Beginning of Efforts to Implement the Congress Alliance Resolution
On 3 July 1961, following discussions between Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Joe Slovo on who would join them on the “High Command” of the new military wing, as well as how they would organise regional commands and urban units, Mandela resigned himself to building the new command structure. He had accepted the fact that his work on the M-Plan was ignored, meaning that the use of the African national Congress (ANC) in deploying forces was postponed. The ANC National Executive Committee had resolved that a national conference was required to adopt or reject the proposal he had made to the Congress Alliance.
As the Congress Alliance had resolved, Mandela’s new structure, would be a separate and independent entity from the South African Communist Party (SACP) as from the ANC. Accordingly, his operatives were no longer to attend any Communist Party meetings, and Mandela, through Joe Slovo, immediately moved to enlist the efforts of white Communists. These included mainly dedicated cadres who had resolved on a course of violence and had already executed acts of sabotage, such as cutting government telephone and communication lines.
Among those they recruited was Jack Hodgson, a Second World War military veteran of the Springbok Legion, and Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, who had served in the South African Army during the Second World War as a gunner (artillery) in North Africa and Italy. Jack was to
