Browsing by Author "Warwick, Rodney C"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Reconsideration of the Battle of Sandfontein : the first phase of the German South West Africa campaign, August to September 1914
    (2003) Warwick, Rodney C; Saunders, Christopher
    This thesis investigates the first phase of the German South West African military campaign during August - September 1914, conducted by the Union Defence Force on behalf of the South African government and British Empire. Its primary focus concerns the battle of Sandfontein on 26 September, and it attempts to re-explain and reinterpret events at this military engagement, with the specific emphasis upon trying to enlarge our understanding of why the defeat occurred, revealing the muted controversies surrounding it, and analysing how nearly three hundred UDF troops endured the horror of being trapped and shelled for a full day on a desert koppie. Besides describing, contextualising, utilising, and challenging the older historiography on Sandfontein, which consists essentially of dated patriotic battle accounts, more recent works in military history, including methodologies intended to analyse and explain how men endure in modern warfare, have been juxtaposed with numerous archival and secondary sources. Other issues concerning the first phase of the GSWA invasion, neglected or ignored in earlier historiography, have also received attention. These include the experiences of the force's black members, the white politcal disputes that assisted the shifting of defeat culpability to Afrikaner Rebels, and the colonial police background of Lukin's force which it is suggested, was not entirely suitable for suddenly embarking upon conventional modern war.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    White South Africa and defence, 1960-1968 : militarization, threat perceptions and counter strategies
    (2009) Warwick, Rodney C
    This thesis is concerned with the militarization of white South African society in the 1960s. It argues that the military threat perceptions of the period were crucial in altering white views of the South African Defence Force (SADF) and reinforcing support for the National Party government. The military achieved enhanced public status within civil society as the state's supposed bulwark. A range of purported potential threats, both internal and external and regularly reported in the media, were investigated by the SADF in response to Afro-Asian bloc spokespersons calling for international military intervention against white South Africa to end apartheid.