A Man in Disguise?

Jan Christiaan Smuts in Parliament Square

I enjoyed giving my talk, The Smuts Report 1917: a new perspective, at the RAF Museum on 20 May despite there only being a few people there, even fewer of whom responded with questions. Online, there was apparently a good audience but unhappily nobody outside the room came forward with any comments or questions about my thesis. That is a pity, as it is really only through questioning, challenging and debating that we can ever arrive at any ‘truth’ that is worthy of the name.

My reason for selecting that particular topic was that I had taken opportunity since the publication of The British Air Power Delusion 1906-1941 to do a little research into Jan Christiaan Smuts’s life and career, and try to understand what motivated him in the summer of 1917. That is important because it is only if we can get close to what influential people – those men and women who played significant parts at the turning points of history – were thinking at the critical time that we can properly interpret their actions. The report was a critically important document as, for better or worse, it had a decisive impact on British defence policy. There are a few sources of basic information about it available online, their almost universal weakness being that they tend to start from the assumption that Smuts showed remarkable foresight, as none of them go to the trouble of investigating the ‘background noise’: what the press were saying and the public thinking about air power in the summer of 1917. If they had done they couldn’t have failed to notice that his theories about the future of air power could be read in popular newspapers. It would be fair to describe them as commonplace. Possibly the most ‘authoritative’ online source – in the sense of having the highest status – is the Gov.UK blog in the History of Government series, The Birth of the Royal Air Force. While it at least hints that the report and its consequences can be seen as a coup by Lloyd George and Smuts working together, the reasons for their collusion are not touched on. Underlying such complacency is the popular, scarcely examined, proposal that the establishment of the Royal Air Force was a ‘Good Thing’, rather than something approaching a disaster for British defence capabilities, as I have been forced to conclude.

The big mistake that British historians make in attempting to understand Smuts is to give him an army rank. ‘General Smuts’ sounds so much more authoritative, certainly when discussing military matters, than ‘Jan Smuts, BL’. Yet there is no doubt that his main achievements in life belong under the general heading of advocacy. His record as a soldier was scarcely stellar. Although he had a little military experience before 1916 any claim he had to field rank rested on his leadership, and for one year only, of the British Empire’s campaign in East Africa.

After a brief, badly botched, attempt to take control of German East Africa in 1914 the British scarcely bothered with it in 1915. There was good reason for that. All that really mattered was to prevent the small German forces there from making too great a nuisance of themselves. The British and their allies controlled territory to the north, south and west and so had to be on their guard against raids across the borders, but it was only to the north – into Kenya and Uganda – that such raids were likely to be a problem. Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, insisted that an offensive would be too expensive. The only thing that the British had to gain by conquering the German colony was a little prestige; meanwhile the men, weaponry and ammunition that would be needed were badly wanted on the Western Front.

No man understood that better than Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German commander. He knew that he couldn’t really ‘win’ his campaign, all he could do was tie down as much of the allied war effort as possible, for as long as possible. He had only a handful of German soldiers and a few thousand local Askaris but from the outbreak of the war he deployed them skilfully. Over the following months his forces were strengthened by a few others: settlers, officials, sailors from SMS Königsberg and such young African men as he could recruit or coerce. They were under-equipped and supplied, much of their weaponry was antiquated. Nevertheless, by using guerilla tactics, he kept his forces in the field and the British guessing. In London, however, things started to change. By the autumn of 1915 Kitchener was out of favour with his Cabinet colleagues. The politicians were frustrated by the poor progress of British arms in a war that was supposed to have been over by last Christmas, and embarrassed by Gallipoli and the ‘Shells Crisis’. They looked round for somewhere where winning a victory should be relatively easy and cheap. East Africa seemed a likely part of the world.

Rather curiously, Smuts too had his eyes on the region.

At the time he was a minister in Louis Botha’s union government. Both of them had been keen to help the British by conquering German South-West Africa, now Namibia, with South African forces. Botha, a man who was realistically titled ‘General’, commanded the operation himself. By the close of 1914 the campaign had been effectively won, although it wasn’t until July 1915 that the last Germans there surrendered. Neither Botha nor Smuts were greatly interested in Britain’s general war aims, but they saw acceptance of British suzerainty over South Africa as being in the interests of the Boer people. In particular, they hoped that South Africa would be rewarded after the war with additional land in the shape of the German colony. For some that was not enough. Smuts, and men who thought like him, also hoped to use the war to expand South Africa to the east. The difficulty with that was that the territory that they cast covetous eyes over was Portuguese Mozambique, and Portugal was a British ally.

Despite that, Smuts postulated that if South Africa were to provide the men and leadership that were needed to defeat the Germans then the Portuguese could be persuaded to swap the southern portion of Mozambique, including Lourenço Marques, its principal city, for a major piece of the German real estate to the north. So to him, and the politicians in London, there seemed to be another opportunity to bring the interests of the Boers and of the British Empire into alignment. That idea, however, had to be hidden from the public’s gaze until after the South African general election of October 1915, because of the fear that it would help the opposition National Party, led by James Hertzog. Hertzog wanted to split the union and take the Boer provinces out of the British Empire altogether, so to win by legal means the freedom that they had failed to win by fighting a few years earlier. In the event the nationalists came third. Botha, despite losing a fifth of his seats, was able to form a new government with the support of the Unionist Party, whose supporters were mainly British colonists rather than Boers.

The election safely in the bag arrangements could be made for South African forces, more or less all of whom were Boers, to play a major role in East Africa. Initially the C-in-C was to be a British general, Horace Smith-Dorien. Unfortunately he contracted pneumonia on the voyage out and had to be invalided home. Casting around, the War Office asked for Louis Botha, whose experience was at least appropriate. Smuts was a stand-in for him. He was far from being an obvious candidate. His only experience of independent military command had been in the Boer War, when he had led a small force of horsemen in his home region of the Western Cape, striving to whip up an anti-British insurgency while keeping one step ahead of the British Army. Commanding an army with a more formal structure, comprising units with differing roles, and which was necessarily dependent on complex logistics was a fresh challenge for which he was personally ill-prepared. Strong objections to his appointment were raised in Whitehall but there was a powerful lobby within the Cabinet that was exasperated with the soldiers, and who hoped that an ‘inspired amateur’ would make a better fist of the fighting than they had.[1]

When he got to Nairobi he immediately dismissed his Chief of Staff, Reginald Hoskins, and replaced him with a South African, Jack Collyer. Hoskins was familiar with the region and had already started work on building up the army’s infrastructure, slow and painstaking work that Smuts believed could be dispensed with, if he only kept moving and von Lettow-Vorbeck on the run. He told Richard Meinertzhagen, an intelligence officer, that he was determined to avoid frontal battles because he couldn’t risk going back to South Africa ‘with the nickname “Butcher Smuts”’.[2] In broad terms he hoped to defeat a guerilla insurgency with guerilla tactics.

In the event the forces under Smuts’s command, including the South African Boers, did suffer high casualties but as the victims of disease rather than fighting. Supplies to forward units were inadequate and intermittent, medical provision couldn’t keep pace with the men’s needs. Mortality was high and large numbers had to be invalided home. After Smuts returned to South Africa at the close of 1916 Hoskins was appointed in his stead and, as the army’s commander, once again focused on building the logistical train that Smuts hadn’t troubled about during his campaign of manoeuvre. After a brief break at home Smuts went to London early in 1917, as South Africa’s representative at an imperial conference which had been summoned by Lloyd George.

Once there Smuts, a little homesickness aside, was in his true element, He ingratiated himself into the corridors of power. Despite never having actually won a campaign he convinced many senior politicians that he was a talented military leader; Lloyd George even proposed that he should take over command of the empire’s forces in the Middle East. His conditions for accepting the post – that the army in Palestine should receive major reinforcements – couldn’t be agreed so he was found work that was more suited to his talents. Bizarrely, given that he was neither a Briton nor a member of either house of parliament, he was given a seat in the War Cabinet. For Lloyd George the most valuable task he undertook, and much the most significant in view of its long term consequences, was drawing up the paper that was to be used to prise the air services away from the army and navy and create an independent force.

What, meanwhile, of the fighting in East Africa? Smuts had been given large reinforcements but had not used them well. The British and allied effort there was whittled back, although not to the level that Kitchener had advocated. Hoskins, however, was not allowed to remain in command for long, being replaced by another Boer, Jacob van Deventer, who had been a subsidiary commander under Smuts. By then Lloyd George thoroughly distrusted both the War Office and the Admiralty. He was prone to seeking information and ideas from others outside the chain of command, and so it is not unlikely that Smuts influenced that decision too.

With his reduced force van Deventer continued the pursuit of von Lettow-Vorbeck but far more prudently than Smuts had done, slowly grinding down the enemy forces. Nevertheless the Germans remained undefeated. They kept in the field until after the Armistice, making von Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign one of the most successful guerilla operations in history. How and why was he able to stay one step ahead for so long? Quite simply, because his force was so small and so poorly equipped. Unlike the British Empire forces he could manage without a logistical train. His greatest needs were food, draught animals and porterage, the work of labouring people. The first two could be looted from villages as he passed through them, porters coerced rather than paid. In a long, cruel, ‘sideshow’, the greatest price was paid by the indigenous Africans: 365,000 are estimated to have died of starvation.

With their defeat in Europe the Germans lost all their colonies. The British were awarded German East Africa at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. They then settled Belgian claims to a share of the spoils by handing over a small western portion of the territory, and so Ruanda-Urundi was stitched on to the Belgian Congo. The main block in the east became the British colony of Tanganika. In all probability the post-war settlement would have been much the same had Kitchener’s advice been followed throughout the war.  But far less people, especially native Africans, would have lost their lives, the war might have ended a little earlier and – who knows – it is even possible that Britain wouldn’t have memorialised Jan Smuts as a Field Marshal.

[1] Letter. Bonar Law to Asquith, 12 November 1915.

[2] Richard Meinertzhagen: Army Diary 1899-1926, p 166.

I enjoyed giving my talk, The Smuts Report 1917: a new perspective, at the RAF Museum on 20 May despite there only being a few people there, even fewer of whom responded with questions. Online, there was apparently a good audience but unhappily nobody outside the room came forward with any comments or questions about my thesis. That is a pity, as it is really only through questioning, challenging and debating that we can ever arrive at any ‘truth’ that is worthy of the name.

My reason for selecting that particular topic was that I had taken opportunity since the publication of The British Air Power Delusion 1906-1941 to do a little research into Jan Christiaan Smuts’s life and career, and try to understand what motivated him in the summer of 1917. That is important because it is only if we can get close to what influential people – those men and women who played significant parts at the turning points of history – were thinking at the critical time that we can properly interpret their actions. The report was a critically important document as, for better or worse, it had a decisive impact on British defence policy. There are a few sources of basic information about it available online, their almost universal weakness being that they tend to start from the assumption that Smuts showed remarkable foresight, as none of them go to the trouble of investigating the ‘background noise’: what the press were saying and the public thinking about air power in the summer of 1917. If they had done they couldn’t have failed to notice that his theories about the future of air power could be read in popular newspapers. It would be fair to describe them as commonplace. Possibly the most ‘authoritative’ online source – in the sense of having the highest status – is the Gov.UK blog in the History of Government series, The Birth of the Royal Air Force. While it at least hints that the report and its consequences can be seen as a coup by Lloyd George and Smuts working together, the reasons for their collusion are not touched on. Underlying such complacency is the popular, scarcely examined, proposal that the establishment of the Royal Air Force was a ‘Good Thing’, rather than something approaching a disaster for British defence capabilities, as I have been forced to conclude.

The big mistake that British historians make in attempting to understand Smuts is to give him an army rank. ‘General Smuts’ sounds so much more authoritative, certainly when discussing military matters, than ‘Jan Smuts, BL’. Yet there is no doubt that his main achievements in life belong under the general heading of advocacy. His record as a soldier was scarcely stellar. Although he had a little military experience before 1916 any claim he had to field rank rested on his leadership, and for one year only, of the British Empire’s campaign in East Africa.

After a brief, badly botched, attempt to take control of German East Africa in 1914 the British scarcely bothered with it in 1915. There was good reason for that. All that really mattered was to prevent the small German forces there from making too great a nuisance of themselves. The British and their allies controlled territory to the north, south and west and so had to be on their guard against raids across the borders, but it was only to the north – into Kenya and Uganda – that such raids were likely to be a problem. Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, insisted that an offensive would be too expensive. The only thing that the British had to gain by conquering the German colony was a little prestige; meanwhile the men, weaponry and ammunition that would be needed were badly wanted on the Western Front.

No man understood that better than Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German commander. He knew that he couldn’t really ‘win’ his campaign, all he could do was tie down as much of the allied war effort as possible, for as long as possible. He had only a handful of German soldiers and a few thousand local Askaris but from the outbreak of the war he deployed them skilfully. Over the following months his forces were strengthened by a few others: settlers, officials, sailors from SMS Königsberg and such young African men as he could recruit or coerce. They were under-equipped and supplied, much of their weaponry was antiquated. Nevertheless, by using guerilla tactics, he kept his forces in the field and the British guessing. In London, however, things started to change. By the autumn of 1915 Kitchener was out of favour with his Cabinet colleagues. The politicians were frustrated by the poor progress of British arms in a war that was supposed to have been over by last Christmas, and embarrassed by Gallipoli and the ‘Shells Crisis’. They looked round for somewhere where winning a victory should be relatively easy and cheap. East Africa seemed a likely part of the world.

Rather curiously, Smuts too had his eyes on the region.

At the time he was a minister in Louis Botha’s union government. Both of them had been keen to help the British by conquering German South-West Africa, now Namibia, with South African forces. Botha, a man who was realistically titled ‘General’, commanded the operation himself. By the close of 1914 the campaign had been effectively won, although it wasn’t until July 1915 that the last Germans there surrendered. Neither Botha nor Smuts were greatly interested in Britain’s general war aims, but they saw acceptance of British suzerainty over South Africa as being in the interests of the Boer people. In particular, they hoped that South Africa would be rewarded after the war with additional land in the shape of the German colony. For some that was not enough. Smuts, and men who thought like him, also hoped to use the war to expand South Africa to the east. The difficulty with that was that the territory that they cast covetous eyes over was Portuguese Mozambique, and Portugal was a British ally.

Despite that, Smuts postulated that if South Africa were to provide the men and leadership that were needed to defeat the Germans then the Portuguese could be persuaded to swap the southern portion of Mozambique, including Lourenço Marques, its principal city, for a major piece of the German real estate to the north. So to him, and the politicians in London, there seemed to be another opportunity to bring the interests of the Boers and of the British Empire into alignment. That idea, however, had to be hidden from the public’s gaze until after the South African general election of October 1915, because of the fear that it would help the opposition National Party, led by James Hertzog. Hertzog wanted to split the union and take the Boer provinces out of the British Empire altogether, so to win by legal means the freedom that they had failed to win by fighting a few years earlier. In the event the nationalists came third. Botha, despite losing a fifth of his seats, was able to form a new government with the support of the Unionist Party, whose supporters were mainly British colonists rather than Boers.

The election safely in the bag arrangements could be made for South African forces, more or less all of whom were Boers, to play a major role in East Africa. Initially the C-in-C was to be a British general, Horace Smith-Dorien. Unfortunately he contracted pneumonia on the voyage out and had to be invalided home. Casting around, the War Office asked for Louis Botha, whose experience was at least appropriate. Smuts was a stand-in for him. He was far from being an obvious candidate. His only experience of independent military command had been in the Boer War, when he had led a small force of horsemen in his home region of the Western Cape, striving to whip up an anti-British insurgency while keeping one step ahead of the British Army. Commanding an army with a more formal structure, comprising units with differing roles, and which was necessarily dependent on complex logistics was a fresh challenge for which he was personally ill-prepared. Strong objections to his appointment were raised in Whitehall but there was a powerful lobby within the Cabinet that was exasperated with the soldiers, and who hoped that an ‘inspired amateur’ would make a better fist of the fighting than they had.[1]

When he got to Nairobi he immediately dismissed his Chief of Staff, Reginald Hoskins, and replaced him with a South African, Jack Collyer. Hoskins was familiar with the region and had already started work on building up the army’s infrastructure, slow and painstaking work that Smuts believed could be dispensed with, if he only kept moving and von Lettow-Vorbeck on the run. He told Richard Meinertzhagen, an intelligence officer, that he was determined to avoid frontal battles because he couldn’t risk going back to South Africa ‘with the nickname “Butcher Smuts”’.[2] In broad terms he hoped to defeat a guerilla insurgency with guerilla tactics.

In the event the forces under Smuts’s command, including the South African Boers, did suffer high casualties but as the victims of disease rather than fighting. Supplies to forward units were inadequate and intermittent, medical provision couldn’t keep pace with the men’s needs. Mortality was high and large numbers had to be invalided home. After Smuts returned to South Africa at the close of 1916 Hoskins was appointed in his stead and, as the army’s commander, once again focused on building the logistical train that Smuts hadn’t troubled about during his campaign of manoeuvre. After a brief break at home Smuts went to London early in 1917, as South Africa’s representative at an imperial conference which had been summoned by Lloyd George.

Once there Smuts, a little homesickness aside, was in his true element, He ingratiated himself into the corridors of power. Despite never having actually won a campaign he convinced many senior politicians that he was a talented military leader; Lloyd George even proposed that he should take over command of the empire’s forces in the Middle East. His conditions for accepting the post – that the army in Palestine should receive major reinforcements – couldn’t be agreed so he was found work that was more suited to his talents. Bizarrely, given that he was neither a Briton nor a member of either house of parliament, he was given a seat in the War Cabinet. For Lloyd George the most valuable task he undertook, and much the most significant in view of its long term consequences, was drawing up the paper that was to be used to prise the air services away from the army and navy and create an independent force.

What, meanwhile, of the fighting in East Africa? Smuts had been given large reinforcements but had not used them well. The British and allied effort there was whittled back, although not to the level that Kitchener had advocated. Hoskins, however, was not allowed to remain in command for long, being replaced by another Boer, Jacob van Deventer, who had been a subsidiary commander under Smuts. By then Lloyd George thoroughly distrusted both the War Office and the Admiralty. He was prone to seeking information and ideas from others outside the chain of command, and so it is not unlikely that Smuts influenced that decision too.

With his reduced force van Deventer continued the pursuit of von Lettow-Vorbeck but far more prudently than Smuts had done, slowly grinding down the enemy forces. Nevertheless the Germans remained undefeated. They kept in the field until after the Armistice, making von Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign one of the most successful guerilla operations in history. How and why was he able to stay one step ahead for so long? Quite simply, because his force was so small and so poorly equipped. Unlike the British Empire forces he could manage without a logistical train. His greatest needs were food, draught animals and porterage, the work of labouring people. The first two could be looted from villages as he passed through them, porters coerced rather than paid. In a long, cruel, ‘sideshow’, the greatest price was paid by the indigenous Africans: 365,000 are estimated to have died of starvation.

With their defeat in Europe the Germans lost all their colonies. The British were awarded German East Africa at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. They then settled Belgian claims to a share of the spoils by handing over a small western portion of the territory, and so Ruanda-Urundi was stitched on to the Belgian Congo. The main block in the east became the British colony of Tanganika. In all probability the post-war settlement would have been much the same had Kitchener’s advice been followed throughout the war.  But far less people, especially native Africans, would have lost their lives, the war might have ended a little earlier and – who knows – it is even possible that Britain wouldn’t have memorialised Jan Smuts as a Field Marshal.

[1] Letter. Bonar Law to Asquith, 12 November 1915.

[2] Richard Meinertzhagen: Army Diary 1899-1926, p 166.