The Union War histories and the battle for the history of the Second World War in South Africa

Military History has three primary audiences: the general public, academe, and the armed forces – each has its own beliefs regarding the purpose and utility of the military past. Recognising the value of a war history for South Africa, Jan Smuts created the Union War Histories section in 1941. Yet the men appointed to write this history realised that they would never be able to satisfy all three competing readerships. This paper examines the research production of the Union War Histories section as well as the official and public response to their work, which is placed within a wider historiographical process. The notion of a historiographical progression – of an intersecting chain of counter narratives – is posited: accounts by journalists, official historians, personal narrators and regimental historians, leading to a post-participant historiography. This is a progression that seems to hold true for South Africa’s other wars, and indeed the wars of other countries.