On this day in 1900… Battle of Diamond Hill
By early June 1900, Lord Roberts’ forces had captured Pretoria and, for a brief moment, an end to the Boer War seemed likely. At the head of around 30,000 troops, Roberts had resumed his advance from Bloemfontein on the 2nd of May, capturing Kroonstad (the newly declared capital of the Free State) on the 12th.
The Noise Before Defeat
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat Sun Tzu Though today trumpeted as ‘Great Generals’ by the likes of Pakenham, the Boer commanders embarked on a war of conquest against the pre-eminent power of the age, and suffered a defeat which was as inevitable as
“A United Kingdom”
The propaganda offensive against the record of the British Empire in Southern Africa makes strange bed fellows of the extreme Right of Afrikanerdom and the extreme Left in Britain; two groups of highly deluded people who have nothing in common, except a determination to pretend that Great Britain is responsible for every ill imaginable. I
Playing the Victim
I have lost count of how many times I have been informed by South Africans that their grandparents were ‘murdered’ in the concentration camps. There seems to be a widespread and bizarre desperation to bask in the warm glow of victimhood by claiming close personal connections to the camps – even if such claims utterly