The Second Boer War was a war fought between the British Commonwealth and the Boer republics of South Africa from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902, resulting in the United Kingdom's annexation of Transvaal and the Orange Free State into its new colony of South Africa. What should have been a routine imperial victory became a drawn-out affair that revealed the limits of British military power.
Background[]
Relations between the Boers and Britain had been tense ever since the British took over the Afrikaans-speaking Cape Colony in South Africa in 1814. In response to the Emancipation Act and attacks by local tribes, Boers began to leave the Cape Colony in 1835 and set up the independent republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The British had recognized both states by 1854. The Transvaal was bankrupt by 1877 and threatened by the Zulus. Britain, worried about German colonial expansion into the region, annexed the Transvaal in return for defending it against the Zulus. With the Zulus defeated by 1879, the Boers rebelled against British rule, defeating them at Laing's Neck in January 1881 and then at Majuba Hill in February. The Treaty of Pretoria, signed in April, restored the state's independence. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 attracted thousands of Uitlanders (foreigners) to the region. The Transvaal government refused to give them voting and other rights, which led to unrest. In 1895 Cecil Rhodes, owner of a Transvaal mining company, sent an armed party of 500 men commanded by Leander Starr Jameson to support an Uitlander uprising. The uprising, however, never materialized.
War[]
The failure of the Jameson Raid in 1895 poisoned relations between the Transvaal and Britain. The British, however, continued to put pressure on the governments of both the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, who felt threatened by Britain's support of the Uitlanders ("foreigners") and by its perceived imperialism. In response, both states declared war on Britain in October 1899 with the aim of forcing a negotiated settlement.
The two sides were far from evenly matched. The British had close to 25,000 soldiers in the region when war broke out, but quickly called on a large standing army stationed elsewhere in the empire. They were well armed and trained, although not familiar with the territory. Their experience of close formation fighting in wars around the world since 1815 was not, however, that relevant or useful when faced with the highly mobile and well—armed Boers. In contrast, the Boers avoided set-piece battles, preferring hit-and-run tactics. They could call on around 83,000 men of fighting age, of whom around 40,000 were fighting at any one time, but they had no trained army. Instead, they had a local militia system grouped into mounted commando units that varied in strength according to the population from which they were recruited. All were skilled, mounted marksmen, their skills learned from hunting on the veldt (wide, treeless grasslands).
Although it was a legal requirement that all adult men own a rifle, many Boers did not, or at least not a modern one, so President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal ordered 37,000 rifles and ten million cartridges from Krupps, the German manufacturer. The Mauser model 1895 rifle was extremely accurate at long range and superior to the British Lee-Metford magazine rifle. The Boers also had a small quantity of modern French and German field artillery.
Under siege[]
At the start of the war fast-moving Boer columns advanced out of the two republics, besieging Colonel Robert Baden Powell and his troops at Mafeking and the garrison at Kimberley, while a 15,000-strong Transvaal force invaded British-run Natal and besieged Ladysmith, The British, commanded by Sir Redvers Buller, sent out three columns to relieve the sieges. The first column, a force of around 10,000 men with 16 guns, advanced northwest from the Cape toward Kimberley and overcame Boer resistance at the Modder River at the end of November 1899. However, it was then defeated by the Boers, led by Piet Cronje, at Magersfontein outside Kimberley on December. On the 9th the second column, which headed north from the eastern Cape to relieve Mafeking, had been defeated at Stormberg. On December 15 the third column heading from Durban in Natal and led by Buller himself, encountered the Boers, led by Louis Botha, at Colenso. The British third column numbered around 21,000 men but was driven back by the 6,500 Boers concealed in difficult terrain. The British had all of its artillery captured, and sustained losses of 143 men killed, 756 men wounded, and 220 men captured. Boer casualties, at around 50, were negligible, as they had been in the previous two encounters.
The three defeats suffered by the British during this "Black Week" led to a rapid change in command. Buller, who retained his local command, was replaced by Field Marshal Viscount Roberts, with General Kitchener as his chief-of-staff. The two rapidly reorganized the British forces to counter Boer mobility, and Buller made another attempt to finally relieve Ladysmith. He divided his force into two; one, led by General Charles Warren, attempted to take control of the commanding heights of Spion Kop to the west of Ladysmith, the balance being held in reserve. On the night of January 24, 1900 2,000 men scaled the hill but discovered in daylight that they could not dig in, had no sandbags, and, worse, were overlooked by Boer artillery. The British came under heavy fire, which they could not return, but reinforcements allowed them to keep the hill despite a Boer attempt to scale the hill and engage them at close quarters. By the evening both sides were exhausted and withdrew, the Boers then regrouped taking the abandoned summit and allowed Buller to retreat. Buller eventually managed to relieve Ladysmith on February 28.
The long war[]
Meanwhile, Roberts had helped free Kimberley in mid-February and then decided to strike at the Boer capitals. A 6,000-strong British force led by Kitchener trapped a slightly smaller Boer force on Paardeberg Hill and attacked it directly, suffering more than 1,000 casualties before Kitchener withdrew. Roberts then took command and subjected the Boers to an artillery barrage before they submitted. He then marched on Bloemfontein, the Orange Free State capital, which he took on March 13 before heading north to Transvaal to take Johannesburg on May 31 and Pretoria on June 5. As Roberts forged ahead, the siege of Mafeking, which had been in progress since the start of the war, was over. Defended by Colonel Baden-Powell, the town was relieved on 17 May 1900.
The Boers, having all but lost the war, turned to guerrilla tactics. They sabotaged rail communications, attacked isolated outposts, and ambushed British troops. The British responded by starting a scorched earth policy that burned farms to deny the rebels food and moved the displaced civilians into concentration camps. Faced with such harsh measures, the Boers capitulated, signing a peace treaty in May 1902.
Aftermath[]
The treaty signed at Vereeniging on the Transvaal-Orange Free State border was lenient on the Boers. The two Boer republics accepted British sovereignty and the promise of future self-government, which both republics gained in 1907. The Boers were also compensated £3 million for restocking and repairing theirfarms. Both Boer republics eventually joined with Cape Colony and Natal to become part of the Union of South Africa, founded in 1910.
It had taken the British more than 500,000 troops to defeat a far smaller number of Boers. Army reforms were desperately needed. Richard Haldane, Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912, created a British Expeditionary Force ready to fight overseas at any time, and a Territorial Force that amalgamated all voluntary local militia forces into a single home defense force. The wisdom of these reforms was proved in the opening months of World War I.
The war had revealed Britain to be isolated diplomatically, with most nations supporting the Boers. What had once been a deliberate policy of "Splendid Isolation" from European affairs now became a liability. Britain therefore moved to secure an alliance with Japan in 1902 and an entente, or understanding, with France in 1904 that settled outstanding colonial differences between the two nations. In 1906 the first in a series of confidential military conversations took place between their military staff in orderto determine a common strategy in the event of a war against Germany. An entente with Russia, similar to that with France, was signed in 1907.