On another occasion, the war hero Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was asked to go to visit, be shown around Nigeria only, and return to peddle the official line. He duly went to Nigeria, but then refused not to go to Biafra. What he saw on the second visit so shocked him that he came back and denounced the official policy. He was immediately smeared as a gullible fool.
It was pretty standard to smear every journalist who expressed disgust at what was going on as either a mercenary, arms dealer, or Ojukwu propagandist, even though a million pictures are rather hard to dispute.
No massive humanitarian tragedy, save those inflicted by nature herself, is possible without two kinds of contributors. Hitler could never have carried out the holocaust that he did if he had relied only on the uniformed sadists of the SS. Behind them had to stand another army of organizers, administrators, and bureaucrats—the enablers.
Someone had to constantly supply the uniforms and the boots, the guns and the ammunition, the wages, the rations, and the barbed wire. Someone had to oversee the supply of instruments of torture and of gas pellets. Someone who never pulled a trigger or turned on a gas chamber. But these people enabled it to happen. It is the difference between the doer and the desk doer.
Starting with Sir David Hunt’s biased and flawed analysis, which was adopted by the Commonwealth Relations Office, taken over and intensified by the Foreign Office, and cravenly endorsed by Harold Wilson and Michael Stewart, what happened could not have happened without the wholesale and covert contribution of the Wilson government. I remain convinced of it to this day.
Nor was it necessary to protect some vital British interest, and what interest merits a million dead children? Britain could have used its huge influence with Lagos to militate for a cease-fire, a peace conference, and a political solution. It chose not to, despite repeated opportunities, pursuing Hunt’s conviction that Biafra must be crushed no matter the cost, but without ever explaining why.
That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honor of my country forever, and I will never forgive them.
A USEFUL CERTIFICATE
The plan was to march many miles through the Nigerian lines to blow up a bridge that formed a major supply route to one of their most advanced salients into Ibo territory.
To be frank, there were no “lines” in the sense of fortified trenches across the landscape. The media liked to draw lines on maps by linking Nigerian advance points, villages they had reached and where there was a Nigerian army presence. But in that rain forest, there were myriad narrow tracks known only to guides from the nearby villages, along which it was possible to march through the “lines” and into the bush hinterland behind them. To reach the target bridge, such was the plan.
The mission was to comprise three mercenaries and twenty of the best-trained Biafran “commandos,” along with a couple of local guides who knew the tracks in the bush. I elected to go along, suspecting a good journalistic story.
On the first night, we were halfway there. We camped because even the guides would not march at night. It was not just dark in the forest; it was pitch-black. So we camped and built a small fire. After a pretty basic dinner, the group settled down to sleep, as ever consumed by mosquitoes and amazed at how noisy the jungle is at night.
There was Taffy, the South African with the Welsh name; Johnny, the Rhodesian with a South African name; Armand, a Parisian with a Corsican name; and me, an Englishman with a Scottish name. And the Biafrans, who were all Ibos. Out of the darkness Taffy suddenly spoke.
“I’m prepared to bet I am the only person around this campfire who can prove he’s sane.”
We all lay there slowly working out that the only way you can prove you are sane is if you have a certificate to say so. And the only way you can be issued such a certificate is on release from a lunatic asylum.
I lay there thinking: I am miles from bloody anywhere. If I disappear tonight, no one will ever know what happened to me, or even ask. I could simply vanish. So I am lying next to a giant who is armed to the teeth and joking that he is half mad. I stayed awake.
There are moments when the question “What the hell am I doing here?” simply will not go away. The next day, Johnny, the explosives wizard, blew the bridge and we marched back through the bush into the Biafran heartland. I made a point of marching behind Taffy in case he had forgotten about his certificate.
MR. SISSONS, I PRESUME
The plan was to motor by Land Rover to the last known Biafran position, then march on to a point far down the road from Aba to Owerri, and mount an ambush. I agreed to go along, even though this would be an all-Biafran affair with no white mercenaries involved.
I was always quite chary of going with an all-Ibo patrol, because if things went seriously pear-shaped, they could simply vaporize into their native rain forest, whereas I would be lost within ten yards and quite likely to walk into a Nigerian army unit mistaking one for the other. The faces were the same, the uniforms similar, and the forest bewildering.
But everything went smoothly. We knew Aba had fallen and was a new Nigerian strongpoint. Owerri was still being contested. The road might carry Nigerian convoys of troops and supplies; hence the night ambush. It never occurred to me that some fool on the Nigerian side might send up a party of visiting journalists.
So the commando officer picked his spot on a grassy bank above the road and we settled down to wait. After an hour, there was the low rumble of engines coming up from the south, then the wash of dimmed headlights.
We were invisible in the long grass and under the trees, but the road, with no tree cover, was visible by moon and stars. The lead Nigerian Land Rover stopped several bullets and drove itself straight into the rain ditch, blocking the road for the convoy and preventing escape forward. The lorries behind panicked, stopped, and began to shed the dim forms of the men inside them. The Biafrans kept firing and the Nigerians started shouting and screaming.
Then, above the noise, I heard a single voice shouting in perfectly accented English: “I’ve been hit, oh, my God, I’ve been hit.” That was the first indication there were any Europeans down on the road.
Peering into the gloom, I discerned the shouting figure on the road and the voice made plain it was a fellow countryman. Next to me, a Biafran soldier also spotted the target and raised his FAL rifle to complete the job. Journalistic rivalry may occasionally become tense, but never that bad. I reached out, eased his barrel upward, and his shot went off through the treetops. He turned and I could see the whites of his eyes glaring at me. Then the ambush commander blew his whistle—the signal to shimmy backward off the bank, into the forest, and run like hell.
The Englishman on the road had taken a bullet in the thigh. Months later, I learned that he was Independent Television News star Peter Sissons, who was evacuated and flown home, and made a full recovery.
Years later, at a fancy-dress charity ball of all things, and being somewhat in my cups, I let it slip. He and his wife were there. Peter took the news with appropriate dignity, but his wife gave me a big wet kiss.
WORTH A LARGE ONE
A dozen years after the Biafra War, I found myself in a London bar with a long-term veteran of the SAS regiment. Out of the blue, he remarked, “You owe me a large one.”
If someone like that tells you he is owed a drink, do not argue. Just go to the bar and buy him a double. So I did. When he had taken a deep draft, I asked him why.
“Because,” he said, “I once had your head in the crosshairs of my scope sight, and I didn’t pull the trigger.”
I reckoned that merited an entire bottle. It also confirmed something I had long suspected. The Special Air Service specializes (among many other things) in deep penetration into target territory, information gathering, and withdrawal unseen. Rumors had long persisted that part of London’s extensive help to Lagos had been the presence of our Special Forces. Political
denial had always been a bit too shrill.
There was certainly no such presence until 1968. My only time west of the Niger had been as a BBC correspondent with the Biafran invasion across the Onitsha Bridge the previous year. After my return in 1968, I had always been inside the Biafran enclave. The only time my contentedly sipping bar friend could have seen me was through a screen of trees deep inside Biafra.
So much for official denials.
BITS OF METAL
Of all the bits of metal that have been thrown in my direction, the nastiest are mortars. This is because they are silent. The only thing you hear from a falling mortar shell is a soft, feathery whisper just before it impacts. Usually not even long enough to dive for cover.
If the ground it falls on is soft or swampy, as sometimes happened in Biafra, the bomb might embed itself at the moment of impact, spending much of its explosive force and its sheets of shrapnel in the surrounding mud.
But if it falls on hard ground, it detonates with an earsplitting crack. That is not the problem; the real problem is that the casing transforms into many hundreds of fragments of razor-sharp metal that spray outward from knee-high to well over the head, and in a 360-degree circle from the explosion. Anyone caught in that hail of shrapnel will probably be torn apart and killed, or at least crippled.
That is why I came to loathe them—the silence. The Nigerians, unlike the Biafrans, had artillery with shells constantly resupplied by London, despite the lies. But they were comfortingly inaccurate as gunners, and an incoming shell makes an audible whoosh like a subway train entering a station. Just enough time to go facedown in the dirt and hope the blast will go over your back.
Machine guns are not funny, but the Nigerians simply put the gun on full automatic, using the entire magazine in one blast, usually aiming high and taking the tops off innumerable innocent trees. Time enough to hit the dirt or dive into the friendly rain ditch and get below ground level.
When it came to rifles, the Nigerians used the NATO-issue SLR, or self-loading rifle. These, too, they put onto the automatic fire setting and went through the magazine in seconds. When you saw the branches above your head start to shred, if you hit the dirt, you would probably stay alive. That apart, the half-trained (if that) compulsory recruits had trouble hitting a barn door at ten paces. Literally hundreds of millions of bullets went through the treetops.
The Biafrans had far more limited supplies, coming in by planeload rather than shipload, but the mercenaries trying to teach ammo-conservancy had an impossible task. In Africa, “spray the landscape” seems to be the only infantry tactic.
Among the Biafrans, the two most feared weapons were the Saladin armored car and the Ferret scout car, both London-supplied. The Saladin had one cannon, which the crew did not know how to use, and each had a heavy machine gun, which was really nasty. But you could hear them coming, too, the growl of the Ferret and the whine of the Saladin usually giving you time to get out of the way. Unfortunately, if the Biafrans heard the Saladin whine coming their way, they would just run for it, and down went another defended village.
At a certain point, Nigeria acquired an air arm; Ilyushin twin-jet bombers and MiG-17 jet fighters, both flown by mercenaries, Egyptians or East Germans. The Biafrans had no anti-air forces, though that did not stop them wasting ammunition by blazing upward whenever they saw one. The Nigerians had no pilots at all, because the only ones they had ever had were Ibos. So the Ilyushins and MiGs could fly low, pick their targets, and bomb or strafe them. But they never changed the course of the war. I was only once caught by a MiG.
I happened to be on a long, straight laterite road with grass fields on either side, so no tree cover. The MiG appeared to my right, visible through the driver’s-side window of my Volkswagen Beetle (Nigeria then drove on the left of the road). I had seen him, but he had also seen me and he was flying in the same direction at about 3,000 feet.
Through the windscreen, I watched him drop the port wing and haul the fighter through 180 degrees, diving to level out just above the road. I slammed on the brakes, bailed out, and went into the rain ditch just as he opened up.
He came down the road with his cannon, ripping small fountains out of the laterite surface, roared overhead, and was gone, making only one pass. He could not have been much good. Despite plowing up the road, he missed the Beetle completely. When he was a dot on the horizon heading for the Niger and home, I was able to start up the VW and crawl through the potholes and thus get back to my bungalow in Umuahia town.
But the one who came nearest to sending me to a new and apparently better place was the mortarman outside Onitsha. I had been visiting the front line south of the riverside city by the bridgehead, but it meant a long hike back across a bare and exposed hillside to where I had parked my car, deep in a grove of trees. I was a third of the way across the flank of the hill when someone across the river must have seen me, presumably with field glasses. It must have been the white face that irritated him, because he really let fly.
I heard that soft whisper and went flat. It was a ranging shot and landed more than a hundred yards away. No damage, but also no cover. I looked around for a friendly rain ditch and spotted one twenty yards to one side. I made it just in time as the second one landed.
Rain ditches make good cover, but the locals tend to use them as latrines. In the rainy season, the waste matter is washed away, but this was during the dry months, so a rain ditch is not recommended for a crawling holiday. Still, it was better than getting shredded. I lay and counted the seconds. Seven. Then the third landed. Closer, but above my head.
I jumped out and began to jog, counting the seconds and hoping my new friend was going to be short on imagination.
He was. At six seconds, I went back into the ditch, and at seven the next one came down. This was not a 60mm party planner, but an 81mm “company” mortar. Very nasty.
I hoped he was watching the fall of his shot, then dropping his next effort down the tube. Travel time for the bomb, exactly seven seconds. I have never liked jogging and this jog least of all. Up-run-dive-bang. Then I made it to the point where the hillside curved away from the river. Two more runs and I would be out of sight.
Hoping he could see me, I turned and gave him a rigid middle finger. Then I was out of sight. There were three more, but they became wider and wider, until I could reach my car and drive home. And that is why I hate mortars.
OF MORE MICE—AND MERCS
For the Biafrans, the experience of foreign white mercenaries was extremely patchy. Both sides used them, but the idea that they were invincible game changers, a reputation deriving from the Congolese wars a few years earlier, proved to be a myth.
For the Biafrans, the first intervention came from France, then ruled by Charles de Gaulle. His principal “fixer” in Africa, Jacques Foccart, responsible for a wide range of skulduggery in the ex-French empire and elsewhere, arranged for about forty mainly French “mercs” to be recruited by ex-Legion icon Roger Faulckes and sent down to show how warfare should be done. They cost Biafra a fortune in its scarce hard-currency reserves.
They duly arrived and were assigned to the Calabar sector, where Nigerian and Biafran troopers were locked in a struggle for the riverine city. On their way there, driving without forward scouts, they ran into an ambush and lost several men. Retreating in disarray, their next stop was the airport, where they demanded to go back home. General Ojukwu, in disgust, just let them go.
But seven opted to stay and were joined by three non-French who came later. They were a mixed bunch. Two were deluded fantasists, two had a taste for killing, and one enjoyed cruelty. Some of the French group stayed because they were wanted in France for various offenses. Finally, there were ex-soldiers from national armies who had simply failed to adapt to civilian life.
There were also three mercenary pilots who flew in Biafra’s short-lived air force until they were shot down or crashed their aircraft an
d left. Three of the land-based mercs died in combat.
Giorgio Noriatto, whom I never met, was an Italian, and the first to die. He was killed fighting in the Imo River area as the Nigerians advanced out of the creeks toward Aba.
“Tiny Bill” Billois was a French giant, known for obvious reasons as “Petit Bill,” weighing in at around 350 pounds. He survived, but died later in a light aircraft crash in France years after the war. Always at his side was his cousin Michel, who was so self-effacing he was hardly noticed, and that included when he left.
Mark Goossens was a former Belgian paratrooper, another huge man. He died with a bullet through the liver during a forlorn attempt to recapture Onitsha city.
The third to die was a Britisher, Steve Neeley, whom I found thoroughly unpleasant. He drove around with a bone-white skull on the bonnet of his Land Rover. It was the head of a dead Nigerian, which he had boiled fleshless and mounted with steel wires above the radiator cap.
He disappeared in the Abakaliki sector and it was later rumored one of his own men might have done the job. They attested he was dead, but the body was never found.
The other five were Rolf Steiner, who had been appointed their commander and called himself colonel. He was ex–Deutsches Jungvolk (a sort of Hitler Youth), ex–Foreign Legion, invalided out of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, just in time, and one of the Faulckes group who elected to stay on. He postured and paraded around in his confiscated American limousine, his staff car, but I never recall him going into combat. He spoke only French and German, so I did a fair amount of interpreting. That made him a good source of information, but I never took to him. Then there was Taffy Williams, already mentioned.
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