‘The Road to Infamy’… one to avoid

One will often hear that it took ‘half a million’ British troops to beat the Boers, but I recently read an even more far-fetched and ridiculous claim in a book called ‘The Road to Infamy’, by Owen Coetzer:

It is interesting that Coetzer didn’t feel the need to provide any sort of reference for his ‘900,000’ nonsense – the simple reason being that he didn’t have one, and it is probably just something he heard once at a braai, and it made him feel a bit better about himself.

It is perfectly true to say that 448,435 Imperial (not British) personnel served in the Boer War,^[1] but utterly untrue to suggest that the Empire ever had anything like that number in South Africa at any one time: there was an ongoing cycling of units and personnel. And (despite what Coetzer stated) this number included the 52,414 locally-raised troops, as well as the contingents from Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

It must also be remembered that this 448,435 includes all the police units from Natal, the Bechuanaland Protectorate, the Cape, and Rhodesia; and the 8,511 officers and men of the South African Constabulary which was formed after the conquest of the two republics, and the 8,500 doctors and hospital staff of the British Army Medical Corps who were in theatre in just 1902 alone^[2]. Also included are the thousands of part-timers who served (at one time or another) in the town guards, district mounted troops,^[3] and various other auxiliary units which were raised / disbanded across Southern Africa throughout the war.^[4]

Though Imperial forces in southern Africa peaked at around 230,000 for a brief period,^[5] for the majority of the guerrilla war, Kitchener only ever had 195,000 and 200,000 men^[6] under his command, a figure which included regulars, locally raised militia units, police, and the part-timers of the yeomanry regiments. About a tenth of Kitchener’s army—20,000 men—was unavailable at any given time due to sickness or leave.^[7] Worse still, such was the massive commitment to protecting his lines of communications and garrisoning towns for fear of rebellion that only about 22,000 troops were available for the flying columns and, of these, only 13,000 were in combat units.^[8] Indeed, manpower shortages led to Kitchener having to reduce the garrisons of many blockhouses first from eight to six, and then down to only four men.^[9]

The very suggestion that the British army could field ‘900,000’ men in South Africa ‘at one time’ is simply ridiculous, and causes one to question Coetzer’s intelligence and / or motivations. Though it suits some to pretend that the British Army was some gargantuan Behemoth in 1899, it was actually shrinking at the height of the Imperial period, and tiny when compared to those of continental rivals. The British Empire was not held by military might; in 1870 all British troops had been removed from Canada and Australasia, leaving the defence of these colonies totally in the hands of locally raised forces.^[10] Other than India, the British Army was only expected to provide garrisons in small, strategic spots, usually coaling stations, such as Mauritius, Hong Kong, and Singapore. This reduction of British troops serving overseas from 49,650 to 23,941 prompted an overall reduction in the size of the army.^[11]

The 1893 Army Handbook gives a theoretical figure for the standing British Army of just 227,300 men,^[12] of whom 148,500 were infantrymen and 19,500 cavalrymen.[13] While the Royal Artillery accounted for some of the remainder, many thousands of others were in non-teeth arms: engineers, pioneers, bandsmen, clerks, signalers, balloon companies, railway and transport companies, medical and veterinary units and so forth. 108,000 soldiers were based in the United Kingdom, 68,000 in India and the rest were scattered across the Empire in garrisons, the largest of which were in Malta (7,500) and Gibraltar (5,000).^[14]

Unfortunately Coetzer is not alone in simply making up numbers to suit his agenda. An earlier work of myth-building, Breytenbach’s apartheid-regime-approved, pro-Kruger rubbish, also peddled propaganda by ludicrously claiming that the British had 1,053,865 soldiers under arms (a large majority of whom would be ‘available for service in South Africa’, apparently)^[15] and that this enormous number did not even include those in Uganda, British East Africa, British Central Africa, and Somaliland. All very damning at first glance, until one realizes that what Breytenbach did was to take a list of every single man who might have at one time worn any sort of uniform across the British Empire, and then claim that these were ‘available for service in South Africa’.

Rather surprisingly—given that he was supposedly an (ahem) esteemed academic whose opinions are so willingly gobbled up by useful idiots like Pakenham et al—what Breytenbach neglected to tell his readers is that the list he worked from contained not only the entire British Army including reserves, militia, and yeomanry, but also such things as the entire Indian army and reserves, the army of the Princely State of Hyderabad, the Canadian navy and police, the New South Wales navy and police, every member of the rifle clubs in Queensland and South Australia, the cadet force in Tasmania, volunteer militia men in the Falkland Islands and St. Helena, and the entire police forces of the West Indies, Fiji, West Africa, Cyprus, and Malaya.^[16] This is the sort of fantastical nonsense which is still regurgitated to try and explain away the republican defeat. Indeed, the only surprise is that Breytenbach forgot to include the elite stormtroopers of the Salvation Army or the trained killers of the Boys Brigade in his lunatic computations.

Moving on from these bizarre rantings and back to reality, the 71 infantry battalions that the British Army retained in the motherland were theoretically kept at 80 per cent of fighting strength (801 all ranks), meaning they would have had to be filled out with reserves before any deployment.^[17] In practice, this was not as simple as it sounds. During a War Office exercise into the deployment of the UK-based forces abroad, it was found that (without having to weaken the colonial garrisons) an average of 180 men would need to be brought up to full strength for each of 18 battalions, another 18 would each need around 300 men, while the other 35 would each need about 480 men apiece.^[18] In 1899 the rest of the British Army was scattered about the world in penny packets, geared toward fighting small, colonial police actions rather than large conventional battles. It was by no means ready to deploy hundreds of thousands of men to South Africa, or anywhere else, especially with a global empire to worry about.^[19]

When tensions rose through the 1890s, a report by British army intelligence stated that, in the event of war with the Boer republics, the Empire would need to deploy a force of 200,000 men to secure victory in South Africa.^[20] To put this enormous number into perspective, on 10 September 1899, just one month before the Boer attack, there were only 9,940 regulars^[21] scattered across South Africa. If—as it is currently fashionable to claim—the British were planning some sort of invasion of the Boer republics, they were doing so with less than five per cent of the troops that their own planners said they needed.

As late as 4 February 1900, almost four months after the Boer invasions, Imperial strength in theatre was still nowhere near this figure and, indeed, was only marginally greater than the total Boer forces available: ‘the effective strength of fighting men in Cape Colony, exclusive of the seven militia battalions and the garrisons of Mafeking and Kimberley, was 51,900’. In Natal, it was ‘34,830, of whom 9,780 were in Ladysmith’.^[22] One should note that this was immediately prior to the period in which Roberts smashed the Boer armies on the Western Front relieving Kimberley, and Buller broke through in Natal, relieved Ladysmith and chased Botha’s men out of the colony.

And if Coetzer’s claim that ‘at one time there were more than 900,000 British troops in the country’ is laughable, Christ alone knows where he got his (equally self-serving) figure of there only being 5,000 Boers from. In reality, 20,779 bittereinders turned themselves in at the surrender in May 1902,^[23] and at least 87,365 Boers / mercenaries / traitors were confirmed to have fought for the republics at some point in the war[24] – though this number does not include the tens of thousands of black Africans who were forced to support the Boers. And, of course, we will never know how many Boers simply slipped through the cracks and returned to normal life without surrendering, but we can be sure that these 87,365 confirmed republicans did not ‘switch out’ with other contingents after a tour of duty. They might have decided to give up the fight, lain low for a while, or been shot or captured, but they didn’t get swapped out in the way Imperial units did.

Claiming that the British Army fielded an army ‘nearly half a million strong’ in South Africa is cunningly done to artificially inflate the Imperial total. It is a claim every bit as inaccurate as saying that Britain fielded an army of 140,000 men in Afghanistan in the modern era—that number ended up serving there over the course of the conflict,^[25] but there were only ever 10,000 to 12,000 Brits in the theatre at the same time. Similarly, though some 60,000 Australians served in the Vietnam War, their peak commitment was just 7,672: no one would ever be stupid enough to claim that Australia fielded ‘a 60,000-strong army in Vietnam’.

But pretending that ‘at one time, there were more than 900,000 British troops in the country’ is sheer, unfettered stupidity.

So how did Coetzer’s God-awful book ever get published? And given how upset Prof Pretorius got over a spelling mistake in ‘Kruger, Kommandos and Kak’, why didn’t he or his sycophantic hangers-on leap into action, and declare that Coetzer’s work is complete nonsense? Why is it that the Defenders of the Myth are happy to turn a blind eye to any rubbish that their minions spew out, as long as it is anti-British, and as long as it keeps their much-cherished, Apartheid-era version of the war alive a little longer?

NOTES:

[1] Maurice, The History of the War in South Africa, 1899–1902, Vol.4, p.674

[2] Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Boer War, p.263

[3] These units were formed in some 125 locations. By mid-1901 around 6,000 South Africans were serving in the town guards and district mounted troops of the Cape Colony. These part-timers were called upon as needed to defend their settlements from raiding bittereinders. They served in khaki, were issued Lee-Enfields, and, if killed in action, were buried with full military honours

[4] WO126/145 to WO126/163

[5] Warner, Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend, p.123

[6] Ibid, p.131

[7] Lee, To the Bitter End, p.137

[8] Carver, p.202

[9] Hamilton, The Happy Warrior, p. 187

[10] The Army Handbook of the British Empire, 1893, p.9

[11] Ibid, p.57

[12] Ibid, p.15

[13] If reserves and militia were called out the British Army could be expanded to 337,300 all ranks. 52 battalions (1,032 men per battalion) were stationed in India, thirteen in the Mediterranean and tropics, and five in Egypt. This larger figure should be compared to the three-million-strong army that Germany could mobilize, France’s four million, and the mind-boggling ten million which could readily be fielded by the Russian army

[14] Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Boer War, p.13

[15] Breytenbach, Geskiedenis van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog 1899–1902, Vol.1, ch.1

[16] Maurice, Vol.1, p.89–95

[17] The Army Handbook of the British Empire, 1893, p.104

[18] Ibid, p.110

[19] Symons, Buller’s Campaign, p.105

[20] Gardner, Mafeking: A Victorian Legend, p.48

[21] Hall, The Hall Handbook of the Anglo Boer War: 1899-1902, p.79

[22] Carver, p.54

[23] Maurice, Vol. 4, p.705

[24] Carver, p.54

[25] In response to a FOI request, the MOD confirmed that, as of 28 February 2014, 140,350 British personnel had served in Afghanistan since 2001. Over the same period, 141,640 had served in Iraq. Obviously, these combined totals would be more than three times the size of the British army in 2014