🔒 Reviving memory of SA WW2 hero and activist that Nats wrote out of history

LONDON — In this story of World War Two fighter pilot and Torch Commando leader Sailor Malan, historian Michael Charton explains why few South Africans know of their great hero. – Alec Hogg

This is The Rational Perspective. I’m Alec Hogg. In this episode: Sailor Malan, a war hero celebrated everywhere, except in his homeland. It’s over a decade since David Rattray was murdered at his Fugitive’s Drift Lodge. Rattray was a masterful storyteller whose tales of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war and particularly, the historic battles of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift built him a global following that attracted packed houses when he went elsewhere in the world, especially in London. The obvious successor to the famous Rattray is chartered accountant turned storyteller Michael Charton who works off a wider canvas but like his fellow South African, specialises in forgotten stories drawn from the troubled history of his homeland.
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Charton, whose events at home are booked out months in advance will be addressing London audiences for the first time this month. His first event was sold out within 24 hours. The second one on Tuesday, the 30th of October is filling up fast. I caught up with Charton to tap him on another fascinating topic – the story of Second World War fighter pilot Sailor Malan – a war hero written out of history by the apartheid government. To set the scene, I asked him to tell us a bit more about his work.

What I primarily do is I tell a couple of stories that – one in particular, called ‘my father’s coat’ – and that story involves five characters who I then speak to for about… It’s about a 90-minute story, which I travel through thousands of years although focusing on the last 200. The idea is to provide some additional context about how South Africa got to the position it’s in right now. I stop at about 1996. There are many, many people who speak about the politics of the day. My take is that there are amazing lessons to be learned from our past and that those lessons in a sense are separate from the politics of the day. Yet, I believe they provide very powerful context and guidance, and for me, healing and a sense of hope as to where South Africa is right now.

One of your favourite characters is a fighter pilot who played a huge role in the Battle of Britain – Adolph Malan. I guess he must have been teased a little bit about the Adolph part of it, so he’s better known as Sailor.

Yeah. What happened in terms of his name, was that Adolph Malan grew up on a farm in Wellington. As a young man, he went off to school and he was a typical farm boy (‘n plaas seun) and a capable young man who was riding horses, shooting guns, and driving the family car by age 10 but he carried with him a sense of adventure and as a young teenager, he then made the decision to join the naval academy at Simonstown and his live really would take a very interesting twist. I guess that for the rest of his years, he lived a most extraordinary life and so he spent time on the ships for north of a decade until in the mid 1930’s, the Royal Air Force who (I guess) sensed that there was some kind of military intervention coming, were all of a sudden looking for pilots at which point, Adolph Malan – this adventurous young man – made the decision to jump across to the RAF. I guess he was one of those rare pilots who had a background on the sea and that was the origin of his nickname, Sailor.

Of course, his real name didn’t count against him because at the time, there was lots going on about the other Adolf but I’m sure he was grateful to have a nickname that was somewhat different.

His name was actually a strange thing. For whatever reason, the people who were closest to him – including his wife in later years – always called him John and I haven’t really worked out what the reason for that was but Adolph seemed to have disappeared quite early on in his life, for whatever reason.

Why did he join the Royal Air Force?

Well, I guess as I said he seemed to have a sense of adventure; the kind of adventure which, unlike many of his peers, saw him leaving school at a young age to take on something new and find something exciting in life. I guess he had a passion for travelling the world on ships. He had a maturity beyond his years and I guess had come to realise that there was something brewing in Europe and if there was going to be something to fight for, he was willing to do it. I guess the idea was that it would be with a view to defending the western civilization as he saw it.

And becoming a pilot? It seems a long jump from being in the navy in Simonstown (a farm boy in Wellington) to getting into a Spitfire.

I think in these early days…to provide the context… The world was full of polymaths. The world wasn’t yet sufficiently complicated where people believed that they had to specialise a huge amount. These days, we still had people who played both rugby and cricket for South Africa so joining an air force after investing 10/15 years becoming a skilled sailor… The UK required pilots. I guess they saw the challenge. They needed to build their air force. They realised that this was where the future of warfare was. The air force was already becoming increasingly important by the end of the First World War. By the time the Second World War was approaching, the RAF realised it needed pilots so they took as many pilots as they could from the British people and then they also put it out to the Commonwealth.

So, what we saw was people joining the RAF from all over the Anzacs, the Australians, the New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians and then very interesting also, other parts of the Commonwealth including India, Jamaica, Trinidad and Burma and so we saw this very interesting collection of peoples congregating in Great Britain to do their training and then it would ultimately be to fight in the Battle of Britain.

How good a pilot was he?

There are two elements to it. One was that he wasn’t necessarily an instinctive pilot. Yet, on the other hand, he was an incredibly accomplished pilot – extraordinarily aggressive and very decisive in everything that he did. Once he was in the sky, he developed a particular style. He was hugely innovative. He changed the way that the RAF were using formations. In fact, he ended up writing a set of laws – 10 laws – for air fighting, which would later be stuck on the cork boards right around the air forces of Britain. It seems like what really set him apart was that he realised what he was good at. He was extremely aggressive. By all accounts, he had an extremely accurate shot but what really emerged in time was that he became very decisive. He knew how these air battles were taking place. He had seen enough of them. He’d had a lot of experience and as such, he knew what to do and was able to command his people and his fellow pilots in a manner which proved to be hugely successful.

When he initially withdrew from active service in the skies; at that stage, he had taken down the most German aircraft out of any pilot in the RAF. Certainly, people in the end, shot down more people than him but he emerged in the early part of the Battle of Britain as perhaps the greatest legend that there was in those early stages.

And then he was promoted – presumably – because he stopped shooting them down from the sky and hopefully helped others to get more proficient.

He was promoted to lead the 74 Squadron – the famous squadron in Britain who earned themselves quite a remarkable reputation in the Battle of Britain – the Tigers. Early on in the war, he was promoted to lead them 8th of August but from that moment it didn’t mean he sat down in a base down below and told everyone else what to do. He remained in the skies. In fact, long after he had been promoted to a position of wing commander and he was encouraged not to enter the skies, he continued to. He was appointed to lead 74 Squadron on the 8th of August 1940 and three days later, was the most famous day for him in the Battle of Britain – the 11th of August – a date which would subsequently be named (quite simply) Sailor’s 11th of August. What had happened was a fleet of Messerschmitts approached the coast of Britain and 74 Squadron was sent off to intercept this.

This one fleet of Messerschmitts was then followed by three subsequent ones which meant that the whole day, 74 Squadron was battling off the south coast of Britain, off Dover. They managed to shoot down (by our count) 38 German aircraft in one day. The other interesting thing about Sailor Malan is he had this stone-cold presence about him. He described that day as something like ‘it was the end of a satisfactory day’s fighting’. He really wasn’t a hugely emotional man. He was very stern, proud, and determined but quite quiet – typically staunch Afrikaner man.

The good news about the Battle of Britain was that it stopped the Germans from getting dominance over the skies and then invading Britain and I guess eventually, that turned the way. But, Sailor Malan himself had an interesting squadron; one that would have been very different from what he’d be used to. He’d be expected with the very white South African upbringing that he must have had…

So, 74 Squadron – like all the squadrons in Great Britain – were a very diverse group of people and they boasted diversity of accents, skin colours, and cultures and these guys fought together under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The life expectancy of these pilots was a matter of weeks and so these people were fighting under desperate scenarios and I guess from what I can read, these people of all these various cultures stood up and did an incredible job, showed extraordinary bravery and skill in defending not only Britain, but in fighting off the evil presence, which was Nazi Germany at the time. I guess these diverse people – the RAF at the time – seems to have left a fairly indelible mark on Sailor Malan because at the end of the war when the war had finished in 1945, he resigned from the RAF in 1946.

It seems to be that having worked alongside these very capable men of all races and cultures, he found it very difficult when he did return to South Africa in 1946 and we saw the emergence of race politics take place over the next few years, culminating in the victory of the National Party in 1948 with DF Malan and his apartheid strategy. What we see is, we see Sailor Malan then shifting his efforts as a famous fighter pilot towards that of – I guess – a man of protest, a man who stood up for the rights of these people who had fought and given everything for the war – often their lives – and now where being denied the fruits of their freedom. It seems to be a scenario which would have been very different from his life back in Wellington but by the end of the war in 1945, he was a man who was 35 years old. He was a fairly experienced human being who had lived all over the world on ships or lived in Britain so he carried with him a modern view of the world considering the time. I think that for him, it was just a matter of mere logic that freedom should be extended to all of those people who he knew were as capable as he was.

Michael, tell us about the Torch Commando because that’s where he played a huge role.

Yeah. So, now he returned back to South Africa and the apartheid government came into play in 1948. Sailor Malan seems to have been more of a man of action. He wasn’t the only man who’d returned back to South Africa with these views. Many South Africans had fought in the war with people of colour and believed similarly that their right to freedom was theirs (was reserved). So, initially there were a few organisations which formed the Springbok Legion being the most famous. This evolved by the early 1950’s into something called the Torch Commandos. It was a slightly more strident organisation and it would probably best be described as a protest organisation rather than a political movement. They wanted to literally stand up and protest against what was going on. Sailor Malan believed that this was not as much a political movement as it was a protest against what he believed was extraordinary inequalities and poverty which was taking place in South Africa as a result of what was originally segregation politics but then the slightly more intense version, which was apartheid.

They formed this group of which Sailor, with his credentials was appointed the president. Something which I learned again, like many of these stories – very late in my life – this organisation became very powerful. At their peak, they had 250,000 signed-up members that had its biggest protest march which was to the Johannesburg City Hall. Seventy-five thousand South Africans walked to protest against the apartheid government and its policies and there, famously, Sailor addressed these people. One famous paragraph being, “The strength of this gathering is evidence that the men and women who fought in the war for freedom, still cherish what they fought for. We are determined not to be denied the fruits of that victory.” So, this was a very powerful organisation which was perceived to be a significant threat to the National Party based on how they then reacted.

Again, for context: during the Second World War, it was certainly not a unified white South Africa that went to war with the British. There were perhaps many who had senior positions in the National Party that won the election in 1948 who were on the other side of the fence and celebrating the victories early on that Hitler was achieving.

Yes. Absolutely. That is a very important point in this story. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I like Sailor Malan with whom to tell stories with because certainly, there was a reasonably solid voice in South African which was certainly sympathetic towards Germany and in some cases, vocally supportive of them and their policies. In current-day South Africa, we find certain people who are divisive by nature and Sailor Malan is an example of this. He had a great many detractors and when I put my story out to the word about Sailor Malan through my YouTube video, I received some feedback from these people which I tried my best to understand and I guess it does link back to this anti-British feeling and the use of the word ‘veraaier’ (traitor), which is such an emotive word in the Afrikaner language and I try hard to get my head around it.

Yet, on the other side, I receive so many comments saying, “This is a hero I wish I had known more about” or amongst the older generation, “Here was a man who was the greatest hero to either myself or my father” so he was a hugely divisive character and to get back to my point: these kinds of characters are beautiful to tell stories about because they are inherently provocative. They force us into a state of introspection which I believe is important for South Africans to delve into.

But he has been written out of this history books. Certainly, when people like you and I were growing up in South Africa, there wasn’t much in the history books to say that there was this great South African hero who fought in the Battle of Britain and was the ace fighter pilot of his generation.

This is another important part of the story for me which again, speaks to the bigger picture and what I do for a living. Sailor Malan was at the time, a great hero and very well-known amongst South Africans and certainly the elder generation will remember him reasonably well. However, because he was a great threat to the National Party… Here was this WW2 fighter pilot/swashbuckling hero/good-looking/oil-slicked hair who was very influential when he needed to be and here he was, leading a very powerful protest organisation. So, the National Party I guess, took the logical step of trying to dismantle this protest movement. They firstly banned all members of the Civil Service at least, from joining the organisation which I guess, cut a lot of their membership out. A lot of their membership (you must remember) were high-profile people.

These were judges and high-profile businesspeople who were members of this organisation so it was a genuine threat and so this process of dismantling took place. The Civil Service members were forbidden from joining the organisation and then that was followed in turn by a fairly intensive program of propaganda. Sailor Malan himself was portrayed very poorly. He was, at one point, shown as some kind of a poodle in his clothing. He was labelled a ‘veraaier’/a traitor alongside Smuts and labelled alongside the great Jewish businessman of the time, which during that WW2 time were still for whatever reason seen as some kind of an insult… His legacy was downplayed to the point where eventually the Torch Commando no longer had the following. It dissipated. It disappeared in the end and its memory would be strategically eliminated.

We would not find it in our history textbooks at school. It wouldn’t be difficult to get your hands on the story of the Torch Commando but at the same time, it would not have been made freely available to young people growing up in South Africa for several decades. We’re coming across this story and the fact that he was systematically written out of the system again, drew some appeal to me as to that this story again, needed to be told. Again, from my generation – people in their thirties and forties… I have great feedback from people saying, “Geez, I just don’t know how I’ve never heard of this guy before” and that’s really true. There are many stories like this which I’m passionate about – hopefully unearthing more and more of that. His legacy was trodden upon so furiously that even in his death, he was denied a military funeral.

No-one was allowed to wear uniforms to his funeral and the SAF was forbidden from putting a tribute together in his death. He was a great man who had risked his life every day for a couple of years – flying out to fight for freedom – who, for political reasons, was written out of the story. It’s a tragedy in its own way. In these situations, one always has to try and place yourselves into the shoes of every side of the story but having done so, it really remains to me a great tragedy that his name is not better-known.

The interesting part of this is that if he were to have lived in the UK/Britain, he would have been recognised everywhere he went. No doubt, asked to do presentations, etc. but he went back home to South Africa where the ruling party wrote him out of history. Did he die a bitter man?

I believe he would have been fairly unhappy with what was happening. He died in 1963 so he died in the midst of the Rivonia trial, which you’ll remember was two or three years after the Sharpeville Massacre. South Africa was in the process of really imploding with a huge amount of protest action. I guess somewhere deep down, he would have felt vindicated that these protests could have been avoided if they’d taken steps earlier. Certainly, South Africa wasn’t a country in deep turmoil when he finally passed away from Parkinson’s in 1963. I hear what you’re saying. If he had stayed in the comfort of Britain where he could have been Sir Adolph Malan (which sounds interesting) … He came back to fight for a cause and in the end, in his lifetime unfortunately, he was on the losing end of that fight.

So, he did continue fighting.

I guess he fought for the rights of people until he no longer could. It seems to me that he wasn’t an anti-apartheid activist in the same way that we would come to know the word in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. It seems that he was a constitutionalist. One of the big things that he barked hard at was the National Party which he believed was flouting the Constitution by removing the Cape Coloureds from the Voting Roll and this was one of his big fighting points. In a sense, he was a constitutionalist. He felt the National Party were Fascist. They were doing things the way that they wanted to do it. They were flaunting democracy. It seems like he wasn’t quite what we would call a struggle activist in the later sense but he certainly fought for what he felt was right and for what he felt was a long-term democratic option for South Africa.

Some of the surveys at the turn of the century put Winston Churchill as the greatest man to have lived – certainly in the Western world in the 1900’s – and Sailor Malan had a connection with him, too.

Yes. I love these things in my stories. I love finding connections in them wherever I can. In this story of Sailor Malan, you’ll pick up two in particular. One is linked to Winston Churchill and the other was quite an obscure link which I just couldn’t believe when I read about it at the time – a New Zealand rugby player called Donald Cobden. The Winston Churchill link was something I picked up in the depths of the internet. When Sailor Malan had finally died in 1963 and he wasn’t given much of a funeral at all, his son Jonathan – who I actually had the privilege of meeting about a month ago in Johannesburg – received a message from his godfather in Great Britain and that godfather just happened to be Winston Churchill. Again, for me, picking this up in the depths of the internet… Later, I’d already researched this whole story when I picked this up again. Here was a man who we know nothing about and yet, the gravitas surrounding him was really quite remarkable.

The letter that Jonathan got from Winston Churchill read quite simply, “My dear Jonathan. I was grieved to hear of the death of your father whose deeds added lustre to the name of the RAF in the great days of the war. Pray, accept my true sympathy to you and your family. Yours, very sincerely, Winston Churchill.” I mean, this is a South African guy who grew up on a farm in Wellington – just a remarkable man. Again, it just highlights the gravitas of a man who was wiped off the history books for so many South African people.

And the New Zealand rugby player?

This guy Donald Cobden was a left-wing for New Zealand who played against the Springboks in 1937 and this happens to be another story I tell. I told this story for many years but Donald Cobden was tackled out of the first by a famous East Griqualander – a man called Ebbo Bastard. There was this famous tackle where there’s video footage and then there’s footage of Donald Cobden being carried moribund off the field and as it turned out, he would never play for the All Blacks again. The reason I’ve picked this up is that the All Black selectors believed that he wasn’t brave enough to wear the All Black jersey again because he had gone off on a stretcher. So, Donald Cobden then joins the RAF in 1938. I told the story for many years, how he had died on his 26th birthday on the 11th August 1940.

That same date just rang a bell for me when I was reading about Sailor Malan and so I went and did some research back to Donald Cobden and sure enough, he had joined 74 Squadron so that famous day where Sailor Malan and his men had shot down 38 German aircraft… It just had an amazing overlap with the story I’d already told and it’s amazing for me when you get these kinds of connections. It’s like a great sense of endorphins just flow across your body. It’s almost like you get goosebumps when you realise how these stories that tell… I guess a big part of my storytelling is to try and find these connections. I believe there’s real power in them. This was just almost like a random once-off. I couldn’t believe it. It just happened to be his 26th birthday on that day. Donald Cobden shot down six miles off the coast. His body washed up on the Belgian coast so for me again, it’s almost an emotional reminder of what this generation sacrificed.

Donald Cobden features in another of Charton’s very popular presentations – The Story of the 1937 Springboks – rugby’s first World Champions. This has been the Rational Perspective. I’m Alec Hogg. Until the next time, cheerio.