Commando

Deneys Reitz

3 ideas

1. Smuts's ragged commando raids into Cape

   In September 1901 Jan Smuts led a few hundred Boer riders, the teenage Reitz among them, south across the Orange River into the Cape Colony. Starving, their horses dying and some men dressed in grain sacks, they overran a camp of the 17th Lancers at Elands River Poort (Modderfontein) and re-equipped themselves with British rifles, horses and khaki. They then roamed the Cape for months, even though British orders threatened execution for Boers captured wearing British uniform.

2. The commando as a voluntary citizen army

   The Boer commando was a militia of mounted farmers who brought their own horses and rifles, elected their officers, and held councils of war where orders could be debated. This produced mobility, marksmanship and initiative. Discipline, though, rested on consent: men routinely rode home after a victory or drifted away when morale sagged, so the force swelled and melted with its fortunes.

3. Guerrilla dispersal outlasts defeat but not attrition

   After the British took the Boer capitals in 1900, small mobile bands kept the war going for two more years by refusing set battles and striking at supply lines. The British answer was to fence the veld with blockhouse lines, burn farms and move families into concentration camps. That destroyed the civilian base the commandos depended on for food, remounts and recruits, and it was this, more than battlefield losses, that forced surrender at Vereeniging in 1902.

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