At Pretoria's Zwartkop air base one day last week, a bareheaded officer of the South African Air Force snapped to attention before a grim court-martial. The accused was Group Captain Arthur French Shuttleworth, a veteran bomber pilot who won Britain's Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II. Shuttleworth was charged with "scandalous behavior, unbecoming to an officer and gentleman," because he had 1) chucked a bottle of mixed pickles at a photograph of South Africa's Nationalist Defense Minister François Christiaan Erasmus, and 2) dropped the offending photograph into a nearby fishpond.
Defendant Shuttleworth is going blind. Both his eyes were permanently injured in 1941 when he pulled his dying navigator out of the wreckage of his bomber. Ostensibly because of his medical condition, South Africa's general staff last week abruptly quashed the charges against Shuttleworth in the midst of the hearing. The court-martial found him "Not Guilty," and even the prosecutor applauded the decision.
The fact is that almost all of South Africa's airmen resent the Nationalist order that Erasmus' picture must be hung in mess halls and barracks. Erasmus is a lawyer who has had no military experience, spent World War II demanding that his country make peace with Hitler.
Behind Shuttleworth's acquittal lay more than softheadedness on the part of Prime Minister Daniel Malan's hardhearted government. The Nationalists are thoroughly alarmed by the uproar provoked in South Africa's armed forces by Defense Minister Erasmus' highhanded attempt to oust veterans of World War II in favor of Nationalist political toadies (TIME, March 24). The troops responded by:
¶ Beating up Erasmus in Capetown a month ago.
¶ Frightening Interior Minister Theophilus Donges to the point where he ordered seven cops to stand guard while he had his hair cut.
By last week, the Nationalist government could no longer rely on the discipline of its regular forces, which are the largest and most modern in Africa. South Africa's 30,000-man army, a seasoned combat force under Good Soldier Jan Smuts (whom Erasmus kicked out), has become a military joke, badly equipped and riddled with political intrigue.