Loyal Renegades

Strange and painful things are happening to South Africa's armed forces. One by one, the officers who led South African forces in World War II have been booted out or shunted aside. Before he died, Good Soldier Jan Christian Smuts was relieved of his honorary post as commander in chief. Deputy Chief of Staff William Poole was sent packing on an unimportant military mission. But that was not all.

Inspired by his dislike of the British crown, demagogic Premier Daniel Malan has been reinstating officers who refused to fight in what the Nationalists called "the British war," and moving them into commands above the officers who had served their country. Malan's Defense Minister, a handsome, rabble-rousing politician named Franc,ois Christian Erasmus, combed the armed forces with "grievance commissions" to reward those who had ducked the war.

The Skietcommando. Erasmus concentrated mostly on his own private Nationalist army, called the Skietcommando and modeled after Hitler's SA and SS troops. He ordered the "Her Majesty" insignia stripped from the caps of all South African naval men, required all military textbooks to be translated into Afrikaans. Propelled, like all the Nationalists, by a fanatic mixture of hatred and fear of South Africa's browns and blacks, Erasmus even disbanded the effective native and half-caste units with which Smuts had built up the South African army.

In reaction, South Africans have resigned in droves from the armed forces to join the ranks of Torch Commando, the anti-Malan political rally formed last year by a young South African air force ace, "Sailor" Malan, who is a distant cousin of the Premier Malan he fights. "Not a single self-respecting white man" would join Torch, a Nationalist minister once prophesied. Last week Torch claimed two of South Africa's most distinguished soldiers. One was General George Edwin Brink, C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., Croix de Guerre. The other was General James Thorn Durrant, who was eased out this year as director general of the air force. General Brink, who commanded South Africa's 1st Division in North Africa, could not stomach what had happened to his country's armed forces. "Soldiers who were disloyal . . . get preference . . ."he declared last week. "We who have fought are now called renegades."

Spies & Counter Spies. Defense Minister Erasmus flippantly dismissed the attacks as "complaints of disappointed men," but privately he and Malan's Nationalist regime were worried. They issued edicts barring soldiers from joining Torch, and sent spies into barracks to root out secret Torch members, only to discover that many of the police spies themselves are clandestinely allied with Sailor Malan's movement. In addition to rolling up a membership of 200,000 South Africans who want a drastic--but democratic--change in government. Torch is enlisting the country's best and toughest soldiers.

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