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Cambridge Imperial & Post-Colonial Studies
The White Redoubt, the Great Powers

and the Struggle for Southern Africa,
1960–1980
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Robert McNamara

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial
Studies Series
Series Editors
Richard Drayton
Department of History
King’s College London
London, UK
Saul Dubow
Magdalene College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection
of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures
which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, compar-
ative and connective studies, and studies which address where particu-
lar regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past
the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its cur-
rent incarnation there is no imperial system, period of human history or
part of the world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly
welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major
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a strong thematic focus. The series includes work on politics, econom-
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lect the most exciting new scholarship on world history with an imperial
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More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/13937
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses
Robert McNamara
The White Redoubt,

the Great Powers
and the Struggle
for Southern Africa,
1960–1980
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses Robert McNamara
Department of History School of English and History
Maynooth University Ulster University
Maynooth, Co. Kildare Coleraine, Northern Ireland
Ireland UK
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

ISBN 978-1-137-44757-9 ISBN 978-1-137-44758-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44758-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950398
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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To our friends and families for their unwavering support
Acknowledgements
This project was made possible by funding from a number of entities.

The greatest single contribution was made by the Irish Research Council
(in its former guise as IRCHSS), without whose generous funding the
enterprise would not have been possible. Additional financial contribu-
tions were made by the British Academy and the Instituto Camões. To
all three bodies our sincere thanks. We were helped in our research by
a number of individuals. Mel Farrell provided excellent support as an
IRCHSS-funded research assistant: for a whole year we were able to
count on his competence, his organizational skills and his good humour.
We are in his debt. Maynooth University’s Summer Programme for
Undergraduate Research (SPUR) allowed us to employ Ms Siomha
Connolly as a research assistant, working in the Irish National Archives.
She too did excellent work, for which we are very grateful. Leez de
Preez’s assistance in Pretoria was most valuable. We would especially
like to thank Neels Muller at the Department of Foreign Affairs, who
allowed access to the department’s archives at very short notice.
Some of the research that underpins this volume was turned into
university modules, taught at Brown University in 2012–2013 and
Maynooth University ever since. Our thanks to the students who
attended them; their input made a significant contribution to this work.
It is also the case that we were supported by a number of colleagues, to
whom we are grateful: in Maynooth, Marian Lyons, David Lederer and
vii
viii Acknowledgements
John Paul Newman; at Ulster University, Alan Sharp, Donald MacRaild,

Ian Thatcher and Stanley Black; at Rhodes University, Gary Baines, who
provided us with access to important documentation; and‚ elsewhere‚
John Horne, Onésimo T. Almeida, William Roger Louis, António Costa
Pinto, Sylvia Ellis, Francisco Bethencourt, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo,
Sue Onslow and Pedro Aires Oliveira.
Contents
Part I White States of Emergency
1 Defying the Wind of Change 3

A Solid White Monolith? 3
White States of Emergency (1): Nyasaland 14
White States of Emergency (2): South Africa 20
White States of Emergency (3): Angola 25
2 Rhodesia: Rise of the Rebel State 33

The Break-Up of the Federation 33
Verwoerd, Salazar and the Road to the UDI 43
Saving Rhodesia from Sanctions 56
South Africa, Portugal and the Efforts to End the
UDI 1966–1972 62
3 Portuguese Africa: Rebellion and Resilience 75

The Liberation Movements and Their Challenges 75
The First Battleground: Angola 81
Engagement and Confrontation with Black Africa 89
War Comes to Mozambique 99
American Engagement 105
ix
x Contents
Part II The Rise and Fall of an Unholy Alliance
4 Building the ‘White Redoubt’ 111

The Origins of Military Cooperation 111
The Rhodesian Dimension 121
The Emergence of Exercise ALCORA 126
5 Brothers-in-Arms: ALCORA in Action 137

Threat Estimates 1970–1979 137
Intelligence Cooperation 146
Success in Angola … 151
… and Growing Failure in Mozambique 154
6 First to Fall: Portugal from Coup to Revolution 161

The Indecision of Marcelo Caetano 161
The Carnation Revolution 168
Part III Towards a Constellation of One
7 Decolonization and Détente in Southern Africa:

Mozambique and Rhodesia, 1974–1975 183
Mozambique’s Road to Independence 183
Rhodesia’s New Challenges 200
Hell-Bent on Détente 205
Victoria Falls 216
8 Debacle and Détente Redux: South Africa in Angola

and Rhodesia, 1975–1977 219
Angola Before and After the Alvor Agreement 219
The End of White Angola 225
South African Decision-Making 229
The American Dimension 236
Détente Redux 239
Towards an Internal Settlement 249
Contents xi
9 P.W. Botha, Total Strategy, and the Life and Death of

Zimbabwe-Rhodesia 257
The Creation of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia 257
Botha Takes Charge 260
A New South African Strategy 263
Towards Lancaster House 267
Endgame 282
Conclusion
287
Notes 295
Bibliography 363
Index 385
Abbreviations
AB Afrikaner Broederbond
ACOC ALCORA Coordination Committee
ADR Accredited Diplomatic Representative
ALCORA Codename for cooperation between the military forces of South
Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal 1970–1974
ANC African National Council (Rhodesia)
ARA Acção Revolucionária Armada
ASF ALCORA Strategic Force
ATLC ALCORA Top Level Committee
BOSS Bureau for State Security
BSAP British South African Police
CAF Central African Federation
CAPS Combined ALCORA Permanent Staff
CCSC Command and Control Subcommittee (ALCORA)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CIO Central Intelligence Organisation (Rhodesia)
COIN Counter-Insurgency
COPCON Comando Operacional do Continente
COREMO Comité Revolucionário de Moçambique
DCI Director of Central Intelligence
DGS Direcção Geral de Segurança (see PIDE)
DMI Directorate of Military Intelligence
ECM Electronic Countermeasures
EEC European Economic Community
EFTA European Free Trade Association
ELINT Electronic Intelligence
xiii
xiv Abbreviations
FAPLA Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola

FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FICO Frente Independente de Convergência Ocidental
FISB Federal Intelligence and Security Bureau
FLEC Frente de Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda
FLN Front de Libération Nationale
FNLA Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola
FRA Frente Revolucionária Armada
FRECOMO Frente Comum de Moçambique
FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique
FROLIZI Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe
FUA Frente de Unidade Angolana
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GE Grupos Especiais
GEP Grupos Especiais Paraquedistas
GNP Gross National Product
GNR Guarda Nacional Republicana
GRAE Governo Revolucionário de Angola no Exílio
GUMO Grupo Unido de Moçambique
HCT High Commission Territories
ICJ International Court of Justice
ISC Intelligence Subcommittee (ALCORA)
JSN Junta de Salvação Nacional
KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
MDLP Movimento Democrático para a Libertação de Portugal
MFA Movimento das Forças Armadas
MK Umkhonto we Sizwe
MNE Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros
MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola
NAC Nyasaland African Congress
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCO Non-Commissioned Officer
NDP National Democratic Party
NIBMR No Independence Before Majority Rule
NP Reformed National Party (of South Africa)
NSA National Security Agency
NSSM National Security Study Memorandum
OAU Organization of African Unity
OCC Operation Coordinating Committee
PAC Pan Africanist Congress
PAIGC Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde
Abbreviations xv
PAIO Permanent ALCORA Intelligence Organization

PAPO Permanent ALCORA Planning Organization
PCDA Partido Cristão Democrata de Angola
PCN Partido da Coligação Nacional
PCP Partido Comunista Português
PF Patriotic Front (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe)
PIDE Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (from 1969 DGS:
Direcção Geral de Segurança)
PPD Partido Popular Democrático (Portugal)
PS Partido Socialista (Portugal)
RENAMO Resistência Nacional Moçambicana
RF Rhodesian Front
RRAF Royal Rhodesian Air Force
RSA Republic of South Africa
RSF Rhodesian Security Forces
SAANC South African African National Congress
SADF South African Defence Force
SALOPS Salisbury Operational Area
SAP South African Police
SCCIA Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação de Informações de
Angola
SCCIM Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação de Informações de
Moçambique
SDECE Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage
SNASP Serviço Nacional de Segurança Popular
SSC State Security Council (South Africa)
SWA South West Africa
SWAPO South West Africa People’s Organization
TAP Transportes Aéreos Portugueses
UANC United African National Council (Zimbabwe-Rhodesia)
UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence
UFP United Federal Party (CAF)
UN United Nations
UNIP United National Independence Party
UNITA União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola
UPA União dos Povos de Angola
UTA Union de Transports Aériens
ZANU Zimbabwe African National Union
ZAPU Zimbabwe African People’s Union
ZIPRA Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army
ZR Zimbabwe-Rhodesia
ZRGBS SADF liaison to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia
Introduction
On 14 October 1974, two delegations of senior officers from the mili-

taries of Rhodesia and South Africa were in Lisbon for a top-secret
meeting with their Portuguese counterparts. The Rhodesians were led
by their army and air force commanders, General Peter Walls and Air
Marshal M.J. McLaren respectively. General Raymond Armstrong, chief
of the defence staff, headed the South African team. The Portuguese
delegation, led as it was by the vice chief of staff of the armed forces,
General J.A. Pinheiro, was less high-powered. Perhaps this was because
his superior, General Francisco Costa Gomes, had recently become pres-
ident of the republic. Discretion being important, the South Africans
and the Rhodesians had travelled incognito in civilian clothes. The
three delegations carried with them briefing documents stamped Top
Secret, Uiters Geheim and Muito Secreto. For once, the use of such clas-
sifications was not hyperbole.1 These documents contained impor-
tant details of one of the most secretive military collaborations of the
eras of decolonization and the Cold War: Exercise ALCORA, the ulti-
mate embodiment of southern Africa’s ‘white redoubt’. ALCORA
had commenced with a top-level liaison between the South African
and Portuguese armies in October 1970, with Rhodesia—a rebel, ille-
gal state—being invited to join in March 1971. Its aim was to ‘inves-
tigate ways and means of achieving a co-ordinated tripartite effort
between Portugal, Rhodesia and the Republic of South Africa (RSA)
with a view to countering the mutual threat against their territories in
xvii
xviii Introduction
Southern Africa’.2 The delegates were attending the eighth ALCORA

Top Level Committee (ATLC), which had met biannually since 1970.
Beneath the ATLC were a variety of committees and subcommittees
that met more regularly. They ranged across the entire field of military,
security and intelligence cooperation.3 So entrenched was this collabora-
tion by 1974 that ALCORA had acquired a permanent headquarters—
staffed from the three militaries—the Permanent ALCORA Planning
Organization (PAPO) in Pretoria. The three ministers of defence (P.W.
Botha of South Africa, John Howman of Rhodesia and General Horácio
de Sá Viana Rebelo of Portugal) agreed PAPO’s establishment, which
was designed to facilitate the running of ALCORA, in a September
1973 meeting. PAPO was still at an early stage of development when
ALCORA was thrown off course by the Portuguese Revolution of 25
April 1974.4 On that day Portugal’s authoritarian government was
overthrown by the mid-ranking officers of the Movimento das Forças
Armadas (MFA, Armed Forces Movement), at least in part motivated by
the wish to extract Portugal from her apparently endless colonial wars in
Portuguese Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.
The first six meetings of the ATLC had overseen the expansion and
deepening of military cooperation to the extent that the organization
had taken on many of the trappings of a military alliance. The seventh
ATLC meeting, held at PAPO’s new Pretoria HQ in June 1974, con-
cluded in a somewhat confused state, Portuguese delegates making
it clear that ALCORA’s grandiose ambitions had to be scaled down as
a result of the new political dispensation in Lisbon. However, in June
1974, Portugal’s colonial plans were still in flux. The new president,
General António de Spínola, favoured a radical rebranding, but not
abandonment, of Overseas Portugal. But Spínola, under increasing pres-
sure from the leftist MFA to implement a rapid decolonization, would
make, during the summer of 1974, repeated concessions, particularly
over the fate of Mozambique and the composition of his own govern-
ment. By the end of September, politically beaten and disillusioned, he
had resigned, being replaced by General Costa Gomes. The MFA was
now firmly in control of the country and determined that rapid decol-
onization would result from the revolutionary process taking place in
Portugal. Having agreed a date for Mozambican independence with the
leadership of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO)
in September, the Portuguese wished to sever their now unpalatable
Introduction xix
military links with the regimes in Salisbury and Pretoria. They believed,
as would become clear at the October meeting, that FRELIMO and the
Angolan nationalist movements suspected the existence of close military
cooperation between Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa. Lisbon feared
this could threaten peaceful decolonization.5
Explaining Portugal’s new stance did not require, in the end, the
five days scheduled for the meeting. Pinheiro, in the chair, was brutally
unequivocal from the start, stating that ‘the future of ALCORA can-
not remain in its present form’. Cross-border hot pursuit of liberation
movement cadres by Rhodesian security forces was no longer possible.
He also ‘made clear the impossibility for Portugal of allowing any mili-
tary activity within the ALCORA concept’. The meeting continued in a
desultory fashion for a time. The Rhodesians, obsessed with hot-pursuit
rights in Mozambique, were unhappy. The South Africans were more
sanguine. It was agreed to quietly bury ALCORA. While further meet-
ings at ATLC or ‘even higher’ level were seen as desirable, the agreed
final document declared that ‘the code name ALCORA is to be dropped
and future cooperation will continue under a new codename’. As for
PAPO, it would ‘cease to exist from 31 October 1974’. As it turned out,
little liaison continued afterwards as Portuguese power in Africa quickly
evaporated.6 The ‘unholy alliance’‚ as some critics, unaware of its extent,
had termed the white redoubt, was over.7
Was ALCORA a formal defence pact, the military manifestation
of this ‘unholy alliance’? The argument proffered here is that while no
treaty of alliance was signed—though the South Africans were push-
ing for such by late 1973—the nature of ALCORA strongly implied a
commitment to joint defence against major external threats. Its docu-
mentation also suggests that the drive to coordinate operations against
liberation movements in all three countries picked up pace in 1973. This
is clear from recent releases by Portuguese, South African and Rhodesian
archives.8 An analogy can be drawn between ALCORA and other infor-
mal military understandings—most notably the Franco-British staff talks
prior to the First World War, which greatly contributed to Britain’s deci-
sion to enter that conflict.9 The analogy is especially apt given that there
is much dispute as to how much most of the British cabinet knew in
1914 about the moral commitment to the defence of France that Britain
had made through its participation in staff talks.10 No documents exist
or have survived that show that the cabinets of South Africa, Portugal
xx Introduction
or Rhodesia ever discussed ALCORA. Indeed, a survey of Portuguese

and South African Departments of Foreign Affairs files has drawn a blank
on ALCORA. Virtually all documentation that survives on the mat-
ter is contained in both countries’ defence and military archives. The
South Africans appear to have purged much of the Rhodesian archives
in 1977 of any reference to military cooperation between Pretoria and
Salisbury.11 A Portuguese officer, at the second meeting of the ATLC in
1971, warned that alterations to the structures and aims ‘would require
renewed political approval’, suggesting that political imprimatur had
been received, but does not tell us at what level.12 Another Portuguese
document from May 1973 speaks of the importance of the prime minis-
ters of the three states being ‘aware of and in approval of the basic con-
cepts and the thinking that presides over all the ALCORA labours’.13
This, however, is ambiguous, as it can be read as either they were
informed or they needed to be informed.
One explanation of ALCORA is that it formed part of the intense
internal power struggles within the RSA for control of foreign and
security policies. Similarly, ALCORA could be viewed as a policy of
the ‘ultras’ in Portugal, who envisaged continued control of her colo-
nies. Defence Minister Sá Viana Rebelo was clearly an enthusiast for
ALCORA.14 Other Portuguese generals, such as Costa Gomes, were
more sceptical about its merits, believing that it limited Portugal’s free-
dom of action.15 The South African case seems clearer. Both the South
African Defence Force (SADF) and the minister of defence from 1966
to 1980, P.W. Botha, had key roles in the creation of ALCORA. Indeed,
the origins of the ALCORA project throw up interesting questions about
who actually ran South African foreign policy in the 1960s and early
1970s, after the accession of John Vorster as prime minister in 1966.16
While conflicts between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry
of Information were widely commented upon in the South African press
from the mid-1970s, a bitter struggle also raged between the Bureau
for State Security (BOSS) and military intelligence ‘over the entire
thrust of security politics’, as Dan O’Meara notes.17 In his recent book,
Jamie Miller argues that through first the ‘outward policy’ towards bid-
dable black African states in the late 1960s and later the détente policy
over Rhodesia (1974–1975) associated with Vorster, the Department of
Foreign Affairs and BOSS held the upper hand when it came to diplo-
matic and security concerns. Only after the collapse of the Geneva Peace
Introduction xxi
Conference in early 1977 did they give way to the total defence strategy
of P.W. Botha.18
It has also been argued elsewhere that Botha’s power base in the
Ministry of Defence ‘created the platform from which he could grasp
the leadership’, and that the institutionalization of a ‘garrison state’, the
virtual displacement of the South African Cabinet by the State Security
Council (SSC) and the increasing dominance of the SADF in policy-
making after 1978 all stemmed from Botha’s rise.19 This project’s ini-
tial research findings tended to support this supposition. However, one
should point to the strong possibility that until April 1974 ALCORA
and the ‘outward policy’ were not incompatible twin-track strategies.
The public South Africa of an apparently ‘Jolly’ John Vorster that sought
peaceful cooperation with South Africa’s black neighbours may well have
coexisted with P.W. Botha’s attempt to strengthen the white redoubt
through Pretoria’s military and financial muscle. So extensive are the
gaps in the documentation, due to deliberate weeding, that a defini-
tive conclusion may never be drawn. Perhaps the existing literature has
focused too much on the internal squabbles between Botha and BOSS.
Indeed, it is argued here that P.W. Botha, as late as 1979, was still blend-
ing a combination of the ‘outward policy’ and ALCORA in his stillborn
idea for a ‘constellation’ of friendly white and black states in southern
Africa linked by anti-communism. It should also be kept in mind that
even in dealings between themselves, the three states at the heart of this
volume remained deeply suspicious of each other’s motives, pursuing,
where possible, their own national interests.
One remarkable aspect of ALCORA was the secrecy which sur-
rounded it. The first indication that ALCORA documents had survived
emerged in Aniceto Afonso and Carlos de Matos Gomes’ unrefer-
enced chronology of Portugal’s colonial wars in 2010.20 The first seri-
ous studies, based on actual Portuguese and South African documents,
only appeared in 2013 in Portuguese and English.21 There were some
oblique references to ALCORA in memoirs but little explanation of
its true nature and extent. Memoirs of some of the protagonists shed
only little light on the subject; others—including Ian Smith’s—none
at all.22 There is silence as well in even the best-informed contempo-
rary accounts.23 The enormously indiscreet Ken Flower, director of the
Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) from 1964 to 1981,
obliquely refers to ‘a common strategy of “Joint Defence of the Zambezi
xxii Introduction
River Line”’, but adds that ‘there seemed little prospect of translating
theory into practice’.24 And General Kaúlza de Arriaga, a Portuguese
military hardliner or ‘ultra’ who served as commander-in-chief in
Mozambique, wrote of an ‘Alcora Alliance’ which never lived up to its
promise.25 Another reference can be found in a semi-official biography of
P.W. Botha, with little made of its importance.26 Hilton Hamann, who
held lengthy interviews with many apartheid-era South African gener-
als, does not mention ALCORA, and describes South African military
support to Portugal as ‘small scale’, with a limited supply of arms and
the occasional ferrying of Portuguese troops on counter-insurgency
(COIN) operations by South African helicopters.27 Extant references to
ALCORA are, for the most part, incomplete or incorrect. The earliest
reference that can be ascertained is by M. Evans, in a 1984 article, which
refers to a South African–Rhodesian–Portuguese ALCORA intelligence
system operating in the years 1964 to 1974.28 Even Kaas Van der Waals,
who was deeply involved as a liaison officer in ALCORA, barely men-
tions it in his account of the Portuguese conflict in Angola.29 Military
cooperation between the white states in the 1960s and 1970s was the
holiest of holies when it came to official secrecy, a secrecy which suited
South African diplomacy and P.W. Botha. After 1974 this secrecy also
suited the emerging democratic regime in Portugal and some of its lead-
ing figures. General Francisco Costa Gomes, president from September
1974 until July 1976, had been involved in ALCORA business before
the revolution, but never mentioned it publicly afterwards.
The origins of the ‘unholy alliance’, which, it must be emphasized,
also included political and economic cooperation long before ALCORA,
lay in events in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. One important cata-
lyst was the shift in thinking about African colonies that took place in
London, Paris and Brussels. Policy was redirected from long-term com-
mitment to empire to rapid disengagement and an acceptance of self-
determination in the face of a rising tide of assertive, sometimes violent,
African nationalism. These shifts, and the sense that African nationalism
was an unstoppable force, produced violent disorder in southern Africa,
where there were large numbers of European settlers of Dutch, British
and Portuguese origin. The state of emergency in Nyasaland in 1959
eventually unravelled the white-dominated Central African Federation
(CAF). South Africa, in 1960, faced an African uprising against apart-
heid’s petty regulations—especially the pass laws, which restricted
Introduction xxiii
free movement of the black majority. The violent aftermath of the

Sharpeville massacre briefly shook white confidence. However, Hendrik
Verwoerd’s National Party government followed a policy of uncom-
promising resistance to reform, preferring to rely on repression. As a
result, both the South African African National Congress (SAANC) and
the Pan African Congress (PAC) were crushed internally, their leader-
ship being incarcerated or forced into exile by 1964. From the ashes of
the CAF, dissolved at the close of 1963, there emerged an independent
Zambia and Malawi. But the Federation’s dissolution also left in place
the semi-autonomous British colony of Southern Rhodesia, with its
white-controlled parliament and government. Both were dominated by
the Rhodesian Front (RF), determined to secure a form of independ-
ence that preserved and enshrined, for the foreseeable future, white rule.
And in early 1961 northern Angola was racked by violence directed by
the nationalist União dos Povos de Angola (UPA). The uprising was
aimed at white Portuguese settlers, scattered among isolated coffee plan-
tations, and the black workforce they employed. UPA expected a rerun
of events recently witnessed in the Belgian Congo, where a similar wave
of violence had led the colonial power to decide on a swift withdrawal.
But Portugal was not Belgium; its nationalist dictatorship, António de
Oliveira Salazar’s New State, rejected decolonization, and so one of the
twentieth century’s longest colonial wars began. This decision, in many
ways the unthinking reflex of a hidebound regime at odds with the world
around it, was to have fateful consequences for southern Africa. Not only
did it ensure that war would eventually come to three of Portugal’s colo-
nial holdings (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau), it also encouraged
other whites in the region to follow the Portuguese lead. South African
and Rhodesian whites refused to forego their privileged lifestyles and
what they believed was their political birthright. They stood firm against
racial equality and majority rule. Whereas this show of defiance was
not unexpected in the case of South Africa, whose sizable white minor-
ity had embarked on the apartheid project after the Second World War,
Southern Rhodesia’s similar stance came as a surprise. The Portuguese
example, and the subsequent solidarity from Lisbon and Pretoria,
emboldened Ian Smith’s RF government to carry out its unilateral—not
to mention illegal—declaration of independence in November 1965.
xxiv Introduction
The primary purpose of this volume is to consider the forces that

drove Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa into each other’s arms over
the course of the 1960s, how far they were willing to travel down the
road of political, intelligence and military cooperation, and why and how
this cooperation was eventually halted amidst accusations of irresponsi-
bility and betrayal. Special attention is paid to the Portuguese Revolution
of 1974–1975 and its aftermath. The revolution, more than any other
event, fatally compromised the white redoubt. This volume attempts to
fill a gap in the existing literature, which tends to view the struggles in
southern Africa in the period through a Cold War lens.30 Undoubtedly,
the white regimes of southern Africa used similar discourses about the
threat posed by the communist bloc. Indeed, they saw themselves as
exemplar defenders of white Christian civilization besieged by African
nationalists directed by Moscow or Beijing.31 While not discounting
the Cold War’s importance, this study foregrounds instead the regional
dimension and framework much more thoroughly and provides a case
study of how these states attempted to defy the wind of change.
This monograph was envisaged from the start as a work of trans-
national history, bringing together the experiences of three different
countries engaged in a common struggle against a rising tide of African
nationalism and increasingly hostile world opinion. As a result, docu-
mentation from each country’s national, military and private archives
forms the basis of the research. As often happened in late colonial situ-
ations, the refusal to decolonize and share power led pro-independence
parties and movements to opt for a campaign of violence, seeking out
the support of those who might help. In this way the situation in south-
ern Africa became enmeshed in the Cold War, as both China and the
Soviet Union jockeyed for position in the area, leading—eventually—to
a Western response. Foreign interference in the regions was, however,
wider. Neo-colonialist practices and attitudes—and Great Britain’s con-
tinued responsibility for the unresolved situation in Rhodesia—ensured
that Europe’s former colonial powers also had their say. As a result of
these considerations, Portuguese, Rhodesian and South African sources
are supplemented by those of other countries, notably the United States,
France, Great Britain and Belgium. Their diplomatic and intelligence ser-
vices were especially useful in providing commentary on the lives of what
were closed societies, subject to censorship and accustomed to strategies
Introduction xxv
of official dissimulation. Use is also made of the enormous number of

participants’ memoirs and the very extensive historiography of the
period, bringing together, insofar as possible, different historical tradi-
tions and currents.
The core of this book is divided into three parts and nine chapters. In
the first part, the forces pushing Portugal, Southern Rhodesia and South
Africa together are examined. Chapter 1 details the key ‘white states of
emergency’ that transformed the politics of southern Africa between
1959 and 1961. Their consequences for the Federation of Rhodesia and
Nyasaland, and more specifically for Southern Rhodesia, are detailed
in Chap. 2. Portugal’s wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the con-
flicts’ echoes across the region, are the subject of Chap. 3. The second
part covers the white redoubt at its peak, marked by the establishment
of Exercise ALCORA, an open-ended military arrangement that was
well on its way to becoming a formal alliance. It also considers, however,
the event which, with hindsight, delivered a mortal blow to the white
redoubt: Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ of April 1974. The pressure
from inside each territory, in the shape of local nationalist movements,
although mounting, was not impossible for the white minority regimes to
contain, especially given the levels of violent repression in which all three
governments were willing to engage. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the steps
taken to strengthen the bonds between Portugal, Rhodesia and South
Africa, once the benefits of cooperation had been identified by key deci-
sion-makers. These chapters also consider the liberation movements—
their origins and the challenges they faced—which braved the ferocity
of the white regimes, as well as the interaction between the latter and
the outside world. The West was deeply uncomfortable with the claim
made by Pretoria, Salisbury and Lisbon about the Zambezi River being
its front line in the struggle to contain international communism. At the
same time, Western governments, with their important economic, finan-
cial and strategic interests, would not let their moral qualms about the
white states’ immoral racial policies prevent them from doing business in
the region. Even the economic sanctions deployed against Rhodesia after
its 1965 illegal independence were never properly enforced. If Lisbon’s
decision to keep Angola was the catalyst in the constitution of what
some came to call the ‘white redoubt’ or the ‘unholy alliance’—an alli-
ance whose actual contours few, if any, were able to identify—then it was
xxvi Introduction
wholesale change in Lisbon that initiated its dissolution. The events of 25

April 1974, the ‘Carnation Revolution’, examined in Chap. 6, were to
have incalculable consequences for southern Africa, beginning, of course,
with the Portuguese colonies themselves.
The volume’s third part examines the fallout of the Portuguese
Revolution, examining the interplay between developments in
Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia and South Africa. Pretoria now opted
for a policy of détente, which caused it to place enormous pressure on
Ian Smith’s embattled regime to evolve in the direction of black-major-
ity rule, in the hope that it might buy the time needed to reform apart-
heid at a pace of its choosing. But as the Portuguese army’s will to fight
evaporated, foreign interference escalated swiftly, so that a resolutely
Cold War logic imposed itself in this resource-rich territory, superpow-
ers fighting for advantage through their proxies in the region. South
Africa was caught off guard by events in Lisbon. For Rhodesia, the post-
1974 situation was much graver. With its hostile borders extended hun-
dreds of miles by the independence of Mozambique and its armed forces
stretched to the limit, the time was up for Ian Smith and his regime—
but it would take many years of exasperating diplomacy and a great deal
of violence before this was accepted. Chapter 7 considers the evolving
Rhodesian and South African response to Mozambican independence,
while Chap. 8 does the same in relation to Angola, where South Africa’s
military intervention led to a humiliating climbdown in the face of mas-
sive Soviet and Cuban intervention. The final chapter charts the complex
relationship between Pretoria and Salisbury until the death of Unilateral
Declaration of Independence (UDI) Rhodesia and its short-lived suc-
cessor state, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia (ZR), as well as the controversial and
drawn-out birth of Zimbabwe as it exists today.
PART I
White States of Emergency

CHAPTER 1
Defying the Wind of Change
A Solid White Monolith?

Over five hundred years elapsed between the arrival of the first
Europeans in southern Africa and their descendants’ final abdica-
tion of power in 1994. The area of Africa approximately south of the
Congo River that remained under colonial or European settler control
by 1959, just before the first major African nationalist challenges arose,
was enormous: southern Africa is, after all, substantially larger than
Europe west of Russia. Angola and Mozambique, South Africa, South
West Africa (SWA), and the CAF occupied virtually the entirety of this
region. The remaining parts of the subcontinent were the British pro-
tectorates of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Swaziland and Basutoland
(now Lesotho), collectively known as the High Commission Territories
(HCT). Entirely surrounded by white-governed territories, they were in
no position to lead the fight against the ‘white redoubt’.
The southernmost quarter of the African continent, while not free of
barren deserts, vast rainforests and uninhabitable mountainous terrain,
was largely hospitable, in terms of climate and arable land, to large-scale
European settlement. Indeed, much of this enormous region had a cli-
mate not dissimilar to that of central or southern Europe, or the temper-
ate zones of Australia and North America. The white-controlled area of
southern Africa was bounded at the south by the Cape of Good Hope,
while its northern extent was a line that, by 1960, stretched westward
© The Author(s) 2018 3

F.R. de Meneses and R. McNamara, The White Redoubt, the Great Powers
and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980, Cambridge Imperial and
Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44758-6_1
4 F.R. de MENESES AND R. McNAMARA
from Luanda, Elizabethville (today’s Lubumbashi) in Katanga—the

resource-rich province of the then Belgian Congo—Mufuliria, Ndola,
Lusaka (in the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia), Kariba, Salisbury
(Southern Rhodesia) and Beira (Mozambique). The scale of this area is
immense: Cape Town to Luanda (Angola) is, as the crow flies, a distance
of 1762 miles (2836 km).32 Mozambique and Angola projected onto a
map of Europe would stretch from Madrid to the Ukraine, a point made
in maps hung in Portuguese classrooms from the 1930s onwards under
the caption ‘Portugal is not a small country’.
All of these territories were thinly populated. South Africa and
Mozambique, with over 20 persons per square mile, and, especially,
Nyasaland (over 70 inhabitants per square mile) were the most densely
populated. Angola, Northern Rhodesia and SWA stood at the other
end of the spectrum. Southern Rhodesia, Angola and, to certain extent,
Mozambique, had seen significant post-war migration from the colo-
nial metropoles. In Angola, the white population doubled in the 1950s
(to just over 160,000) and again between 1960 and 1973, reaching,
in one conservative estimate, a total of 335,000 out of six million.33
As Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar remarked in 1943,
‘the rich extensive colonial lands, under-developed and sparsely popu-
lated, are the natural complement for metropolitan agriculture’.34 In
Mozambique (pop. 6,592,994: 1960 census), the number of whites
had reached 109,000 by 1966, and various sources suggest a figure of
200,000 to perhaps 250,000 by 1974.35
The settler-dominated CAF, made up of Northern and Southern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland, was established, amidst considerable contro-
versy and dissent from its African majority, in 1953.36 The colony of
Southern Rhodesia had a population of 3,110,000 (1960 estimate),37
of whom about 215,000 were European settlers. In Northern Rhodesia,
whites numbered some 72,000. The white population of Southern
Rhodesia was notably transient. While 256,000 whites settled in
Southern Rhodesia between 1955 and 1979, 246,000 also left. This sug-
gests that many of them saw Rhodesia as a mere stopping point in their
life rather than a final destination, a fact that would hugely undermine
the sustainability of white rule by the mid-1970s.38 The white population
of South Africa was the most established, dating back to the seventeenth
century. Throughout this enormous country, economic and political
power rested with whites. Roughly three million of them (1.8 million
Afrikaners of Dutch descent and 1.2 million primarily British in origin)
1 DEFYING THE WIND OF CHANGE 5
ruled over about four times as many people, most of them blacks. South
Africa was a sovereign state where the militantly racist Reformed National
Party (hereinafter NP) government had been implementing, since gain-
ing power in 1948, its doctrine of apartheid. In the Federation, political
power also rested with whites at both the federal and the national lev-
els, as it did in Southern Rhodesia. Only a tiny number of Africans had
the franchise for the Southern Rhodesian parliament, which had enjoyed
considerable autonomy over the country’s domestic affairs since 1923.
Whites exploited this circumstance to impose a notorious land settlement
(the Land Apportionment Act) that allocated half the land to them-
selves. In Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the British Colonial Office,
through London-appointed governors, retained considerable powers,
particularly over native rights and law and order, which remained out-
side the federal government’s competence. Portuguese governors, usually
military men, ran Mozambique and Angola with only limited input from
the local whites, who could not be allowed to have more of a say in their
affairs than the politically repressed metropolitan population.
When the CAF was established in 1953, the idea that sub-Saharan
Africa would within a decade be predominantly under independent
African authority would have shocked most observers. British, French,
Belgian and Portuguese rule had, in fact, deepened in the years after the
Second World War as colonial powers sought to modernize their respec-
tive possessions. European empires in Africa were barely touched, until
the middle of the 1950s, by the ‘backwash from the demise of colonial-
ism in Asia’.39 In fact, the remoteness of the African nationalist threat in
the decade after 1945 meant that relations between the three major white
powers in southern Africa—the Federation, Portugal and South Africa—
were not always warm. South African apartheid, underpinned by fantasti-
cal pseudo-sociological concepts, was in essence a ruthless programme of
ethnic cleansing, a license to move huge numbers of Africans from urban
areas to economically barren homelands, where they could be denied
citizenship. The NP’s strong nationalism and instinctive anti-Britishness,
derived from memories of Afrikaner suffering during the Anglo-Boer
War (1899–1902), made its supporters suspicious of English speakers
in South Africa and the territories to the north. On the surface at least,
apartheid was qualitatively different from Portugal’s intention to create
multiracial societies in Africa and the Federation’s ‘partnership’ model,
which promised eventual political and economic opportunity for all races,
based on a qualitative franchise. Each country could be dismissive of
the others’ models, particularly when it suited them for international or

domestic purposes. However, the relative importance of these divergent
racial policies would lessen in the face of common security needs.
Another barrier to joint action was the long-standing fear in Lisbon,
London and Salisbury of South Africa’s expansionist tendencies. South
African statesmen, including Jan Smuts and Louis Botha, had wanted
to annex, among other territories, German SWA, Southern Rhodesia
and Mozambique after 1910. The result, they hoped, would be a sub-
continental dominion from the Cape to the Zambezi. The First World
War allowed the first phase of these ambitions to be completed,
through the seizure of SWA (acquired as a League of Nations mandate
from Germany rather than being formally annexed). South Africa duti-
fully provided yearly reports to the League, but from the 1950s its
Europeans were given seats in South Africa’s parliament to cement the
NP’s grip on power.40 As it happened, South African rule never extended
beyond this territory. The Portuguese successfully resisted pressure to
sell Mozambique during the Paris Peace Conference, while Southern
Rhodesia rejected amalgamation in 1923 and the HCT remained in
British hands until given independence in the late 1960s. Indeed, as
will be demonstrated below, the 1953 establishment of the Federation
was at least partly motivated by the British government’s desire to check
South African influence and power in southern Africa.41 After its election
in 1948 the NP government seemed less interested in the expansionist
dreams of Smuts, with the exception of the HCT, viewed as future black
homelands or ‘Bantustans’. A desire to gain the HCT did not moderate
NP policy or rhetoric. The Pretoria News accused the uncompromising
minister of defence, F.C. Erasmus, after a typically truculent speech, of
flinging the Bechuanaland protectorate ‘into the arms of the Rhodesian
Federation, which will surely be a fact one day’.42 That being said, the
occasional speech, such as the one delivered by Prime Minister J.G.
Strijdom at a NP rally in June 1955, suggested that the old expansionist
tendencies had not entirely disappeared: ‘We must convince all Europeans
of our viewpoint [on apartheid] and then the suffering, sorrow and sacri-
fices will not have been in vain. We shall then attain what we believe God
has put us here for—our influence to spread right through Africa.’43
The Federation had a considerable Afrikaner population, some
40,000-strong, by the time it was created in 1953. Leading Rhodesian
politicians, notably the future premiers of the CAF, Godfrey Huggins
(1953–1956) and Roy Welensky (1956–1963), often raised with British
officials the spectre of Afrikaner migration into the Rhodesias (particu-

larly to work on the Copperbelt) as an argument, no doubt a cynical
one, for the creation of the Federation.44 Along with the diaspora came
the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), the Dutch Reformed Church, calls for
language equality and even absorption into South Africa. The language
issue was particularly salient for the NP government because of its over-
whelming importance to Afrikaner societies like the AB. The refusal of
the Southern Rhodesian government to support Afrikaans-medium edu-
cation caused much controversy in the mid-1950s. While the Rhodesian
Herald criticized Dr. Malan, the South African premier, for suggest-
ing that Afrikaners had to right to keep their language and culture in
Rhodesia, Die Transvaler stridently warned ‘that the rulers of Rhodesia
should remember historical examples. Every attempt in South Africa
to suppress Afrikaans not only failed but contributed to its complete
triumph.’45
The NP and its supporters in the press also viewed the Southern
Rhodesian claims to be more liberal on racial matters with contempt. Die
Kruithorlng, the party’s official organ, claimed in 1952 that ‘there was
more apartheid in that country [Southern Rhodesia] than there was in
the Union’. It backed up this claim with a damning list of examples of
racial discrimination and segregation in all walks of Rhodesian life.46 In
return, Rhodesians of British extraction often shared the contempt of
English-speaking South Africans for Afrikaners, whom they portrayed as
backward country bumpkins.47 The culture of white Southern Rhodesia
was that of English-speaking South Africa. Links with South Africa were
embedded into the white economy and society. South Africa was a place
where Rhodesians holidayed, attended university and did business, with
many Rhodesian firms being subsidiaries of larger South African con-
cerns. South Africa dominated transportation links, particularly for
those entering and leaving Southern Rhodesia. Moreover, while there
were scares about Afrikaner emigration, many who moved to Southern
Rhodesia after 1948 were in fact English-speaking South Africans, dis-
illusioned with the Afrikaner-dominated state developing in their home
country. They were not necessarily illiberal.48 They often, however,
changed stripes once in Rhodesia. P.K. van der Byl, Rhodesia’s notorious
hard-line foreign minister in the late 1970s and, as the journalist Max
Hastings notes, ‘one of the ugliest figures in the history of the struggle
for Africa’, came from a politically liberal South African background.49
When opportune, those who defended the Federation saw fit to dis-
associate themselves strongly from South African apartheid to curry
favour in Westminster. When this happened, the South African govern-
ment and the Afrikaner press, often little more than a mouthpiece of
the NP, responded in kind. The English-language press in South Africa,
conversely, was usually hostile—sometimes deeply so—to the NP govern-
ment. The most powerful press conglomerate, Argus, which also dom-
inated the Rhodesian press, was more liberal than its readership. Most
English-speaking whites, when it came down to it, opposed apartheid
more because it dispossessed them of power and patronage than out of
concern for Africans. The Afrikaans press did not enjoy large sales and
depended heavily after 1948 on government support through state
advertising and printing contracts. Many of the NP leadership had cut
their teeth as newspaper editors. D.F. Malan was a Die Burger editor
before leading the party to victory in 1948. H.F. Verwoerd, the architect
of ‘Grand Apartheid’ and prime minister from 1958 to 1966, made his
reputation as the founding editor of Die Transvaler. Remarkably, both
he and his successor, B.J. Vorster, chaired the holding company of the
Die Transvaler while being simultaneously head of government.50
Although the Federation barred South Africa’s putative northwards
expansion, South African ministers rarely attacked it in public. They
did so only when Federation politicians used the apartheid system to
make racial partnership sound better than it actually was, or when the
NP wished to emphasize the dangers of the partnership model. In Die
Transvaler of 12 October 1953, the notably maladroit South African
minister of economic affairs, Eric Louw, attacked Sir Godfrey Huggins,
prime minister of the Federation, for criticizing South African racial and
political affairs. Louw warned that such attacks hampered the friendly
relations that should exist between neighbouring states.51 Prime Minister
Malan’s deputy, N.C. Havenga, on the other hand, declared that
‘Rhodesia is a white man’s country and we must co-operate.’ He was,
however, sceptical about partnership, warning that if ‘the non-Europe-
ans were given political rights the time would come when the European
would be in danger’.52
After the 1953 federal election, which Huggins’ United Federal
Party (UFP) won easily, the extreme right-wing Die Volksblad car-
ried, as a headline, ‘UFP Wins Election by Intimidation— Strong
Afrikaner Hatred in Rhodesia—Smuts-Policy’s Big Role’. The English-
language press in South Africa, meanwhile, trumpeted what was seen
as a good result for UFP and a more liberal approach to race relations.
The Federation’s electorate had ‘emphatically rejected the Confederate
Party alternative of fragmentation through apartheid!’ shouted the Cape
Argus.53 Die Transvaler commented that the South African public would
neither rejoice nor shed tears over the result, although it regretted that
‘the leaders of the Federation do not always maintain the same good
will towards the Union as has been demonstrated by the Union towards
the Federation’.54 This minor press skirmish in some ways illustrates the
problem that the Federation posed for the NP government. Not only did
the Federation prevent South Africa’s territorial expansion, it also pro-
vided ammunition for the opposition United Party (and its press sup-
porters) by providing an apparent alternative to apartheid.55
Portugal was different in the eyes of the South Africans. On the one
hand, unlike the Federation, it was a sovereign power, a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) member with which formal military links
could be forged. On the other hand, however, there were important cul-
tural tensions due to Portugal’s more relaxed attitude to racial mixing
and the Dutch Reformed Church’s instinctive anti-Catholicism. Indeed,
the US Embassy in South Africa, as late as 1968, opined that security
and political cooperation between the South Africans and Portuguese,
built upon the Afrikaners’ admiration for the ‘extraordinary efforts’ of
Portugal to hang on in southern Africa, was complicated by simultane-
ous contempt for the Portuguese ‘as virtually a mulatto people them-
selves’.56 Still, the South Africans had considerable confidence in the
robustness of Portuguese colonialism. As the Rand Daily Mail noted in
1960, South Africans believed that ‘the Portuguese know how to han-
dle Africans’: they had ‘some almost mystic expertise denied to other
colonial powers’ and often boasted that they ‘were the first to arrive in
Africa and will be the last to leave’.57 The British ambassador to Lisbon,
in 1954, reported on a dinner given by the minister for foreign affairs,
Paulo Cunha, in honour of the South African minister of transport, Paul
Sauer. When Cunha stated that Portugal and the Union might have to
consider stronger ties in the future, Sauer replied that ‘neither Portugal
nor South Africa had any intention of allowing what had happened in
other continents to affect the security or permanence of their hold upon
their African territories’.58
Portugal had carefully rebranded her colonial rule in Africa after
the Second World War in preparation for her admittance to the United
Nations (UN). By turning colonies into ‘overseas provinces’, Salazar
hoped to be able to prevent the UN, whose charter barred interfer-

ence in the internal affairs of states, from investigating its African ter-
ritories. This would allow for the ‘aggrandizement of the emergent
and racially mixed societies in Angola and Mozambique’, which would
serve as ‘Portugal’s first line of defence against international criticism’.59
South Africa was also understandably eager to make sure that apartheid
was never placed on the agenda of the UN on the same domestic-affairs
grounds. In 1957 the two countries’ foreign ministers, Eric Louw and
Cunha, discussed unwelcome international attention. Louw, in par-
ticular, decried the attempts to discuss domestic matters in New York.
South Africa, Portugal and other like-minded governments should, he
explained, vote against, rather than abstain on, such initiatives.60
Like many other observers, South Africans doubted the sincerity of
supposedly liberal legislative changes in Portuguese Africa, noting the
difference between the theory and reality. Their consul in Lourenço
Marques remarked, in April 1955, after Portugal passed a law apparently
aimed at improving the rights of Africans,
The Portuguese are most skilful in drafting regulations which will not
offend even the tenderest liberal conscience. Decrees containing the most
autocratic powers read like a United Nations declaration of human rights.
This particular decree, for example, is ostensibly issued for the principal
purpose of protecting the native from possible exploitation by Europeans
and others. In fact it accords to the Administration very considerable pow-
ers of control.61
The same official went on to explain that despite the liberal-sounding

laws, the Portuguese kept a very firm hand over ‘their Natives’: police
methods were ‘far rougher than those in the Union’, beatings were
‘almost a matter of routine in Charge Offices, whilst scant attention is
paid to the niceties of Habeas Corpus’. The consul also noted the cyni-
cism of the governor-general, Naval Captain Gabriel Teixeira, ‘an avowed
supporter of the policy of the firm hand’. Africans, Captain Teixeira
claimed, were ‘far from ready for the full rights of citizenship’ when they
found these rights carried obligations. The consul concluded, ‘Now that
the implications of becoming an assimilado were better understood there
were remarkably few applications for inclusion amongst the elect.’62
This rather puts into perspective the comments of Franco Nogueira, the
Portuguese foreign minister in the 1960s, who claimed that Portugal
‘alone, before anyone else, brought to Africa the notion of human rights
and racial equality’, and that Portugal ‘also practiced the principle of
multi-racialism, which all now consider to be the most perfect and daring
expression of human brotherhood and sociological progress’.63
One trait that linked all the three white states was a fanatical anti-
communism. In the Union, the NP had been fusing the threats of com-
munism and African nationalism since the 1930s,64 and increasingly used
fear of both to bind Afrikaners and English speakers.65 As Die Transvaler
explained in 1953, Afrikaners had been at put at ‘the southern point of
Africa by an Omniscient Providence in order to make the light of the
Gospel and civilisation shine here’. This task, or ‘vocation’, was doubly
important since the ‘non-European’ was being courted from various
quarters: ‘From Moscow the attempt is made to make him believe that
his salvation lies in a communist revolution and that he must regard all
Europeans who are living in Africa as his enemies.’66 Anti-communism
also featured strongly in the discourse of Europeans in Rhodesia. After
the UDI in 1965, white Rhodesians lamented the fact that Great
Britain—especially under Harold Wilson—seemed no longer willing to
resist communist encroachment, as they themselves were doing.67 In
Portugal, Salazar made the most of the Cold War by pointing out that
his New State had been warning of the communist menace since well
before the Second World War. Given that the Portuguese Communist
Party (Partido Comunista Português, PCP) was the most important
source of opposition to the regime, this was not necessarily surprising.
Between the beginning of 1959 and the end of 1965, the white-
dominated states of southern Africa witnessed a number of major crises
which appeared to threaten their continued existence, especially when
set against the sudden (and, in the view of the white states, precipitate)
abdication of European power in Africa.68 These crises were the 1959
state of emergency in Nyasaland;69 the outbreak of unrest in South Africa
in early 1960, which briefly shook the NP government;70 the Angolan
rebellion of March 1961;71 the dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia
and Nyasaland; and the Southern Rhodesian UDI in 1965.72 These
events, while not always explicitly linked (though an increasingly asser-
tive African nationalism and the unwillingness of whites to surrender
their dominance or make significant compromises was at the core of all
of them), were akin to a wave that many observers considered, for a time
at least, unstoppable. By the end of 1965, however, the tide had ebbed.
White rule, had survived, at least in the medium term, in Angola and
Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. The crises confirmed

the drift to the right in white electorates in Southern Rhodesia and
South Africa, with the coming to power of the RF in Southern Rhodesia
(1962) and the consolidation of the electoral dominance of the NP in
South Africa. Both parties were determined, at virtually all costs, to defy
the wind of change. Portugal, meanwhile, had stepped up its efforts to
maintain its colonial possessions in Africa with unprecedented military
deployments at huge financial cost. In the short term, the strategy was
relatively successful: attempts by nationalists to launch guerrilla wars in
South Africa and Southern Rhodesia were defeated while the more seri-
ous rebellions in Angola and Mozambique were contained. This did not
mean, however, that the underlying situation had been resolved.
The key external factor in these crises was the very rapid change of
mind in Paris, Brussels and, most importantly, London about the
future of their African colonial possessions. In a relatively short period
between 1959 and the end of 1960, British, French and Belgian think-
ing switched from viewing colonies as long-term projects (which might
be granted independence in an orderly manner decades into the future)
to a new paradigm, wherein they would be advanced to independence
in a very short period of time. Events in Nyasaland and almost simul-
taneously in Kenya (the Hola camp massacre) in 1959 crystallized
British thinking about empire in Africa. London’s colonial policy had
changed relatively little over the course of the previous decade. After the
Conservatives’ return to office in 1951, the governments of Winston
Churchill and Anthony Eden continued to uphold the British position
in the Middle East, Asia and Africa while remaining aloof from moves
towards European unity.73 After the 1956 Suez crisis, this stance came
under increasing strain and scrutiny. In Africa, the British Conservative
government had adopted a flexible strategy in the early 1950s. It was
deemed that west Africa (primarily the Gold Coast and Nigeria), with
its inhospitable climate for whites, could be rapidly brought forward to
autonomy and independence under African rule, but that east, central
and southern Africa—areas of white settlement—were to be treated dif-
ferently. This strategy explains the paradox of the simultaneous appoint-
ments in 1953 of Kwame Nkrumah, an African nationalist, and Godfrey
Huggins, a white settler, as prime ministers of the Gold Coast and the
Federation respectively.74
While it was not until the autumn of 1959 that Harold Macmillan’s
government became overtly committed to accelerating African
decolonization, the groundwork for new thinking had been established

in the first three years of his premiership. In 1957, in the aftermath of
Suez, Macmillan began the reorientation of British foreign, defence and
colonial policy. Nuclear weapons, it was now decided, were the sinews of
a major power. The capacity for the large-scale colonial policing opera-
tions ongoing in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus was reduced accordingly and
there was considerable reluctance to engage in new ones, which explains,
at least in part, the gloom that descended over British attitudes to the
Federation after the Nyasaland emergency of 1959. Economics also
played a role. New trading patterns revealed that investment in the colo-
nies was almost never as lucrative as investment in the metropole or in
other already developed economies. European integration, not depend-
ence on the underdeveloped world of the Commonwealth and colonies,
seemed the future. Once in power, Macmillan called for a balance sheet
of empire and various papers were produced. However, these made no
cast-iron case made for disengagement, perhaps to Macmillan’s cha-
grin.75 Indeed, the important ‘Africa: The Next Ten Years’ paper (1959)
forecast the United Kingdom having a major role in the Federation and
East Africa, the areas of white settlement, until 1970. The great worry
was that the failure of the Federation would make even more acute an
already evident racial conflict between European and African politicians.
The paper concluded with a conundrum rather than a solution: torn
between running the risk of transferring power to local governments
before they were ready to exercise it or withholding the transfer of power
and appeasing European minorities, Britain ran the risk of being iden-
tified with the extreme racial doctrines of South Africa and of pushing
independent Africa towards the Soviet Union.76
Equally influential on British attitudes were France’s colonial difficul-
ties, particularly the brutal and costly war in Algeria against the Front
de Libération Nationale (FLN). By May 1958 the war had so destabi-
lized metropolitan France that, in the face of a military putsch, General
Charles de Gaulle was brought out of retirement. He, like Macmillan,
saw the restoration of French greatness lying in nuclear weapons and
Europe rather than the colonial sphere. The creation of the French
Community in 1959, and France’s clear statement that individual drives
for independence would not be combated, effectively handed power
to Africans. In June 1960 he spoke of the French empire as something
from the past, like the age of sail and the ‘gentle light of oil lamps’.77
This change, of course, had a profound impact on Macmillan, who
increasingly came to fear a series of British ‘Algerias’ in East and Central

Africa. Equally important was the sudden abandonment of empire by
Belgium, when, in the face of serious unrest in 1959, independence was
promised for the Belgian Congo by the middle of 1960.78 Conversely,
the post-colonial shambles of the Congo strengthened the determination
of southern Africa’s whites to maintain their dominance.
White States of Emergency (1): Nyasaland

African nationalists objected to the CAF from the beginning. The
Federation’s spectacular economic growth disproportionately benefited
whites in Southern Rhodesia. Throughout the 1950s there was seri-
ous labour and political strife in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.79
In Southern Rhodesia, the local African National Congress (ANC) was
formed in 1957. It was led by Joshua Nkomo (present at the London
Conference of 1952 and an opponent of the federal scheme) and
George Nyandoro, the leader of rural Africans opposed to the exist-
ing land dispensation. In Northern Rhodesia, the Zambian ANC was
led by Kenneth Kaunda and Simon Kapwepwe. It called for a com-
plete boycott of the new constitution and Zambian withdrawal from
the Federation. But in Nyasaland political tensions grew fastest, with
the government refusing to recognize the Nyasaland African Congress
(NAC) as a valid interlocutor. That the explosion which eventually
wrecked the Federation should start in Nyasaland might be consid-
ered a surprise. After all, it was the poorest, most densely populated
and underdeveloped component of the Federation. Nyasaland was
frequently referred to by Federation and British politicians alike as a
‘slum’.80 Its governor, Sir Robert Armitage, had written in July 1956 of
the Nyasalanders’ enormous distrust of white Rhodesians. Presciently,
he noted, ‘I have little doubt that the opportunity to use extreme
physical force to crush violence in Nyasaland would be very welcome
in certain quarters.’81 Little did he know that he would, within three
years, deliver just such an opportunity. Armitage eventually concluded
that ‘Nyasaland was not essential to the Federation but the Federation
was essential to Nyasaland’, and that the best solution was to have an
African government within Nyasaland even while the federal administra-
tion remained predominantly white. This led to concerns that Northern
Rhodesia would demand the same treatment, leading to a partition
of the Federation into white and black areas.82 In 1958 Armitage
explained to Sir Roy Welensky that it had to be acknowledged pub-

licly that Nyasaland would eventually be an African-organized territory
within the Federation. Such an admission would have the greatest calm-
ing impact if made by Welensky.83 Welensky, however, would only agree
to a future black government in Nyasaland if law and order became a
federal matter, which the governors of the northern territories opposed,
given its importance.84 A putative black government in Nyasaland with-
out control of law and order would be, to all intents and purposes,
powerless.
On 6 July 1958 Dr. Hastings Banda arrived in Nyasaland, after forty-
three years abroad, to take over the leadership of the NAC. The ‘stu-
pid, so-called Federation’, as Banda described it, was about to meet its
nemesis. His platform rested on universal suffrage, an African majority
in parliament and the break-up of the CAF. Banda’s return fomented
an increasing assertiveness among Africans, which raised the ire of
Europeans, the federal government and the Colonial Office. Banda was
greeted by huge crowds on his arrival. He was an extraordinary figure.
Born in 1898 (though he would later claim 1906), and having received
a truncated missionary education, he worked in modest jobs in South
Africa before an American missionary helped him reach the United
States, where he studied for a medical degree, awarded in 1937. Unable
to secure adequate terms for an appointment in Nyasaland, he instead
built up a successful general practice in London. Nonetheless, Banda
retained an interest in Nyasaland and colonial affairs, acting as the NAC’s
London representative.85 He also advised Nyasaland nationalists on their
opposition to federation. Banda moved to the Gold Coast in 1953.
Possibly the best-educated Nyasalander, he was lobbied by the NAC’s
leadership to return; the party’s annual congress passed a resolution urg-
ing him to do just that in August 1957. He was perhaps motivated by
the impending review of the Federation, scheduled for 1960, likely to be
the last chance to prevent the structure acquiring increasing control over
native affairs or, as he put it to the Devlin Commission, ‘amalgamation
by the back door’.86
Banda’s arrival marked the climax of the mobilization of Nyasaland’s
indigenous population against the Federation. After overcoming ini-
tial inhibitions, he proved to be more than capable of fulfilling the
role expected of him by supporters.87 Incongruously dressed for tropi-
cal Africa in the three-piece suit and homburg hat typical of suburban
middle-class British GPs, Banda soon began addressing mass meetings
and electrifying crowds. Indeed, a district commissioner, Mr. Graham

Jolly, was called out in October 1958 to read the Riot Act after a politi-
cal meeting addressed by Banda.88 The NAC’s ‘Young Turks’, who had
brought Banda back, appeared to view him as a messiah.89 Meanwhile,
presaging his twenty-nine years of authoritarian rule after independence,
Banda swiftly secured untrammelled control of the party. His speeches
were studies in ambiguity, combining moderation with militancy.90 After
being harassed by customs officials in Salisbury airport in early 1959,
Banda told a meeting in Highfield, ‘My job is to break up this stupid
and hellish Federation. I don’t mind if they send me to prison. They can
put me on the Seychelles like Makarios or on St Helena like Napoleon.
I am prepared for anything, even death.’ He called on Africans in the
Federation to reject moderation, embrace extremism and go to jail in
their millions if necessary.91 The following month, Banda was banned
from the two Rhodesias.92 The Devlin Commission would later con-
clude that much of the content of Banda’s speeches was moderate and
not seditious, although it did concede that these were ‘the speeches of a
demagogue’.93 Banda did not impress all Africans. His obvious indiffer-
ence to the political struggle outside Nyasaland provoked the President
of the Northern Rhodesian ANC, Harry Nkumbala, to declare that
it was ‘extremely dangerous to think along Dr. Banda’s lines […] Let
us not forget our brethren in the south. We must not sell them to the
whites of Southern Africa in order to achieve our own aims.’94
By early 1959, both Nyasaland’s tiny European minority and the fed-
eral government wanted Banda crushed before his movement gained
any more momentum.95 Banda also caused concern in both federal and
British government circles. London feared a ‘showdown’ which might
involve federal forces, since once the latter were installed in Nyasaland
the claim for federal control of law and order would be incredibly dif-
ficult to deny. To forestall this possibility, the Colonial Office began to
prepare papers ‘to find the best advice which could be offered to Sir R.
Armitage as to means of neutralising Dr. Banda and his associates […]’.96
Early in 1959, African nationalists’ heated rhetoric provoked a wave of
violent protest across the Federation. Sir Edgar Whitehead, Southern
Rhodesia’s prime minister, declared a state of emergency on 26 February,
and five hundred arrests were carried out; draconian powers were del-
egated to the government to contain all violence and the local ANC
was proscribed. Northern Rhodesia’s own ANC was also proscribed in
advance of elections in April.
These actions were, however, dwarfed by the crackdown in Nyasaland.

Rumours were already circulating of a move against Banda and the NAC
by the British governor and the federal authorities.97 It duly came at
the end of February when Armitage requested the federal prime min-
ister send troops to prevent an alleged murder plot, recently uncov-
ered.98 It was claimed that on 24–25 January 1959, at a secret gathering
(known as ‘the meeting in the bush’) held during an NAC Conference,
agreement had been reached that, should Banda be arrested, four
of his ‘lieutenants’ would ‘launch a campaign of sabotage, intimida-
tion and murder against European settlers, loyal Africans, and British
civil servants’, including Armitage. Armitage subsequently stated that
by 20 February he had enough justification to declare a state of emer-
gency, delaying this step solely to ensure that he had sufficient forces
in place to deal with all contingencies. Later, a commission of inquiry
would cast doubt on the intelligence that justified this extreme meas-
ure.99 Philip Murphy also demonstrates that this was indeed rather
sketchy. Armitage’s relative caution contrasted with the attitude of
the Commissioner of the Nyasaland Police, J.V. Mullin, who was con-
vinced that the NAC planned mass murder if Dr. Banda was arrested or
killed. In London, both the Intelligence and Security Department of
the Colonial Office and MI5 agreed with the more alarmist readings of
the ‘meeting in the bush’.100 When proclaimed, the state of emergency
saw the deployment of significant numbers of federal troops, leading to
claims in Britain that the whole process was the result of pressure from
Welensky on Armitage.
Banda was arrested on 3 March (he would be detained in Southern
Rhodesia) along with hundreds of his followers. But ‘Operation
Sunrise’, the swoop on the NAC leadership, was almost entirely coun-
terproductive, provoking the rioting and violence that Armitage was
trying to prevent.101 Some fifty-one Africans were shot and killed in
the ensuing disorder. Writing a few days afterwards, Harold Taswell,
the South African high commissioner to the Federation, wondered
whether Banda’s arrest would turn him into a hero like Nkrumah
in Ghana. Taswell noted that if Nyasaland was allowed independ-
ence outside the Federation, it would be almost impossible to stop
Northern Rhodesia following suit. The loss of Northern Rhodesia
and its mineral resources would in turn undermine Southern
Rhodesia’s economic position. If that happened, there would be an
immediate drop in the region’s purchasing power, with enormous
consequences for the South African economy, which had annual

exports to the Federation of around £60 million. It also could have
significant political consequences as well. Taswell had no confidence
in the long-term future of the Federation. He noted that behind its
evolution lay a struggle between the two major parties in England:
‘Among many of the Conservative leaders, it is felt that the whites in
the Federation complicate the whole position and harm progress of
the Bantu. Between these and the irresponsibility of the Labour party,
the Federation has an unpleasant choice.’102 Taswell’s views were
prescient. Britain’s economic interest and defence posture were, by
February 1959, pointing towards colonial disengagement. Moral and
political questions of the highest order came together as a result of
the Nyasaland state of emergency and the revelations about the Hola
camp in Kenya. As John Darwin notes, while Macmillan had survived
the parliamentary inquisition on the Devlin report, the ‘scars remained
and “No more Nyasalands” became the unspoken motto of his African
policy’.103
In Britain, disquiet grew over the declaration and implementation
of Nyasaland’s state of emergency, particularly in the Labour Party.104
Pressure accordingly mounted on the Conservative government.
Macmillan, who made only one brief reference to the Nyasaland in his
diary before the emergency, recorded on 5 March that the ‘Federation
plan, altho’ economically correct since Nyasaland is not “viable” is
regarded with such great suspicion by advanced native opinion as to
be politically unacceptable.’105 The following week, on 11 March,
Macmillan attempted to regain the initiative by seeking increased inter-
departmental coordination of Central African affairs by the British
bureaucracy, the publication of the intelligence reports that led to the
state of emergency and the appointment of a commission into the
cause of the disturbances in Nyasaland (subsequently established as the
Devlin Commission, which reported in July). He wondered could the
Federation continue in ‘its present form’.106
At this time, the Southern Rhodesian press began to publish rumours
that units of the South African army had been put on alert for deploy-
ment to the Federation. This threw up one of those not uncommon
attempts by this press to differentiate between the Federation and South
Africa. On 11 March, the Bulawayo Chronicle urged Sir Roy Welensky
to reject politely such an offer, arguing that the ‘road South Africa is
treading in matter of general internal policy is the concern of the people
of that country […] but […] the Federation is taking a different road;
apartheid and partnership are irreconcilable’.107 This was not a universal
view among Rhodesian whites: Taswell reported the mayor of Bulawayo
calling South Africa a true friend.108
South Africa’s high commissioner in London noted that the ‘govern-
ment’s charge that there was a widespread massacre plot in Nyasaland
has been received in Britain with a great deal of scepticism and even
incredulity’. He added that there were calls for a commission of inquiry
that would inevitably lead to proposals to placate the Nyasalanders’ opin-
ion and ‘confirm the conviction of the Africans in all dependent territo-
ries that violence does pay’. 109 In conversation with Taswell, the federal
minister of finance, Donald McIntyre, suggested that the Nyasaland and
Barotseland (in Northern Rhodesia) could be handled in much the same
way as the homelands proposed by South Africa: ‘We have a tremen-
dous amount of land here. Much more than you do in the Union and
we can apply separate development more easily.’ Taswell noted that these
remarks bore ‘a striking similarity’ to the plans of the much more right-
wing opposition Dominion Party, which Welensky frequently decried.
McIntyre concluded the interview by saying that ‘all of us whites in
Southern Africa must stand together. We must not be divided by small
matters. If one part falls, we all fall.’ Taswell replied that the Portuguese
had expressed similar sentiments to him.110
The consequences of the Nyasaland emergency continued to develop
over the summer. Macmillan met with Welensky, whom he saw as sincere
and progressive but also as someone who ‘would not shrink from seces-
sion if he thought the Europeans ill-treated from London’.111 Indeed,
military staff in the CAF continued to argue for increased federal con-
trol over Nyasaland.112 But the publication in July 1959 of the damn-
ing report on the Nyasaland disturbances by Lord Devlin reignited the
debate over the Federation’s future. Macmillan, who viewed the report
as ‘dynamite’ that could topple his government, complained privately
that Devlin was an Irish-Fenian, lapsed-Catholic hunchback, embittered
towards the government by his failure to be made lord chief justice.113
According to his diary, Macmillan would have resigned had the Cabinet
not backed his decision to support the Governor of Nyasaland and the
Colonial Secretary. The government easily survived the ensuing debate
by taking a strong line, notably continuing to insist on the veracity of the
murder plot and refusing to release Banda. This misled many European
politicians in the Federation to conclude that the Tories remained
their firm supporters. However, the ground was shifting. Added to

the controversies in Kenya, the situation in Nyasaland was turning the
Conservative leadership away from empire. One of the notable casualties
of the change of mindset (and subsequently policy) would be the multi-
racial partnership of the Federation. What in 1953 had been viewed as
a progressive concept was now looking increasingly anachronistic in the
face of a rising tide of African nationalism. An advisory commission for
Central Africa to explore the future of the Federation was announced.
Harold Macmillan’s Conservative party was decisively returned to
power in October 1959. In the Federation’s territories, nationalists,
their leaders released from jail, prepared themselves better for the com-
ing struggle. Unbeknownst to them, the Macmillan government was
about to undertake a dramatic reversal of its Africa policy. Iain Macleod
replaced Alan Lennox Boyd as colonial secretary. The hysterical and
overwrought government response to the Devlin report gave way to a
new understanding of empire as an anachronism to be jettisoned before
Britain was burdened with a series of Algeria-style insurgencies of its
own.114 Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech, delivered in Cape
Town in January 1960 during a wider tour of Africa, was an important
harbinger of the new British attitude. On the one hand, it was a signal to
Hendrik Verwoerd that Britain would no longer serve as South Africa’s
mudguard at the UN. On the other, it was a warning to British settlers in
Africa that Britain’s commitment to them was diminishing.115 Southern
Africa’s whites viewed it simply as an act of betrayal. Welensky wrote later
that Macmillan’s speech and tour implied that the British government
had chosen, in the face of the ‘wind of change’, to shorten sail and run
‘before the tempest to the nearest and earliest harbour’.116 Macmillan’s
speech would also have unforeseen consequences in South Africa itself.
White States of Emergency (2): South Africa

The death of Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom in office in August 1958
provoked a battle between the Transvaal and Cape wings of the NP.
Hendrik Verwoerd, with his base in the Transvaal, emerged as winner
from the vote of the party caucus. Perhaps the party’s most ‘implacable
extremist’, his victory over the more moderate representative of the Cape
nationalists, Eben Dönges, paved the way for the implementation of
‘grand apartheid’ as all around, in the colonial sphere, the old certainties
were disappearing.117 Verwoerd was born in the Netherlands (hence his
nickname, Die Hollander). Like so many significant nationalist leaders

born abroad or on the periphery (Hitler, Napoleon, Éamon de Valera),
he became the embodiment, for a time at least, of his chosen people—in
his case the Afrikaner nation. Verwoerd’s first year in office saw a bat-
tery of new legislation that pressed forward his revised apartheid project,
predicated on South Africa, at some period in the distant future, becom-
ing a commonwealth of the white provinces and autonomous ‘Bantu’
states. Separate development was now to replace baaskap (white domina-
tion). Whether this was a cynical ploy on the part of Verwoerd to show
that South Africa was taking account of the decolonization process, or
a sincere attempt to solve the racial problem (though very much to the
economic and political advantage of whites), remains somewhat unclear.
During the first decade of apartheid it was by no means assured that
the homelands policy would become its central plank. Prime Minister
Malan had not been enthusiastic about it, preferring segregation and
group areas to self-governing African homelands. Some Afrikaner intel-
lectuals saw the homelands policy as a means of putting a positive spin on
apartheid, moving it away from restrictive racial laws.118 The most sig-
nificant milestone on the road to grand apartheid was the report of the
1955 Tomlinson Commission into the native reserves. The Tomlinson
plan argued for their development, calling for the spending of £104
million over ten years. A series of black homelands would be created,
predicated on the assumption that that there was no single black South
African identity but, instead, eight different tribes or nations. Verwoerd
accepted the commission’s demographic projections but rejected its call
for massive investment. After abolishing black representation in parlia-
ment, he stated that ‘when the white man is given full authority only in
his areas … The Bantu will acquire full authority elsewhere in the course
of time.’119
Verwoerd never let his mask of sincerity slip. The trouble was that
even under the most generous interpretation, the homelands policy was
simply unworkable.120 Some nationalists, concerned about maintaining
traditional white domination, were not happy about the very concept
of Bantu homelands, which seemed both a concession to world opin-
ion and, potentially, a step on the road to the partition of South Africa.
Verwoerd kept them on side with a battery of new legislation extend-
ing the petty aspects of apartheid. New laws were passed abolishing the
three seats in the House of Assembly reserved for white representatives
of Cape African voters and excluding non-whites from white universities,
on which funding would be concentrated (the absurdly titled ‘Extension

of University Education Act’). Verwoerd also made clear that the issue
of establishing a republic, which his predecessors had played down, was
now back on the agenda.
It was amid this unpleasant atmosphere that Harold Macmillan con-
cluded his African tour of 1960 with an address to the South African
parliament in Cape Town. If Macmillan’s aim was to point out the folly
of apartheid whilst keeping South Africa within the Commonwealth, the
speech was a failure. Saul Dubow notes that in ‘Britain, the speech was
immediately recognized as signalling a clear break with vestigial empire
loyalism, a willingness to countenance more rapid withdrawal from
Africa, and a readiness to abandon support of South Africa at the United
Nations’.121 Writing in October 1960, Sir John Maud, the British high
commissioner, explained that the speech had been bitterly ‘resented by
the government whose spokesmen, including Dr. Verwoerd, have sug-
gested that Mr Macmillan must share the blame for what followed in
March in the union and for later troubles elsewhere in Africa’.122 The
events of the following year, detailed below, would, however, give
Verwoerd, as Maud concluded, a ‘mesmerizing hold on the Nationalist
caucus and large swathes of the electorate’.123
African nationalism in the Union had not been quiescent since 1948,
just relatively ineffective. A new generation of leaders had taken control
of the SAANC after the NP came to power: of these, the most impor-
tant were Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. In 1952,
alongside the South African Indian Congress, a passive resistance cam-
paign was launched, which, while attracting large-scale support, failed
to change government policy. It was hastily abandoned after serious vio-
lence broke out in the Eastern Cape. The SAANC, because of the mili-
tant Africanist nature of the rioters, downplayed the killing by police of
more than 200 protestors in Duncan Village, East London, in November
1952: a massacre much more extensive than the better-known event
at Sharpeville.124 The SAANC preferred to emphasize its more lib-
eral characteristics and in June 1955 it adopted the Freedom Charter,
which promised a multiracial South Africa. The government responded
by accusing the SAANC of high treason, hoping to break it once and
for all. The ensuing prosecution collapsed but it tied up much of the
SAANC leadership until 1961. The movement’s willingness to work
alongside white groupings alienated some blacks, who were enthused by
Pan-Africanist ideas current in the 1950s. Robert Sobukwe broke from
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position from a military point of view, made it the most important
object for any military expedition.
There is a great bend in the Mississippi, thirty miles above the
head of the passes, the lowest favorable locality for defence, where
two forts had been erected by the United States Government, St.
Philip on the left, or north bank, and a little further down, Fort
Jackson, on the right bank. A single fort at this point had held a
British fleet in check for nine days, in spite of a vigorous shelling by
their guns and mortars. Fort St. Philip was originally built by the
Spaniards, but had been completely reconstructed. It was a
quadrangular earthwork, with a brick scarp, and powerful batteries
exteriorly, above and below. Fort Jackson was more important, and
rose twenty-five feet above the river and swamp, while St. Philip was
only nineteen feet above them.
The Confederates had taken possession of these works, and had
put them in complete order; Jackson mounted seventy-five powerful
guns, and St. Philip forty. Fourteen of Fort Jackson’s guns were in
bomb-proof casemates. The works were garrisoned by fifteen
hundred men, commanded by Brigadier General Duncan; St. Philip
being commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Higgins, formerly
an officer of the United States Navy.
Above the forts lay a fleet of fifteen vessels, under Commodore J.
K. Mitchell, formerly of the United States Navy, which included the
ironclad ram Manassas, and a huge floating battery, covered with
railroad iron, called the “Louisiana.”
Just below Fort Jackson the river was obstructed by a heavy
chain, brought from the Pensacola Navy-yard. This chain was
supported by cypress logs, at short intervals; the ends made fast to
great trees on shore, and the whole kept from sagging down with the
current by heavy anchors.
This contrivance was swept away by a spring freshet, and was
replaced by smaller chains, passed over eight dismasted hulks,
anchored abreast, and partially by logs, as before. There was a
battery at the end opposite Fort Jackson.
A number of sharpshooters patrolled the banks below, to give
notice of any movements of the United States forces.
Farragut’s task was to break through the obstructions, pass the
forts, destroy or capture the Rebel fleet, and then to place New
Orleans under the guns of his own ships, and demand its surrender.
He had six sloops-of-war, sixteen gun-boats—all steam-vessels—
and twenty-one schooners, each with a 13-inch mortar, and five
sailing vessels, which were to act as magazines and store-ships.
The fleet carried over two hundred guns, and was the largest that
had ever been seen under our flag, up to that time; but was
afterwards much exceeded by that which bombarded Fort Fisher.
There was little opportunity for General Butler and his fifteen
thousand troops to co-operate in the passage of the forts; so they
only held themselves ready to hold what Farragut might capture.
Farragut hoped to have taken the Colorado, a most powerful
frigate, up the river, but she drew entirely too much water to be got
over the bar. Great difficulty was experienced in getting the Brooklyn,
Mississippi, and Pensacola into the river. The Mississippi, although
lightened in every possible way, had to be dragged through at least a
foot of mud.
When the arduous labor was finished, and the time for action
arrived, Butler’s troops were embarked on the transports, and
Porter’s mortar-schooners were placed on each bank, below the
forts; being protected from the view of those in the batteries by the
forest trees, and by having great branches lashed at their mast-
heads, which blended with the foliage on the banks.
The mortars threw shells weighing two hundred and eighty-five
pounds, and their fire was guided by a careful triangulation, made by
Mr. Gerdes, of the Coast Survey. Fort Jackson received most of the
shells, of which about a thousand a day were thrown, for six days.
The Confederates had a good many killed and wounded by this
means, and much damage was done, but the forts were not
silenced; and Lieutenant Weitzel reported, after their surrender, that
they were as strong as before the first shell was fired.
NEW ORLEANS—FLEET PASSING FORTS JACKSON AND ST. PHILIP.
One schooner was sunk, and one steamer disabled by the return
fire from the fort.
In the course of the delay waiting for the result of the
bombardment, many of Farragut’s ships were damaged by collisions,
caused by strong winds and currents, and by efforts to avoid the fire-
rafts which the enemy sent down. Only one of the latter put the ships
in any danger, and that was at last turned off. These fire-rafts were
flatboats piled with dry wood, sprinkled with tar and turpentine. They
were towed out of the way by the ships’ boats.
Farragut had issued orders to his commanding officers in regard to
preparing their ships for this particular service. After providing for the
top hamper, and dispensing with many masts and spars, he says,
“Make arrangements, if possible, to mount one or two guns on the
poop and top-gallant-forecastle; in other words, be prepared to use
as many guns as possible, ahead and astern, to protect yourself
against the enemy’s gun-boats and batteries, bearing in mind that
you will always have to ride head to the current, and can only avail
yourself of the sheer of the helm to point a broadside gun more than
three points forward of the beam.
“Have a kedge in the mizzen-chains (or any convenient place) on
the quarter, with a hawser bent and leading through in the stern
chock, ready for any emergency; also grapnels in the boats, ready to
hook on to and to tow off fire-ships. Trim your vessel a few inches by
the head, so that if she touches the bottom she will not swing head
down the river. Put your boat howitzers in the fore and main tops, on
the boat carriages, and secure them for firing abeam, etc. Should
any accident occur to the machinery of the ship, making it necessary
to drop down the river, you will back and fill down under sail, or you
can drop your anchor and drift down, but in no case attempt to turn
the ship’s head down stream. You will have a spare hawser ready,
and when ordered to take in tow your next astern, do so, keeping the
hawser slack so long as the ship can maintain her own position,
having a care not to foul the propeller.
“No vessel must withdraw from battle, under any circumstances,
without the consent of the flag-officer. You will see that force and
other pumps and engine hose are in good order, and men stationed
by them, and your men will be drilled to the extinguishing of fires.
“Have light Jacob-ladders made to throw over the side, for the use
of the carpenters in stopping shot-holes, who are to be supplied with
pieces of inch board lined with felt, and ordinary nails, and see that
the ports are marked, in accordance with the ‘ordnance instructions,’
on the berth deck, to show the locality of the shot-holes.
“Have many tubs of water about the decks, both for the purpose of
extinguishing fire and for drinking. Have a heavy kedge in the port
main-chains, and a whip on the main-yard, ready to run it up and let
fall on the deck of any vessel you may run alongside of, in order to
secure her for boarding.
“You will be careful to have lanyards on the lever of the screw, so
as to secure the gun at the proper elevation, and prevent it from
running down at each fire. I wish you to understand that the day is at
hand when you will be called upon to meet the enemy in the worst
form for our profession. You must be prepared to execute all those
duties to which you have been so long trained in the Navy without
having the opportunity of practicing. I expect every vessel’s crew to
be well exercised at their guns, because it is required by the
regulations of the service, and it is usually the first object of our
attention; but they must be equally well trained for stopping shot-
holes and extinguishing fire. Hot and cold shot will, no doubt, be
freely dealt to us, and there must be stout hearts and quick hands to
extinguish the one and stop the holes of the other.
“I shall expect the most prompt attention to signals and verbal
orders, either from myself or the Captain of the fleet, who, it will be
understood, in all cases, acts by my authority.”
After the bombardment had continued three days Farragut, who
had made up his mind to attempt the passage of the forts in any
event, called a council of his Captains, to obtain their opinion as to
the best manner of doing so.
Immediately after the council Farragut issued the following general
order:—
“United States Flag-ship Hartford,
Mississippi River, April 20th, 1862.
“The Flag-Officer, having heard all the opinions expressed by the
different commanders, is of the opinion that whatever is to be done
will have to be done quickly, or we shall be again reduced to a
blockading squadron, without the means of carrying on the
bombardment, as we have nearly expended all the shells and fuses
and material for making cartridges. He has always entertained the
same opinions which are expressed by Commander Porter; that is,
there are three modes of attack; and the question is, which is the
one to be adopted? his own opinion is, that a combination of two
should be made; viz., the forts should be run, and when a force is
once above the forts, to protect the troops, they should be landed at
quarantine, from the Gulf side, by bringing them through the bayou,
and then our forces should move up the river, mutually aiding each
other as it can be done to advantage.
“When, in the opinion of the Flag-Officer, the propitious time has
arrived, the signal will be made to weigh and advance to the conflict.
If, in his opinion, at the time of arriving at the respective positions of
the different divisions of the fleet, we have the advantage, he will
make the signal for close action, number 8, and abide the result,
conquer, or be conquered, drop anchor or keep under way, as in his
opinion is best.
“Unless the signal above mentioned is made, it will be understood
that the first order of sailing will be formed after leaving Fort St.
Philip, and we will proceed up the river in accordance with the
original opinion expressed.
“The programme of the order of sailing accompanies this general
order, and the commanders will hold themselves in readiness for the
service as indicated.
“D. G. Farragut,
“Flag-Officer Western Gulf Blockading Squadron.”
Having decided to run by the forts, he confided to Fleet-Captain
Bell the dangerous mission of proceeding, with the gunboats Pinola
and Itasca, to make a passage for his fleet through the chain
obstructions.
Lieutenant Caldwell, of the Itasca, and his party, with great
coolness and bravery, boarded one of the hulks, and succeeded in
detaching the chains. They were accompanied by the inventor of a
new submarine petard, which he placed under one of the hulks. But
a movement of the Pinola in the swift current snapped the wires, and
it could not be exploded. In spite of a very heavy fire directed upon
them, the party at last succeeded in making a sufficient opening for
the fleet to pass through.
Farragut wrote, the next day: “* * * Captain Bell went last night to
cut the chain across the river. I never felt such anxiety in my life, as I
did until his return. One of his vessels got on shore, and I was fearful
she would be captured. They kept up a tremendous fire on him; but
Porter diverted their fire with a heavy cannonade. * * * * Bell would
have burned the hulks, but the illumination would have given the
enemy a chance to destroy his gunboat, which got aground.
However, the chain was divided, and it gives us space enough to go
through. I was as glad to see Bell, on his return, as if he had been
my boy. I was up all night, and could not sleep until he got back to
the ship.”
Farragut had determined to run by the forts at the end of five days’
bombardment; but he was detained for twenty-four hours by the
necessity of repairing damages to two of his vessels. At first he had
determined to lead, in the Hartford, but was dissuaded from that, and
appointed Captain Bailey, whose ship, the Colorado, drew too much
water to get up, to lead the column, in the gun-boat Cayuga,
Lieutenant Commanding N. B. Harrison.
Long before this—on the 6th of April—Farragut had himself
reconnoitred the forts, by daylight, going up in the gun-boat
Kennebec in whose cross-trees he sat, glass in hand, until the
gunners in the fort began to get his range.
On the night of the passage, April 23-24, the moon would rise
about half-past three in the morning, and the fleet was ordered to be
ready to start about two.
In this, as in most other important operations during the war, the
enemy were mysteriously apprised of what was to be done.
At sunset there was a light southerly breeze, and a haze upon the
water. Caldwell was sent up, in the Itasca, to see if the passage
made in the obstructions was still open. At eleven at night he
signalled that it was, and just at that time the enemy opened fire
upon him, sent down burning rafts, and lighted immense piles of
wood which they had prepared on shore, near the ends of the chain.
Soon after midnight the hammocks of the fleet were quietly
stowed, and the ships cleared for action.
At five minutes before two, two ordinary red lights were shown at
the peak of the flag-ship, the signal to get under way, but it was half-
past three before all was ready. This was the time for the moon to
rise, but that made little difference, with the light of the blazing rafts
and bonfires.
The mortar-boats and the sailing sloop Portsmouth moved further
up stream, to engage the water battery, as the ships were going by.
This they promptly did, and then Captain Bailey led off, with his
division of eight vessels, whose objective point was Fort St. Philip.
All of these passed safely through the opening in the cable.
The forts opened on them promptly, but in five minutes they had
reached St. Philip, and were pouring grape and canister into that
work.
In ten minutes more the Cayuga had passed beyond range of the
fort, to find herself surrounded by eleven Rebel gun-boats. Three of
these attempted to board her at once. An 11-inch shot was sent
through one of them, at a range of about thirty yards, and she was at
once run ashore and burned up.
The Parrott gun on the Cayuga’s forecastle drove off another; and
she was preparing to close with the third, when the Oneida and
Varuna, which had run in close to St. Philip, thus avoiding the
elevated guns of that fort, while they swept its bastions with grape
and shrapnel, came to the assistance of the Cayuga. S. P. Lee, in
the Oneida, ran full speed into one of the enemy’s vessels, cut her
nearly in two, and left her floating down the current, a helpless
wreck.
She fired right and left into two others, and then went to the
assistance of the Varuna, which had got ashore on the left bank,
hard pressed by two Rebel gun-boats, one of which was said to be
the Manassas. The Varuna was rammed by both of them, and fifteen
minutes after, she sunk. In that time she had put three 8-inch shells
into the Governor Moore, besides so crippling her with solid shot that
she surrendered to the Oneida. She also forced another to take to
the bank by her 8-inch shell. The Varuna was commanded by
Commander (now Admiral) C. S. Boggs. It is said that, before
sinking, he also exploded the boiler of another small steamer.
The Pensacola steamed slowly and steadily by, firing her powerful
battery with great deliberation, and doing especial execution with her
11-inch pivot gun and her rifled eighty-pounder. In return she
received a heavy fire, and lost thirty-seven in killed and wounded;
the greatest number of any of the fleet. Her boats were lowered, and
sent to assist the sinking Varuna.
The Mississippi came up next in line to the Pensacola, but
escaped with light loss of life. She it was that met the ram Manassas,
and the latter gave her a severe cut, below the water, on the port-
quarter, and disabled her machinery. But the Mississippi riddled her
with shot, boarded her, and set her on fire, and she drifted down
below the forts and blew up.
The Katahdin ran close to the forts, passed them rapidly, got near
the head of the line, and was engaged principally with the ironclad
Louisiana. The Kineo ran by, close under St. Philip, and then
assisted the Mississippi with the ram Manassas: but she was
afterwards attacked by three of the enemy’s gun-boats at once, and,
having had her pivot-gun-carriage injured, withdrew, and continued
up stream.
The Wissahickon, the last of the eight vessels of the first division,
was less fortunate. She got ashore before she reached the forts, got
off and passed them, and ran on shore again above.
It must be remembered that these operations were carried on in
the darkness and thick smoke, lighted only by the lurid flashes of
more than two hundred guns.
The second division of the fleet was led by Farragut himself, in the
Hartford, followed by the Brooklyn and Richmond. These were three
formidable vessels. The Hartford opened fire on Fort Jackson just
before four in the morning, and received a heavy fire from both forts.
Soon after, in attempting to avoid a fire-raft, she grounded on a shoal
spot, near St. Philip. At the same time the ram Manassas pushed a
fire-raft under her port-quarter, and she at once took fire. A portion of
her crew went to fire-quarters, and soon subdued the flames, the
working of her guns being steadily continued. Soon she backed off,
into deep water; but this movement set her head down stream, and it
was with difficulty that she was turned round against the current.
When, at last, this was accomplished, she proceeded up the river,
firing into several of the enemy’s vessels as she passed. One of
these was a steamer, packed with men, apparently a boarding party.
She was making straight for the Hartford, when Captain Broome’s
gun, manned by marines, planted a shell in her, which exploded, and
she disappeared.
During the critical period when she was slowly turning up river, the
Admiral stood aft, giving orders, and occasionally consulting a little
compass attached to his watch-chain. During most of the
engagement, however, he was forward, watching the progress of the
fight.
The Brooklyn was also detained by getting entangled with a raft,
and running over one of the hulks which held up the chain, during
which time she was raked by Fort Jackson, and suffered somewhat
from the fire of St. Philip.
Just as she was clear, and headed up stream, she was butted by
the Manassas, which had not headway enough to damage her
much, and slid off again into the darkness. Then the Brooklyn was
attacked by a large steamer, but she gave her her port broadside, at
fifty yards, and set her on fire. Feeling her way along, in a dense
cloud of smoke from a fire-raft, she came close abreast of St. Philip,
into which she poured such tremendous broadsides that by the
flashes the gunners were seen running to shelter, and for the time
the fort was silenced. The Brooklyn then passed on, and engaged
several of the enemy’s gun-boats. One of these, the Warrior, came
under her port broadside, when eleven five-second shells were
planted in her, which set her on fire, and she was run on shore. The
Brooklyn was under fire an hour and a half, but did not lose quite so
many as the Pensacola.
The Richmond, a slow ship, was the third and last of the centre
division. She came on steadily, and without accident, working her
battery with the utmost regularity. Her loss was not heavy, which her
commander attributed mainly to a complete provision of splinter
nettings.
The gun-boat Sciota, carrying Fleet-Captain Bell, led the third
division. She steamed by the forts, firing as she passed, and above
them burned two steamboats. Then she sent a boat to receive the
surrender of an armed steamboat, but the latter was found to be fast
ashore.
The Iroquois, Commander John DeCamp, had not such good
fortune. She passed so close to Fort Jackson as to escape much
injury, but received a terrible raking from St. Philip, and was also
raked by the armed steamer McCrea, with grape. She drove off the
McCrea with an eleven-inch shell and a stand of canister, and then
went through a group of the enemy’s gun-boats, giving them
broadsides as she passed. The Iroquois’ losses were heavy.
The gun-boat Pinola passed up in line, firing her eleven-inch pivot
and Parrott rifles at the flashes of the guns of the forts, which were
all that Commander Crosby could see; then she emerged from the
smoke cloud, steered towards St. Philip, and by the light of the
blazing rafts, received the discharges of its forty guns.
The Pinola was the last vessel which passed the forts, and she got
up in time to fire a few shell at the enemy’s flotilla.
Of the other three gun-boats of the division, the Kennebec got out
of her course, became entangled in the rafts, and did not get free
until it was broad daylight, and too late to attempt a passage. The
Itasca, upon arriving in front of Fort Jackson, received a shot in her
boiler, incapacitating her, and she was obliged to drift down stream.
The Winona got astray among the hulks, and when she came
within range of Fort Jackson it was broad daylight, and the fleet had
gone on. Fort Jackson opened upon her, and she soon lost all the
crew of her rifled gun but one man. Still she kept on, to endeavor to
get through, but St. Philip opening upon her, from her lower battery,
at less than point blank range, the little Winona was forced to turn
and descend the stream.
Thus did Farragut accomplish a feat in naval warfare which had no
precedent, and which is still without a parallel, except the one
furnished by himself, at Mobile, two years later.
Starting with seventeen wooden vessels, he had passed, with all
but three of them, against the swift current of a river, there but half a
mile wide, between two powerful earthworks, which had long been
prepared for him, his course impeded by blazing rafts, and
immediately thereafter had met the enemy’s fleet of fifteen vessels,
two of them ironclad, and either captured or destroyed every one of
them.
All this was done with the loss of but one vessel from his own
squadron. Probably few naval men would have believed that this
work could have been done so effectually, even with ironclads.
Captain Wilkinson, who was in this battle as executive officer of
the Confederate iron-clad Louisiana, in his “Narrative of a Blockade
Runner,” says: “Most of us belonging to that little naval fleet knew
that Admiral Farragut would dare to attempt what any man would;
and, for my part, I had not forgotten that while I was under his
command, during the Mexican war, he had proposed to Commodore
Perry, then commanding the Gulf Squadron, and urged upon him,
the enterprise of capturing the strong fort of San Juan de Ulloa, at
Vera Cruz, by boarding. Ladders were to be constructed, and triced
up along the attacking ships’ masts, and the ships to be towed
alongside the walls by the steamers of the squadron. Here was a
much grander prize to be fought for, and every day of delay was
strengthening his adversaries.”
The magnitude of Farragut’s novel enterprise was scarcely
realized at the North when the first news was received. It was simply
announced that he “had run by the forts.” The Confederates knew
too well what resistance and difficulties he had overcome, and what
a loss they sustained in New Orleans.
An officer who was in the engagement expressed an opinion that if
the passage had been attempted by daylight the fleet would have
sustained a fearful loss.
After the fleet had passed the forts Captain Bailey, in the Cayuga,
preceded the flag-ship up the river, and at the quarantine station
captured the Chalmette regiment, encamped upon the river bank.
On the morning of the 25th, the Cayuga, still leading, encountered
the Chalmette batteries, three miles below New Orleans. The
Hartford and Brooklyn, with several others, soon joined her, and
silenced these batteries. New Orleans was now fairly under
Farragut’s guns, and this had been effected at the cost of thirty-
seven killed and one hundred and forty-seven wounded.
Farragut appointed eleven o’clock of the morning of the 26th as
the hour “for all the officers and crews of the fleet to return thanks to
Almighty God for His great goodness and mercy, in permitting us to
pass through the events of the last two days with so little loss of life
and blood.”
The ships passed up to the city, and anchored immediately in front
of it, and Captain Bailey was sent on shore to demand the surrender
of it, from the authorities, to which the Mayor replied that the city was
under martial law, and that he had no authority. General Lovell, who
was present, said he would deliver up nothing, but, in order to free
the city from embarrassment, he would restore the city authorities,
and retire with his troops, which he did.
Farragut then seized all the steamboats which had not been
destroyed and sent them down to the quarantine station, for Butler’s
troops. Among them was the Tennessee, which the blockaders had
been so long watching for, but which never got out.
The levee at New Orleans was at this time a scene of perfect
desolation, as ships, steamers, and huge piles of cotton and wool
had been set on fire by the Confederates, and an immense amount
of property was destroyed. A very powerful ironclad, called the
Mississippi, was set on fire, and drifted down past the city, in flames.
Another was sunk directly in front of the Custom House, and others
which had been begun at Algiers were destroyed.
Several miles up the river, about Carrollton, were extensive
fortifications—all taken possession of by Commander Lee—and an
immense work, supporting chains, to prevent Foote’s gun-boats from
descending the river.
Farragut had sent a party on shore to hoist the flag on the Custom
House and Mint, belonging to the General Government. The party
acted with great firmness and discretion, in spite of insults from a
large and excited crowd. At noon on the 26th, during the
performance of divine service referred to before, the officers and
crews of the vessels were startled by the discharge of a howitzer in
the main-top of the Pensacola. The lookout aloft had seen four men
mount to the roof of the Mint and tear down the United States flag,
and he had instantly fired the gun, which was trained upon the flag-
staff, and loaded with grape.
The leader of these men, a desperado and gambler, who thus
imperilled the lives and property of the whole of the citizens, was, by
order of General Butler, tried for the offence afterwards, was found
guilty, and hanged by a beam and rope thrust out of the highest
window of the Mint.
When Admiral Farragut arrived at the quarantine station, after
passing the forts, he had sent Captain Boggs (whose vessel, the
Varuna, was lost) in a boat, through the bayous, to inform General
Butler and Commander Porter of his success. The Captain was
twenty-six hours in getting through. But General Butler, in the
steamer Saxon, had followed the fleet up near the forts, and had
witnessed the passage of the ships. He then hurried back to his
troops, and they rendezvoused at Sable Island, twelve miles in the
rear of Fort St. Philip, whence they were carried up in transports and
landed at a point five miles above that work. At the same time
Commander Porter had sent six of his mortar-boats to the bay
behind Fort Jackson, where they arrived on the morning of April
27th, thus making a complete investment. That night two hundred
and fifty of the garrison of Fort Jackson came out and surrendered
themselves to the Union pickets.
While Farragut was passing the forts, Porter, with his mortar-
boats, and their attendant steamers, continued the bombardment.
On the 24th he demanded a surrender, but was refused, and for the
three days following there was little or no firing. During these days
the garrisons were occupied in re-mounting some of their
dismounted guns, and transferred others to the floating battery
Louisiana.
On the 28th, General Duncan, the commander of the forts,
learning that Farragut had possession of New Orleans, accepted the
terms offered by Porter. While the articles of capitulation were being
drawn up and signed, on board the Harriet Lane, and flags of truce
were flying, the Confederate naval officers, after destroying three of
their four remaining vessels, set fire to the Louisiana, and cast her
adrift.
Fortunately her magazine exploded before she reached Porter’s
flotilla, or some of his vessels must have shared her fate; and, not
improbably, all of them.
After the surrender had been consummated, he went up the river,
and captured the naval officers who were supposed to have been
guilty of this perfidious and most dishonorable, and murderous act,
and put them in close confinement, to be sent North, and dealt with
as the Government might see fit. John K. Mitchell, the Commodore
of the Confederate flotilla, sent a letter to Farragut, justifying himself
for destroying his vessels, and excusing his attempt to blow up
Porter’s vessels, in this wise:—
“Lieutenant Whittle was sent in a boat with a flag of truce to inform
Commander Porter that in firing the Louisiana, her magazine had not
been effectually drowned and that, though efforts were made to
drown the charges in the guns, they may not have succeeded. This
information was given in consideration of the negotiations then
pending under flag of truce between him and Fort Jackson; but while
the message was on its way the explosion took place, a fact that
does not affect the honorable purposes intended by it.”
This letter seems almost too childish and disingenuous to receive
serious notice. It was almost the only instance during the war when
naval officers did not act in good faith.
The Confederate naval officers claimed, in justification of their
action, that they were no party to the flag of truce, nor were they
included in the terms of surrender of the forts, General Duncan
treating only for the garrisons under his command, and expressly
disclaiming all connection with the navy. The whole was a pitiful
commentary upon the jealousies and want of united conduct, which
rendered Farragut’s task a little more easy. Mitchell had always been
considered an “ill-conditioned” man, in the old navy, and the
Government was disposed to treat him, and some of his officers,
pretty rigorously; but matters were arranged, afterwards, in a
correspondence which took place, upon their being sent North,
between the Secretary of the Navy and Mitchell, that resulted in their
treatment as ordinary prisoners.
In writing to his family, after his capture of New Orleans, Farragut
said, “It is a strange thought, that I am here among my relatives, and
yet not one has dared to say, ‘I am happy to see you.’ There is a
reign of terror in this doomed city: but, although I am abused as one
who wished to kill all the women and children, I still see a feeling of
respect for me.”
ATLANTA AND WEEHAWKEN. JUNE 17th, 1863
n the latter part of the year 1861 an English steamer,

named the Fingal, ran past the blockading vessels,
and got safely into Savannah.
That part was very well done, but the getting to
sea again was another matter, for she was so
closely watched that it was found impossible to do
so. All sorts of stratagems were resorted to, and
several starts made upon the darkest nights, but
there was always found a Federal gun-boat, or
perhaps more than one, ready to receive her, all
the more that she was a valuable vessel, and
would turn in plenty of prize-money to her captors.
At last, in despair of any more use of her as a
blockade-runner, the Rebel authorities determined
to convert her into an ironclad ship-of-war. She was
cut down, so as to leave her deck not more than two feet above the
water; and upon this deck was built a very heavy casemate, inclining
at an angle of about thirty degrees, and mounting four heavy rifled
guns. The battery-deck was built of great beams of timber, a foot and
a half thick. Her iron armor was four inches thick, then considered
quite formidable, and was secured to a backing of oak and pine,
eighteen inches thick. Her sides about and below the water line were
protected by heavy logs or timbers built upon her, so that from being
a slim and graceful blockade-runner, she attained a breadth of forty-
one feet, with a length of two hundred and four. The ports in her
casemate were closed by iron shutters, of the same thickness as her
armor. Her bow was formed into a ram, and also carried, at the end
of a spar, a percussion torpedo.
In fact, she was a very formidable craft, of the general style of
those built by the Confederates during the war. The Merrimac was
nearly all casemate, but the later built ones had as small a casemate
as was consistent with the working of the guns they were intended to
carry.
Thicker armor than hers had not yet come into use, the English
ironclad ships just then built, in consequence of the success of the
Monitor and Merrimac, not being any more protected.
The first contest between a monitor and fifteen-inch guns, and an
ironclad with stationary casemate or turret and rifled guns, was now
to take place.
The Atlanta was commanded by an officer of energy and ability,
named Webb, formerly a Lieutenant in the United States Navy.
The Confederate authorities were certain that this latest production
of their naval architects was to overcome the redoubtable monitors,
and they fully believed that, while the Atlanta’s armor would resist
their heavy round shot, her heavy rifled guns, at close quarters,
would tear the monitor turret to pieces, while the ram and torpedo
would finish the work begun by the guns.
The vessel, being ready, came down from Savannah, passed
through the Wilmington, a mouth of the Savannah River, and so
passed down into Wassaw Sound, improperly named, in many books
and maps, Warsaw.
Admiral Du Pont had taken measures to keep himself informed as
regarded this vessel’s state of preparation, and the monitors
Weehawken and Nahant had been sent to meet her and some other
armored vessels preparing at Savannah.
Both the Nahant and Weehawken were at anchor when the
strange vessel was seen. It was at daylight, and she was then about
three miles from the Nahant, and coming down very rapidly. The
Weehawken was commanded by that capable and sterling officer,
John Rogers, and he at once slipped his cable, and made rapidly off,
seaward, as if in headlong flight, but, in the meantime, making
preparations for action.
At about half-past four, on this bright summer morning, the
Weehawken rounded to, and breasted the tide, approaching her
enemy.
The Nahant had no pilot, and could only follow in the
Weehawken’s wake, through the channels of the Sound.
The Atlanta fired the first shot, at about a quarter to five, being
then distant about a mile and a half. This passed across the stern of
the Weehawken, and struck the water near the Nahant. The Atlanta
seemed to be lying across the channel, awaiting attack, and keeping
up her fire.
The Weehawken steadily came up the channel, and at a little after
5 a. m., having approached within about three hundred yards,
opened her fire. She fired five shots, which took her fifteen minutes,
and at the end of that time the Atlanta hauled down the Confederate
colors, and hoisted a white flag. Such a rapid threshing is seldom
recorded in naval history, and is the more remarkable when we
remember that the commander of the Atlanta was a cool and
experienced officer, trained in the United States Navy, and an
excellent seaman.
Two passenger steamers, loaded down with ladies and non-
combatants, had followed the Atlanta down from Savannah, to
witness the capture of the Yankee monitors. These now made the
best of their way back to that city.
The Atlanta had a crew of twenty-one officers and one hundred
and twenty-four men. Landsmen often wonder why ships have so
many officers in proportion to men, but it is necessary.
The officers of the Confederate vessel stated her speed to be ten
knots, and they confidently expected to capture both the monitors,
after which, as it appeared from the instruments captured on board
of her, she expected to proceed to sea, and try conclusions with the
Charleston fleet. Her engines were first-rate, and her hull of a good
model, and there is no reason why she should not have gone up to
Charleston and broken the blockade there, except the one fact that
she turned out not to be equal to the monitors.
The action was so brief that the Nahant did not share in it, and of
the five shots fired by the Weehawken, four struck the Atlanta, and
caused her surrender. The first was a fifteen-inch shot, which,
though it struck the casemate of the Atlanta at a very acute angle,
smashed through both the iron armor and the wooden backing,
strewed the deck with splinters, prostrated some forty officers and
men by the concussion, and wounded several by the splinters and
fragments of armor driven in. We can imagine the consternation of a
crew which had come down confident of an easy victory. In fact, this
one shot virtually settled the battle. The Weehawken fired an eleven-
inch shot next, but this did little damage. The third shot was from the
fifteen-inch gun, and knocked off the top of the pilot-house, which
projected slightly above the casemate, wounded the pilots, and
stunned the men at the wheel. The fourth shot carried away one of
the port-stoppers. Sixteen of her crew were wounded.
The Atlanta was valued by the appraisers, for prize-money, at
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a sum, as Boynton
remarks, easily won in fifteen minutes, with only five shots, and
without a loss of a single man on the other side. More than this, it
settled the value of that class of vessels, as compared with monitors.
“As the fight of the Merrimac with the Cumberland, Congress and
Minnesota virtually set aside as worthless for war purposes the vast
wooden navies of Europe,” so it showed that great changes and
improvements were necessary in the broadside ironclads, if they
were to be opposed to monitors armed with guns of great power. The
result was a great increase in the thickness of armor, which went on,
as the power of the guns increased, until now it is a question
whether armor may not be abandoned, except for certain purposes.
KEARSARGE AND ALABAMA. JUNE 19th, 1864.
uring the summer of 1864, while Grant and his army

were fighting the terrible battles which opened his
way to the James, through Virginia; and the whole
country was upon the very tenter-hooks of anxiety,
a piece of news came across the water which gave
more satisfaction to the country at large than many
a hard-won battle has given, where a thousand
times the numbers were engaged. It was the
intelligence that the Alabama was at the bottom of
the sea.
We may borrow the words of Boynton, in his
“History of the Navy during the Rebellion,” to put
the reader in possession of a part of the career of
the notorious Alabama, previous to her meeting with the Kearsarge.
No event of the great civil war excited such deep indignation, such
bitter resentment, as the career of the Alabama. It was not alone
because she committed such havoc with our commerce—burning
our merchantmen in great numbers; nor was it because she had
sunk the Hatteras—a merchant steamer converted into a gun-boat;
but it was because England had sent out a British ship, with British
guns, and seamen trained in her own practice-ship, a vessel English
in every essential but her flag, to lay waste the commerce of a
country with which she professed to be at peace. To add to the
provocation, this vessel was originally called the “290,” to show, by
the large number who had contributed to fit her out, how widespread
was English sympathy for the cause she was to support. The
Alabama was not regarded as a Confederate vessel of war, but as
an English man-of-war, sent forth under the thin veil of another flag,
to sink and destroy our merchantmen. The short-lived triumph in
which England indulged turned out to be about as costly a pleasure
as she could well have taken; and deeply mortified as we were that
the successful rover should escape our watchful cruisers, and so

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The White Redoubt, the Great Powers

and the Struggle for Southern Africa,

Overcoming the Oppressors: White and Black in Southern

The struggle for recognition in international relations

Oil and the Great Powers: Britain and Germany, 1914 to

Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War: Connected

George White and the Victorian Army in India and

White Drug Cultures and Regulation in London, 1916–1960

The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle

Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of

The White Redoubt, the Great Powers

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Robert McNamara

More information about this series at

The White Redoubt,

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950398

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image © Shaun Higson/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This project was made possible by funding from a number of entities.

John Paul Newman; at Ulster University, Alan Sharp, Donald MacRaild,

Part I White States of Emergency

1 Defying the Wind of Change 3

2 Rhodesia: Rise of the Rebel State 33

3 Portuguese Africa: Rebellion and Resilience 75

Part II The Rise and Fall of an Unholy Alliance

4 Building the ‘White Redoubt’ 111

5 Brothers-in-Arms: ALCORA in Action 137

6 First to Fall: Portugal from Coup to Revolution 161

Part III Towards a Constellation of One

7 Decolonization and Détente in Southern Africa:

8 Debacle and Détente Redux: South Africa in Angola

9 P.W. Botha, Total Strategy, and the Life and Death of

FAPLA Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola

PAIO Permanent ALCORA Intelligence Organization

On 14 October 1974, two delegations of senior officers from the mili-

Southern Africa’.2 The delegates were attending the eighth ALCORA

or Rhodesia ever discussed ALCORA. Indeed, a survey of Portuguese

free movement of the black majority. The violent aftermath of the

The primary purpose of this volume is to consider the forces that

of official dissimulation. Use is also made of the enormous number of

wholesale change in Lisbon that initiated its dissolution. The events of 25

White States of Emergency

Defying the Wind of Change

A Solid White Monolith?

© The Author(s) 2018 3

from Luanda, Elizabethville (today’s Lubumbashi) in Katanga—the

the others’ models, particularly when it suited them for international or

officials the spectre of Afrikaner migration into the Rhodesias (particu-

hoped to be able to prevent the UN, whose charter barred interfer-

The same official went on to explain that despite the liberal-sounding

Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. The crises confirmed

decolonization, the groundwork for new thinking had been established

increasingly came to fear a series of British ‘Algerias’ in East and Central

White States of Emergency (1): Nyasaland

explained to Sir Roy Welensky that it had to be acknowledged pub-

and electrifying crowds. Indeed, a district commissioner, Mr. Graham

These actions were, however, dwarfed by the crackdown in Nyasaland.

consequences for the South African economy, which had annual

their firm supporters. However, the ground was shifting. Added to

White States of Emergency (2): South Africa

nickname, Die Hollander). Like so many significant nationalist leaders

White States of Emergency (1): Nyasaland

White States of Emergency (2): South Africa