Smuts, Empire, and the Legacy of Defeat: The Shaping of South African War Policy in 1944.Smuts faced an increasingly vociferous and growing anti-war Afrikaner nationalist movement that received impetus from the twin disasters of Sidi Rezegh 1941 and the surrender of Tobruk in 1942. General Dan Pienaar, commanding the surviving 1st South African Division, appeared increasingly embittered by South African losses that supposedly owed much to the British tactical incompetence highlighted by the brilliance of a rampant Rommel. Pienaar faced growing impatience verging on exasperation with his hesitancy to risk his remaining brigades in what he saw as a futile defence of Alamein. The successful outcome of the battle of Alamein and the ejection of the Axis from Africa in 1943, marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Allies, and provided South Africa breathing space to regroup and reconstruct its forces. In the aftermath of North Africa, South Africas war policy was shaped by a myriad of conflicting pressures that conspired to weaken her fighting power and embolden those who opposed the war effort back on the home-front. Manpower shortages arising from political pressures that precluded conscription and racial policies that would not entertain the deployment of black soldiers as combatants, limited South Africas scope of fielding more than one division. The lower manpower demands of an armoured division and its greater hardiness to battle casualties together with a need to better meet the demands of a modern mechanical battlefield, led to the formation of the 6th South African armoured division that would deploy to Italy in 1944. This deployment also satisfied Smutss desire to contribute to the defence of the Empire in a theatre of operations that could be argued was beyond the immediate scope of defending South Africa.Despite a more secure home-front in the wake of Smutss election victory in 1943, and declining pro-German sentiments correlating with the diminishing fortunes of the Wehrmacht, South African war policy and relations with the United Kingdom continued to be shaped by a politically divided nation, a sensitivity to losses, and perhaps an insecurity as to the fighting abilities of the UDF. Confirmation that these problems persisted, was demonstrated in the overreaction by an alarmed Smuts, who diverted his aeroplane to immediately bolster his generals on the news that a company of South Africans had surrendered after being surrounded by Germans at the Italian town of Chuisi in 1944This paper examines the impact and consequences of the twin military disasters of Sidi Rezegh in 1941 and Tobruk in 1942 and their role in shaping the war policy and relations with the United Kingdom in the last two years of the war, by making extensive use of the unpublished narratives and primary documents of the Union War Histories Section together with South African semi-official and other secondary sources.