The fascist war machine, honed to deadly effectiveness by a heartless state ideology, sought to rid Europe of all none racially pure groups. Starting with Jews in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s psychosis broadened to include any ethnic groups not considered Ayran: Slavs and Romanies specfically. Black troops fought valiantly and heroically for the Allied cause recruited through the British Empire, but how did they fare if captured as POWs and non-Aryans in a Europe dominated by fascist conquest? This brief item will chart the progress as a POW from the North African campaign of an ordinary South African soldier, Corporal Timothy Mathopa who answered his King’s call.
The forest surrounding Onesse et Laharie in south west France is re-claimed land ten miles from the endless stretch of tree planted sand dunes holding together the shifting shore line of the Landes littoral. The light house, at Contis Plage, a bright metronomic beacon, shafts light far into the Atlantic. A concrete bunker, deserted, home to litter and worse, lies gutted of its one time aggression: did the German’s really expect an invasion from the south west?
No, this was to be elsewhere, but needless war time tragedy, there was. This strategically vital area bordering Franco’s Spain, aided by the Nazi’s in his rise to power, judiciously sought neutrality, sheltered intrigue from all sides. The Axis Powers respited U-boat crews from Atlantic Sea Pack ravages, the Allies routed escaping servicemen through the Pyranees to Spain and hence back to the war effort.
In the same region Maurice Papon, Vichy official in Bordeaux, tried for war crimes, signed death warrants for Jewish men, women and children: Henri Ayzenberg aged three, Simone Zavidowitcz, aged six, amongst other innocents. Whilst the British parachuted Yvonne Cormeau as a radio operator in August 1943 to relay vital information about German troop deployments and fight with the Maquis.
The tiny hamlet of Onesse et Laharie, some four hundred souls in the late thirties, has a well tended cemetery and a simple plaque on the stark white wall, blinding in summer’s light: Commonwealth War Graves Commission. A marble cross for an Allied serviceman; Cpl. T. Mathopa, N/6837, NMC. Timothy Mathopa serving with South Africa's Native Military Corps, died 13th. August 1944.
Several other black South African soldiers also rest in the Landes area. Private Kekana, 17th. January 1945, Private J.M. Thobane, 14th. January 1945, husband of Siteng Thobane of Sekukuniland, Transvaal, and Corporal Sam Kazamula, 30th. November 1943.
Why the South African presence in this part of France? Corporal Kazamula’s death, for instance, predates the Normandy Landings. Had they been part of some special force’s detachment? Perhaps they’d been airborne troops whose plane had been brought down as a monument at nearby Mezos commemorates American fliers. Or had they been summarily executed immediately after capture by the Gestapo intent on racially purifying Europe?
I’d been to Onesse several times and become fascinated by this solitary Commonwealth grave: whatever the reason for it I wanted to find out who was Timothy Mathopa and why was he buried in Onesse?
Taking advantage of South Africa’s new freedom I wrote to their Embassy in London who forwarded my simple request for information on Corporal Mathopa to the Chief of the South African National Defence Force, an aptly named Colonel J.P. Human.
An envelope arrived at my Westminster home within two months packed with photocopied military documents, many marked ‘restricted’ or ‘secret’, together with letters from the Red Cross and various departments of the South Africa army. From this unexpectedly large bundle of papers I began to piece together fragments of the life of one humble South African soldier.
I’d already tried to discover from Onesse’s locals why this Allied grave existed, but drew a blank. The secretary of the Ancienne Combattants claimed to know nothing about the grave, though a local medical general practitioner discovered a prisoner of war camp had existed nearby, but papers relating to it, I was informed, had not survived the war. Maybe, I began to think, Mathopa had been executed as the German war machine was grinding to a halt, because he was black.
As I sifted the documents a rich and complex picture emerged. A Prisoner of War list, Box 31 in the NMC files, ‘X List Personnel’, contained the names of eleven South African servicemen who had been released from POW camps and were in the process of repatriation to their units during late summer and the early autumn of 1944, one, Private Jim Moquena, was bound for the Middle East. The eleventh name on the list, under PARA. 62, was the Corporal’s. Copies of this order being sent to, amongst others in the bureaucratic entanglement, the Chief Paymaster, Pretoria, the Voter’s Registration Section, Johannesburg, and POW Records care of Captain E.W. Steele, the High Commission, South Africa House, London.
Earlier, on March 2nd. 1943, the Red Cross Society corresponded with Lieutenant Horwitz of the South African Non-European Army Service announcing “we have pleasure in enclosing herewith a further list of native POWs with camp or hospital addresses”. Corporal Mathopa, serving with the 7th. Recce Battalion, who had been promoted on the 15th. October 1941, was in Camp 82, Laterina, Italy. A further document, reporting on Camp 82 written following a visit to it between the 23rd. to 24th. February 1943, revealed there were two South African officers, 101 NCO’s and 840 men, out of a total POW population of 2,457 in a camp built to house 6,000.
The prisoners in this camp, captured in North Africa, had “access to writing paper and post cards .... a sufficient reserve of parcels containing foodstuffs, comforts and medicine ...and are always given hot water for making tea and coffee”.
Medical treatment in the camp was considered good and a major in the Italian Medical Corps, who had practised in England for many years, was well liked by his patients. Of the seventy of so patients who presented themselves each day for examination and treatment, few had serious complaints, most cases, the Report states, were for slight injuries. On the day the report’s author visited fifteen patients were in the sickroom suffering from diabetes, inflammation of the bronchial tubes, sore throats and slight influenza. Persons suffering from infectious diseases were sent to the local hospital at once and an ambulance was made available for that purpose. Life, though without freedom, was fair enough given the prevailing war conditions: “the treatment and food are exactly the same for the prisoners as for the Italian patients”, concluded Captain Trippi’s report.
However, since the previous visit two prisoners had died in hospital: J. Bester from South Africa and F. Kevan from Liverpool.
From Camp 82 the details and story as to the corporal’s movements, draw a blank. The next news we have of Corporal Mathopa, and some 900 other black South African’s, is from a report filed by the Director of Non European Auxiliary Services, Box 5, Group 2, NMC POWs, the Annex of which announces Mathopa’s death. Though not in Italy.
Towards the end of the summer of 1944 with the Allies pushing through northern France and the German army in disarray elsewhere, travel within France was once more becoming feasible. The 900 fellow POW’s with whom Timothy Mathopa had been part of, had been evacuated by a Lieutenant Fennesy who was told that eleven South African’s had been left behind in various hospitals in the south west, one of these in Mont de Marsan, the Sanatorium de Neuvielle, was where the corporal spent the last months of his life.
Advice had been given “through various channels” that the prisoners left behind, were, in spite of being hospitalised, lacking in essential food, and in some cases, proper medical care and attention.
A Captain Fink, and the anonymous author of the Box Report, were despatched from London with the following mission: “to evacuate six South African Non Europeans”, but on reporting to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, were instructed “to interest ourselves in all Allied personnel”.
Departing on January 18th. 1945 and landing in France the following day after catching the boat train, they arrived in Versailles on the 22nd. where they received further instructions and drove to Dijon and then on the Marseilles. Here they received two ambulances and sufficient petrol to take them to the south west.
Travelling across France from Marseilles they journeyed through Toulouse, where they were informed by Lieutenant Colonel de Gros of the British Civil Affairs authority that one patient, Private Siljosing had already been evacuated through Marseilles. The colonel also informed the two officers that an Irish woman, Miss Rea, who had looked after the South African POWs since the German collapse, should be contacted in Bayonne. Leaving Toulouse the pair drove through Tarbes, Pau and Orthez, before finally reaching Bayonne.
On the 27th. January “we arrived in Bayonne and immediately interviewed Miss Rea who advised us that only two patients remained to be evacuated of the original eleven left behind by Lieutenant Fennesy in the previous September. Of this 11, 7 had died, 2 had already been taken off and two others remained to be removed”. One of these two was in the hospital at Bayonne and the other in Mont de Marsan. Both these patients survived and were joined by another discovered in an unnamed hospital, driven by the two officers to Marseilles where they embarked on a hospital ship bound for the Middle East and South Africa.
Corporal Mathopa, had, unfortunately, not survived whatever injuries or illness he had sustained resulting in his hospitalisation. We do know, however, from his service record, that he had two periods of hospitalisation in March and August of 1941 before being posted back to his unit. Perhaps he had some weakness, some re-occurring illness that plagued his constitution: we’ll never know. Nor is there any reason given as to why he is buried in Onesse when three of his South African comrades are buried in Mont de Marsan.
What we do know is this: that black South African soldiers fighting the Allied cause against the Axis powers had been captured in North Africa, transported through a continent exterminating non-Aryans and kept alive. They were fed and clothed and hospitalised as Prisoners of War. They were freed by Miss Rea, the Irish woman negotiating on their behalf with the Germans. Sought by the British despatched from London on a mission whose raison d’être more than equals ‘Saving Private Ryan’, and were nursed by the French. European co-operation at its finest where the South Africans’ status as Allied soldiers sidelined race as of no consequence.
