At the Fireside Page 17
… The bomb doors are open
… It’s over to you
Swing-song, Louis MacNeice
Just 65 years ago at this time of writing a young South African airman seconded to the Royal Air Force named Major Edwin Swales was loafing around RAF Little Staughton, about 80 kilometres from London, happily preparing to go on leave. There was a vitally important raid on Pforzheim in Germany coming off that morning, but he was not involved; he was off to the bright lights.
Twenty-nine-year-old Edwin Swales was no ordinary pilot. Born at Inanda, Natal, he had seen action in the Natal Mounted Rifles in Abyssinia and North Africa, then transferred to the South African Air Force in 1942. In August 1943, having won his wings, he was seconded to the RAF – although proudly retaining his khaki SAAF uniform and his rank of lieutenant (unlike the RAF, the SAAF uses the same rank titles as the Army).
The RAF trained him on heavy bombers and in June 1944 he was posted straight to 582 Squadron which was part of the elite Pathfinder Force – a mark of his excellence because normally a pilot would have to do a full tour on bombers before the Pathfinders would accept him. He soon made his mark. By 1945 he was a major, one of two ‘Master Bombers’ in the squadron and holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross.
To show what an extraordinary distinction this was, it is necessary to describe the Pathfinders’ role. They were the elite of the bomber force and the best of them were made Master Bombers.
A Master Bomber was expected to fly way out in front of the main bomber stream and carry out an incredibly complex task which carried enormous responsibility.
Out there on his own, he would calculate the wind and ground speeds, the direction, the height, the turbulence and the angle of approach at which to go in, pinpoint the target’s co-ordinates and then radio the information back to the other bombers. If he got it wrong, the entire mission would fail and good men would die for no reason. That was why only the best of the best became Master Bombers.
Now, just as he was about to set off on his well-earned leave, his squadron commander informed him that the squadron’s other Master Bomber had been taken ill; would Swales delay his leave for a day and take his place? It was a hard thing to ask of a man about to go on leave, and no doubt his commanding officer knew it. But Swales did not hesitate to say ‘yes’ because that was the sort of man he was.
The Pforzheim raid was an unusual one. The squadron was due to take off just after 4:30 pm. This meant that although the actual attack would take place after dark, they would have to fly most of the way there in broad daylight.
The squadron took off as scheduled and were over the target at about eight o’clock that evening. Swales was right out in front in his Lancaster, as usual, making his calculations while his crew waited tensely for the deadly Me-110 night fighters to pounce on them which they did while Swales was calling his information and co-ordinates back to the main body. His tail gunner tried to warn him, but could not get through. The gunner then prepared to fire an agreed-on sequence of bursts to alert the rest of the crew … and his gun jammed.
The first Swales knew of the attack was when the starboard outer engine coughed out oily blue smoke and seized up. Then the port inner engine was knocked out. With iron determination Swales stayed on course while he finished relaying his vital information to the bomber stream.
Then, with the Lancaster’s tail shot to pieces and another engine losing power, Swales started bobbing and weaving while the rest of the squadron got into the correct approach position.
… K for Kitty, calling P for Prue
… The bomb doors are open
… It’s over to you.
Now the Me-110 veered off and started climbing: he had bigger fish to fry. Swales’s task was done and he turned and started limping homewards. The Lancaster was a flying wreck – two engines dead and one dying, communications and instrumentation gone, height and speed diminishing with every mile that passed under the wings.
Swales fought to control the big bomber and keep it in the air: he was not prepared to have his seven-man crew jump into captivity or force-land in enemy territory. For an hour he fought the Lancaster’s controls till it crossed over into Allied airspace. By now there was just enough height left for the crew to bale out and he told them to jump. One after the other they threw themselves into the night sky.
All of them made it safely to the ground, but Edwin Swales was found in his seat at the controls of the shattered Lancaster plane. He had ridden it down to his death so that his crew could live, and as free men rather than prisoners.
The Bible says it best in the Book of John, Chapter 15: ‘Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.’
It brings to mind another one of our great leaders who told the judge from the dock at the Rivonia Trial that ‘it is a cause, My Lord, that I have lived for all my life and, if necessary, My Lord, one for which I am prepared to die’.
Deep words indeed for both were fighters for freedom: the first a freedom fighter against the evils of Nazi socialism in Europe – fighting to maintain the freedom of the West; the second fighting against the evils of apartheid and for the freedom of his people. The difference is that Swales paid the ultimate price whilst Nelson Mandela still lives.
The Pforzheim raid was later described as one of the most effective of the War; delivered with pin-point accuracy, the Lancasters’ bombs had dealt a savage blow to the German war effort. Swales was posthumously decorated with the Victoria Cross, the highest military honour the Commonwealth could bestow.
It is such a revered accolade that the simple bronze cross takes precedence over all other honours, medals and decorations on the wearer’s breast. And a stark statistic exists to indicate just how dangerous Swales’s task was. He was the third (and last) Master Bomber to earn the VC – and all three were posthumous awards.
Just four South Africans won the VC during World War II and the City of Durban saw fit to honour his name in perpetuity by naming one of its major roads after him.
But it turned out that perpetuity wasn’t so perpetual after all. After 1994 the municipality wiped out this tribute by replacing it with ‘Solomon Mahlangu Drive’ named after an early casualty in the African National Congress’s ‘armed struggle’.
It was a sad thing. In essence, the municipality saw fit to interfere with the very make-up and fabric of our society by meddling with the history that makes us who we are – one of the building blocks of the concept of freedom – by erasing the memory of a man whose legacy was a supreme example of humility and courage.
It demonstrated unfettered ignorance of what the fabric of society really consists of, for you cannot build a nation by breaking it down; that way you only encourage hatred and suspicion. If new heroes rightly deserve recognition, let it be done by perpetuating their names in new developments in their name, not by tearing holes in that fabric that is expected to make us a nation.
We should remember that our heroes belong to the nation, not to any specific ethnic group or political party. If we say otherwise, we can hardly call ourselves a nation.
I was privileged to be present at Durban High School one Remembrance Day, the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, the date of the armistice which ended World War I and now represents a day of commemoration and mourning for the honoured dead of all our wars.
It gave me deep joy as a South African to stand at that quadrangle of remembrance as the then Chief of the South African Air force, Lieutenant-General Carlo Gagiano, unveiled a beautiful monument to Major Edwin Swales VC DFC, and I listened as the deep psychological concepts of bravery, valour, honour and sacrifice were explained to those young boys.
It was a lesson that touched every one of them, and will be one of the determinants of their future behavioural patterns as they mingle with society in years to come, for such is the importance of le
ssons of that nature.
God help us if we allow some shallow and ignorant person to change the fabric of our belief structures for some short-term political gain. That will be the day when we forget who we are. As Cicero wrote in 64 BC: ‘Cultures without their history doom themselves to remain trapped in the most illusionary tense of all – the present – for, when trapped in the present, you become akin to a child. You know not whence you came, nor whither you go.’
Thanks to people like David Scholtz, Paul Kilmartin, Ken Gillings and General Gagiano, I was afforded the privilege of peeking into a portion of Durban’s wonderful past.
May it never be tampered with again. It is the property of the soul of society.
The New Unanswerable Questions
THE NEW UNANSWERABLE
QUESTIONS
On a weekly basis, we push the frontiers of knowledge, science and understanding further and further into the unknown, and it seems to me that as we do this, more and more complex questions keep popping up. But let me explain.
Last week I spent a few days on a new game lodge called Ra-Molopo, near Rooiberg in the Northern Province, which has just been opened to the public. It is owned by Tim and Helen Calvert, and it is a truly lovely spot and well worth a visit as the prices are within the reach of the average family.
Nearby is the old Rooiberg tin mine where they have found archaeological evidence dating back hundreds and hundreds of years. An ancient people mined there for tin, but nobody seems to be able to tell us who they were or what they used the metal for, or who taught them the mining techniques.
Or, for that matter, how the knowledge could possibly have been passed down from generation to generation without a written language since the art of mining – the prospecting, mining techniques, extraction and metallurgical processes – is complex in the extreme.
And it’s getting more complex every day. For instance, look at the coup that the experts at one big mining house, which cannot be named here but does appear first in the alphabet, has pulled off. In their laboratories they managed to isolate 51 of the isotopes of gold, then went to all of the gold- mining shafts and took samples. What it amounts to is that they can now ‘fingerprint’ gold from every angle – take them a sample and they can tell you which area, mine and actual shaft it came from.
Then they took it a step further and adapted the same technique for rhinoceros horn identification. They can analyse a sample and tell you which grazing area the rhino came from because they can identify the types of grasses it fed on.
This breakthrough alone opens up a huge, brand-new area of discovery. Imagine if we took slivers of gold from Mapungubwe’s famous ‘Golden Rhino’ and equally famous ‘Golden Staff’, analysed it, and found out where it was mined? What would we find if we took samples of the golden bangles from the wrists of Queen Lotshwa, who lies at Thulamela in the far northern part of the Kruger National Park, and analysed the content?
And what about the gold artefacts from the Zimbabwe Ruins? Or if we went even further afield and took a speck from Tutankhamun’s famous funerary mask? What secrets might that not hold? And to make matters even more intriguing, the old books on mining by Roger Summers will tell you that on all the sites in the Zimbabwean and South African areas there is evidence that mining took place long, long ago.
Let’s ask an even more unanswerable question by examining what Professor Lee Burger, the head of the Paleoanthropological Unit of Witwatersrand University, had to say the other day about the Cradle of Humankind in the Gladysvale area of Gauteng.
Here they are now finding evidence of hominids over seven feet tall, in other words, well over two metres, and it would appear that these early hominids went through a stage of ‘gianting’. All very interesting, especially as one of the factors determining your height is the gravitational pull of the Earth. Does this mean that there was a period of less gravity at one stage? Is there a connection with the passage in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis which states that there was a time when giants roamed the Earth?
It’s all very exciting and quite scary in its own way. All I can say is that our present headlong journey of discovery into areas previously completely unknown will require the rewriting of at least part of the old belief structures, which means that our view of our history will change accordingly. And the thing that fascinates me is that most of this is happening right here, in our own country.
Before I depart from this most interesting subject and myriad avenues for speculation that it opens up, let me throw just one more pebble into the pond and see where the ripples go. The biologists are now turning to the archaeologists and saying we humans have a layer of fat just under our skins that makes up 30% of our body weight. This is an excellent layer of insulation – if you happen to live in water. And the only other mammals which have this layer are sea creatures, whales and dolphins.
So what are they are saying? Are you talking about an aquatic ape, Mr Archaeologist? Furthermore, if we did come out of the trees and onto the plains, as we are told, why did we lose our covering of hair? Doing this would be tantamount to committing suicide as a species for the simple reason that you would freeze during the winter months. Perhaps issues like these will also be addressed as we trek deeper into these exciting and challenging times.
The Cape of Storms, Good Hope or Unknown
THE CAPE OF STORMS,
GOOD HOPE OR UNKNOWN
I do not believe we have even started to scratch the surface of the real ancient history of the Cape Peninsula. For more than four centuries Bartholomew Diaz has bathed in the glory of being the first man to sail around the Cape. But was he really the first?
Herodotus described the circumnavigation of Africa by a Phoenician fleet 600 years before Christ. The timbers of old ships have been dug up from the sands of the Cape Flats on several occasions in the past, and could it be that, in an era long past, there was a sea channel from False Bay, across the flats, into Table Bay? That would have made an island of the area from Cape Town eastwards through Muizenberg, Simon’s Town, down to Cape Point and back westwards via Kommetjie and Hout Bay.
Others say that the Chinese sailed around our coast as far back as the early 15th century – you only have to read that amazing book by Gavin Menzies entitled 1421: The year China discovered the world to get a feel for that. In this regard, shards of Ming dynasty pottery and crockery have been found not only all the way down the East African seaboard but also in places like Mapungubwe and Thulamela way up on the northern border.
Not so long ago two beautiful little Egyptian dolls were unearthed at an archaeological dig at Skuinsdrift, near Zeerust. I have seen them and they came to us complete with neatly engraved cartouches on their fronts. What were they doing there? The truth is, we don’t know. All we know is that there are Arab maps, drawn long before 1488, that depict the Cape, and Arab geographers recorded a voyage to the Cape in years gone by, certainly before Diaz and Da Gama. It has subsequently been verified that the Chinese sailed around the Cape of Good Hope as early as 1421 AD.
Then, of course, there is the Malay theory. Don’t knock it because a kabang, or dugout canoe, was thrown up on the beach at Port Elizabeth in February 1927 and scientists traced its origins back to the Nicobar Islands: it had floated across to us totally unharmed … Interesting to dwell on the ocean currents, if nothing else.
The late Professor JP Schwartz believed that the race of the Makalakas, found in the Kalahari, were descendants of the Malays, and it is well to remember that the Malays colonised Madagascar well over two thousand years ago. If a journey like that is possible, sailing across to the mainland of Africa would have been relatively simple.
Another interesting bit of information is that the first Dutch settlers called the people they found around the Cape ‘Chinese Hottentots’ for a number of reasons. The colour of their skin was like light copper, the features were very oriental, their s
peech differed markedly from that of the Bushmen and their speech structure was far more advanced. Let’s see what we have to work on.
In 1827 a Capetonian named George Thompson came across what seemed to be timbers deeply embedded in the sand. Captain W Owen of the Royal Navy, who charted much of the South African coast and was a man of high repute, visited this spot with Thompson and, like him, formed the opinion that the timbers came from an ancient ship. Owen thought that the wood was cedar which is particularly interesting because the cedars of Lebanon were famous for shipbuilding in times gone by.
In the 1860s Charles Bell, the surveyor-general of the Cape, examined a wreck which had been exposed when flooding changed the course of the Haardekraaltje stream, and reported it to Lieutenant-General C Darling (the town Darling is named after him) in the following manner. ‘However extraordinary it may seem, I am compelled to believe that this wood is part of a vessel, upwards of seventy feet in length, wrecked on the ancient beaches, now raised hundreds of feet up above the high-water mark, and left high and dry, at a place which is now at least 10 miles from the sea.’
When first seen, the ribs and knees of the vessel stood about five feet above the surface and were still partly connected with planking. These were broken off and carried away. A wagonload was sent to England, but could not be identified. Iron bolts were found, but no copper. Darling gave Bell £20 to cover disinterment expenses, but alas, the Cape Archives have no further information on the subject.
In the 1880s workmen were digging out gravel for brick-making near Cape Town’s Woltemade cemetery when they uncovered a vessel, nowhere near the wreck that Bell had reported. The timber of this wreck had a peculiar smell but burnt well and therefore sold easily for firewood! There was so much of it found that months passed before the entire ship was excavated, chopped up and sent to Cape Town for sale.
There was no scientific examination of the wreck at all and not one word of protest while what might have been the oldest evidence we would ever have had of ancient visitors was fed into Cape Town’s fireplaces and then literally went up in smoke. It was finally investigated in 1924 when JH Hofmeyer, then head of the University of the Witwatersrand, got the renowned Professor Raymond Dart to gather all possible evidence that might remain. Dart located and interviewed two old men who had helped to dig up the ship. One had a clear recollection of the mast, which he said was in excess of three feet in diameter, and of the length of the ship, well over 180 feet.