This is an attempt to get some of the military history of South Africa on the Web in a useable format. I am working from a book that I have which lists about 621 military units from the early 1800's up to about 1947. Some of the information in the book is extremely outdated, but I decided to put it up exactly as I get it from there. The book is called “The Armed Forces of South Africa with an appendix on the commandos” by Major G. Tylden. Of course, the ideal would be to update the information and that can be seen as a later stage in the project.

What I have started with is a list of the Wars and Campaigns. Then I have created a database for the Units. I started by typing in just the unit names . The Second Phase is to type in the actual info about the units. This is very time consuming and is taking forever.  I have created two cross-links as well. These are where one unit has a ‘link’ to another (such as See Also) which should display correctly in the various unit screens. Also a cross reference between the Unit and the War tables which means that it should be possible to list the Units in a war, and the wars that a unit has fought in. This cross-reference is something that I have to create manually so it is some extra work..

There are also various “resources” which are additional sets of information that I pick up or are supplied to me by people such as yourself :-) Each resource has a page describing what it is and then it is linked to the individual units for which it has relevance, with a detail which identifies the reason it is linked to the resource.

This work is ongoing.. I will update the database as I get the time. This page will display the stats of how far I have got in terms of the number of records added to the various tables.

The database when it is complete with the info that I have will include only the info that I have from this particular book and then maybe a bit extra on my units ie the Natal Carbineers and the Cape Town Highlanders. Anyone with any additional info, or suggestions as to fields to add to the database or links to make.. please feel free to email to me at john@justdone.co.za.

Volunteers to assist in this project would be very gratefully received.. :-)

This is the new home of the South African Military Units Web Site. I left the University of Stellenbosch and have been trying to create a new web-site for some time now. This site will grow in functionality as time passes, so please be patient. If you have any comments or suggestions, please email them to me. Also, all changes to the database.

Please visit the Roll of Honour Site