by Al Venter
I immediately banked towards some tall trees to my right and ended up doing a complete 360 degree turn, the idea being that the gunner could get in his sights whoever had been doing the shooting. He did exactly that only moments later and the firing momentarily stopped. Early reports indicated that it had been quite a strong force, possibly several dozen enemy troops who had infiltrated Rhodesia from Mozambique several days before. Most were laid out on slabs before nightfall, as a result of the subsequent RAR ground action, when the unit got caught in an effective crossfire. Clearly, their training hadn’t been as good as ours.
Nellis recalls that while that contact went off quite well, it wasn’t always easy to work with the Rhodesians. Almost to a man, he recalls, these soldiers were ‘very professional, well trained, coordinated and supremely motivated’. It was almost as if they regarded the bush war as an interim diversion from normal life, he reckoned. ‘There were unpleasant things taking place out in the bush, but most were mere hiccups before the gooks were run to ground, one of them told me. Moreover, he really believed it.’ He added:
There was no arguing with the Rhodesians, even though operationally, from our perspective, things didn’t look too good. We were always reminded that it didn’t matter what we thought about the war, we were outsiders who’d been sent in to help the Smith regime stay in power. Even then, we were only grudgingly accepted for offering a hand, although some of our blokes were killed doing it. ‘This is our country’ they would say, and for the majority who were born there it was all they had.
In part, Nellis suggests, the Rhodesians actually believed they could win their war, if only because their success rate was so extraordinarily high. They were killing insurgents at a rate of something like 20 or 25 to one, but somebody hadn’t factored in that a single fatality on their side was likely to count for quite a lot when the entire white population was measured in terms of a few hundred thousand people—men women and children—or roughly speaking, a town the size of Bournemouth in England.
We couldn’t help sensing that the Rhodesians, almost like the Israelis, regarded themselves as superior to everybody else. But then, I suppose, they were, especially when it came to battling the preponderant enemy force against which they had been ranged for several years already.
As far as the Rhodesian Air Force was concerned, we were a bunch of novices, and there were times when that kind of attitude hurt. They certainly rated themselves as superior to the air crews from down south, but then they’d been fighting for a while and knew both the country and the enemy better than anybody. Sometimes we would blunder—it happens in battle—and they’d have to guide us back to base by radio in this vast, bush-covered land with few natural features. Then the word would go around: ‘the slopes have got lost again.’
A favourite word for South Africans among Rhodesian fighting men was the word ‘slope’, which was supposed to refer to the way that the foreheads of some of our people ‘sloped’ down, almost like a bunch of Neanderthals. I suppose it did with some of our fellows, but they painted most of us with the same disdainful brush, which was a pity because our intentions were honourable.
I was actually quite lucky because I blended in quite well with local crews. I’d been educated in Rhodesia and knew some of their pilots from school so they probably regarded me as one of them.
Towards the end of that Rhodesian tour, Nellis recalls:
The crews operated from a primitive makeshift base near Mtoko— a few hours’ drive north-east of Salisbury and at the core of what was then referred to as Operation Hurricane. There were no fixed buildings to talk of, and most of the air crews were billeted in tents, with their water coming from a 44-gallon drum suspended over a wood fire. They would bathe in turn in a modest little zinc bath because it was really all there was.
However, the food was always good because the Rhodesian Air Force liked to commandeer all the top restaurant chefs from Salisbury and Bulawayo for their call-ups. The result was that we’d come in after a day’s action and cold beers would be waiting at the improvised bar, which, as I recall, was a huge log that had been planed down flat. Then the party would start and often go on until midnight, which was pushing it because first call was usually before dawn.
The air crews would always go over the day’s events in some detail once we got back to Mtoko, almost like an informal debrief and quite useful because you could pick up quite a lot from the experiences of others. It was all fascinating combat stuff, of course, and it sometimes made me wonder why there were so few casualties among flying personnel. We were taking enormous risks, yet had astonishingly few casualties when compared to similar conflicts in other parts of the world. I think it must have been down to the inferior training of the enemy and our aggressive approach.
I recall going into a particularly heavy contact, while flying the G-Car, where one of the South Africans on permanent secondment talked me down to land in a maize field, but with my 20mm cannon facing in the wrong direction. Just as I was going through transition, I came under some heavy tracer fire—it was green, so we knew where it came from and it was striking the ground on all sides of us. We were committed to land so I took the chopper in anyway, but then the fire force troops wouldn’t get out because of incoming fire.
I turned to the engineer, and told him chuck the fuckers out, which he tried to do. He literally got them by the scruffs of their necks and attempted to force them out of the helicopter’s open door, but they resisted. They were staying put, they said and still refused to budge. So in my basic sign language—because of rotor noise—I indicated that we were staying on the ground until they were out of there and they quickly got the message. Moments later they hit the turf running and, curiously, nobody on the Alouette took a hit.
After a spell at Mtoko, Nellis was drafted to the Joint Operations Command (JOC) at Mudzi, but that was short-lived. He was medevaced to Salisbury one evening with what was diagnosed as a gut problem. In fact, it was a bit more serious and later that night he was wheeled into the theatre for an appendectomy and repatriated to South Africa to recuperate. Days later he was rushed back to the military hospital in Bloemfontein with septicaemia. He was out of action for a few weeks and stayed in Salisbury for that time.
While Nellis Ellis spent time after his recuperation as an instructor on Alouettes, conditions in Rhodesia continued to deteriorate. Some South African forces had been pulled out—the South African Police had been forced to withdraw some time earlier because of American pressure on Pretoria—but some of the helicopter assets stayed behind,
Because the Rhodesians were under serious strain again, Nellis was ordered back to Rhodesia. In the nine months between May 1979 and February the following year, he completed six tours of operational duty in the Rhodesian bush, each of which varied between a month and six weeks in duration.
Whereas the Rhodesians previously wouldn’t allow the South Africans to fly the K-Car, this time round he was given an Alouette and worked throughout with the RLI fire force. As he says, it was also his first real experiences of controlling troops on the ground during a contact. Much of the tactics were centred on the 20mm cannon mounted at the rear of the cockpit, and although he wasn’t to know it then, these sorties formed the basis of his tactical knowledge, which he went on to use in the escalating military struggle in the vast semi-arid region south of Angola, then still known as Deutsch-Südwestafrika. All of his experience, he acknowledges, came directly from Rhodesia.
CHAPTER THREE
EARLY DAYS DURING THE BORDER WAR
South Africa’s Border War began in earnest for Neall Ellis in December 1975. Posted for an eight-week tour to the Ondangua—the regional air force base in northern South-West Africa (Namibia today), he was to work closely with elements of South Africa’s Airborne, the Parachute Battalion or, in the lingo, the ‘Parabats’.
As he recalls, just about everything that happened in this regional conflict filtered through to the operations room, commonly known as the ‘Ops Room�
�. Although it sounded grand, it was little more than a tin shack with a cement floor that for most of the year was more akin to a sauna than an important operational planning centre.
The conflict sometimes took hostilities behind enemy lines and considerable distances beyond internationally recognised frontiers (to the consternation of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations). The South African Army also went into Zambia and Mozambique several times. There were more clandestine raids further afield, with South African Navy Daphne Class submarines dropping Special Forces strike teams off the coasts of some of South Africa’s most outspoken enemies, Tanzania and Angola.
The war lasted a full generation, about 24 years in all, and by the time it all ended, thousands of sons had followed in the footsteps of their fathers and experienced military service. Although casualty figures throughout this conflict were modest, this was largely due to the immense area (by European standards) across which it was fought. There were hostilities in one form or another from the appropriately named Skeleton Coast on the Atlantic Ocean, to a tiny point on the map 1,500km to the east where the frontiers of three nations—South-West Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)—conjoined.
Actual numbers of fatalities and wounded are difficult to assess accurately, in part because the Angolans never opened their archives to the outside world. The South African Army and Air Force (there were few SA Navy casualties because, apart from the briefly resuscitated South African Marines, there were almost no naval personnel directly involved) lost fewer than 800 men during the conflict, roughly three or four a month. The enemy had a casualty rate that was many times that.
In South-West Africa itself, it was the preponderant Ovambo tribal people who initially set the scene for conflict. Always against what they regarded as Pretoria’s illegal occupation of their country, they protested at the UN, and when that didn’t achieve any results, they asked several African countries for military help to displace what they termed the ‘hated racist oppressors’.
Although the Ovambos were regarded by the South Africans as ‘primitive and tribal’ (this was former apartheid government minister Pik Botha’s off-the-cuff phrase, which he used when attending the International Court of Justice at The Hague), they were anything but. Certainly, this African nation followed all the traditional tribal norms, but they were also single-minded in their efforts to dislodge the South African presence from their land. Thus, by the time the war started, they had formed their own political party, the South-West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and sent batches of troops for military training abroad.
To bring matters properly into perspective, it is essential to look back a little. Pretoria had originally occupied the old German colony of Deutsch-Südwestafrika by right of conquest during World War I. That territory was entrusted to Pretoria by a League of Nations mandate. Efforts had already started after the end of World War II to neutralise South African jurisdiction in South-West Africa, but Pretoria hung on resolutely, at one stage even suggesting that the country was already a de facto fifth province of South Africa.
It was then that a group of Ovambo tribal leaders took matters in hand. Having viewed the ongoing ‘colonial’ war in Angola to the immediate north, and what was then going on in Rhodesia, as precedents, they started a military struggle of their own. Thus a low-key guerrilla struggle was launched in 1965. The consensus was that if Pretoria was not prepared to listen to reason, SWAPO guerrillas, armed and abetted by Moscow and China, would engage Pretoria militarily and force it to relinquish control of South Africa, which was eventually to become Namibia. Obviously, the South Africans viewed all these developments as preposterous.
At the heart of the guerrilla military effort was the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), SWAPO’s military wing. Although some modern historians tend to denigrate PLAN’s efforts, we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that with dollops of foreign financial and military aid, this moderate-sized group of freedom fighters was finally moulded into an extremely competent and dedicated group of guerrillas. How else could they have kept South Africa—the continent’s most advanced industrial country—on a partial war footing for more than two decades?
The war began slowly. A total of six dissident Ovambos, armed with Soviet carbines, infiltrated a remote corner of their tribal homeland in 1965 and established a temporary base. The idea was that more fighters, on their way overland on foot from Zambia through Portuguese Angola (then already in its fifth year of hostilities), would join them. The camp itself, which would become a touchstone of SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma’s liberation folklore, was called Ongulumbashe.
The operation launched to tackle these ‘infiltrators’ mainly consisted of members of the South African Police, with a small army detachment, together with elements from the South African Air Force. The initial operation became known in southern African military lore as Operation Blouwildebees. By contemporary standards, the strike was little more than a token effort, launched from what was then still an isolated northern administrative outpost at Ruacana, a small town that straddled the great Kunene River, which had headwaters to the north in Angola. Had it taken place in later years, it would probably have warranted little more than a footnote. South African military historian, Paul Els, wrote a book about it.2
The main force comprised four police officers, together with 37 other ranks. There were also four army officers, of whom one was a doctor, and seven NCOs. The South African Air Force contribution was nine, almost all of them pilots. To reduce weight, the eight Alouette helicopters involved in the operation were deployed without their usual complement of flight techs and were able to uplift five men each. It was the first time Alouette helicopters had been used in an offensive role.
By the time the Border War was over, it was estimated that almost half-a-million South Africans had experienced some form of military service, many along a succession of the country’s embattled northern frontiers. On the Angolan side, the tally is said to have exceeded a million men in uniform, and cumulatively, over more than a dozen years of fighting, included a couple of hundred thousand Cubans. Their casualties, never confirmed, were rated by unofficial sources in Havana to have totalled into five figures, many more from tropical illnesses such as malaria, typhus, meningitis and typhoid than from actual combat.
There were also scores of Cuban, Soviet, East German and other communist air crews killed during the course of hostilities, a significant number by American Stinger MANPADS1introduced into this African theatre of hostilities by the CIA in an effort to counter Moscow’s gains. The South Africans did their bit by handing over to anti-government UNITA guerrillas almost all the weapons captured in operations such as Operations Protea, Modular, Askari, Super and others.
SAM-7 (Strela-2) man-portable, shoulder-fired missiles captured during these ground operations—and there were dozens of them, similar to the U.S. Army tail-chasing REDEYEs—also went to UNITA and, by all accounts, they did enough damage to cause Cuban and Eastern-Bloc pilots to fly well beyond the estimated 4.2km slant-range of these weapons. That was in sharp contrast to South African military pilots who liked to operate as close to the ground as possible.
Although the Angolans also had low-altitude SAM systems, they hardly ever achieved a lock-on because the South African helicopters were rarely around long enough to become targets, or they hung so low over the forest that heavy foliage interfered with the sighting ability of those handling these weapons. In fact, during the entire war, while there were numerous SAAF aircraft and helicopters brought down by ground fire, not a single South African (or Rhodesian) helicopter was shot down by SAMs. It wasn’t for want of trying. In one major contact during Operational Super in March 1982, Neall Ellis in his Alouette gunship dodged three successive SAM-7s fired in about 90 seconds.
As with most wars, much of the day-to-day activity in South Africa’s operational area in South-West Africa was routine.
By the time that Nellis arrived at O
ndangua, low-key military activity in the region had been on the go for several years. His first deployments came while his helicopter squadron worked with the South African adaptation of the Rhodesian fire force: only Pretoria called it Reaction Force.
The day would start before dawn, with pilots accompanied by their flight engineers and servicing personnel carefully going over their choppers along the flight line. Banter across the hardstand was mostly light-hearted, usually between aircrew and members of the parachute battalion, some of the men taking bets on the possibility of a contact during the day.
The Parabats were active too, checking equipment and filling water bottles. Everything they took into battle had to be secured to prevent loss in the furious activity that usually preceded a contact and afterwards. Once both aircrews and troops were satisfied that everything was in working order, pilots and stick leaders would gather for a preliminary briefing in the operations room.
Typically, the first task of the day would be for crews to remain on standby for an area operation to the immediate north of the base. Other units had been taken in some hours before, cordoned off specific areas and systematically started searching villages—kraals in the argot—while looking for insurgents and weapons caches.
Operational experience gained in both the Rhodesian and South-West African Wars was a major factor in the war. Experience had proved that the most efficient method of gathering information on insurgent movements was to either deploy observation posts or send in clandestine patrols (usually disguised as insurgents) to reconnoitre an area where information about an enemy presence might have been received from other sources.