The Siege of Kimberley
War: The Boer War
Date: 14th October 1899 to 15th February 1900.
Place: Northern Cape Colony in South Africa on the border
of the Orange Free State.
Combatants: British and South African colonial troops
against the Boers.
Commanded: The British garrison was commanded by Colonel Kekewich of
the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, assisted (or impeded) by Cecil
Rhodes, against General Cronje.
Size of the armies: 1,624 British troops against a varying
besieging force of Boers, around 6,500 with several guns.
Uniforms, arms and equipment: The Boer War was a serious
jolt for the British Army. At the outbreak of the war British
tactics were appropriate for the use of single shot firearms, fired
in volleys controlled by company and battalion officers; the troops
fighting in close order. The need for tight formations had been
emphasised time and again in colonial fighting. In the Zulu and
Sudan Wars overwhelming enemy numbers armed principally with
stabbing weapons were easily kept at a distance by such tactics;
but, as at Isandlwana, would overrun a loosely formed force. These
tactics had to be entirely rethought in battle against the Boers
armed with modern weapons.
In the months before hostilities the Boer commandant general,
General Joubert, bought 30,000 Mauser magazine rifles and a number
of modern field guns and automatic weapons from the German armaments
manufacturer Krupp and the French firm Creusot. The commandoes,
without formal discipline, welded into a fighting force through a
strong sense of community and dislike for the British. Field Cornets
led burghers by personal influence not through any military code.
The Boers did not adopt military formation in battle, instinctively
fighting from whatever cover there might be. The preponderance were
countrymen, running their farms from the back of a pony with a rifle
in one hand. These rural Boers brought a life time of marksmanship
to the war, an important edge, further exploited by Joubert’s
consignment of magazine rifles. Viljoen is said to have coined the
aphorism “Through God and the Mauser”. With strong fieldcraft skills
and high mobility the Boers were natural mounted infantry. The urban
burghers and foreign volunteers readily adopted the fighting methods
of the rest of the army.
Other than in the regular uniformed Staats Artillery and police
units, the Boers wore their every day civilian clothes on campaign.
After the first month the Boers lost their numerical superiority,
spending the rest of the formal war on the defensive against British
forces that regularly outnumbered them.
British tactics, little changed from the Crimea, used at Modder
River, Magersfontein, Colenso and Spion Kop were incapable of
winning battles against entrenched troops armed with modern magazine
rifles. Every British commander made the same mistake; Buller;
Methuen, Roberts and Kitchener. When General Kelly-Kenny attempted
to winkle Cronje’s commandoes out of their riverside entrenchments
at Paardeburg using his artillery, Kitchener intervened and insisted
on a battle of infantry assaults; with the same disastrous
consequences as Colenso, Modder River, Magersfontein and Spion Kop.
Some of the most successful British troops were the non-regular
regiments; the City Imperial Volunteers, the South Africans,
Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who more easily broke
from the habit of traditional European warfare, using their horses
for transport rather than the charge, advancing by fire and
manouevre in loose formations and making use of cover, rather than
the formal advance into a storm of Mauser bullets.
Uniform: The British regiments made an uncertain change
into khaki uniforms in the years preceding the Boer War, with the
topee helmet as tropical headgear. Highland regiments in Natal
devised aprons to conceal coloured kilts and sporrans. By the end of
the war the uniform of choice was a slouch hat, drab tunic and
trousers; the danger of shiny buttons and too ostentatious emblems
of rank emphasised in several engagements with disproportionately
high officer casualties. |
