Publication	Sunday Times
Date	2012-04-08
Reporter	Chris Barron
Web Link	www.timeslive.co.za

Admiral Hugo "Boozy" Biermann, who has died in Fish Hoek at the age of 95, was chief of the South African Navy and head of the SA Defence Force

He served on minesweepers in the Mediterranean during World War 2 before being promoted to lieutenant- commander.

He was in command of the salvage vessel HMSAS Gamtoos, which played an invaluable role clearing key Mediterranean ports, including Marseilles, after the Allied landings in the south of France in 1944.

Biermann was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his role.

After the war he played a small role in helping to build the SA Navy, which until then had only existed as part of the Royal Navy, into an independent entity.

His promotion as head of the navy in the 1950s was seen as an affirmative action appointment by the National Party.

It was controversial and opposed by fellow officers and sections of the English press in South Africa, notably the Sunday Times, because it was felt he was not the most qualified man for the job.

He was appointed over the heads of more senior and deserving officers because he was an Afrikaner and they were English speakers.

Once appointed, however, Biermann resisted political pressure from defence minister Frans Erasmus to promote Afrikaners at the expense of more qualified English-speaking officers.

In the mid-1950s Biermann went with Erasmus to London to persuade the first lord of the admiralty to hand control of the Simon's Town naval base to South Africa.

They had to overcome a strong argument from the Royal Navy that the South African Navy was not yet ready to assume responsibility for defending the sea route around the Cape.

This was the origin of the so-called "defence-of-the sea-route" doctrine which stressed the strategic importance to the West of the route around the Cape during the Cold War.

Even when the British used the argument in the 1950s as a justification for keeping Simon's Town, serious strategists had already begun to discredit it.

By the 1970s it was little more than a propaganda tool used by the apartheid government to convince the West that it couldn't do without South Africa.

But Biermann, through a combination of being out of touch with modern thinking and a sense of loyalty to his political masters, continued to be one of its strongest champions.

In 1974, by which time Biermann had succeeded General Rudolph Hiemstra as chief of the SADF, he went to Washington for a series of secret meetings with the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in a futile effort to persuade them that a closer US military alliance with South Africa was essential if SA were to continue protecting this supposedly vital sea route.

Biermann was born in Johannesburg on August 6 1916.

His family moved to Cape Town, where he decided on a naval career after visiting Union-Castle passenger liners in Cape Town harbour.

He left Jan van Riebeeck High School after completing his junior certificate - Grade 10 - and joined the navy training ship General Botha.

His fellow cadets called him "Boozy" because of his surname Biermann (beer man), and the nickname stuck.

After two years at the General Botha, he joined the British Merchant Navy.

In 1938 he became a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, SA division.

After the war he attended the British Naval Staff Course at Greenwich and was appointed as naval attaché in South Africa House, London, with the rank of commander.

Shortly before the SADF invaded newly independent Angola in 1974 he said he saw "no reason" why South Africa would send forces into that country. He retired in 1976.

He is survived by two children. His wife, Peggy, who was Scottish but spoke fluent Afrikaans, died in 2008.

With acknowledgements to Chris Barron and Sunday Times.

Hogwash, Barron!

Theo Honiball
Letters Correspondent
15 April 2012
http://www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2012/04/15/your-views-1504-ilive

Chris Barron's obituary for Admiral H H Biermann is disjointed, contradictory and disrespectful.

Barron writes: "After the war he played a small role in helping to build the SA Navy." That is nonsense. Admiral Biermann was the founder of the post-war navy.

He played a major role in building a capable and modern new navy. He took the navy from a Loch Class frigate squadron to a modern navy with first-rate anti-submarine frigates; a professional mine-warfare flotilla; into the missile era with capable and effective missile strike craft; and an effective operational submarine service.

He acquired the SA Navy's first replenishment ship, which was refitted for the role by the naval dockyard, so that we were no longer dependent on Royal Navy Fleet Auxiliaries, and he extended the SA Navy's reach.

The hydrographic service remains highly respected world-wide and is a productive hydrographic survey service. All that happened while Admiral Biermann was the chief of the navy.

And Barron says: "Biermann was out of touch with modern thinking." He never worked in isolation from modern thinking and remained in close touch with the British Royal Navy's C-in-C, South Atlantic and South America, and the US Navy.

He was a graduate of the Royal Navy's Greenwich Staff College.

Having served with distinction at sea in the Mediterranean during the war and decorated with an Order of the British Empire, who else was better qualified and "more deserving" to be appointed for the task of chief of the navy at the time?

Theo Honiball
Knysna

My Obituary for Adm H.H. Biermann

When I did my national service in 1976, Adm Biermann was Chief of the SADF.

But he "retired" on 31 August 1976 of that year to be replaced by Gen Magnus Malan.

But actually he must have been on leave since about April because I had already been on the SWA Angola border  for over two months by 31 August 1976 earning my Pro Patria decoration in the battle against communism.

I remember that day in 2 Signal Regiment in Pretoria when the change in command happened. Suddenly we were running at the double everywhere (and this was specialist second phase training) and then the dreaded pole PT also soon came back (after a temporary ban for ordinary non-special forces troops) - much to the joy and amusement of those sadist PTIs.

Things were chalk and cheese between the Biermann and Malan eras, the former the days of tough gentlemen and the latter of savoury toughies.

Things took on a greater Afrikaner / Englishman polarisation in the SADF after Biermann.

It was quite unnecessary and actually debilitating for many.

Biermann was actually a gentleman (although I never met him or I don't think even set sights on him); he married a Scottish woman and earned an OBE for Second world War work for the Allies.

Unlike John Vorster, my overall commander-in-chief of the SADF in 1976, who earned himself a burning ox wagon watch and a stay in Gen Jan Smuts's WWII penitentiary.

I also think that Adm Biermann left early and straight after Operation Savannah as he clearly did not support a military frolic into foreign territory 5 000 km to our north.

Yet under his military watch the SADF, progressed 3 000 km in 33 days in the fastest military advance in the history of warfare, fighting battles almost every other day.

Then Uncle Sam got wet brooks and effectively ordered the SADF out of Angola which it did by March 1976.

Adm Biermann probably took the punch for that fiasco (the fact that the SADF had caught the proverbial bus and then found itself without superpower backing being the only major fiasco).

Ironical it was indeed, because that lead to the next 12 years of glory days for the SADF.

Adm Biermann must have had some grimaces and many smiles over his next 36 years thinking back to those glorious days to a situation now when the SANDF spends billions of Rands of tax payers' money every year and battles to muster one company of infantry for border protection..

He also had a great innings of 95.

May he rest in peace.