Jan Smuts – 1942 – 1948

Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, OM, CH, PC, ED, KC, FRS (May 24, 1870 – September 11, 1950) was a prominent South African and British Commonwealth statesman, military leader, and philosopher.

In addition to various cabinet appointments, he served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948. He served in the First World War and as a British Field Marshal in the Second World War.

Smuts led commandos in the Second Anglo Boer War for the Transvaal.

During the First World War, he led the armies of South Africa against Germany, capturing German South-West Africa and commanding the British Army in East Africa.

From 1917 to 1919, he was also one of five members of the British War Cabinet, helping to create the Royal Air Force.

He became a Field Marshal in the British Army in 1941, and served in the Imperial War Cabinet under Winston Churchill.

He was the only person to sign the peace treaties ending both the First and Second World Wars. His advice not to inflict heavy reparations on Germany was prudent but did not carry the day.

Smuts was instrumental in creating both the League of Nations and the United Nations, writing the preamble to its charter.

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He was the only person to sign the charters of both the League of Nations and the UN.

He sought to redefine the relationship between the United Kingdom and her colonies, by establishing the British Commonwealth, as it was known at the time.

However, in 1946 the Smuts government was strongly condemned by a large majority in the United Nations Assembly for its discriminatory racial policies.

For most of his life, Smuts supported racial segregation and separate development but from 1948 advocated liberalization of South Africa’s race law, although very soon the new National Party government would formalize apartheid.

He was a warrior and a peace-maker. He wanted harmony not hostility between people. He truly believed that humanity could relegate war to history and resolve differences without recourse to violence. As a soldier, he had first-hand experience of the horror of war.

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Climbing the ladder

Smuts began to practice law in Cape Town, but his abrasive nature made him few friends. Finding little financial success in the law, he began to divert more and more of his time to politics and journalism, writing for the Cape Times.

Smuts was intrigued by the prospect of a united South Africa, and joined the Afrikaner Bond.

By good fortune, Smuts’ father knew the leader of the group, Jan Hofmeyr; Hofmeyr recommended Jan to Cecil Rhodes, who owned the De Beers mining company.

In 1895, Rhodes hired Smuts as his personal legal advisor, a role that found the youngster much criticized by the hostile Afrikaans press. Regardless, Smuts trusted Rhodes implicitly.

When Rhodes launched the Jameson Raid, in the summer of 1895-1896, Smuts was outraged. Betrayed by his employer, friend, and political ally, he resigned from De Beers, and disappeared from public life.

Seeing no future for him in Cape Town, he decided to move to Johannesburg in August 1896. However, he was disgusted by what appeared to be a gin-soaked mining camp, and his new law practice could attract little business in such an environment. Smuts sought refuge in the capital of the South African Republic, Pretoria.

Through 1896, Smuts’ politics were turned on their head. He was transformed from being Rhodes’ most ardent supporter to being the most fervent opponent of British expansion.

Through late 1896 and 1897, Smuts toured South Africa, furiously condemning the United Kingdom, Rhodes, and anyone opposed to the Transvaal President, the autocratic Paul Kruger.

In April 1897, he married Isie Krige of Cape Town. Professor J.I. Marais, Smuts’ benefactor at Cambridge, presided over the ceremony. Twins were born to the pair in March 1898, but unfortunately survived only a few weeks.

Kruger was opposed by many liberal elements in South Africa, and, when, in June 1898, Kruger fired the Transvaal Chief Justice, his long-term political rival John Gilbert Kotzé, most lawyers were up in arms. Recognizing the opportunity, Smuts wrote a legal thesis in support of Kruger, who rewarded Smuts as State Attorney. In this capacity, he tore into the establishment, firing those he deemed to be illiberal, old-fashioned, or corrupt. His efforts to rejuvenate the republic polarized Afrikaners.

After the Jameson Raid, relations between the British and the Afrikaners had deteriorated steadily. By 1898, war seemed imminent. Orange Free State President Martinus Steyn called for a peace conference at Bloemfontein to settle each side’s grievances. With an intimate knowledge of the British, Smuts took control of the Transvaal delegation. Sir Alfred Milner, head of the British delegation, took exception to his dominance, and conflict between the two led to the collapse of the conference, consigning South Africa to war.

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The Anlglo Boer War

On October 11, 1899, the Boer republics invaded the British South African colonies, beginning the Second Boer War. In the early stages of the conflict, Smuts served as Kruger’s eyes and ears, handling propaganda, logistics, communication with generals and diplomats, and anything else that was required.

In the second phase of the war, Smuts served under Koos de la Rey, who commanded 500 commandos in the Western Transvaal. Smuts excelled at hit-and-run warfare, and the unit evaded and harassed a British army forty times its size. President Kruger and the deputation in Europe thought that there was good hope for their cause in the Cape Colony. They decided to send General de la Rey there to assume supreme command, but then decided to act more cautiously when they realized that General de la Rey could hardly be spared in the Western Transvaal.

Consequently, Smuts left with a small force of 300 men while another 100 men followed him. By this point in the war, the British scorched earth policy left little grazing land. One hundred of the cavalry that had joined Smuts were therefore too weak to continue and so Smuts had to leave these men with General Kritzinger.

With few exceptions, Smuts met all the commandos in the Cape Colony and found between 1,400–1,500 men under arms, and not the 3,000 men as had been reported. By the time of the peace Conference in May 1902 there were 3,300 men operating in the Cape Colony.

Although the people were enthusiastic for a general rising, there was a great shortage of horses (the Boers were an entirely mounted force) as they had been taken by the British. There was an absence of grass and wheat, which meant that he was forced to refuse nine tenths of those who were willing to join. The Boer forces raided supply lines and farms, spread Afrikaner propaganda, and intimidated those that opposed them, but they never succeeded in causing a revolt against the government. This raid was to prove one of the most influential military adventures of the twentieth century and had a direct influence on the creation of the British Commandos and all the other special forces which followed. With these practical developments came the development of the military doctrines of deep penetration raids, asymmetric warfare and, more recently, elements of fourth generation warfare.

To end the conflict, Smuts sought to take a major target, the copper-mining town of Okiep. With a full assault impossible, Smuts packed a train full of explosives, and tried to push it downhill, into the town, where it would bring the enemy garrison to its knees. Although this failed, Smuts had proven his point: that he would stop at nothing to defeat his enemies. Combined with their failure to pacify the Transvaal, Smuts’ success left the United Kingdom with no choice but to offer a ceasefire and a peace conference, to be held at Vereeniging.

Just before the conference, Smuts met Lord Kitchener at Kroonstad station, where they discussed the proposed terms of surrender. Smuts then took a leading role in the negotiations between the representatives from all of the commandos from the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (May 15-31, 1902). Although he admitted that, from a purely military perspective, the war could continue, he stressed the importance of not sacrificing the Afrikaner people for that independence.

He was very conscious that ‘more than 20,000 women and children have already died in the Concentration Camps of the enemy’. He felt it would have been a crime to continue the war without the assurance of help from elsewhere and declared, “Comrades, we decided to stand to the bitter end. Let us now, like men, admit that that end has come for us, come in a more bitter shape than we ever thought.”

His opinions were representative of the conference, which then voted by 54 to 6 in favor of peace. Representatives of the Governments met Lord Kitchener and at five minutes past eleven on May 31, 1902, Acting President Burger signed the Peace Treaty, followed by the members of his Government, Acting President de Wet and the members of his Government.

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(BROEDERBOND)   (AFRIKANERBOND – FRONTIERS)

The Union of South Africa was born, and the Afrikaners held the key to political power, for they formed the largest part of the electorate. Although Botha was appointed Prime Minister of the new country, Smuts was given three key ministries: those for the Interior, the Mines, and Defense.

Undeniably, Smuts was the second most powerful man in South Africa. To solidify their dominance of South African politics, the Afrikaners united to form the South African Party, a new pan-South African Afrikaner party.

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The harmony and cooperation soon ended. Smuts was criticized for his over-arching powers, and was reshuffled, losing his positions in charge of Defense and the Mines, but gaining control of the Treasury. This was still too much for Smuts’ opponents, who decried his possession of both Defense and Finance: two departments that were usually at loggerheads.

At the 1913 South African Party conference, the Old Boers, of Hertzog, Steyn, and De Wet, called for Botha and Smuts to step down. The two narrowly survived a conference vote, and the troublesome triumvirate stormed out, leaving the party for good.

With the schism in internal party politics came a new threat to the mines that brought South Africa its wealth. A small-scale miners’ dispute flared into a full-blown strike, and rioting broke out in Johannesburg after Smuts intervened heavy-handedly.

After police shot dead 21 strikers, Smuts and Botha headed unaccompanied to Johannesburg to personally resolve the situation. They did, facing down threats to their own lives, and successfully negotiating a cease-fire.

The cease-fire did not hold, and, in 1914, a railway strike turned into a general strike, and threats of a revolution caused Smuts to declare martial law. Smuts acted ruthlessly, deporting union leaders without trial and using Parliament to retrospectively absolve him or the government of any blame. This was too much for the Old Boers, who set up their own party, the National Party, to fight the all-powerful Botha-Smuts partnership.

The Old Boers urged Smuts’ opponents to arm themselves, and civil war seemed inevitable before the end of 1914. In October 1914, when the Government was faced with open rebellion by Lt Col Manie Maritz and others in the Maritz Rebellion, Government forces under the command of Botha and Smuts were able to put down the rebellion without it ever seriously threatening to ignite into a Third Boer War.

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Jan Smuts : Blue on Blue incident Germany