Wikipedia entry I didn’t know even approximately how many people had been killed on each side.
In order to provide troops for the conflict, in 1967 South Africa introduced universal conscription of white males. There were two intakes each year, one in January, the other in July. In the beginning the initial period of service was one year (in practice usually 9 or 11 months), followed by periodic shorter “camps”. The initial period was later increased to 2 years, followed by “camps” for 12 more years. I think camps were limited to being no more than once per year, with the duration alternating between 30 and 90 days. National service was eventually abolished in 1994. Wikipedia has an entry on conscription in South Africa, but it is rather short on details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_South_Africa.
Along with conscripts, the South African Defence Force (SADF) also had personnel who were career military, referred to as Permanent Force (PF) members. Officers in the higher ranks were all PF. In the Navy this applied to ranks above sub-lieutenant. Also, some roles were restricted to members of the Permanent Force, such as pilots in the South African Air Force.
Comparison of ranks of officers and trainee officers in the Navy and Army in South Africa:
Navy Army
Admiral General
Vice Admiral Lieutenant
General
Rear Admiral Major
General
Commodore Brigadier
General
Captain Colonel
Commander Lieutenant
Colonel
Lieutenant Commander Major
Lieutenant Captain
Sub-lieutenant Lieutenant
Ensign Second
Lieutenant
Midshipman Candidate
Officer
Comparison of ranks of non-commissioned officers and enlisted personnel in the Navy and Army in South Africa:
Navy Army
Warrant Officer 1st class Warrant
Officer 1st class
Warrant Officer 2nd class Warrant
Officer 2nd class
Chief Petty Officer Staff
Sergeant
Petty Officer Sergeant
Leading Seaman Corporal
Able Seaman Lance
Corporal
Seaman Private
The names of some of the ranks have changed somewhat since back in the day. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_military_ranks the Navy rank that used to be “Commodore” is now “Rear Admiral (junior grade)”.
Americans pronounce “lieutenant” as “loo-tenant” whereas in Britain and South Africa it is pronounced as “lef-tenant”. Another variation is sometimes used in the Navy, sounding more like “le tenant” or “luh tenant”.
The army was involved in actual conflict. On the other hand, there was no credible threat to South Africa from the sea. So, there wasn’t a need for a large Navy. There were very few fighting ships. There were three aging frigates, obtained from the Royal Navy in the 1950s-60s, a supply ship, three Daphné-class submarines, obtained from France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphn%C3%A9-class_submarine#South_African_Navy, and several Warrier-class missile-carrying strike craft, which were obtained from Israel. The strike craft were referred to as “vomit comets” because they were small and didn’t cope well with rough seas. They had apparently been designed for the relatively calm Mediterranean Sea and were not well suited to conditions off the South African coast. But, in the face of tightening arms embargoes, South Africa wasn’t able to shop around for more suitable vessels. There were also several smaller vessels, such as harbor patrol boats. At any time, at least one frigate and one submarine were laid up while undergoing a refit.
The Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Navy#Ships_and_weapons
gives details of the current fleet and in the section “Decommissioned fleet”
mentions the vessels in service when I was there.
Most conscripts did their initial service after completing
high school. Those young men who
intended going to university could either serve directly after high school or
defer service until after graduating (or dropping out). In the ’70s there was no allowance for
conscientious objection. If one didn’t
want to serve, one either had to flee the country or be sentenced to a
protracted period in a military prison.
I think that at the time I did my service the prison sentence for
refusing to serve was 12 years, with no possibility of early parole. By the late ’80s, if one managed to get
classified as a bona fide religious objector it was possible to perform
approved alternative service instead of being in the military. My “little” brother Ian managed to get
religious objector status. That wasn’t
an option for me because it wasn’t available in the ’70s and in any case I
wasn’t sufficiently religious.
Had I served directly after high school, my initial period would have been either 9 or 11 months. But I took deferment and by the time I graduated the initial period had been extended to two years. Do I regret opting for deferment? Definitely not. I may have had to serve for a longer period, but I certainly had it easier than I would otherwise, including avoiding being involved in active combat. So, much as I complain below, I know I was very fortunate compared to many of my peers. My other brother, Mick, served a couple of years after me. He ended up in the S.A. Medical Services (SAMS) and was initially assigned to the Navy Medical Center in Simon’s Town, but later spent time in the “operational area” either side of the border between (then) South West Africa and Angola. He had trained as a social worker and served in that capacity. He has said that he made it his mission to classify as many conscripts as possible as being unfit for combat duties.
Where one ended up serving was mostly a matter of luck. The vast majority were in the army, with very few conscripts called up to the navy or the air force. Even for those called up to the army, some training establishments were tougher than others and one didn’t have a choice as to where one’s call-up would be.
I have never tried to pull strings or use contacts to try to advance my career. However, it is possible that strings were pulled for me in order to get me called up to the South African Navy and then seconded to the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT). Notwithstanding the bland sounding name, IMT was the naval branch of Armscor (the Armaments Corporation of South Africa), a government body doing military research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armscor_%28South_Africa%29. The permanent staff at IMT were all civilians and included engineers and a few statisticians. One of the statisticians, Johan Strumpfer, was a regular attendee at seminars in UCT’s Department of Mathematical Statistics when I was a BSc(Hons) student in the department in 1977. I think Johan may have heard me mention that I was going to have to do national service in 1978 and may have pulled strings to get me called up to the Navy to supplement the statistics / operations research team at IMT.
I don’t know if Johan did indeed have anything to do with it, but when my call-up papers arrived they were to SAS Saldanha, the Navy’s training establishment at Saldanha Bay, which is about 80 miles north-northwest of Cape Town (see map below). BTW, SAS = South African Ship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Saldanha. The call-up papers made no mention of IMT, so all I knew for certain was that I would be in the Navy rather than the Army.
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| Saldanha Bay and Cape Town. (Image from Google Maps.) |
Aside: I may not have tried pulling strings or using
contacts to advance my career, but I have definitely had luck on my side. There have been several occasions when I have
been in the right place, at the right time, with the right qualifications. That has happened not just for my career, but
for at least one other notable turning point in my life. I’ll explain when I eventually get to writing
about 1981 how it was just through luck that Riëtta and I happened to cross paths.
As I described in “Ancyent blog30 UCT 1977,” by the end of 1977 I was starting to think of myself as a reasonable runner. I had no illusions of ever being great. Although I had reasonable endurance, I didn’t have enough basic speed to be very good. I assumed that by the end of basic training in the Navy I would be the fittest I had ever been. We’ll see below how that turned out. (Spoiler alert: it was quite the opposite.)
Off to war (or at least to the Navy)
In the first week of January 1978, I boarded a troop train with a bunch of other conscripts who had been called up to the Navy. I don’t recall whether it was one of the items we were told to take with us, but I had a very large bottle of aspirin (probably at least a thousand pills), the relevance of which will become clear later. After a long train ride, we reached SAS Saldanha Bay. Then, in good military hurry-up-and-wait style, those of us who had been to university first had to spend a few days hanging around waiting to hear our fate. We weren’t issued uniforms at that stage and so had to make do with the few civilian clothes we had been allowed to bring with us. The base was large. As we didn’t have much else to do, I was able to run. The base commander somehow heard I had a degree in operations research and so put me to work trying to find an optimal schedule for assigning guard duty. Apart from that, we were left to our own devices. (Not devices in the current meaning of the word though, this being well before cell phones and such-like.)
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| Pro forma letter from the Officer Commanding SAS Saldanha to let my parents know I had arrived safely. |
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| The second page of the letter provided information about leave and visiting hours. Most of that wasn’t relevant because, as noted below, I spent just a few days at SAS Saldanha. |
After a few days at SAS Saldanha, those of us who had
completed a university degree were loaded up in military transport and driven
to a much smaller training base in Simon’s Town, which is just short of a
marathon distance from central Cape Town (the Peninsula Marathon used to go
from Green Point Stadium in Cape Town to the naval sports fields in Simon’s
Town). See the leftward pointing arrow
on the map below. The naval training
base there was hardly bigger than a postage stamp. (The whole naval base was much larger, with
several contiguous and disjoint components.)
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| Approximate route of the Peninsula Marathon – Greenpoint to Simon’s Town. The relevance of the arrows indicating Karbonkelberg and Palmietrivier will be explained later. |
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| Simon’s Town naval base (from Google Maps). The Lower North Battery, which I will mention a little later, is marked in the upper left. Boulders Beach, also mentioned later, is towards the lower right. |
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| Another view of Simon’s Town (source of photo unknown). The Navy training base is on the far right, next to the water. |
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| Closer view of the harbor, showing part of the current fleet. Off to the left, outside the western wall of the harbor is a yacht (sailboat) basin. The Institute for Maritime Technology is towards the lower right, next to the Navy’s sports field. IMT moved into the current building at some stage in the 1980s, after my time there but before we left South Africa. (Image from Google Maps.) |
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| Close-up of a part of the above photo, showing a submarine and what appears to be a strike craft out of the water for a refit. (Image from Google Maps.) |
There were 30 of us conscripts who had been to college first. We were put directly into an Officers’
Orientation Course (OOC) without having to do basic training. The longer initial period of National Service
was still very new. The Navy didn’t seem
able to have made up its mind how to train graduates, with the plan varying
from intake to intake. Both the intakes
before us had their officer training at Gordon’ Bay, the navy’s main officer
training base. The rightward pointing
arrow on the map further up indicates Gordon’s Bay. I think one of the two intakes first had to
do regular basic training, the same as lower ranks, before an OOC, whereas the
other intake had to go through the full regular officers’ training (not just an
orientation course for graduates).
While on the OOC we had the “rank” midshipman (i.e., candidate officer). I put “rank” in quotes because midshipman isn’t a real rank. Also on the OOC with us were 6-7 graduates who had signed up for the permanent force (PF, that is, career military rather than being conscripts). Even though they were also fresh in the military, they had already been assigned actual officer ranks. Two of them, Lt. Booysen and Lt. Schreuder even outranked the officer in charge of the OOC, S/Lt. Morris. While on the OOC they were required to take orders from someone they outranked! At least a couple of the PF guys were in their 30s. I don’t know how they had avoided being conscripted when they were younger. Maybe they had served in the Army directly after high school and later decided they wanted a career in the Navy. Some of the PF guys were heavy smokers and very unfit, especially Lt. Booysen. In overall charge of the OOC were S/Lt. Morris and Warrant Officer (W/O) Harmse, with a variety of other people responsible for specific aspects of the course. W/O Harmse liked to remind us that in terms of the naval hierarchy “midshipmen are lower than shark sh*t”.
The photo shows us – conscripts, permanent force officers on the OOC, and two of the officers in charge of us, in our “ice cream suits” (summer parade uniforms). The two officers in charge of us were S/Lt Morris, mentioned above, and Lt/Cdr Oliver, who I think was the commander of the base. The conscripts were a fairly even mix of English and Afrikaans speakers. I had met one of them, Quentin Espey, way back in primary school, but didn’t know the others beforehand. I think Allen Tucker was the only one among the midshipmen who was married. He was as thin as a rake, but his wife was quite obese. A few others will be mentioned later in this piece.
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| Officers Orientation Course class photo. The officers have rank insignia on their shoulders. If you look closely at the rest of us, you will see two small dark rectangles at our throats. These were green (with a gold button) and indicated that we were midshipmen. |
We spent a little under 3 months on the OOC, from mid
January until early April. Apart from
the training we had to undergo, one of the things we had to do was to produce
an occasional newsletter, called the Gunroom Gazette. In days of yore midshipmen were housed in the
gun rooms of ships and “gunroom” has since become the term for the sleeping
quarters for midshipmen. The newsletter
was edited by Lt. Schreuder, with S/Lt Morris and W/O Harmse listed as
censors! (I don’t know why Lt. Schreuder
isn’t in the photo above.) We produced 4
issues of the newsletter. Some of the
articles were serious/factual, for instance, Raymond Willows (whose undergrad
degree was in land surveying) wrote about the different types of land
surveying; Mike Morton wrote about hang-gliding – including how hang-gliders
are made and operated; and Peter Southwood, who had studied naval engineering,
wrote on “A trimaran design concept” and included hand-drawn diagrams. Others were more light-hearted or involved gentle
(?) mockery of some of our compatriots.
Some extracts from the Gunroom Gazette will feature later.
One issue included brief biographical information, though
only about the midshipmen, giving just the person’s name, nickname (if any),
interests (serious or otherwise, with some of the latter being scatological),
home address, home telephone number, and degree and major. Some nicknames were related to demeanor or
characteristics, such as Quentin “Sloth” Espey; Francois “Rooies” Prinsloo, on
account of his red hair (“rooi” being Afrikaans for “red”); and Antonius
“Dozey” van Schijndel, on account of his ability to fall asleep within seconds
whenever we had a few minutes’ break in activities. A few were related to insults shouted by
instructors or whose origins I have long forgotten, such as Mike “Baboon”
Davies. Others were shortened or twisted
versions of names, such as Mike “Mort” Morton, and Kevin “Dildo” Dillon. My nickname, as recorded in the Gunroom
Gazette, was of this latter type, namely “Grouper”. Sometimes this morphed to “Group sex”. That was just word play rather than having
any actual meaning. I have never
participated in group sex and wasn’t even having solo sex. However, the latter may have been at least
part of the reason for the nickname of Johann “Bed Stain” Augustyn. Why just part? It may also have been partly word play, as
the last part of the Afrikaans name Augustyn is pronounced “stain”. Maybe the nicknames and attributed interests
were why the PF guys on the OOC were not included in biosketches. Whoever compiled the biosketches attributed
just one interest to me – “Running”. I
can’t find fault with that. 😊
When we arrived in Simon’s Town for the OOC we were issued uniforms and forbidden to wear civilian clothes for the duration of the course. We wore the “ice cream suits” in the photo just a handful of times in the course of two years. The regular summer uniform was also white, with short sleeves, and shorts (at least for junior officers). Winter uniforms had white shirts, and black pants, jackets, and ties. There were also combat / working uniforms, of the kind worn when on active duty on ships. Those were blue, as seen in the third photo below. Rank insignia were worn on the shoulder in the summer and working uniforms, and on the sleeves of the winter uniforms.
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| This is the jacket of the winter uniform, with the gold braid indicating my final rank (sub lieutenant). This photo was taken in 2024, just before I disposed of the uniform. |
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| The rank insignia for the summer and working uniforms. |
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| The rank insignia on the shirt of my working uniform. |
The only pieces of equipment we were issued are shown in the photo below. A hussif (contraction of “housewife”) is a sewing kit. The pointed implement on the knife is for untying naval knots (not to be confused with the naval unit of speed). We weren’t issued any weapons, unless these count as such. As I note later, we seldom even touched a weapon.
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| Equipment issued to us, a hussif and a knife. (Photo taken in December 2025. I obviously haven’t kept the knife in tip-top condition.) |
Although I had hated cadets when I was in high school,
having had to do that did have at least some benefit. During the OOC we had to march and do
drills. Some of the other midshipmen had
been at schools where they hadn’t had cadets as part of “youth preparedness”
and were even worse at marching in step than I was. On the other hand, maybe they were taught
some more generally useful life skills.
Being the military, we had to do nearly everything in squad formation, including running. But Lt. Booysen and 1-2 of the other permanent force guys were so unfit that they couldn’t run for more than about 100 yards without needing to rest. So we didn’t get much exercise. As I mentioned, the training base was very small (see image below). Unless I was willing to run many laps around the buildings, there was no way I could maintain any running fitness. I put in a written request to be allowed to go running outside the base, but that was turned down. We were kept busy (even if not physically busy), so I was too tired and unmotivated to want to run laps around the buildings.
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| The Navy training base in Simon’s Town. The southern wall of the base is just above where “St Geroge’s St” is marked and the entrance to the base is to the right of the pedestrian crossing. I am not sure where the other boundaries of the base were. (Image from Google Maps. This is a cropped version of one of the earlier images.) |
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| Entrance to the training base. (From Google Street View.) |
For part of our course we had a few days with an instructor
who was a first-class asshole. Lt.
“Gunner” Mead was a gunnery officer, though that wasn’t his role in our
training. (As a gunnery officer he used
to train Navy seamen to load and fire naval guns. The photo below shows the Lower North Battery
where they used to practice, right next to the main road to Simon's Town. Manual loading of these big guns was probably
already obsolete in proper navies by that stage. Gunner Mead used to claim that his gunnery
teams were so fast they would be able to shoot down an anti-ship missile. I don’t think he had any conception of how
fast a missile travels.) Gunner Mead
seemed to be taking out his frustrations on us.
Maybe it was because of a sense of inadequacy – he was middle-aged, yet
still in a rather lowly officer rank and without any skills needed to progress
further, whereas we were recent graduates with supposedly bright futures ahead
of us. I won’t claim to have been
singled out in any way, though I did have my own feeling of inadequacy; in one
of the activities in Gunner Mead’s part of the course I was the only one with
so little upper body strength that I couldn’t pull myself up a sheer slope
using a rope.
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| Lower North (gun) Battery, on Main Road between Glencairn and Simon's Town; from Google Maps. |
Part of Gunner Mead’s section of the course was on riot
control. The Army and Air Force were
involved in the war to the north, so the Navy was apparently supposed to deal
with internal unrest. The formation we were
taught to adopt when facing rioters was called “Form D”. The straight edge of the D had to face the
rioters and whoever was in charge of the formation would be in the middle,
along with soldiers firing tear gas and the like. The idea that we might be required to fire on
fellow citizens (most likely of other races) was deeply disturbing to me. I don’t think the Navy ever ended up having
to do riot control. The police were
often involved though, such as in the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpeville_massacre. Other units of the military may also have
been involved at later stages of the Apartheid era. (There have been numerous massacres in South
Africa over the past couple of hundred years.
Not all have been between races.
Some were Black on Black, at least one was White on White, notably the
Rand Rebellion in 1922, and in the nineteenth century several were Black on White. Later there were White on Black ones
suppressing anti-Apartheid protests.
This list on Wikipedia seemed rather incomplete when I first looked at
it a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_South_Africa.)
An article in one of the issues of the Gunroom Gazette by Kevin Dillon, one of the law school graduates, was on “The individual’s liability in a riot control situation”. He wrote:
This article is an attempt to
clearly delineate the common law liability of the individual for his actions
taken while acting under superior orders in peacetime.
The situation to be considered is the
following: The police consider a riot in township L sufficiently serious to
warrant calling in the Navy. A platoon
under Platoon Commander X confronts the crowd and X considers fire power is
necessary. An ice cream seller is caught
up in the midst of the rioting mob and X considers him to be an instigator and
consequently orders rifleman No. 3 in Section No. 1 to shoot and kill the ice
cream seller. The rifleman considers him
an innocent bystander but acts on the order and fires the round.
[This was followed by a discussion of the
types of defence that could be raised in a murder trial of rifleman No. 3.]
[Another article, by Bruce Hall, another of the law school graduates was on “The medico-legal importance of alcohol intoxication in relation to the military discipline code (MDC)”.]
We had a couple of days of weapons training, the first part
of which was learning to take apart and reassemble a rifle and a pistol,
followed by some time on the rifle and pistol ranges. On the day we had to do actual shooting, half
of us were assigned to the rifle range in the morning while the other half went
to the pistol range. In the afternoon we
were supposed to switch ranges. But it
started raining and the afternoon’s shooting was abandoned. I was one of those who went to the rifle
range in the morning. So I never had an
opportunity to fire a pistol. Naval
officers carry pistols, not rifles. That
meant I didn’t get a chance to practice with the weapon I would be expected to
use, though I had learned how to disassemble it. I used to joke that if I was attacked I would
have to say “Hold it right there. I
don’t know how to shoot you but look how quickly I can take this pistol apart.” We weren’t issued our own pistols but for
some duties (mentioned below) were allocated one to use while on duty. I usually left it in the safe.
I don’t recall exactly when we had our first “pass” allowing us to go off base in uniform for a few hours one afternoon. Before we were allowed off the base we had to line up in parade formation to be inspected. Several of the guys “failed” the inspection and were made to go and shave, even though most of them had shaved earlier in the day. I had not shaved that morning, but my beard grows so slowly and sparsely that I passed the inspection.
I think that first pass was on the day of the Peninsula
Marathon, which went right by the main gate of the base, less than a mile from
the finish of the race. (See photo above
of the main gate.) I didn’t watch the
runners going by that morning. There
must have been a strong headwind though.
Brian Chamberlain, who won in 2:32:43, was a better runner than Bruce
Robinson who had run 2:30:47 to win the previous year. Also, the winning time in most of the next 10
years was not only under 2:30 but under 2:20.
I don’t remember what we did with our free time on that first
“pass”. I know I didn’t go for a
run. Probably went to a nearby bar with
some of the others.
Each component of our course lasted a day or two, at the end of which we had an exam on that section. The instructors generally had at most a high school certificate and had little experience setting exams. They usually pretty much just gave us the answers. And as there weren’t any consequences for doing poorly, the exams didn’t add any stress. One exception was the section on law and the Military Discipline Code. That part was taught by a (uniformed) navy lawyer, and he set a more realistic exam. I tried looking for loopholes, such as ways to get off base to go for a run. So I studied the material carefully and ended up with the highest score in the class, even doing better than the 4 fellow midshipmen who had just finished law school.
One day we got to take a couple of sailboats out on False
Bay. One of the two, Voortrekker, was a
famous racing yacht: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voortrekker_(yacht).
The morning was relatively calm, with
little wind. The wind picked up nicely
as the day wore on, enabling us to sail at a good clip. I wrote “us” though I didn’t exactly do
much. I have little interest in
sailboats whereas some of the others were keen sailors (and one, Peter
Southwood, had qualified as a naval engineer as well as being a keen sailor). There were more of them than were needed to handle
the boat. So I let them do the
work. I went below deck and had a very
pleasant nap, with our speed across the increasingly choppy water being very
soothing.
At some point we competed in a track meet against some of
the other local units. The meet was on a
300m grass track, on the Navy’s sports-fields where the Peninsula Marathon
traditionally ended. I ran the 1,500m
and maybe also the 800m. What made the
1,500m memorable was that after I finished W/O Harmse accused me of running a
lap short! I don’t recall anyone being
lapped, so I don’t know why he thought I had run a lap short. I hadn’t even won; I was just a
not-very-close second, to Mike Morton (who also won the 800m). W/O Harmse obviously didn’t think much of my
running ability. He wasn’t the only
one. Several months after the end of the
OOC, after I was back in reasonable shape, a fellow conscript said he didn’t
know how I managed to run so fast because I always looked very lethargic. I hadn’t been aware of my supposed lethargy
and was too taken aback to think of a response such as “That’s because I am
conserving energy.”
The track meet was mentioned in a letter home in an issue of
the Gunroom Gazette “written” by Francois “Rooies” Prinsloo. Rooies came from a small town in the Oranje
Vrystaat (Orange Free State) which is a landlocked province of South
Africa. Prior to defeat in the Tweede
Vryheidsoorlog (literally “Second War of Freedom” but known in English as the Second
Anglo-Boer War) in 1902 it had been an independent Boer republic. How someone from a rural area in the middle of
the country ended up in the Navy is a question for the military geniuses. Most of the rest of us were from coastal
cities. Rooies had a degree in personnel
management, so it wasn’t as if he had a qualification that would have been
highly sought after by the Navy. The
letter was actually written by one of the other Afrikaners, Anri Smuts, so it
wasn’t a liberal urban English-speaker mocking a rural Afrikaner. My translation:
Dear Mom and Dad and brothers and sisters,
It is Rooies. I am
now in Simon’s Town. In Saldanha a guy
with a bunch of gold stripes came to talk to me. Now I am here.
I struggle to
understand some of the guys. They often
speak English. Here one has to do one’s
own laundry and make one’s own bed. Ther
are many [crossed out South African slur for Black people] here to do it but
the guys are too stupid to shout at them to do these jobs. Also, we are not allowed to call them
[crossed out slur again].
The guys here are
very stupid. They support the Western
Province rugby team and even like Morné
[du Plessis, the captain of the Western Province rugby team]. It shows they know nothing about rugby.
Saturday was a
sports day. Wow, that was fun. There were short races and long races and a
bunch of other things that I don’t know.
At one place one had to throw a big iron ball. Then I won.
There was also a place where we had to throw a flat piece of metal. I could have won the short races too but they
said I am not allowed to trip the other guys.
We also had tug-of-war but they made me wear shoes, and they did the
tug-of-war on grass. I am not used to
that.
We have to wear
the same uniforms all day. When you
greet one of the guys with gold stripes you are not allowed to doff your
hat. The Mauser that Dad gave me wasn’t
necessary. There are other weapons
here. The first morning someone shouted
at me and said I must wear socks, even with my boots. Then everyone laughed.
Dad must call if
it rains. I want to come to help plough,
but I don’t know. The guys at the gate
stopped me the other day when I wanted to go into town. They had rifles, but my Mauser has been
locked up, so I couldn’t even shoot back.
There are women
here too [see (*) below]. The guys with
the gold stripes said I am not allowed to fraternize with the women. That’s good, because I get very shy when a
woman talks to me.
Today I heard
that the guys with the gold strips are officers. That means they are in charge. Some of them have more stripes than others. I’m still not sure whose place this is. One has to greet them like Jafta [presumably
a worker on the farm] greets Dad, touching yourself just above the eyes, though
without making contact with your hat.
We have classes
every day. They are easy and I sleep a
lot, because the guys are stupid. They
don’t even set homework. They think that
this year Western Province is going to win the Currie Cup [the South African
rugby equivalent of the Super Bowl in the U.S. or the F.A. Cup final in
England].
Further, it is
quiet here. I usually sleep, but some of
the guys play cards (don’t tell the Dominee), or read books, but the books
don’t have photos. They don’t even know
who Mark Condor is. [Mark Condor was the
hero in a series of photo story magazines.]
I’ll say goodbye
now and I hope it rains this year where you are in the Free State. Oh yes, there is a lot of water here, but it
is terrible and no-one drinks it.
Rooies
PS: We have to fill
in forms. They call it security. The guy was very strict and said we have to
tell the truth. So I told about Dad and
the witblits [literal translation, “white lightning”; what Americans call
moonshine] and about the taxes. I hope
Dad isn’t cross.
PPS: Tell William I will kill him if he shoots
with my .22 [rifle].
Rooies also featured in a piece I wrote for the Gunroom Gazette about the track meet. Extracts:
Leadership by example was the order of the day as S/Lt
Morris showed fine acceleration from the gun and cruised home amidst raucous
support from the stands. Unfortunately a
seaman ignored respect for rank and edged S/Lt Morris into second place in the
final.
Meanwhile on the lower field events were rather more
one-sided as “Rooie” Prinsloo, baffled by a week of lectures in a strange
language and a foreign country [the Western Cape and the Orange Free State are
so different they might as well be different countries], picked an appropriate
place to vent his frustrations as he
hurled the shot-put and discus metres past the best efforts of his opponents.
The efficiency of the medical
examiners at Saldanha resulted in a “G4”
[presumably a classification meaning unfit for duty] being a star as Mike
Morton led from the start to win both the 800 and 1500 metre races.
The first part involved hiking in full gear (plus rifles) in the Karbonkelberg (literal translation: Carbuncle Mountain) part of the Table Mountain range. (See downward arrow on the map further up and a closer view below.) I had forgotten that that had included camping out for two nights. I was reminded by glancing through a copy of the Gunroom Gazette in which I had written one of the two articles about the Karbonkelberg experience. I have copied my piece below. We were divided into 4 groups, with each group given a map and a two-way radio. We were told to make our way to various points (in a different order for each group) and to report in by radio from each of the points. One group “failed” that test. One of the points was next to the ocean, reached by going down a long and rather steep slope. That group decided they didn’t want to go down and then right back up again, so they radioed in from the top, saying they were at the bottom. (The bottom was probably a little to the east of where “Bos 400” is marked on the map below.) What they didn’t realize was that the bottom was in a radio shadow from the base camp and so they should not have been able to make contact if they had really been at the foot of the mountain. When they returned to base camp, they were made to go out again to do the task properly. The group I was in didn’t make the same mistake. We went all the way down, though we took a different route on the way up because of where we needed to be to reach the next checkpoint. While traversing a steep section of quite thick bushes we disturbed a swarm of bees, which promptly attacked us. Bee stings don’t affect me much. Although I was stung multiple times, all I did was hold my helmet over my face to protect it. I was very amused at the big tough guys in the squad crashing through the bushes and screaming as they tried to avoid getting stung. What we didn’t realize was that Rooies who was in our group, was very allergic to bee stings. Fortunately for him he moved in the opposite direction from where the other guys were hurtling down with the bees in hot pursuit. So he emerged unscathed. Apart from that, our hike was tiring but uneventful. (The least fit of the permanent force guys must have been excused this exercise.)
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| Karbonkelberg. One of the groups camped out on one of the nights at Sandy Bay, in the middle of the top part of the image. Sandy Bay was a nudist beach. Nude beaches were illegal and there were sometimes police raids, though presumably not at night. (Image from Google Maps.) |
Below is the piece I wrote for the Gunroom Gazette
about our Karbonkelberg adventures [with some attempts at explanation in
brackets, like this].
Some you win, and some you lose
Karbonkelberg in retrospect
For many of us, Karbonkelberg was the highlight of the
course. Typical Naval organization
resulted in the trip taking place on the “wrong” weekend (ask first starboard
watch [we were divided into different groups, first and second starboard watch
and first and second port watch; I presume that group was supposed to have a
weekend “pass” that weekend]) but apart from that the operation was smoothly
run. My memories, as indicated by the
title, include a number of contrasting experiences.
To 32 of us, our rifles were the worst possible curse that
could have been inflicted upon us while Alan Woolfson’s saved him from an
untimely end [not by shooting anyone – we were not issued with ammunition, so
he must have used it to stop himself falling].
Adri Smuts drank so much water that his stomach rejected it, while Harry
Trisos suffered the same fate from having too little water. For two days we would have paid any price for
a beer, whereas on Saturday night most people had more than they were able to
drink.
The star skinniver [Google is no help in finding a good
explanation; basically means someone who has a knack of avoiding work or
anything requiring effort] of the course lost his unbeaten record when his
group succeeded in contacting base from an area previously thought to be
“blind” for radio transmitting, and paid the price for their mistake.
A hot night in luxury at base camp made a welcome change
from the two (Southern) uncomfortable nights spent in the bush although many of
us woke up exhausted after a collective dream that we had been made to run up
an enormous mountain shortly after midnight.
[The “Southern” refers to Southern Comfort whiskey, that some people
must have taken on the hike to provide “warmth”. I presume the “dream” was real – that we were
roused from sleep to run up a mountain, though I don’t remember that.]
For all that we suffered (and most
of us did) the experience was worthwhile in that many of us dragged ourselves
(or were pushed) to levels of endurance not previously reached and there is a
(Southern) ring of truth in the idea that we came to see facets of character in
others (and ourselves) which could no longer be camouflaged.
 |
| Cover of the Gunroom Gazette and the page with my article. |
A couple of other people also wrote about the Karbonkelberg
experience. Excerpts are below.
Tristan Blandin de Chalain:
Michael Morton and Quesps [Quintin Espey], in their nightly
sojourn at Sandy Bay, were not unduly surprised the next morning to find that
they had been joined, not 15 feet away, by a sleeping-bag-bound couple. Red faces on the part of the latter revealed
the unintentionality of their gregarious habits.
Bravo [group], during its aimless
wanderings on the slopes of the Ravine, plunged head-first into a nest of
belligerent bees. Better pandemonium
resulted. Reds [Rooies] Prinsloo, from
his position lower down on the slope later recounted: “I was making my way down
carefully when a tremendous calamity broke loose above me. The bushes suddenly parted, branches crashed,
and eight guys came bounding down the slope, yelling like maniacs each time a
bee struck. That was the last I
knew.” A bounding rock struck him in the
noggin, temporarily disabling him. Bravo
licked its wounds, picked up its scattered equipment, gritted its teeth, and
once more clawed its way up the slope.
The next (and last) part of the leadership training was spending two days going down the Palmietrivier (literal translation: Bulrush River) on rafts. This was right at the end of the OOC, and there wasn’t an issue of the Gunroom Gazette after that. So there was no written record, just my memories of my own experience:
We were split up into pairs and had to tie foam-filled fiberglass “logs” together to make the rafts. I was paired with a quiet Afrikaner, Andre Kruger. Or at least initially it was going to be just the two of us. Then we were told that we had to take Lt. Booysen, the least fit of the older guys, along with us on our raft. Most of the first day was spent pulling the raft through the bulrushes giving the river its name. The other pairs merely had to pull their rafts over the bulrushes. Lt. Booysen not only was unable to help pull, but we had to pull him along on top of our raft. Andre was one of those dependable types one wants to have with one in the trenches – no complaining, just gets the job done. Even so, the first day was rather tough for the two of us. We all camped together next to the river that evening. In the morning we found that the previous day’s work had got us through the bulrushes and we had reached the part of the river where we could actually ride downstream on our rafts. Even better as far as Andre and I were concerned was that the powers-that-be decided we no longer needed to have Lt. Booysen on our raft. That turned out to be a very pleasant day being carried by the current, going over several rapids and across stretches of open water. (I may not have any interest in sailing but I’ve always enjoyed being in and around water.)
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| Palmietrivier is where the red marker is towards the right in the image. To put it in context with other parts of this post, Karbonkelberg is just west of where “Hout Bay” is marked towards the top left, and the naval base at Simon’s Town is next to where “Boulders Beach” is marked. (Image from Google Maps.) |
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| My report at the end of the OOC. I don’t recall how “Seamanship” was tested. It must have been based just on theory because I certainly didn’t do any practical seamanship. |
Next up, seconded to the Institute for Maritime Technology
(IMT).
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