Litnet

Oor die Kakies wat lag
’n Handjie van ons teen ’n hele groot mag
En die kranse lê hier teen ons rug
Hulle dink dis verby
– “De la Rey”, Bok van Blerk

En hoog in die rande,
versprei in die brande,
is die grassaad aan roere
soos winkende hande.
– “Winternag”, Eugene Marais

Per Ardua ad Astra (Through hardship to the stars)

– Motto of the Royal and South African Air Forces

Soldiers in a trench at Mafikeng during the Boer War (Skeoch Cumming W, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This image was created and released by the Imperial War Museum on the IWM Non Commercial Licence.)

The legendary Boer War hero, Koos de la Rey, was a kind of Volodymyr Zelensky of his day – a “bittereinder” tactical genius (he introduced trench warfare to South Africa) who refused to surrender to Lord Roberts after the capture of Pretoria, and tormented the British imperial army to the “bitter end”. But was this son of the veld, with his long beard and steely resolution, who campaigned in the company of the prophet “Siener” van Rensburg, also inadvertently responsible for changing the course of world history through an odd accident of fate?

A curious question, you might think, but it is a Koestlerian “roots of coincidence” moment, nonetheless, evidence of which can be found in the unlikely setting of Caernarfon Castle in North Wales, where I live. The castle’s military museum contains a brief account of the death of 19-year-old 2nd Lt John Roger Williams-Ellis of the 1st Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, killed in an ambush at Dwarsvlei in the western Transvaal on 9 October 1900 – another unfortunate casualty, among many, of General De la Rey’s astute soldiering tactics.

The Williams-Ellises are one of the great Anglo-Welsh families who have been a presence for centuries in this part of Wales, in the shadow of the high range of Snowdon. So, the young lieutenant’s death was big news on his home turf. But possibly even more significant from a historical point of view, as it turned out in the long run, was a hitherto undistinguished 31-year-old British Army officer who fell alongside him, trapped in the same ambush, shot through the lung and spine at more or less point blank range – Captain Hugh Trenchard. He was destined miraculously to survive his wounds, and become the eventual driving force behind the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. The Royal Flying Corps provided the template on which the Royal Air Force, the South African Air Force, the Australian Air Force and the Canadian Air Force were inspired. Trenchard, a man of steely resolution and extraordinary organisational talent, was one of those individuals who confound the view that single personalities don’t make history. For it was Trenchard, as the “father” of the Royal Air Force, who also devised and promoted the philosophy behind the hugely controversial “carpet bombing” campaigns over Nazi Germany, which killed 600 000 men, women and children in a bid to destroy German civilian morale and end the war.

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How events happened to propel Trenchard into this position of enormous influence is an unusual tale, and it all, very oddly, began with Koos de la Rey, probably South Africa’s most stubborn Boer general.

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How events happened to propel Trenchard into this position of enormous influence is an unusual tale, and it all, very oddly, began with Koos de la Rey, probably South Africa’s most stubborn Boer general.

In May and June 1900, the British Army occupied Johannesburg and Pretoria, and most observers concluded that the Boer War must be over. However, Koos de la Rey, Louis Botha and a few of the other Boer commanders refused to surrender. They laid down a new strategy of guerrilla warfare. The tactics included living off the land and keeping on the move. The western Transvaal (as it was then) fell to De la Rey, who demonstrated lethal battle talents, and as late as February 1902 had acquired a stockpile of captured ammunition and supplies sufficient to reinvigorate the Boer forces and keep them in the field for years to come.

De la Rey and his several thousand strong Boer commando were never captured. He was a regular Scarlet Pimpernel, and the British paid him the compliment of regarding him as their most dangerous adversary.

Occupying the Magaliesberg mountain range after the fall of Pretoria, De la Rey detected a tactical weakness on the part of the British occupying the area, and seized his moment, luring the imperial army into an ambush. A farmhouse at Dwarsvlei, some 70 kilometres from Krugersdorp, was discreetly occupied by Boer guerrillas under the command of Sarel Oosthuizen – De la Rey’s deputy. The battle is well documented. Captain Trenchard and Lt Williams-Ellis were gunned down as they approached the farmhouse. The medics considered both men beyond help, and they were set to one side in a field hospital tent. Although their assessment in respect of Lt Williams-Ellis was correct, they were wrong in the case of Captain Trenchard, who, though severely wounded, pulled through, seemingly through willpower and character alone – traits for which he was eventually to become famous.

Trenchard was sent back to England, paralysed from the waist down. A Swiss sanatorium at St Moritz beckoned as the only solution to his damaged lungs, and it was while he was recovering that the doctors suggested he try some exercise in the new sport of bobsleighing. His legs were strapped down on a sledge, and Trenchard whizzed along the Cresta Run. A few days later, he had a bad crash at very high speed, and his spine self-corrected in the accident. Doctors were stupefied as Trenchard rose, Lazarus-like without help, from a crash that would have killed most people. A couple of days later, he was winning bobsleigh trophies in competition.

An application to rejoin his old army unit on frontline duty in South Africa was initially refused on grounds of physical disability, and it looked as if his soldiering career had come to an end. Nothing daunted, Trenchard took up tennis with the help of a coach, and within a few months was able to reach the semi-finals in a local tournament. The army medics were persuaded they may have been wrong, and returned him to South Africa, where he once again took part in manoeuvres under Lord Kitchener, who was still pursuing his deadly policy of attrition warfare. But Trenchard’s damaged lung continued to be a problem, and it was soon clear to everyone that an active campaigning military career on horseback looked to be at an end for him.

After South Africa, a field mapping stint in Nigeria and a desk job in Dublin at the Castle, Trenchard was approaching his 40th birthday with misgivings. Dwarsvlei had put an end to his soldiering, the army had little further use for him, and no job was on the table. The bread queue beckoned. A friend suggested he try his hand at a newly established army flying school which had acquired a few of the newfangled invention of aeroplanes. If he got his “wings” and flying licence before he turned 40 (the cut-off age), that might just possibly open up new prospects. Trenchard met the deadline, taking a mere ten days to learn to fly, signed his own pilot’s licence, sewed on his own wings and then proceeded to demonstrate an extraordinary unsuspected organisational talent of leadership, turning the “Royal Flying Corps”, as it became known, into the Royal Air Force by the end of the First World War, by which time he had refined the art of bombing from the air altogether.

Appointed head of the RAF in the period between the First and Second World Wars, he gradually built it up into an independent branch of the British defence forces, with modern planes, including the famous Spitfire. His colleagues regarded him with extraordinary reverence. Lord Trenchard, as he was to become, was an enormous, lanky figure with a racing brain, very forceful and utterly contemptuous of ideas that were not his own. He encouraged the development of the first British bombers as opposed to the fighters; the bombers were established as a separate branch within the RAF to repay the Germans for having bombed Britain during the First World War. Trenchard became known as the foremost advocate of using bombers to smash the enemy into submission on their own territory. He encouraged fellow fliers like Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who eventually was to head up the RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War, to develop area bombing techniques where civilian and industrial targets would comprise the objectives of total war. One wonders to what degree Trenchard may have been influenced by his earlier commander, Lord Kitchener, in the merits of scorched earth attrition warfare.

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As a strategic article of faith in the new RAF, Lord Trenchard believed the moral effect of bombing stood to the material effect in a proportion of 20 to one.

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As a strategic article of faith in the new RAF, Lord Trenchard believed the moral effect of bombing stood to the material effect in a proportion of 20 to one. The objective must be to destroy enemy morale, and the best way of achieving this was to destroy the workers in factories and the houses they lived in, as well as their cities and towns.

Strategic bombing was therefore a defence founded on aggression. Britain had no desire to invade anyone, but if attacked then long-range bombing campaigns could, in the case of Germany, destroy Germany’s war industry, demoralise its population and prepare the ground for the army to finish the job. This was the essence of strategic bombing, and the chief justification for the existence of the RAF was its ability to wage a strategic bombing campaign.

There is a vast literature on the subject of Bomber Command, in both its British and its American incarnations. From our point of view, what is important is the influence of Lord Trenchard. The Americans had worked with Trenchard from the earliest days of the First World War and later as the American Air Force itself developed. However, a doctrinal difference of opinion set in: the Americans preferred to develop precision bombing techniques and they flew only by day, whereas the British, who knew from experience that their bombers were at great risk of being shot down by day, geared their campaign against Germany to night bombing.

Winston Churchill, who was instinctively against carpet-bombing civilian targets, nonetheless found himself with little option but to support the RAF approach – into which years of training had been invested – when he and Roosevelt met in Casablanca in 1942 to coordinate their respective bombing campaigns. The Americans had three expensive projects under way at the time: the B-29 high altitude bomber, the atomic bomb Manhattan Project and, finally, the Norden bombsight, which allowed high altitude precision bombing.

The Americans and the British agreed to disagree somewhat on area bombing. Eventually, however, under actual flying conditions of war, the first proper test of the Norden bombsight – to destroy a centre of German ball bearing production – failed to produce the result. Although precision bombing remained an objective of the US Air Force thereafter, both RAF and US Bomber Commands frequently ended up working together to destroy German cities and towns – Dresden being a notorious example. By war’s end, the RAF had dropped just shy of a million tons of bombs and the Americans not much fewer. Some 70 German cities and towns were reduced to rubble, and the refugee wave augmented the sense of collapse.

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But was the actual aim of demoralising the German population ever achieved? Was Germany defeated as a result of it?

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But was the actual aim of demoralising the German population ever achieved? Was Germany defeated as a result of it? It is a debate which rages on to this day. Trenchard never doubted for a moment that it was the right policy.

After the war, British public opinion turned against Bomber Command, as the human consequences of the nightly thousand-bomber raids over Germany became more apparent. Churchill sensed which way the wind was blowing and tried to distance himself from the policy. Despite the heroism of the aircrews – the RAF alone lost some 55 000 aircrew – the bombing campaign was partially airbrushed from memory, whereas Fighter Command and the Battle of Britain pilots became the heroes. A monument to Bomber Command was erected in London only relatively recently.

I do sometimes wonder, if fate and General De la Rey’s commando had not intervened at Dwarsvlei all those years ago, whether Hugh Trenchard might not simply have gone down a different path, either being killed or carrying on with the uncomplicated path of an army officer, never becoming head of the RAF and never deploying his formidable force of character to promote area bombing. As a tactic of war, it would not have been a given. In fact, on several occasions in the 1920s at various disarmament conferences, Britain, together with a number of other countries, supported outlawing bombers altogether. There was already a sense of revulsion in Britain at the horrors of Guernica as a vivid recent example of the awful results of aerial warfare, and not everyone in Churchill’s cabinet agreed with the policy as a means to destroying civilian morale. But Trenchard’s views carried the day, at least in those days.

Today, we know that advocates of precision bombing from great heights, from unseen and unheard aircraft, have won the argument. Technology has made pinpoint bombing not only possible but usual – not only by planes, but also with missiles and drones, etc. We are unlikely ever again to see the kind of thousand-bomber raids of 1943. But isn’t it strange that even in today’s technological world, the goal is still to defeat the civilian morale of the enemy in order to force them to the negotiating table? Today, however, the tactic is more to cut off power and water than mass murder – or at least we must hope so.

Notes

I am indebted for political, technical and biographical aspects of this article to these two works – both excellently researched: Bomber boys by Patrick Bishop, Harper Perennial, 2007; and The bomber mafia by Malcolm Gladwell, Allen Lane, 2021.

References to General De la Rey are numerous in Boer War literature. For the purposes of this article, I would like to acknowledge with thanks extracts from the private papers of Jonathan Williams-Ellis in respect of his late relative, 2nd Lt Williams-Ellis of the 1st Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers.