Wartime minesweeper commander who was chief of staff of South Africa’s defence forces under apartheid
Descendants of a Hamburg tailor who enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch East India Company in the early 18th century, the Biermann family became prominent wagon-makers and blacksmiths in the Durbanville and Paarl areas of South Africa. Hugo Biermann, whose grandfather fought in a commando against the British in the Anglo-Boer War, rose to be head of the South African Navy for nearly 20 years and subsequently chief of defence staff.
Although inevitably concerned in the developments that shaped South Africa after the Second World War, he was generally regarded as apolitical. He respected all South Africans regardless of race, colour or creed, and he said he would rather resign than give preference to Afrikaans-speaking servicemen.
Hugo Hendrick Biermann joined the South African training ship General Botha as a cadet in 1932. As a young lieutenant he commanded two converted minesweepers in South African coastal waters until 1940. In command of HMSAS Imhoff, he sailed in response to an urgent need for minesweepers to Haifa in northern Israel.
Biermann subsequently returned home to command the minesweeper Roodepoort in the Table Bay mine clearance flotilla, but in late 1944 he returned to the Mediterranean to command the salvage vessel HMSAS Gamtoos.
Under his command she continued the work of clearing harbours of wrecked ships, notably the Vieux Port at Marseilles, where the 12,000-ton Cap Corse had been scuttled as a block ship. Biermann decided that demolition was the quickest route, and the consequent explosion revealed a ground-mine booby-trap under the hull. Gamtoos dealt with the wreck of the destroyer Maori in Grand Harbour, Malta, and raised in record time the merchantman Talabot, still full of petrol after being sunk during the blitz of Malta.
Biermann was appointed OBE for his services, and returned home to pay off the Gamtoos. Remaining in the South African Navy, by May 1946 he was captain of the Canadian built minesweeper Bloemfontein. Two years on, the staff of the Director-General of the South African Naval Forces at Pretoria were followed by the Royal Navy’s staff course at Greenwich.
Promoted to commander, he was appointed naval attaché in London, during which tour Jan Smuts’s United Party was ousted in favour of D. F. Malan’s National Party on an apartheid platform. The National Party minister of defence, Frans Erasmus, an Anglophobe, initiated a process of ridding the Defence Force of officers who he believed were associated with the Smuts government, instituting tighter regulations on bilingualism with new uniforms and rank titles in order to create a uniquely South African defence force. In 1951 there was a shock reshuffle of senior naval posts. The English-speaking director-general of the South African Naval Force, Commodore F. J. Dean, was moved sideways and in 1952 Biermann was appointed acting Naval and Marine chief of staff of the new South African Navy.
But the Nationalists found that the bilingual Afrikaner they had put in charge of the SAN was not to be pushed around by politicians. For the next 20 years, Biermann enlarged and modernised the SAN, acquiring frigates and submarines.
From 1955 to 1957 he played a large part in the negotiations towards the Simonstown Agreement with the Royal Navy and the UK government whereby this fully equipped dockyard was handed over to South Africa but with some caveats concerning usage by the Royal Navy. A UK arms embargo led eventually to the renegotiation of the Agreement in 1967 and the UK’s nominal C-in-C South Atlantic Station being finally withdrawn.
In 1965 Bierman had been promoted to vice-admiral and appointed Commander, Maritime Defence, SA Defence Forces. In 1972 he was appointed Chief of Staff of the South African Defence Forces as a full admiral.
As such he was responsible for the conduct of what South Africans called “the Border War”, which began in 1966 with the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) making incursions into South West Africa (now Namibia), the governance of which was disputed between South Africa and the UN. During Biermann’s tenure, Portugal renounced its colonial control of Angola, granting independence in 1975. The consequent power vacuum led to a messy conflict which continued for another 15 years, becoming entwined with the Angolan internal civil war and the Namibian war of independence until a peace agreement was brokered by the UN.
Biermann had retired in 1976, being awarded the Southern Cross Decoration, having already received the Star of South Africa in the 1960s. In retirement he was chairman of Gilbey’s (South Africa). He was noted for having initiated the annual ocean yacht race to Rio de Janeiro.
His wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1939, died in 2008. He is survived by their son and daughter.
Admiral Hugo Biermann, OBE, Chief of South African Defence Forces, 1972-76, was born on August 6, 1916. He died on March 27, 2012, aged 95
Rosario Bentivegna
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Italian resistance fighter whose 1944 ambush of German troops in Rome prompted savage reprisals
Rosario Bentivegna was one of the central figures in the most celebrated and controversial act of resistance to Germany’s occupation of Italy during the Second World War.
After the Italian Government’s decision in September 1943 to conclude a separate armistice with the Allies, much of the country, including Rome, was taken over by their erstwhile partners in the Axis. This prompted hundreds of those with police records of anti-Fascist behaviour to go underground. Among them was “Sasà” Bentivegna, then a medical student.
Under the nom de guerre “Paolo”, he joined the most prominent of the resistance networks which had sprung up, Gruppo di Azione Patriottica (GAP). Within a few weeks he was appointed the leader of one of the four small cells based in the city centre. His deputy was a 24-year-old secretary, Carla Capponi.
During the winter they conducted several daring and deadly attacks on German soldiers and officials still loyal to the Fascist regime. Then, on the afternoon of March 23, 1944, they targeted a column of SS troops as it marched along the narrow Via Rasella, not far from the Trevi Fountain.
Bentivegna disguised himself as a street cleaner and, as the Germans approached, used his pipe to light the fuse of a 40lb bomb hidden in his cart. In the 50 seconds before it went off, he walked to the top of the street, where Capponi was waiting with a raincoat for him to put over his conspicuous clothes. Her behaviour had aroused the suspicions of two detectives, but as they moved to intercept the couple, and she reached for her pistol, the charge exploded.
Other members of the cell then followed up the blast by launching mortar shells which Capponi had been carrying in her shopping bag. Thirty-three soldiers were killed in what was one of the bloodiest deeds of defiance carried out in any city under Nazi control.
There were two civilian casualties, however, including a young boy. Their deaths would prompt many polemics after the war, but above all these were engendered by the scale of the German reprisals. On the day after the ambush, 335 men — by no means all members of the Resistance — were taken from Rome’s main prison to the Ardeatine Caves outside the city and executed.
The massacre remains to this day one of the fault lines in Italian society. It has been suggested that Bentivegna’s operation was unnecessary given that the Allies were nearing Rome, and even that the incumbent Pope, Pius XII, could have prevented the Germans’ retaliation.
GAP was dominated by communists, and their opponents have also theorised that the real plan was to provoke a reaction which would eliminate many rival partisans. Bentivegna remained unrepentant about his role in the attack, however, insisting that it had been a legitimate act of war. His view was challenged in several cases for compensation founded on the events in the Via Rasella, but it was always upheld by the courts.
Rosario Bentivegna was born in Rome in 1922. His family, which came originally from Sicily, had a long history of involvement in politics since the time of Garibaldi.
In 1941 he was arrested for antiFascist activity, including a sit-in at the university where he was studying medicine. His friendship with the son of an important police official spared him a worse fate than a spell in prison. Soon after his release in 1943 he helped to treat those injured in an Allied bombing raid and determined to rid Italy of those who had embroiled the country in war. This decision spurred him to join the Communist Party.
By the time that Rome was liberated a year later he was, aged 21, military commander of the resistance forces in the countryside behind the German lines at Cassino. He went on to fight in Yugoslavia before embarking on a career as a doctor. In the late 1960s he helped young Greeks who were struggling against the Colonels’ dictatorship, and latterly he had been life president of the veterans association of Italy’s partisans.
“Sasà” Bentivegna married Carla Capponi in 1944. They were later divorced and he spent the last 38 years of his life with Patrizia Toraldo di Francia. The daughter of his marriage survives him.
Rosario Bentivegna, wartime resistance fighter, was born on June 22, 1922. He died on April 2, 2012, aged 89
