Some years ago, I answered a question on Quora, ‘Why were the Boer Wars so brutal?’
My answer was:
Brutal compared to what, though? If you mean brutal compared to other guerrilla wars throughout the rest of the 20th Century, then the 1899–1902 Boer War cannot reasonably have been thought to be. If you study the Philippine-American War (which was fought almost concurrently with the Boer War), for example, you would see that was fought in a much more brutal fashion: towns giving support to insurgent forces could be destroyed and ‘…the population [of one area which was an insurgent stronghold] was forced into zones of concentration around the major towns and anything left outside was considered fair game. American units burned villages, killed animals, and destroyed crops … one officer who took part in the campaign, recalled, ‘We did not take any prisoners. We shot everybody on sight.’’
And this was by no means the occasional excess: Major Littleton Waller of the US Marines received the following orders from his general:
‘I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.’
When Waller questioned what the lower age limit was on the killing, he was told ‘ten years of age’. After an insurgent attack on American forces at Balangiga in the Philippines had left forty-eight US troops dead, ‘the town of Balangiga was razed to the ground, such that nothing there remains to this day but the bare walls of the church used to conceal the ambushers’. One American officer had cages measuring fifteen by 30 feet and six feet high constructed from railway tracks, and crammed up to fifty prisoners in them for months at a time. He proudly posed in front of his cages for a press photographer, and cheerfully answered questions about the death rates they caused.
An American soldier wrote home to tell his family:
‘The town of Titatia [sic] was surrendered to us a few days ago, and two companies occupy the same. Last night one of our boys was found shot and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight; which was done to a finish. About 1,000 men, women and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger.’
There were certainly very unpleasant incidents in the Boer War – as in every war that has ever been fought – but I do not see that it was an especially brutal conflict when considered rationally and compared to equivalent guerrilla / counter-insurgency wars. Though the Boers fought out of uniform and adopted a very ‘cavalier’ attitude to the use of the White Flag, the standard rules of war were adhered to in the main.
Boer forces did indulge in mass killings of blacks (eg at Modderfontein, where Boers under Smuts murdered 200 black civilians) and treated captured non-white scouts and gallopers terribly, but this cannot be considered especially unusual in guerrilla warfare. Compare this, for example, to the French occupation of Spain in the Napoleonic Wars, the German occupation of Yugoslavia and parts of the Soviet Union in WW2, or the Cold War conflicts fought in Algeria, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Similarly, the fact that a measles epidemic rampaged through Southern Africa at the time of the war should not be construed (as the later Apartheid Government desperately tried) as proof of a dastardly British plan to exterminate the Boers. It is well worth noting that twice as many Imperial troops died of disease than from enemy action.
Indeed, far from modern day perceptions of Imperial brutality in the Boer War, an American military observer was even moved to remark:
The British have been too merciful, and I believe, had a more rigorous course been adopted when the army first entered this capital and the enemy been thoroughly stampeded, the war would have been materially shortened.
– Captain Slocum, American military attaché, writing from Bloemfontein
Few would argue that Kitchener’s scorched-earth campaign was something to be proud of, but it was a necessary evil of war (as was the infinitely more ‘brutal’ Allied carpet bombing campaign in WW2, for example) and one forced upon the Imperial forces by republican tactics. One should always remember that, seeking to intimidate and punish ‘hands-uppers’ and loyalists, the Boers burned plenty of farms too; it was General Louis Botha who rejected Kitchener’s proposal to declare all farms off-limits. A viable alternative of how else Kitchener could have won the war is yet to be suggested; indeed, if anything, and just like Captain Slocum, a common theme in diaries and letters is the feeling that the British were too lenient in their dealings with the diehards.
As Professor Michael Howard observed in 1971,
‘seventy years’ further experience of insurgency and counter-insurgency in warfare may lead us to wonder, not that Lord Kitchener’s pacification campaign took so long and involved some incidental brutalities, but that it did not take still longer and involve yet more’.
Eight years after I posted this, one more my more entertaining Quora stalkers popped up and – judging by his spelling mistakes, fortified by a few Klippies and Cokes – decided it was once again time to humiliate himself:
Only a fellow like Henro would scream about the invalidity of ‘Scondary’ sources… and then use a secondary source (Haig was not present) to try to make his point about what ‘really’ happened at Modderfontein. But what is really entertaining is that Henro was – of course – squealing and squawking about events that happened at a completely different Modderfontein, as I pointed out to him:
As always with these wide-eyed fellows, historical reality is completely irrelevant to them – and, in this case, geography is too. All they are interested in is frantically keeping their myths alive, and pretending that the Boers were innocent victims, who wouldn’t harm a fly.
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