Admiral Hugo Biermann

Admiral Hugo Biermann, who had died aged 96, held top naval and defence appointments in South Africa for a quarter of a century while resisting the worst measures of the Nationalist Party.

Hugo Hendrik Biermann, known as ‘Boozy’ or ‘HH’, was born on August 6, 1916 in Johannesburg, scion of a family who had settled Cape Province in the early 18^th century.   One grandmother was a de Beer, and a grandfather was a Boer commando who fought against the British.   Young Hugo was educated at Jan van Riebeck High School, but it was a visit to a Union Castle mail ship alongside in Capetown which decided him on a career at sea.

He joined the Merchant Navy training ship General Botha and before the war qualified as a Master Mariner in the Prince Line, but transferred to the South African Naval Forces on the outbreak of war.

Biermann commanded HMSAShips Soetvlei and Brakvlei in South African waters in 1940, but in mid-1941 was given command of a whalecatcher, Imoff,   which he sailed to Haifa in Palestine to find the equipment needed to convert her to a magnetic and acoustic minesweeper.   Biermann’s tiny ship operated along the North African coast from a base in Alexandria, and where after parachute mines had been seen dropping into the harbour.    he was fully employed in April and May 1942.   Biermann persisted at his task regardless of German air raids: once an ammunition ship exploded alongside him, and on another occasion a bomb close-missed blowing out doors, hatches and fittings from Imoff, but after repairs next day Biermann carried on his salvage work unperturbed.

In the midst of these intense operations, he was surprised when on April 20 he was suddenly ordered to land his crew and march them to another jetty, where they were inspected by HRH the Duke of Gloucester.    A visit in May by the South African, Prime Minister Field Marshal Smuts, was less formal.

Biermann returned to South Africa to command the minesweeper Roodepoort and to take part in Operation Volley in September 1942, a search for German raiders off the Cape of Good Hope.

His next command, as an Acting Lieutenant Commander, was an unwieldy, small and ugly coal-burning tug Gamtoos whose crew included 17 non-Europeans, the first SA naval personnel of colour to be sent to an active theatre of war.   They cleared several Mediterranean ports of sunken and scuttled ships, and at Marseilles Biermann blew a hole in the harbour wall so that he could enter the Vieux Port and begin work.   Later he recalled that the most difficult and intense period of his sea-going career occurred when he had to manoeuvre his single-screw ship round an unexploded mine.

Biermann was made an OBE for his distinguished service during the Allied landings in southern France.

Postwar he decided to stay in the SAN and was given command of the Algerine-class ocean minesweeper Bloemfontein, as Senior Officer SANF Minesweeping Squadron

In the early 1950s he attended the Royal Navy Staff College at Greenwich, and stayed in London to be SA Defence Adviser [attaché].

He was thus out of the country when the Nationalist Party began to instigate its policy of apartheid, and an avowed anglophobe, Frans Erasmus, became Minister of Defence.  Erasmus was determined to get rid of Smuts’ protégés and of English-speaking officers, and retired many early or posted them abroad.  Biermann was summoned home to be promoted two ranks to Temporary Commodore and became Chief of Navy, but the Nationalist Party soon learned to their chagrin that the fully bilingual Afrikaner they had put in charge of their Navy was not to be pushed around by politicians.

In fact he had been taught from childhood to respect all South Africans, regardless of race, colour or creed, and he resisted extremists who wished him to prefer Afrikaans-speaking servicemen.

Biermann served as head of the South African Navy from 1952 to 1972: such power would have corrupted lesser men, but Biermann, supported by his wife, was friendly, approachable, modest, understanding and always considerate, and his adroit even-handedness made him equally acceptable to farmers in South Africa’s plattelands and to English-speakers in the towns.  But when it came to siding with politicians or with his own officers and men, Biermann always chose the latter.

After the Suez War he was involved in the negotiations which led to the Simon’s Town Agreement, and the handing over of the Royal Navy’s base there to South African Navy in April 1957.  Biermann was grateful that in the background of his talks with successive Tory governments was his good friend Lord Mountbatten, who, despite his antipathy to the South African government, was anxious to see the establishment of a combined UK-South African naval force in the South Atlantic as a subdivision of NATO.

Twenty ships were part of the agreement, six of them new Type 12 frigates which would be built in Britain (though for budgetary and then political reasons only three were built).   When Labour came to power in London there were ructions over the supply of Wasp helicopters, which Biermann eventually obtained when they were placed in a category not forbidden under the Labour government’s arms embargo.   However, the British were not prepared to sell submarines to South Africa, and Biermann opened negotiations with the French government resulting in the building of Daphne-class submarines in Nantes and the training of South African crews in Toulon.

Meanwhile in 1966 Biermann introduced polices which would remove race barriers in the SAN, and, he stopped the Nationalist government from removing Malay traders from Simon’s Town, many of whose families had been there since the 18^th century.

In 1972 he became Commandant-General of the South African Defence Force.   Previously the secretive Broederbond had held a veto over appointments at the top of South African society, and his appointment was widely held to mark the beginning of a more tolerant society in South Africa.

In the 1970s the Border War against Angolan forces supported by Cuban troops was in full swing, including a covert naval operation called Savannah.   Biermann resisted the more hard-line members of the PW Botha cabinet who wanted to extend the war and, when it proved clear that American support was not forthcoming, Biermann accompanied Botha to a secret meeting in the bush where they announced their intention to withdraw South African forces from the war to a shocked Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA.

When he retired in 1976, Biermann had received the Star of South Africa, the Argentine Grand Cross of Guillermo Brown, and the Knight Grand Cross of Henry of Portugal, and he was the first officer to receive the Southern Cross Decoration, but the greatest honour was that the South African submarine base at Simon’s Town was renamed SAS Hugo Biermann.   The Biermanns settled at Muizenberg, a few miles away, and then Silvermine Retirement Village, Noordhoek.

Biermann, who died on March 27, 2012, married Margaret ‘Peggy’ Elaine Cruwys in 1939:  she predeceased him in 2008 and he is survived by their daughter and son.