by Don McCullin
Before long I worked up a powerful dislike to the colonel in charge of operations, who went by the name of Hannibal. He spoke English, strangely enough, with a Yorkshire accent, and was married to an Englishwoman, though this did nothing to soften his scorn for the British position over the war. As a result he didn’t like me. Gilles was altogether different and much in favour. By the fifth day friendliness between Gilles and Hannibal had waned, and it finally disappeared when some deserters were spotted and rounded up. What happened to them was quite unexpected.
At a clearing in the bush Hannibal drew the men up into a square, like the quarter-basse employed at the time of Napoleon. After orders were given for the attack on the morrow, the men caught trying to run away were brought forward to be disciplined. Three rag-tag people were made to lie down while soldiers of some rank (displayed by their better uniforms) went off to cut staves six feet long which they were flexing as they returned. Punishment was twenty-five strokes of the rod. Gilles’s sense of military honour was affronted by the spectacle of the victims rolling around in the dirt, biting their knuckles and trying not to scream.
Parched and in need of fortification after the caning, I asked Gilles if he thought we could plunder some of those crates of beer we had seen. I went up to the man standing on guard by the crates.
‘Any chance of one of those beers, my friend?’ I asked in all innocence.
The man giggled, and then they all started laughing, eyes rolling hysterically as the camp became engulfed with laughter on the night before the attack. I stood looking from one to the other with no understanding of what they all found so funny. Eventually one of them explained after wiping his arm across his face. ‘It is not beer for drinking, Sir. It’s enemy beer.’
Still in the dark, I said, ‘What do you mean, enemy beer?’
‘It is for . . . we take a light, and we throw it at the enemy.’
I went back to Gilles more disturbed than usual.
‘This operation’s mad,’ I said. ‘That’s not beer at all, they’re Molotov cocktails. They’re going up against Nato rifles with beer bottles filled with petrol.’
Next morning the silence of fear was in the air. I said to Gilles, ‘This lot are definitely going over today.’
‘I hope so. I want to get this over and get back.’
Around nine o’clock in the morning, rather late in the African day which usually starts in the cool of dawn, the first mortars started dropping. There was a lot of running about, a lot of confusion. Men were already returning wounded from the front. One, with his intestines bubbling out from between his fingers, was trying to incarcerate his stomach with the palms of his two hands while he walked. I moved on to the front.
There, in the dense smoke and noise of small arms fire, I met a horrific sight. It was a jeep on fire, a Nigerian army jeep in the back of which sat a woman engulfed in flames. She was alight, burning from head to foot. I was harrowed by this sight of a human torch, slowly moving backwards and forwards, mouth open, emitting sounds, beyond all help.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ I said to one of the officers. ‘Do something. Do anything. Put her out of her agony.’
And he said, in a drawly Sandhurst voice, ‘Why should I? She’s only a tart.’
I ran round the front of the jeep, and there was a Biafran struggling furiously to get the clothes off the dead driver before blood and fire ruined them.
Ahead of us some men were being pushed in our direction. They were prisoners: Nigerian soldiers who, like the occupants of the jeep, had been caught off-guard.
Rapidly men started stripping the clothes off the soldiers’ backs and blindfolding them. Hannibal was taking map co-ordinates. Someone came over and said, ‘What shall we do with the prisoners?’ Without looking up, he replied, ‘Shoot them.’
Gilles said to me, ‘I don’t believe this. I had thought this was an honourable man.’ But Hannibal repeated the order. The Biafran soldiers looked at each other a bit perturbed and very gingerly pulled back the bolts of their AK-47s. Then they looked at each other again.
The prisoners started weeping, and their legs were shivering: they were breaking out into uncontrollable crying and shaking. Then someone opened up with an AK-47. And then there were more shots.
One of the prisoners seemed to have become the main target of all the shots. He slumped to the ground with a dreadful thumping of the body and a terrible heart-rending sound. This was followed by an exhalation of air. It was like a beast in an abattoir. I was rigid with shock. I couldn’t move. The other man, who had been missed, was in full flood of tears, vainly pleading and begging. I stood there incapable of speech, incapable of movement. Gilles was also rooted to the spot.
It was a long time before we could speak a word to one another after that.
The bridge was taken, or rather our end of it. We moved on to the bridge. Up to this point the assault had been going according to plan, but the Nigerians had managed to regroup themselves and were counter-attacking. In the space of an hour they dropped some 300 mortar shells around and on the bridge. I remember to this day the sound of the mortar shells as they were hitting the huge bailey-type iron construction, the clattering echoes, and the ricochet of bullets coming off the ironwork.
Things were becoming critical. It was soon clear that our new position was not tenable. There was a general withdrawal fast. We started moving away, aware that the operation had failed totally, retreating as fast as we could. I was very anxious not to be left behind in a headlong flight. The sight of two Westerners in Vietnam camouflage could easily have given rise to the interpretation we were mercenaries. Most of the mercenaries involved in the conflict were on the Biafran side, though the Nigerians had Russian and English mercenary pilots.
Once the retreat had begun there was general terror of being captured. Fears of reprisals for Hannibal’s methods of dealing with Nigerian prisoners were now added to the fears of genocide. It became a rout.
The walking wounded, and the too severely wounded, the crawling wounded, started grabbing desperately at us, saying, ‘Please Sir, do not leave me. Take me. Take me with you, Sir. Please carry me, Sir.’ They were grabbing at my legs as I was crashing through the bush.
There were men lying with their eyes hanging out, the socket gone; men lying with mortar wounds in their legs, unable to move and desperate with the fear of being captured by the Nigerian army.
The fire and the mortars kept coming.
Leaving these wounded behind made it a terrible retreat. We were all, every man who could run or walk, intent on saving our own skins. We just crashed on and on, putting as much distance between ourselves and the bridge as we possibly could.
We were still in enemy territory. And there was still the Niger to cross, and at least thirty miles to go before we reached the crossing point. We got to a village and a Biafran officer commandeered every bicycle in it. Gilles and I, and a Telegraph journalist who’d arrived, were given bikes, and with a guide ahead of us who knew the dry tracks we pedalled furiously through the bush and the jungle footpaths. We made tremendous speed until we reached the Niger River where big boats were waiting to take us to the comparative safety of the other side. We reached the boats soaked in sweat, utterly exhausted. It was dark.
We got into the boats and crossed the river. The relief at having kept our lives made it one of the greatest river crossings we could remember. It was totally still. A galaxy of stars hung in the sky but the air over what was left of this hopelessly outmatched little Biafran battalion was heavy with disappointment and failure.
There were epilogues, both happy and tragic, to this day’s events. I was not able to find out what happened to the wounded we had abandoned, but the Nigerians were in general far more merciful in victory than they had been reputed to be. They did not go in for vicious reprisals, or bloodbaths or genocide. They behaved well. Hannibal, in contrast, became a wanted war crimi
nal. Gilles was to die tragically, in circumstances similar to the atrocity we had witnessed, as a prisoner, in another dark jungle a long way from Africa.
I went back to Biafra as often as I could. My access was due to the offices of a strange public relations firm called Markpress, which operated out of Geneva. They used to vet people who were trying to go to Biafra. Unless you were wholly pro-Biafran you didn’t get in. I became a so-called trusty of this organisation. At that time the machinations behind the scenes in this war still hadn’t become apparent, but with each visit my own belief in the soundness of the Biafran cause dwindled.
I went back in 1969 to work on my own. My plan was go west up to the Okpala front where the 52nd battalion of the 63rd brigade of the Biafran army was reported to be trying to break through the encircling Nigerians. I made it to the front but, as I got out of the Land Rover, my legs buckled under me in the sand. I had gone down with malaria, or something very like it.
I woke up in a grass hut with a Biafran woman tenderly bathing me with lukewarm water. It was part of a field hospital. A doctor injected me with what, he apologised, was not a virgin needle. I lay in a feverish daze for two days until I was strong enough to fulfil an engagement to eat breakfast at the army commander’s house.
Some fried plantains had been placed before me. I was politely trying to dig into them with the commander urging me to eat, because the attack was to take place today, when renewed waves of fever and nausea overcame me. I hastily excused myself and collapsed vomiting in the sand outside, with my eyes, I’m told, rolling all over the place. I passed out again and woke to find a woman wiping my face with a leaf.
I doused myself with water and was rescued by one of the Biafran officers. He was very pukka, right down to the Sandhurst swagger-stick, except for a large pair of wellington boots. He fed me some palatable rice to strengthen me for the two o’clock push.
At noon they started bringing in ammunition. They brought in mortars: huge French ones, 120s. To go with them were precisely two shells. Then they started dishing out two rounds of ammunition to each soldier. I must have been looking askance, because my rescuer—Captain Steven Osadebe—explained, ‘I’m sorry, Donald, but we do not have much ammunition. We give each man two rounds. Then when we go forward, we capture Nigerian weapons and get more ammunition that way.’
Then the boys were paraded. I remember one, of about sixteen. He was wearing an ill-fitting, old-fashioned pinstriped suit. His feet were bare. Some of these boys were ferociously disciplined for trying to run away, they were beaten about the shoulders with the swagger-stick, or shaken and knocked about the head. All were lectured. The officer stood on his toes and sprang around using his hands, much like Jonathan Miller at the National Theatre. A whistle blew, and we went forward—myself still deliriously feverish—into the most fearful barrage of Nigerian small arms fire.
It was as if someone had a huge whip and was striking the trees. The bullets were zipping through and cutting trees, cutting leaves. It was like music. A whipping mistral of firepower. Then the mortars started coming in. Soon men could be seen running with hands clutching at ripped bellies, men running with bloody faces.
A man next to me was thrashing about in the undergrowth. When he tried to stand I could see that a bullet had gone through his mouth and taken out the side of his cheek. Another next to me was lifeless. I was trying to load my camera and shoot pictures. Some casualties were coming in so fast that I slightly got the willies. I saw the commander bent over one of the dead soldiers and talking to him as if he were still alive. He was praising the man’s courage, and thanking him on behalf of the Biafran nation. It was moving and alarming at the same time.
I went back to the front line to where the wounded were being sent and saw again the pinstriped suit, now with a bullet hole in its shoulder. I saw men carrying other men on litters, home-made litters. There was an old truck, which looked like a Dormobile van with the windows gone and the doors off. It was in an ill state of repair. Men were sitting in the truck and holding their wounded arms and legs. One was lying with his intestines dribbling out of his hands.
The Biafrans didn’t have the medical facilities you see in other wars. These people were pared down to the bone. A man with a huge gaping hole in the side of his face could not be spared any morphine. Head wounds are less painful than other wounds, but they are still dire. Most of the wounds in this battle were to shoulders, upper arms and the face, because the men were crawling forward on their arms and knees.
I asked the driver with his load of wounded why he didn’t move off.
‘We cannot leave until we are completely full, Sir. We cannot spare the petrol.’
In the rear of the battle I saw Captain Osadebe again, in an agitated state. He had taken a Nigerian army round, a Nato rifle wound, in his right leg. They’d pumped some morphine into him and taken him into the house. He was becoming delirious. He said, ‘Donald, Donald, I’m worried. Please, Donald, promise me you will go and tell the men to move forward. They will listen to you.’
I couldn’t face sending men further to die, crawling on their stomachs against insuperable odds and firepower, with their non-existent ammunition. Clearly, what I had been told was not true, there was no general advance on a twenty-mile front. I also knew Steven needed some reassurance to still his agitation.
I said, ‘Okay, Steven.’
I went outside the house and lurked about, and then went back in again. He said, ‘Did you do that?’ I said, ‘Yes, Steven, they’re moving forward.’
I was suffering from the after-effect of malaria, fear and reaction to the non-virgin needle. My body had had enough and was breaking out in huge blotches. I found sanctuary at a big Catholic mission about ten miles behind the front. One of the nuns had a remedy that stopped the itching and the blotching almost instantly. I slept a long deep sleep on a mission bed.
It was through the mission that I came to see the Biafran horrors that were to leave the most enduring impression on my mind. I was directed to a mission in the Umuiaghu area where I could see a different kind of victim of the war—the orphaned and abandoned children of Biafra. They were also close to starvation. The war of course had disrupted all forms of agricultural production. Relief supplies, mainly from France, rarely got through. What food there was went to feed army bellies.
At the mission, I met Father Kennedy, one of those people who are both strong and good. He took me to what had been a primary school but was now a hospital for some of the many war-orphaned children. There were 800 there. As I entered I saw a young albino boy. To be a starving Biafran orphan was to be in a most pitiable situation, but to be a starving albino Biafran was to be in a position beyond description. Dying of starvation, he was still among his peers an object of ostracism, ridicule and insult. I saw this boy looking at me. He was like a living skeleton. There was a skeletal kind of whiteness about him. He moved nearer and nearer to me. He wore the remnants of an ill-fitting jumper and was clutching a corner of a corned beef tin, an empty corned beef tin.
The boy looked at me with a fixity that evoked the evil eye in a way which harrowed me with guilt and unease. He was moving closer. I was trying not to look at him. I tried to focus my eyes elsewhere. Some French doctors from Médecins sans Frontières were trying to save a small girl who was dying. They are doctors renowned for going into the centre of the darkness to help. They were trying to revive the little girl by thrusting a needle in her throat and banging her chest. The sight was almost unendurable. She died in front of me. The smallest human being I had ever, in all my grim experience, seen die.
Still in the corner of my eye I could see the albino boy. I caught the flash of whiteness. He was haunting me, getting nearer. Someone was giving me the statistics of the suffering, the awful multiples of this tragedy. As I gazed at these grim victims of deprivation and starvation, my mind retreated to my own home in England where my children of much the same age were
careless and cavalier with food, as Western children often are. Trying to balance between these two visions produced in me a kind of mental torment.
I felt something touch my hand. The albino boy had crept close and moved his hand into mine. I felt the tears come into my eyes as I stood there holding his hand. I thought, Don’t look, think of something else, anything else. Don’t cry in front of these kids. I put my hand in my pocket and found one of my barley sugar sweets. Surreptitiously I transferred it to the albino boy’s hand and he went away. He stood a short distance off and slowly unwrapped the sweet with fumbling fingers. He licked the sweet and stared at me with huge eyes. I noticed that he was still clutching the empty corned beef tin while he stood delicately licking the sweet as if it might disappear too quickly. He looked hardly human, as if a tiny skeleton had somehow stayed alive.
A nine-year-old albino boy clutching an empty corned beef tin, Biafra, 1968
My mind was assaulted with every kind of affliction that starving children can suffer. There was an English doctor cradling a dying infant who was determined to stand on legs devoid of all strength. In the other arm she sheltered another child with a drip-feed tube through its nose. Half-blind children with bellies like beer barrels (from malnutrition and kwashiorkor) stood on legs like sticks. One boy’s arms hung out of their sockets, attached only by thin strips of skin due to the muscular collapse. Others lay dying in their own excrement with flies encrusting their sores.
It was beyond war, it was beyond journalism, it was beyond photography, but not beyond politics. This unspeakable suffering was not the result of one of Africa’s natural disasters. Here was not nature’s pruning fork at work but the outcome of men’s evil desires. If I could, I would take this day out of my life, demolish the memory of it. But as with memories of those haunting pictures of the Nazi death camps, we cannot, must not be allowed to forget the appalling things we are all capable of doing to our fellow human beings. The photograph I took of that little albino boy must remain engraved on the minds of all who see it.