Boer War

How did a ragtag group of Dutch farmers keep the Worlds greatest Empire at bay for three years?

And why did the British fight a war they ultimately left in the control of the Boers in a new colony?

Crack marksmanship and familiarity with terrain. They didn't leave the colony in control of the Boers. Britain gained all the mineral and administrative rights they needed. Debatable if it was worth it.

British Ground Forces aren't really the best in the world.

Facing these guys made the British (finally) drop the Redcoats and finally join the modern military world. Red stands out like a sore thumb in the battlefield, meanwhile the Boers were camouflaged, the Brits didn't even know what hit them, suffering horrendous casualties while inflicting minimal ones on the enemy.

The boers were africans with better weapons and comparatively sound logistics.
Imagine if ISIS had anti-air missiles, even old ones, and the ability to replenish their supply of such. What sort of war would the current one in syria and iraq look like?

Reminder: The British invented the concentration camp and are basically worse than the nazis.

Don't forget they outright defeated the British in open warfare a couple of decades prior. True, the Brits didn't commit fully, but it was nonetheless a humiliating defeat.

Really it comes down to a heavy emphasis on speed, stealth, and marksmanship in rough, open terrain that the Boers knew very well, coupled with excellent leadership. This against an emphasis on discipline and formation with middling leadership on unfamiliar terrain with average marksmanship. Basically the Boers were insanely elusive to the British, both tactically and strategically. The Brits strung pillboxes with direct line of sight to each other in lines across the entire country and still couldn't trap and destroy the Boer armies. The main reason for this is that every man in the Boer armies was mounted and, again, knew the terrain exceedingly well, and additionally they had comparatively excellent intelligence regarding British movements.

The thing is, there was no way the Boers could have won outright without blitzkrieging the entire Cape Colony before British reinforcements arrived and that simply was not a possibility; despite their drastically better performance in the field, the Boers were not equipped for siege warfare, and their tactical superiority was not enough for them to compete with the sheer industrial might of the Empire. IIRC the British Cape Colony alone had a bigger population than both Boer republics combined at the outbreak of the war. They didn't have the manpower to outright win, the best they could have done was humiliate the British into leaving. But ultimately Kitchener's brutal (but nonetheless effective) tactic of (if we're being honest) outright murdering the Boer women and children left behind in British occupied territory sapped the Boers' will to fight faster than their ongoing success in the field could sap the will of the British public.

As for the second part of your question, the Boers were a fiercely nationalist group which had unanimously revolted from British rule with an outright war in the past (see The First Boer War). All the British sought to gain from the war, really, was control over the immense material wealth of the territory of the Boer Republics. So they killed two birds with one stone with the lenient peace deal: the Boers were free enough that their nationalistic itch was sated while they got the security of British protection, and the British were able to reap the economic benefits of the material wealth of the entirety of modern South Africa.

>tactic of (if we're being honest) outright murdering the Boer women and children left behind

I hope you aren't falsely equating death by disease as murder.

Lets not forget, this was compounded by the ongoing Boer raids against supply lines making it extremely difficult to get food and supplies to the camps. Indeed large numbers of British troops died from exactly the same causes.

It was at worse negligence. Which was remedied within a year when Hobhouse started complaining.

They wouldn't have been dying from disease and starvation if the British hadn't forcibly relocated them and burnt their farms. Forcibly moving someone away from the source of their sustenance and/or medicine and then neglecting to provide them with sustenance/medicine is murder, just by disease/starvation rather than a bullet. If I abduct your child and keep them in my basement without food until they die of starvation I'm pretty sure you would call that murder.

Besides, it doesn't matter if it was "remedied within a year," a demographically significant amount of civilians had already died.

It was a war, moron.

The only thing wrong with the concentration camps was the lack of medical and food supplies. The whole idea of a concentration camp is to remove the ability of guerillas to hide among civilian populations and undermine their base of support. From a military perspective when fighting guerillas they make a lot of sense.

Objectively they could have shot them as collaborators and/or spies in wartime, but instead opted to waste resources housing and feeding them.

>People wouldn't have died if there wasn't a war

No shit.

The British proved you can win a guerilla war, someone should have told America eh?

>Murdering women and children isn't murder when its war

We got a real tough guy here

>The only thing wrong with the concentration camps was the lack of medical and food supplies
That's kind of a big thing user.

There's going to be teething issues when attempting these ideas for the first time.

Don't worry by the time of WW2 the Nazis had gotten pretty good at it.

>Say chap people in the camps are dying from lack of food and medicine
>Well I say, how do we remedy this?
>Not a clue, this is the first time we do this so clearly we can't know how to resolve this situation.

What exactly is the point you're trying to make here?

I fully agree that targeting civilians is the only way to effectively win a guerilla war. I even said that that strategy was effective in my post. All I'm saying is that you can't sugarcoat it, targeting non-combatants is murder, whether it's an effective military strategy or not.

The eternal anglo using the Boer raids to justify the death toll in their concentration camps is like someone grabbing your hand, punching your own face and asking why you are slapping yourself.

Awful
Necrotic
Gruesome
Life
Organism

That separating the idea and the actual reality of concentration camps in that occasion is not really a meaningful thing because it's not like the mistakes made were minor or lacked an association with general prejudice against the boers.

>I'd bloody like to give em some medicine eh Tommy?
>Shame old Afrikana over there keeps raiding our food trucks
>No bloody respect for Queen and country that man
>Hohoho well said Jenkins, better take his gold mines to teach him a lesson

Pretty much yeah, Britain deserved the loss of their empire and south africa wouldn't be such a shithole today if it weren't for the Boer War probably.

>south africa wouldn't be such a shithole today if it weren't for the Boer War probably.

Please do go on, I can't wait to read this.

I've heard a lot of arguments that Apartheid was essentially a product of Afrikaner butthurt over their loss to the British, maybe he's taking that line.

Apartheid was the only thing that kept SA from falling apart earlier.

Is this the old

>allies bombed the roads

Defence?

Huge advantage in understanding the local terrain, guerilla tactics, determination. These three things have defeated or significantly hindered conventional armies time and time again

Reminder that chance of dying in a concentration camp lessened as the war went on and the brits got enough supplies to improve conditions.
Really makes you think

underrated post

Thanks to the Boers, the Brits got to go into WWI with camouflage and not bright red pants like the Frogs.

How many colonial troops were involved in the Boer War?

I know there was a handful of Australians.

How important do you think they were to the victory?

The Brits hardly won a battle. They won the war because they were willing to force the Boers to surrender by targeting women and children. None of the British troops were terribly important other than just existing as an occupying military unit hostile to the Boers.