Rorke’s Drift battle was war crime scene

(I wrote about our family’s small involvement in the filming of the film Zulu and linked to this article. Afraid it’ll go missing, I have pasted the article here).

This article is more than 22 years old

Heroic effort marred by brutal aftermath

Rory Carroll in Johannesburg – Tue 29 Apr 2003

It is one of the glories of British military history. A garrison of just over 100 men, including sick and wounded, holding out against an army of 3,000 Zulus.

Wave after wave of warriors with spears and rifles crashed against the makeshift defences at Rorke’s Drift, South Africa, and still the redcoats held firm.

After a number of unsuccessful attacks in the 11-hour battle, the Zulus were finally forced to withdraw. Queen Victoria and her empire had reason to celebrate. In a way Britain still does: the 1964 film Zulu, starring Michael Caine as one of the officers at Rorke’s Drift, endures as a television favourite.

More Victoria Crosses (11) were awarded to the troops at Rorke’s Drift than at any other single battle by the British army.

But that image of valour and nobility in the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 could now turn to shame. Documents have been uncovered which show that Rorke’s Drift was the scene of an atrocity – a war crime, in today’s language – which Britain covered up.

In the hours after the battle senior officers and enlisted men of a force sent to relieve the garrison are said to have killed hundreds of wounded Zulu prisoners. Some were bayoneted, some hanged and others buried alive in mass graves.

More Zulus are estimated to have died in this way than in combat, but the executions were hushed up to preserve Rorke’s Drift’s image as a bloody but clean fight between two forces which saluted the other’s courage.

Damning testimonies from British soldiers are published in a new book, Zulu Victory, written by two retired British officers, Ron Lock and Peter Quantrill, and published in Britain by Greenhill.

The letters and manuscripts, stored and forgotten in British and South African museums and archives, show that the British had no mercy for captured opponents after the Zulus set fire to the garrison’s hospital during the battle, then burst in and speared the patients.

“Altogether we buried 375 dead Zulus, and some wounded were thrown in the grave,” wrote one trooper, William James Clarke. “Seeing the manner in which our wounded had been mutilated after being dragged from the hospital we were very bitter and did not spare wounded Zulus.”

Horace Smith-Dorrien, a lieutenant who later became a general, wrote that a frame to dry ox-hides became an improvised gallows “for hanging Zulus who were supposed to have behaved treacherously” during the battle.

Samuel Pitts, a private, told the newspaper the Western Mail in 1914 that the official enemy death toll was too low. “We reckon we had accounted for 875, but the books will tell you 400 or 500.”

In fact, Lieutenant Colonel John North Crealock’s private journal, discovered in the royal archives at Windsor, reported that “351 dead Zulus were found and 500 wounded”. He did not elaborate on the fate of the wounded and the book’s authors conclude they were probably all killed, since there was no record of taking prisoners or tending wounded.

The garrison’s heroism was no myth, but the Victorians lionised Rorke’s Drift to compensate for the debacle at nearby Isandhlwana, a British camp where 20,000 Zulus killed over 1,000 soldiers on the same day.

Taking no prisoners, they disembowelled many of the British and their colonial and native allies.

A British relief force saw the bodies on its way to Rorke’s Drift, and it was this force which executed the Zulu wounded, not the garrison’s men, who were resting after the battle.

Six months after Rorke’s Drift, the British government said “several” Zulus had been treated, but made no mention of the hundreds of other wounded Zulus.

“The British government and public thought it was better to sweep it under the carpet,” Ron Lock said yesterday.

There is no mention of the atrocity at the museum at Rorke’s Drift, nor monuments marking mass graves.

Mr Lock, a former inspector with the Kenyan mounted police and a battlefield historian, wrote the book with Peter Quantrill, who is retired from the British army’s Gurkha regiment.

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