South Africa declares war on Germany

On 6 September 1939 the Union of South Africa declared war on Germany. The decision came after three days of the most acute political crisis in the dominion’s history. The prime minister, Barry Hertzog, wanted the country to remain neutral, but on 4 September the House of Assembly voted 80 to 67 for breaking with Germany. The governor-general refused Hertzog’s request to dissolve parliament, the prime minister resigned, and on 5 September his deputy, General Jan Smuts, formed a government. The next day South Africa was at war. Of all the British dominions, it was the only one in which entry into the war was settled by a vote whose outcome remained uncertain until the very last moment.

Chronologies spread these events over three days: on 4 September Hertzog’s neutrality motion is “defeated 80 to 67” and the governor-general, Patrick Duncan, refuses to call an election; on 5 September Duncan asks Smuts to form a government; on 6 September the Union under Smuts declares war. This sequence agrees with the sources, with one qualification. Formally the vote was on Smuts’s amendment to the prime minister’s motion, and its adoption meant the defeat of the neutrality motion. Some accounts also state that Smuts took office only on 6 September; most, including official lists of prime ministers, give 5 September.

A divided dominion

The Union of South Africa, created in 1910 from two former British colonies and two Boer republics defeated in the Second Boer War, was by 1939 a fully self-governing dominion. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 had confirmed that the parliament in London could not legislate for the dominions, and South Africa’s Status of the Union Act of 1934 underlined this sovereignty. The common link with Britain remained the king, George VI. In 1914 the Union had entered the war automatically, together with the whole Empire. In 1939 it had to decide for itself.

The country’s white population was divided. The Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers, made up the majority of it, and many of them remembered the Boer War, the burnt farms and the concentration camps in which tens of thousands of Boer women and children had died. White South Africans of British descent felt themselves part of the Empire. The black majority of the population had no say in the matter, as the franchise was in practice reserved for whites.

Since 1934 the country had been governed by the United Party, formed by the merger of Hertzog’s National Party and Smuts’s South African Party. The two former Boer generals, bitter rivals for years, now governed together: Hertzog as prime minister, Smuts as deputy prime minister and minister of justice. To their right stood the “purified” National Party of Daniel F. Malan, which regarded the merger as a betrayal of the Afrikaner cause. The coalition held together only until it had to decide what to do in the event of a war between Britain and Germany.

Hertzog had long held that the dominion should take no part in European wars. During the Sudeten crisis of September 1938 he pushed through the cabinet a formula under which, in the event of war, the Union would remain neutral, albeit in a manner friendly to Britain. Smuts agreed to it, and since the Munich Agreement then averted war, the question remained theoretical. In the months that followed, however, Smuts made it clear in many speeches that his position was changing. The defence minister, Oswald Pirow, who had visited Berlin in the autumn of 1938 and talked with Adolf Hitler, openly admired Nazi Germany.

The cabinet splits

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, parliament in Cape Town happened to have been summoned for a short session on another matter: the extension of the term of the Senate, which was about to expire. On 2 September Hertzog gathered the cabinet at his residence, Groote Schuur. He set out his position that the Union would remain neutral. The government split almost evenly: according to those present, five ministers backed Hertzog, while seven, led by Smuts, came out in favour of entering the war. The next day Britain and France declared war on Germany, and Australia and New Zealand followed within hours. In Pretoria and Cape Town there was still no decision.

Hertzog resolved to settle the dispute in parliament. He was convinced that he had a majority: he counted on his supporters in the United Party and on Malan’s members, who would certainly vote for neutrality.

The vote of 4 September

On 4 September the prime minister laid before the House of Assembly a motion that the Union of South Africa should remain neutral in the war and maintain its existing relations with all the parties to the conflict, while honouring its treaty obligations, including the British navy’s right to the base at Simonstown. In his speech, however, he went further than a defence of neutrality required. He argued that Hitler was not seeking world domination, that Germany’s actions towards Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland stemmed from the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, and that Afrikaners, who had themselves fought for self-determination, ought to understand this. According to many accounts, it was this speech that alienated the wavering members of his own party.

Smuts moved an amendment. Under it the Union was to sever relations with Germany, refuse to adopt a neutral stance and fulfil its obligations towards the British Commonwealth, while taking the steps necessary to defend its own territory and South West Africa, a former German colony that the Union administered under a League of Nations mandate. The amendment stipulated that troops would not be sent overseas, as they had been in the previous war. Smuts argued that the fate of South West Africa, whose return Germany had been demanding for years, and the security of the sea route round the Cape depended on the outcome of the war, and that neutrality towards Hitler would leave the country isolated.

The amendment was carried by 80 votes to 67. Most of the United Party members voted with Smuts, as did the members of the Dominion Party and the Labour Party. A minority of his own party and Malan’s Nationalists went with Hertzog. The prime minister’s motion fell.

The governor-general refuses

Hertzog did not resign at once. He asked the governor-general, Sir Patrick Duncan, to dissolve parliament and call an election in which the voters would decide the question of war. Duncan, the first South African citizen to hold the office and a former minister in Smuts’s government, refused. He judged that the House had just expressed itself clearly, that there was another leader able to form a government with majority support, and that an election campaign over the war would tear the country apart at a time of danger. The decision was in line with constitutional practice, but for years Afrikaner nationalists presented it as proof that in imperial matters the dominion’s fate was decided by the Crown’s men.

On 5 September Hertzog resigned, and Duncan asked Smuts to form a government. The new prime minister relied on the majority of the United Party together with the Dominion Party and the Labour Party. His cabinet also included Afrikaners, but the ministers loyal to Hertzog left with him. Smuts personally took charge of foreign affairs and defence.

The declaration of war

On 6 September 1939 the governor-general issued a proclamation that a state of war existed between the Union of South Africa and the German Reich. The Union was the third dominion, after Australia and New Zealand, to enter the war. Canada did so four days later. Ireland, which formally still belonged to the Commonwealth, declared neutrality and kept to it until the end of the war.

South Africa’s armed forces in 1939 were negligible. The Union Defence Force numbered about 5,300 regular soldiers and fewer than 15,000 trained reservists of the Active Citizen Force, armed and trained for operations in the bush rather than for modern warfare. Smuts began by securing the coasts and the ports along the sea route round the Cape of Good Hope. He also knew that with the country so deeply divided he could not introduce conscription. Service beyond the borders was to be purely voluntary.

Afrikaner resistance

The war broke up the United Party and reunited the Afrikaner nationalist camp. In January 1940 the followers of Hertzog and Malan formed the Reunited National Party (Herenigde Nasionale Party), whose programme openly called for a republic as the only guarantee that the Union would never again be dragged into Britain’s wars. Hertzog soon lost his influence within it, withdrew from politics at the end of 1940, and in 1941 publicly praised National Socialism as a system close to the Afrikaner tradition. He died in November 1942. In 1940 Pirow founded the New Order, a movement openly modelled on Nazism.

The most dangerous opponent of the war proved to be the Ossewabrandwag, the “Ox-Wagon Sentinel”. Founded in Bloemfontein in February 1939 on the wave of the centenary celebrations of the Great Trek, it began as a cultural movement. After the outbreak of war it became a mass organisation, with by various estimates hundreds of thousands of members, hostile to Britain and sympathetic to Germany. Its militant wing, the Stormjaers, carried out sabotage on railway and telegraph lines. Smuts’s government interned thousands of suspects, among them the future prime minister John Vorster, and accepted for front-line service only volunteers who had taken an oath of readiness to fight anywhere in Africa. They wore red tabs on their shoulder straps, a mark of distinction and, in the eyes of the nationalists, a stigma.

Place in the war

Despite these divisions, South Africa’s contribution to the war was far greater than the cautious amendment of 4 September had suggested. In 1940–1941 its divisions fought the Italians in East Africa, and its air force took part in the liberation of Ethiopia. In North Africa the 5th South African Brigade was destroyed at Sidi Rezegh in November 1941, and on 21 June 1942 the 2nd South African Division surrendered at Tobruk, which meant captivity for some 10,000 of its men. South Africans then fought at El Alamein, and the 6th South African Armoured Division went through the Italian campaign. According to the figures usually quoted, more than 330,000 people served as volunteers in the Union’s armed forces, including thousands of black and coloured South Africans, who were, however, admitted only to auxiliary services; some 11,000–12,000 were killed or died.

Smuts became one of Winston Churchill’s closest advisers, was made a British field marshal in 1941, and in 1945 helped draft the United Nations Charter in San Francisco. At home, however, he paid a political price for the war. Afrikaner nationalism, which had lost the vote in September 1939, emerged from the war stronger and united. In 1948 Malan’s National Party won the election and began introducing apartheid, and in 1961 the Republic of South Africa broke with the Crown and left the Commonwealth. The vote of 4 September 1939 was one of Smuts’s greatest victories over that part of the Afrikaner nation which had never come to terms with defeat in the Boer War.