A Country at War 1939-1945 - The Mood of a Nation by Jennifer Crwys-Williams

ISBN: 9781874800491

Ashanti Publishing, December 1992

451 pages, Hardcover

A COUNTRY AT WAR is a powerful story of South Africa riven between opposing factions over the years 1939-1945. The book, described by Harry F Oppenheimer as ‘a work of fundamental importance’, is an intimate account of the experience of South Africans during that war, and the momentous impact that those years were to have on them all.

Crwys-Williams paints a broad canvas of what it was like to live in the war years, that is often amusing and often poignant. She details what food we ate; how schoolboys enlisted, lived and died for a cause; the coastal black-outs, the parties, the steel-grey convoys which disgorged thousands of men at a time into Cape Town and Durban. The men Up North fighting; a woman mourning the loss of her hus-band; a eulogy on Jan Smuts; a radio broadcast by a famous general. Such are the ingredients.

Arranged chronologically, A COUNTRY AT WAR is a collection of interviews with men and women of all persuasions, from Italian and South African prisoners of war to a soldier who lost both legs in the desert; from a young war bride to a member of the Ossewabrandwag; from the man who surrendered Tobruk to the poignant story of a Polish child refugee who found a haven in South Africa. The mood and fabric of the country are conveyed, revealing a spirit, energy and atmosphere long since relegated to the past but all too recognisable with its parallels to the present.

The dramatic sweep of personal and global events elevates the story of a lifetime from the dull annals of history, and places it in the context of an immedi-ate and cathartic reality. The author takes the reader from wartime Cape Town to a prisoner- of-war camp outside Pretoria, from Somalia to the dubious delights of Cairo, from the Western Desert to the outskirts of liberated Florence – and to the homecoming of the men and women who fought for their divided country.