Episode 101 - De Wet’s son shot by English special forces & Jan Smuts rides into view

The Anglo-Boer War

This week we hear about the Dandy Fifth and Deneys Reitz. It’s also time to ride with General Christiaan de Wet as he sums up the Blockhouses. Reitz has fallen in with “this little band” as he calls them - and most would die tragically. There were Dandy fifth were actually nine in number and led by Jack Borrius who was a short thick-set man of 28 from Potchefstroom. We must stand back and take a look at what was happening across the battlefields at this time. For most of South Africa the winter period was a time of stagnation but significant developments were taking place. Remember how General Jan Smuts was already riding south towards the Cape Colony border and was planning an invasion with a crack squad of Boers. His plan was simple. Destabilise the colony and convince the Cape Afrikaners to rise up and join the two Boer states of the Transvaal and the Free State in their long war against the British. In the Free State, while drives, columns and patrols continued across the desolate plains, a lightning raid on General Hertzog’s commando laagered in the South West on the 25 August indicated new methods. The British were finally going Boer in their tactics. After the start of the guerrilla campaign in late 1900, the British continued concentrating their forces around the logistic centres like railway lines and towns. They also preferred moving during the day and the Boers had taken to sniping at these large columns but never facing them, then riding away and resting before resting for the night and then continuing the skirmishes the next day. IN the Eastern Transvaal Boer tactics had been successful in attacking the British during the night. Now things were changing in the Free State much to the chagrin and frustration of leaders like Christiaan de Wet who’d figured out long ago how to fight this war of attrition against the British Empire. Lord Kitchener, the Commander in Chief in South Africa, now ordered that each large column which moved through the veld to hand pick the most daring and skilled men on horseback to operate as special units. These were lightly equipped but proactive soldiers - the same kind of man as the Boer if you like. They could spend days on the veld living on next to nothing and sleeping in short bursts, but could pop up anywhere within a 50 mile radius of the columns and possibly catch the Boers unprepared. Kitchener went further. He set up special mobile columns in August which worked along a logic that would be called special force raids rather than a stolid slow march across the veld. The Drives as they were known were co-operative and therefore slow. Each section would have to move in relation to the other.