“South Africa was the only country in the Commonwealth that trained women as soldiers during World War II,” says Wim Myburgh. “And not in one, but in two specialist fields.”
We're chatting in a coffee shop in Pringle Bay. Wim takes a sip of water and looks up at Hangklip mountain. “Now it's a chapter of our history that threatens to disappear.”
Wim is a retired psychologist and amateur historian. He wrote a book called Women at War to tell the tale of these women soldiers. It was no easy task. The Union Defence Force (UDF) archives from the 1940s didn't offer much. And all the activities that the women participated in during the war were classified as top secret. Except for a few photographs, documents and anecdotes remembered by surviving family members, there wasn't a lot of information available.
“You need context to understand the whole story,” Wim says.
He explains how the closure of the Suez Canal in 1940 caused increased shipping traffic around the Cape. Our waters crawled with friendly and enemy seacraft, including German submarines that moved through the depths as quiet as sharks.
Monitoring the coastline using radar technology became a priority for the UDF, but most male soldiers had already been called to the North African front. General Jan Smuts made a genius but risky move: He recruited women from civil society to fill these roles. And so the Artillery Specialists of the Women Auxiliary Army Service (AS WAAS) was established in 1941, which branched out a year later to become the Special Signal Services (SSS).
“It was a different time and there were doubts about whether the nooientjies were up for the task,” Wim says.
Many UDF higher-ups questioned the women's ability to master the maths required. Recruits for the SSS sense (soldiers without sense) by officers. But it soon became clear that these women – who had to be between 19 and 32 years old to join – knew exactly what they were doing.
