Colonel Coetzee's War: Loyalty, Subversion and the South African Police, 1939–1945

This article analyses the (mal)functioning of the state administrative machinery during the Second World War government of General Smuts, focusing on opposition to the war policy within the police. The emphasis is on the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Colonel J.J. (‘Bill’) Coetzee. The CID had the principal role in producing intelligence and countering subversion, but Coetzee's actions respecting Axis espionage and South African anti-war republicans raised suspicions about his and the police's loyalties among his fellow senior civil servants and other Union and Allied intelligence organisations operating in Southern Africa. Drawing on South African, British and American archives, I examine the evidence against Coetzee and assess both his motives and those of the domestic and foreign rivals who suspected him. The account shows how Smuts survived in power despite the extent of internal opposition to his government; reveals the complexities particularly of Afrikaners' conduct in public service during the 1940s; interrogates the historiography of Anglo-South African intelligence relations; and confronts the challenges of establishing the disposition of an individual like Coetzee while relying predominantly on the untested views of his friends and foes.