THE BULLYTIN Official Newsletter of Field Marshal Shellhole

AUGUST 2016

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Dear Reader,

My sincere thanks to those who provided feedback on the June 2016 edition of “the Bullytin” it’s nice to know that one is still on track with the material sourced and used in our newsletter. I decided to open this edition with a number of untitled images, which by now I am sure you have all recognized as war posters from both the 1st and 2nd World Wars. What I found interesting in my search for these images was how few actually depict or refer directly to South Africa. That which I found I have attached but surely there must be more, if you know where I can find more or have images of such posters please let me know as I would like to include these in future editions.

On another matter altogether, I wish to share with you my opinion of a book that I recently acquired. The title of said book is “OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE” and its author is none other than Charles Evenden aka Moth 0 the founder of the MOTH order. The book in my mind is certainly an autobiography of Moth 0 but with emphasis on those aspects of his life that led to him establishing the Memorable Order of Tin Hats in 1927. Not only does the book provide the history behind the MOTH it details why things are done the way they are, the significance of some of our traditions and the incredible characters who along with MOTH 0 built this magnificent order, which sadly dwindles in numbers with each passing year. The book makes for a great historical tour of our country and the so many brave souls who made the ultimate sacrifice. The great Field Marshal Jan Smuts features a number of times in the book and it was clear that besides being a Moth himself he was very proud of the order and that which it represented. I also discovered that Field Marshal Montgomery was presented with a Tin Hat by Moth 0. My dear reader as a very wet behind the ears Moth I have taken much from the book but most of all I have learnt that humility is one of the greatest qualities that a man or woman possesses and living that quality can make a huge difference. Should you wish to obtain a copy of the book please let me know and I shall put you in contact with the relevant person, the book sells at R80.00 which in today’s terms is a hamburger and chips at the “Spur” excluding the beer!

Let me now leave you in peace to read and digest that which follows below, I trust you will enjoy this edition and until we meet again “let us remember them”.

Moth Johnny Demetroudes

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Sailor Malan: a Battle of Britain Pilot

Photo: 74(F) Tiger Squadron Association

Adolph Gysbert Malan, better known as Sailor Malan, was a famed World War II RAF fighter pilot who led No.74 Squadron RAF during the height of the Battle of Britain. Under his leadership the 74 became one of the RAF’s best units and Malan’s exploits during the battle left a lasting legacy.  According to director Guy Hamilton, the character of Squadron Leader Skipper in the 1969 war film Battle of Britain was explicitly based on Malan. But what made him such a well respected pilot, and how did No. 74 squadron become a Battle of Britain success story?

South African-born Malan joined the RAF in 1935 after a stint in the Navy. He soon went on to join 74 Squadron in 1936. Malan was given command of the squadron at the height of the Battle of Britain; on 11 August 1940 74 was sent to intercept a raid near Dover, which was followed by another three raids. At the end of the raids, 74 claimed to have shot down 38 aircraft, and the day was known from then on as ‘Sailor’s August the Eleventh’. Malan himself commented, ‘thus ended a very successful morning of combat’. This was the first of Sailor Malan’s victories. However, by the end of 1940 he had achieved 18 victories and received the Distinguished Service Order.

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Malan is not thought to have been a particularly skillful or gifted pilot. Having said this, he did possess many other talents that led to success when commanding 74 squadron.  Malan’s particular strengths were his superior use of tactics, an exceptional shot and an aggressive fighting style, as demonstrated during the Battle. It seems that use of these skills and the subsequent passing on of his knowledge were a recipe for victory.

During the Battle of Britain, 74 squadron abandoned some of the RAF’s outmoded doctrines under Sailor Malan’s leadership. For example, they ended the practice of flying in a Vic formation of three aircraft in favour of the German Schwarm or Finger Four formation with a Tail-end Charlie to cover the flight. This formation was later generally used by Fighter Command. In addition to this, Malan had great success with what he referred to as his ‘ten simple rules’ for fighter pilots. These rules proved indispensible to future generations of fighter pilots and could eventually be found on the walls of most airbases.

During his illustrious career Adolph Gysbert Malan won not only the Distinguished Service Order and Bar but also the Distinguished Flying Cross, Belgium Croix, Czecho-Slovakian Military Cross, French Legion Of Honour and French Croix de Guerre. Malan was a strict disciplinarian, and honed 74 Squadron into a superb air fighting unit during his tenure as its commander. The lasting respect Adolph Gysbert Malan commands, as well as the continued use of both his new formation of flying and his ten rules for fighting, stand testament to his achievements as a Battle of Britain pilot.

http://www.military-history.org/articles/sailor-malan-a-battle-of-britain-pilot.htm

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“Now Dear Reader while researching “SAILOR” Malan I came across this fascinating piece of which I have extracted the “meaty bit”…………continued reading is not recommended to those who prefer to mind their P’s and Q’s.”

To illustrate Britain's victory as the achievement of its united empire, the decorated airmen were a Briton, a New Zealander and a South African. At one point during their school assembly talks, an ace pilot began to describe a thrilling combat 'show' over the English Channel:

'really, there was simply no time even to feel scared. I had two of those fuckers coming up on my tail, one fucker was coming up at me from the left, and then I spotted two more fuckers a few hundred feet above me, just waiting for their chance...'. At this moment, an increasingly agitated headmistress stood up and interrupted the guest speaker. 'Girls, as some of you may not know this, Group Captain Malan is referring to a common type of German aeroplane, called the Focker'. To which a bemused Sailor Malan retorted: 'Madam, I don't know anything about that. All I can tell you and your girls is that those bloody fuckers were flying Messerschmitts.

http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-01902009000100004

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Dear Reader,

“Me again……..

As we commemorate the centenary of the battle of Delville Wood and those poor souls who perished in the conflict, I felt it proper to include this article which I found on the NEWS24 website. It revives a number of truths about war but most of all why we remember the fallen. It provided me with yet another reason as to why I became a MOTH and am proud to wear the Tin Hat.”

2500 South Africans died in Delville Wood – who cares? by Susan Erasmus

They were buried where they fell – as all the soldiers and support staff from France, Britain and the colonies and dominions of the British Crown, of which South Africa was one.

And of bodies there was no shortage – it is estimated that almost 20 million people in total died in The Great War, as it was called before World War II broke out. Not even the British Empire could seriously contemplate transporting millions of bodies home.

Remembrance Day on 12 July 2016

And this month there are countless remembrance days at the various memorials where these soldiers (many unknown) lie buried in France, including one on Tuesday 12 July at the very beautiful South African Memorial near Delville Wood. So what is the point of these? But first, a bit of background.

South Africa in 1916

In just four days between 15 and 19 July, the SA Brigade, numbering only 3150 men, attached to the 9th Scottish Division lost 766 men with the dead outnumbering the wounded four to one. At the height of the Battle of Delville Wood, enemy artillery fire reached 400 shells a minute.

That’s what happens when you combine 19th century battle strategies with 20th

century machine guns.  The vast number of casualties of this war has put a question mark over the military insights of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front.

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South Africa had been a Union for little over four years when the Great War broke out. Wounds were still fresh from the Anglo-Boer War, and it was a country sharply divided between English and Afrikaans and even more sharply between black and white.

So sharply, that the names of the almost 1100 black and coloured SA troops from the SA Native Labour Corps, used as stretcher bearers and trench diggers, were only this week unveiled after being added to a remembrance wall at the SA Memorial near Delville Wood. Many of them died while rushing to the rescue of their white compatriots in this brutal battle, which lasted from 15 July – 3 September 1916.

The war was not a popular one on all fronts, and yet 229 000 South Africans volunteered (those that were not in the army already) to join the British and French forces fighting on the Western Front. Of those 10 000 in total would die on the battlefields of WW1 and countless thousands injured and maimed.

Why did these soldiers go and fight?

Why did they go in the first place? Times were hard, work was scarce, there was labour unrest, and for many people the army provided secure employment. Also this could be their one chance to travel beyond SA’s shores in days before travelling was so commonplace. Or it might have been a feeling of patriotic duty, a sense of adventure, or a combination of any of the above.

Hurled into the kind of ongoing hell we can scarcely imagine from the relative safety of our suburban homes, these men put on a brave battle. We should never think that all soldiers are great heroes, though. It wasn’t all camaraderie and the Last Post. In any fighting division you are likely to find not just your heroes, but also your drunkards, those sleeping on guard duty, a deserter or three, someone who will not risk himself to save a friend. Just people like everyone else. Who’s to tell what kind of soldier you and I would have been? Pray that we never find out.

The point is that many of these South Africans were hardly professional soldiers. They were people like you and me with a few weeks of hurried and probably insufficient training and little if any battlefield experience and they were thrown into one of the most vicious and deadly battles mankind has ever known – in four months in the Battle of the Somme, there were, on both sides, over a million casualties.

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Why do we remember them?

Do we remember the SA soldiers because they were young men, distant relatives, or South Africans? Or because we hope that the senseless slaughter of these young men was not in vain and would deter us from engaging in fresh wars?

Barely a generation later, within 21 years, Europe was at war again. So if deterrence is not what remembrance days are about, then what’s the point?

Standing still for a moment, we honour those who fought and died, possibly not by choice, for a minute remembering the fear, the  blood, the trenches, the mud, the bravery, the desperation, the boredom, and the agony. Respecting that they knew if they survived no one who hadn’t been there would ever really understand what they had gone through – and how life just could not ever really be the same again.

There’s little romance to war – forget the movies. But what one does often seem to find in real life among the survivors is a sense of desperate, intense and lasting camaraderie – the kind that brings tears to the eyes of an 80-year-old war veteran saluting fellow soldiers and friends who did not survive. In the face of death, one is probably the most acutely alive that you will ever be.

Two-thirds of those 5493 soldiers buried at Delville Wood are unknown – a testimony to the incredible destruction that characterised this particular battle. Countless families remained bereft at having nothing more than the phrase ‘missing in action’ hanging over them.

Men of the 4th South African Infantry Regiment take a rest along a road. (Delville Wood Museum).

In a way by standing still and paying quiet tribute to these men who died in brutal chaos, even if just in our own minds, we, for a moment, restore their “dignity and

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their individuality” to quote poet Walt Whitman. He spoke of the “untold and unwritten history of war” and of the countless men who suffered and died anonymously. They are not just names on memorial plaques gathering dust – for someone out there that was a father, a husband, a lover, a son, an uncle, a friend, a brother. The tragedy of such loss can echo through a family for generations.

The stories of the heroes are often remembered, but what about everyone else who also lost everything?

We cannot change history, and we cannot stop it from being repeated, but we can acknowledge what we think these people went through.

In honouring these soldiers, we honour life, what we have now, and pay some tribute to the society in which we would like to live. And in which they never would.

We will remember them. And we should.

DELVILLE WOOD A few years after the War, Colonel Donald MacLeod asked W.A. Beattie to

write a poem about Delville Wood. Beattie had fought in the wood in the 4th SAI as Lance Corporal and was wounded.

By ruined homes in Montauban, by trench and sunken road.

All resolute and strong the living stream of khaki flowed.

Through land laid waste and seared and torn by ruthless giant guns

And so that stream South Africa had lent her sturdy sons.

 

Of Boer and British stock were they, and lean and lithe and tanned.9

Yet mingling there as brothers fighting for one Motherland ;

For kith and kindred o’er the sea, for King and Country now

Their hands they joined in fellowship, and took the filial vow.

 

And thus they entered Bernafay through fire and fitid fume,

While every tree atrembling stood, as if it sensed its doom ;

And in that avenue of woe they paused to count their dead.

Then grimly on on Delville, where their path of glory led.

 

Within that wood of epic fame for days and nights they fought.

And backward thrust the stubborn foe, through every step was bought

With tragic toll of vivid youth, that had but life to give.

And gladly gave that precious gift, that you and I might live.

 

From hour to hour the battle raged and fearful tumult reigned.

And still they fought as men inspired and still their ground maintained ;

And as their stricken comrades fell, the shattered boughs dropped down

In pity on their mangled forms – and made their laurel crown.

 

So year by year we think of them and humble homage pay

To thocs who trad with courage high that Gethsemane.

Now Delville is South Africa blooddrenched with manhood’s bloom.

Our heritage from heroes brave, our temple and our tomb.

                                                                                    W.A. BEATTIE

Humour in UniformA drill sergeant had just chewed out one of his cadets, and as he was walking away, he turned to the cadet and said, "I guess when I die you'll come and dance

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on my grave."

The cadet replied, "Not me, Serge. I promised myself that when I got out of the Army I'd never stand in another line."

The Kiss

Four strangers travelled together in the same compartment of an European train.

Two men and two women faced each other. One woman was a very wealthy and sophisticated 70 year old lady who was decked out in the finest of furs and jewellery.

Next to her sat a beautiful young woman, nineteen years old--who looked like something right off the cover of a fashion magazine. Across from the older lady was a very mature looking man in his mid-forties who was a highly decorated Sergeant Major in the Army.

Next to the Sergeant Major sat a young private fresh out of boot camp. As these four strangers travelled, they talked and chatted about trivial things until they entered an unlighted tunnel, and there they sat in complete darkness and total silence, until the sound of a distinct kiss broke the silence; following the kiss a loud slap could be heard throughout the cabin.

In the ensuing period of silence the four strangers sat quietly with their own thoughts.

The older lady was thinking, "Isn't it wonderful that even in this permissive day and age there are still young women who have a little self-respect and dignity?"The young woman, shaking her head and greatly puzzled, asked herself, "Why in the world would any man in his right mind want to kiss an old fossil like that when I'm sitting here?"

The Sergeant Major, rubbing his sore face, was outraged that any woman could ever think that a man in his position would try to sneak a kiss in the dark.

The private, grinning from ear to ear, was thinking, "What a crazy and mixed up world this is when a private can kiss the back of his hand and then smack a Sergeant Major in the face and get away with it!"

Train Your Brain

This is a tough one…………………good luck!

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Private Peter Perkins wants to change his branch of military service. He is currently in the army, but wants to join the navy. To leave the army, he must get out of his tank. He then has to go on board a ship to join the navy. Change ARMY to NAVY by changing one letter at a time. The change must go through TANK and SHIP. Each change must produce a valid word in the English language. No word can be used more than once.

ARMY ----> TANK ----> SHIP ----> NAVY

Example: ARMY will change to ARMSARMS will change to AIMS etc, etc until you arrive at the word NAVY.

Just Enough Time to Deliver the MessageIn Cryptography teasers, a phrase or expressions has been encoded in some way (frequently by replacing letters with other letters). You need to figure out the encoding method and then decode the message to find the answer.

Justin Case and Auntie Bellum are fellow con artists who deliver coded messages to each other to communicate. Recently Auntie Bellum was put in jail for stealing a rare and expensive diamond. Only a few days after this, Justin Case sent her a friendly letter asking her how she was. On the inside of the envelope of the letter, he hid a code. Yesterday, Auntie Bellum escaped and left the envelope and the letter inside the jail cell. The police did some research and found the code on the inside of the envelope, but they haven't been able to crack it. Could you help the police find out what the message is?

This is the code:

llwatchawtfeclocklnisksundialcirbetimersool

Hint

It was a TIMED escape

Dates to Remember

13th of August 2016 - Field Marshal Shellhole’s 64th Anniversary dinner.

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The shellhole will be celebrating its 64 th birthday in the form of a dinner to be held at Evenden House on the 13th of August 2016. Remember you are all welcome to invite family and friends to the event. Cost per person is R150.00. It promises to be a very special evening.

Dress Code for Moths: Formal MOTH kit with miniature medals (normal medals in the absence of miniatures). Black bow ties may be worn in place of ties.

Ex Service members: Civilian attire befitting a formal (with medals)

Civilian guests: Attire befitting a formal evening dinner.

Time: 1730B for 1800B

17th of September – Ex Servicemen’s braai

Field Marshal shellhole will be hosting an ex Servicemen’s braai at the Shellhole in Irene on the 17th of September.

Members of the shellhole are requested to invite friends or family that have served in the armed forces.

Please RSVP to Moth Selwyn Plage on email :

Selwyn Plage <Selwyn.Plage@babcock.co.za>

Time: 1130B till the last man or woman standing.

Parting ShotIn closing this edition of the “Bullytin” I wish to share with you some amazing images of how them “Pom’s remember their fallen.

As part of the Battle of the Somme centenary commemoration these images were projected onto the white cliffs of Dover on the 1st of July 2016.

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They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

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