Page 176 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

678 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

officers at the same level as professional people in the civilian sector. 9
To carry out this new cadet training policy Erasmus established the South African Mili-
tary Academy as branch of the South African Military College on 1 April 1950 and affiliated
it with the University of Pretoria, who bestowed a BA (Mil) or BSc (Mil) degree upon the
successful candidates. The cadets resided at the SA Military College, but received the bulk of
their academic tuition on the campus of the University of Pretoria. Since Pretoria’s inland
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location permitted the training of army and air force cadets only, the Department of Defence
made an agreement with the University of Natal to institute a BSc degree for naval cadets
in cooperation with the Naval Training Centre at Salisbury Island, Durban with effect from
1953. 11
Erasmus and the founding fathers of the Military Academy at DHQ originally wanted
to establish the Military Academy as an independent tertiary military institution issuing its
own degrees. An intake of a mere 30 cadets per annum made this expensive and impractical.
Military command then opted for the Academy as a subservient branch of the SA Military
College and a constituent college of The University of South Africa (Unisa). The latter af-
filiation would have allowed the Academy maximum independence and strict military su-
pervision and control. But even this proved too challenging for the meagre defence budget,
which forced the UDF into the agreement with the University of Pretoria who had objected
strongly to the proposed affiliation with Unisa and offered to provide the university connec-
tion itself. This saved Erasmus’s ideal of establishing a military Academy, but robbed DHQ
of their dream of an independent military university. Not all was bad luck for Erasmus: the
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affiliation of the Academy with one of the leading Afrikaans-speaking universities served his
underlying aim of luring the Afrikaner back to the UDF, instilling Afrikaner traditions in the
UDF and popularising the UDF amongst the general public, more specifically the Afrikaner
community, extremely well. Participation in the Second World War had split white society by
and large along cultural (Afrikaans-English) lines and a large portion of the 60% Afrikaans-
speaking section of the population strongly resented the UDF as an instrument of British
imperialism in the wake of the Second World War. Unisa arguably would not have been as
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useful an instrument to ‘Afrikanerise’ the Military Academy and by extension the UDF, than

9 SANDFA, CGS (WAR) 281, 56/36, Acting CGS – Min. of Defence, 22 March 1949.
10 SANDFA, SA Mil. Col. (Gp. 1) 164, MC/T/12/1, Cmdt. SA Mil. Col. - CGS, 27 February 1950; SANDFA,
SA Mil. Col. (Gp. 1) 164, MC/T/12/1, Cmdt. SA Mil. Col. – Dir. Policy Coordination, 16 March 1950; SAN-
DFA, SA Mil. Col. (Gp. 1) 169, MK/K/227G vol. 2, statistics w.r.t. cadet courses 1950-1953, n.d.; SANDFA,
AG(3) 223, AG(3)1906/9 vol. 2, Sec. for Defence – Dir. Gen. Land Forces, 5 May 1950.
11 SANDFA, KG K43 L81, KG/GPT/1/3/1/1 vol. 1, Naval and Marine Chief of Staff – Rector University of
Natal, 17 May 1952; SANDFA, KG K43 L81, KG/GPT/1/3/1/1 vol. 1, report by Prof. S.F. Bush, 7 June
1952; SANDFA, KG K43 L81, KG/GPT/1/3/1/1 vol. 1, Registrar University of Natal – Naval and Marine
Chief of Staff, 28 July 1952; SANDFA, KG K43 L81, CGS/GPT/1/3/1/1 vol. 3, Naval and Marine Chief
of Staff – CGS, 31 March 1954; SANDFA, KG K43 L81, CGS/GPT/1/3/1/1 vol. 2, memorandum on Mil.
acad., n.d.
12 G.E. Visser: Neither Sandhurst, nor West Point: The South African Military Academy and its Foreign Role
Models. Historia 46(2), November 2001, pp. 392-393.
13 G.E. Visser: British influence on military training and education in South Africa: The case of the South Afri-
can Military Academy and its predecessors. South African Historical Journal vol. 46, May 2002, pp. 75-79.