Identity
Person No.
33462
Old ROH no.
35662
Service No.
84435338BG
Last Name
First Name
Jaco Petrus
Initials
J P
Date of Birth
Unknown
Est. Birth Year
Age at Death
19
Death Record
Date of Death
Cause code
MIA 785
Missing in action
Cause of Death
Missing, presumably drowned, after he went swimming in a river and disappeared. It is thought that he was taken by a crocodile, Ops 1 area. He has no known grave and remains unaccounted for
Military Service
Branch
Army
Rank
Gunner
Regiment
Unknown
Secondary Unit
"A" Coy.
Defence Force
SADF 3,839
South African Defence Force
Location
Country
Locality
Cemetery
Grave Reference
Coordinates
Unit History
Part of
Notes
Son of Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Boshoff
Research notes
MERGE 25 Aug 2026: PersonNumber 48773 ("Van der Merwe") deleted as a duplicate of this record -- identical ServiceNo (84435338BG) and DateDeath (1988-08-19), surname a spelling/OCR/case variant, confirmed via the pantser.cmvo.org.za SADF deaths PDF cross-check. Same class of error as the Sekonjela/Sekonyela merge earlier the same day. | Gunners Association RoH lists them (South African Border War 1988 Gunner J.P. Van der Merwe) - https://www.gunners.org.za/home-2/roll-of-honour/
Citations
Unknown
External References
-
Gunners' Association of South Africa Roll of Honour
open source ↗
South African Border War 1988 Gunner J.P. Van der Merwe
- South African War Graves Project open source ↗
Stories 1
At that stage I had been in Angola for 7 months myself. I didn't know JP personally but we were together in the convoy being extracted back to Namibia. We had stopped at a river to give everyone an opportunity to wash clothes and get ourselves clean. It was in the afternoon when I was sitting in the cab of my truck, having bully beef for lunch, when I heard the men calling around for JP Van Der Merwe. Eventually we were all searching for him. Some of the troops saw him swimming in the river as many of the other men were doing. It was the first relaxtion we had had in many months. As I understand it, JP was swimming close to a large rappid when he went under and it is believed that he got caught in the turmoil at the bottom of this rappid. We stayed there for three days, ever searching the banks of the river for kilometers. I recall that his body was found on the third day, although I read on another site that his body was never recovered.
Dedications
No dedications have been added yet.