Assault on Zanzibar

by E. C. Williams

  Landry had been too excited to sleep, his mind racing with alternative scenarios and how he would react: if so-and-so happened, what would be his response? Not, he thought, that he would have much control once the fire-fight started: he would have no contact with his other teams except by runner, an uncertain method that also deprived him of one or more of his men. He was beginning to feel tired and stiff, and hoped that the usual adrenaline rush of going into action would take over and wash away his fatigue.

  The boat slowed as tension came off the towline, and caused a stir among the men; they were nearing the landing point. He looked ahead toward Joan, and saw that she was showing the faint green light that meant the boats should cast off their towlines, and turn to port precisely ninety degrees to motor toward their landing spots. He then heard the splash as Utukufu’s bow hook cast off her towline, and the noise of her engine starting.

  The Utukufu’s helmsman then turned the vessel ninety degrees to port, by compass, and slowed to half speed. They were about to find out how good Joan’s dead reckoning was.

  The bow hissed onto what appeared to be sandy beach, and the crew rigged out the two narrow cleated boards, one either side of the bow, for her troops to disembark. The Utukufu drew more water than the other two sloops, so this was necessary to be sure they got ashore dry-foot, avoiding the squelching sounds of wet boots alerting the enemy.

  The Utukufu landed her troops first, followed by the sloops from the Joan and the Albatros. Landry was first ashore, carefully lugging his crate of fire bombs. He passed one to each Gunner as he debarked, and each stowed it away carefully in a shoulder bag. They then formed up by team, guided by whispers and hisses from their team leaders, trying to make as little noise as possible – but to Landry, it sounded like a crowd in a bar, and he kept compulsively shushing them.

  Finally, they were all in place, and Landry led his team away into the bush. He was to attack the sixth dhow up stream, so his team faced the longest approach march. This meant, if all went according to plan, that the other teams would all be in place by the time Landry’s reached its target. Gunshots, fire bombs, and flares from his attack would be the signal for a general assault from landward and from the creek.

  Landry still had no idea if they had landed in the right place. The only thing to do was to follow the compass bearing provided by the Joan’s navigator.

  He checked his compass by electric torch, and led his men off in what he hoped was the right direction. The bush was not quite as dense as it looked on the aerial photos, but, as predicted, they had to deal with ruins – mostly foundations and heaps of rubble. One man tripped and fell, but he said he was unhurt and could continue. The noise he made had worried Landry and he paused his team to listen for a moment. He heard no noise from what he thought was the direction of the nearest dhow, no cries of alarm or call to battle stations, so they moved on to the mouth of the creek. He looked to his right, and could just make out the dark shape of a dhow, moored close in to the overhanging trees and covered with more vegetation as camouflage. He quickly and quietly waved his team back deeper into the bush, and they continued southward, by compass, parallel to the right bank of the creek. Apparently, their landing had been spot on, a wonder of dead reckoning navigation by the officers of the Joan. In gratitude, he made a heart-felt vow to himself that they would never pay for another drink in his presence.

  They continued in the very edge of the bush, creeping as quietly as possible past each dhow in turn. He would have preferred to march deeper in the bush, but he was afraid he would miss his count of dhows, and not go far enough. Their slow pace, needed for silence, also made him worry that first light would catch them short of their target.

  After what seemed like all night, they finally reached the sixth dhow. He used hand signals, made more visible in the dark by holding a white handkerchief, to station his men along the length of the dhow, prone and well covered.

  The dhow was dark; the heap of cut bushes almost, but not quite, disguising her outline. There were a couple of figures visible on deck, drowsing sleepily against the rigging and the helm, respectively – obviously the anchor watch. The signal to begin the attack was simple: Landry would open fire and the rest of his team – and the teams upstream – would follow suit.

  Landry decided to take out the figure at the helm, and then toss a firebomb, followed by a red flare. He took careful aim and shot the man in center-mass, then pulled out his firebomb as a babble of noise ensued – cries in Arabic, rustling in the camouflage on deck by the crew members who had apparently been sleeping under it, a rattle of rifle fire as the members of his team opened fire, with the three-round bursts of the SLAR man adding to the cacophony. He pulled the striker string on the firebomb, and to his surprise it worked; the fuse burst into flame. He tossed the bomb into the mass of camouflage on deck, then took up his rifle again and resumed fire at the figures emerging from it with cries of alarm and pain. Others of his team, two or three, also tossed firebombs, one of them striking the side of the dhow, leaving a trail of fire down the hull and into the water. He decided to add to the building conflagration with flare. It proved that it was’nt designed as a weapon by missing the dhow high over the deck and igniting over the creek into a red starburst. That’s well, he thought to himself. It’ll help alert the other teams.

  On board the dhow, someone, probably the master, was trying to restore order to the chaos by shouting orders. Pirates began trying to fight the fires with water buckets dipped over the side, or by tossing burning branches into the creek; others appeared to be trying to get the dhow away from the bank, casting off the lines and pushing with sweeps. Landry did his best to disrupt these actions by picking off Pirates silhouetted by the flames. When he paused to reload, he heard firing up the creek, and the unmistakable bark of a 75mm recoilless rifle. Members of his team tossed a few more firebombs, a couple of hits and one wild throw that ended in the creek; apparently the strikers were not working properly on all the bombs, and would-be fire-bombers were delayed by the need to light the fuse by hand.

  The dhow was now free of the shore, and drifting out into the creek, but she was well ablaze now along her entire length. Landry heard multiple splashes as Pirates abandoned ship on the offshore side. Both furled sails caught, and sent pillars of fire higher than the masts, illuminating the entire scene.

  What now? Landry thought. The surviving Pirates who made it to the opposite shore were obviously beyond their reach. Continued small-arms fire at the burning dhow seemed unproductive. He wanted the dhow destroyed, not just burned to the waterline and available for salvage efforts – particularly for her three-inch bronze gun, which would survive the fire and be available to arm another dhow.

  At that moment, one of the gunboats hove into view, lit up by the fire, and opened up on the burning dhow with its 75mm rifle. It apparently fired a couple of rounds of solid shot, followed by an explosive shell – which produced a spectacular secondary explosion, clearly the dhow’s store of ammo. The flash momentarily blinded Landry. When his vision returned, he saw that there was nothing left of the dhow but bits of smoldering wood floating on the surface of the water. Anything on the dhow that survived the blast was now on the bottom of the creek, in the middle of the channel. Good luck salvaging that gun! he thought to himself; aloud, he gave a raucous cheer, echoed by his team members.

  He struggled through the thin strip of vegetation separating him from the creek, and looked downstream, toward the mouth. He saw a confused scene of burning dhows, and the gunboats firing into them. He couldn’t count the dhows in the glare, so he worried that one, or even two, had gotten away.

  Landry then thought of his men, and mustered them as best he could in the dark. He had one casualty: a gunner for whom the striker had failed on his firebomb, and he had then dropped the bomb just as he got the wick alight. It burst, and burned his leg badly. He had kept his head, however, and rolled on the ground, away from the puddle of burning fuel, and managed to put out the flames. H
is mates had bandaged his wound, and there was no knowing how serious the injury was until Doc Cheah had gotten a look at it. His mates also improvised a litter to carry him to the rendezvous point for debarkation.

  Landry fired off a single green flare, straight up for best visibility, the signal that his team had carried out the mission. Three green flares in quick succession answered, and after a pause, two more: every team was reporting success. Landry waited deliberately for two minutes by his watch, and then fired two more green flares in quick succession: the signal for all teams to rally to the embarkation point.

  The trip back went far quicker than the approach march; unhampered by the need for silence, the gunners tramped noisily through the bush, laughing and joking, euphoric with the release of long-pent-up tension and anxiety. Landry, too, was happy about the victory, which seemed complete, but worried about the “butcher’s bill” – the still-unknown total casualty count. Mostly, he was just tired.

  At the embarkation point, near the site of the first dhow from seaward, the gunners were all so noisy and elated their shouting team leaders had to calm them, warning of the possibility of armed Pirate stragglers on the shore, and posting pickets along a defense perimeter around the site. Landry was happy to discover that there were no KIAs among his gunners, but not so happy to discover that their half-dozen wounded all suffered from self-inflicted burns by the putain firebombs. Although it was hard to envision a way this mission could have been successful without them, they clearly needed a radical re-design if they were not to stay almost as hazardous to friend as to foe.

  The boats came in one by one to take off the landing party, and keeping quiet and order as the boats’ crews and the gunners congratulated one another occasioned another bout of swearing by team leaders. Because the pickets had come from each of the teams, Landry made no attempt to ensure the gunners boarded the boat on which they had arrived, instead simply making sure each boat-load included at least one PO or leading hand. When the third boat, Joan’s motor launch, grounded on the beach, Landry called in the pickets and was last to board. The sudden tropical dawn made its usual dramatic entrance just as the launch pushed back from the beach.

  Landry dozed off and on most of that long day under tow back to Mafia and Chole Bay. Most of his gunners did the same, once fatigue subdued their high spirits, sheltering as best they could from the sun under their floppy hats and rolled-down sleeves. The crew of the boat, just as tired, got what rest they could by rotating the chore of steering and keeping a bow lookout among themselves. Landry, in moments of wakefulness, volunteered several times to take one or the other of these duties; he didn’t like to order his tired gunners to do it, but a few of them volunteered as well. Everyone thus was at least somewhat rested when they arrived “back home” in Chole Bay.

  Joan cast the boats free off the eastern entrance to the bay, and they made their way in line-ahead through the narrow channel. As the boats approached the anchorage, Landry was surprised to see the rails of Charlemagne and Albatros lined with cheering, hat waving sailors. Clearly, Joan had radioed ahead with the news of their victory. The Joan’s and the men in the gunboats, began to cheer back, and soon the anchorage resounded with the noise, and fluttered with the waving hats, agitating the sea birds, who took flight, adding their cries of protest to the racket. When Commodore Ennis passed the word to splice the main-brace aboard all vessels, the noise, already enormous, seemed to double.

  Landry and his gunners, after turning over their burns victims to the sick bays of Joan and Albatros, landed at the tiny Chole Bay shore station, now manned entirely by island militia, and the men began to “splice” away with a will. Landry joined in a few toasts, then took a borrowed hammock into the shade of the trees bordering the little station, slung it, and was fast asleep while the party continued into the night.

  His abstinence found its reward the next morning when he was the only man of the party not nursing a roaring hangover. They groaned and cursed when he roused them, but Landry was pitiless; he wanted to get them back into the interior to relieve the militiamen who had stood-to in their absence. The fact that neither coffee nor breakfast appeared at all imminent – the station-keepers had all joined their comrades in arms in their revelry the evening before, and at any rate there wasn’t enough food for fifty men in the tiny base.

  “The sooner we get to the camp, the sooner you’ll get breakfast and coffee,” he replied to their grumbles. Now get your gear together and form up! “

  The long march to Camp Van der Merwe sweated the booze out of them. At least, today they had daylight and a wide, well-traveled trail to follow. He insisted they drink lots of water; the liquor they had drunk the night before (the regulation drink of watered rum, followed by lots of pombe, the Mafians’ home-brewed beer) had left them dehydrated. By the time they had reached the camp, the hands had sweated off their hangovers and were ferociously hungry. The elite militia-men, called “Richburg’s Raiders” by the Kerguelenians and Nosy Be men, and “Askari wa Mafia” (simply “soldiers of mafia”) by themselves, welcomed Landry’s boys enthusiastically, overwhelmed them with questions about their mission (which they mostly didn’t understand, being in Swahili); and went at once to work to produce a big traditional meal for them. Some even offered to send runners to the nearest village to fetch pombe with which to celebrate the victory; Landry stepped on that idea, hard, and met no disagreement from the hands, some of whom went a queasy green at the mention of the stuff.

  Landry had an enthusiastic welcome from CSM Richburg. “Hail, the conquering hero!” he said, grasping Landry’s hand.

  “Hero, not so much,” replied Landry. “But I want to hear all about how your Raiders did while you had center stage.”

  “Not until I hear all about your raid! Step into the WO’s mess and I’ll buy you a rum while you regale me with every detail.”

  The “Warrant Officers’ Mess” was sort of a joke between Richburg and Landry; a hut identical to all the others in the camp but reserved for one or both when in residence. It had a crude table, two rudimentary stools, and space enough to swing two hammocks. Once they were at the table with a mug of rum in front of each, Richburg said, “Okay. Now give.”

  “Not a chance, Rich! You obviously already know at least the outline of the action at Dar es Salaam, but I know absolutely nothing about what’s been going on here, so you gotta go first.”

  “Pulling rank, huh? Well since you’re a lordly Chief Warrant Officer and I’m but a lowly CSM, a non-com, I must obey.”

  “Wait, I’m what?”

  “Didn’t you get the word? Commodore Ennis decided to use a change of titles to recognize the distinction between upper warrant officers, like navigators of ships and your good self, and mere peasants like Carpenters, Boatswains, and CSMs. The rumor was that since you insisted on being called ‘Chief’ he’d make that form of address legit. You and your sailing-master colleagues are now officially ‘Chief Warrant Officers’. There was a memo, which you obviously failed to read.”

  “I’m a bit behind on my paperwork,” Landry admitted sheepishly. “On behalf of the vessel navigators, I’m glad to hear it – they’re all master mariners with years at sea, and deserve the distinction. The only reason they’re not commissioned officers is that they’re mostly a bit on the elderly side.”

  “Well, the official rationale for you being included in their number is that you have an independent command in the field. Which, logically, ought to mean you should be a commissioned officer.”

  “Me, an officer!” Landry exclaimed. “Not hardly – no education, no polish, and a tendency to say just what I think – no thanks, I’m happy where I am. Now quit stalling and tell me how your Askari did during my absence.”

  “In a word: super. I can’t tell you just how proud I am of these boys.

  “The Pirates obviously have good Intel – I think they’ve got coast watchers hidden on the shores of Chole Bay to track vessel comings and goings, because you lot were hardly ou
t of sight before the buggers mounted a determined attack on Camp Van der Merwe.”

  “How’d that go? I mean, it’s still here and ours so I assume the assault was a failure, but how did it proceed?”

  “It started with a sudden surprise rush at first light the morning after your task element departed. I had taken charge of the camp, and something told me this was likely, so I had half the Askaris stand-to through the night, three hours on and three off. So that first attack failed, with the Pirates taking heavy casualties and none on our part.

  “After that, they took cover in the bush, and sniped at us for a while. They didn’t have much luck, because of your foresight in clearing the bush away for a hundred meters or so around the boma – but our guys, with repeaters, made ‘em pay every time they showed themselves. Our emphasis on marksmanship really paid off – and the askaris seem to be natural-born shots with a rifle.

  “Then they tried setting fire to the boma, by having a guy slither through the grass up to it with a torch while his mates gave him a hail of covering fire. We put out the first fire, and of course killed the torch man, but they then made several efforts at once, and we had one fire we couldn’t control. Despite lots of shouting in abba-dabba from the other side, which I assumed was their leader trying to force them to attack at that point, the Pirates showed a natural reluctance to run through a blazing fire, and waited until it had died down a bit. My askaris rallied to that point and shot them down. The attack petered out at that point.

  “We buried twenty-seven Pirates, and suffered only three wounded, but no dead.”

  “Wah! A great victory!”

  “Yes. The Askari are over the moon about it – they’ve even devised a sort of battle streamer for themselves, a feather in their caps – literally.