ABSTRACT
This account began from the premise that class and ethnicity, the binary categories conventionally used by social scientists to interrogate South African society, are unable to account adequately for the history of the white men who volunteered to serve in the UDF during the Second World War. The popularity of the militant and sometimes confrontational 'trade union of the ranks' among white troops was consistent with longer histories among poorer white men of mistrusting the state. Generally those white men who volunteered had not themselves experienced the shocks of poverty and urbanization, or the struggles to find work to the extent that their fathers did. Wartime shifts to the labor process not only transformed relations of production and the composition of the workforce, but also brought an influx of blacks to the cities. The MOTH provided white veterans with the cultural space to develop and preserve bonds of comradeship.
