by Al Venter
Nellis’ favourite ‘workhorse’ on the helipad at Cockerill, on the outskirts of
One of four Royal Air Force Chinook HC2 helicopters deployed to West Africa at the start of
CHAPTER FIVE
INTO ANGOLA WITH THE GUNSHIPS
Like all things associated with mice and men—conflict included—things don’t always pan out as expected and escalating hostilities along the Angolan border were no different. Launching raids into remote and hostile regions, especially in Angola, presented the South Africans with some peculiar sets of imponderables.
Following the abrupt departure of the Portuguese from Angola in the mid-1970s and the entry of Moscow’s surrogates, Cuba included, into the political and military void that Lisbon left behind, the South Africans decided that because Angola was on the verge of becoming a Soviet client-state, Moscow’s progression needed to be checked.
It was an almost impossible task. Of the three former Portuguese colonies—Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (today Guiné-Bissau)—Angola had, by far, the most strategic importance. It straddled a vital region in the South Atlantic and not long after it became independent and communist, it became a major Soviet naval and aviation staging base. It also emerged as one of Moscow’s most important surrogates on the African continent. The country contains some of the largest natural resources on the African continent, the most important being oil. There are also diamonds, gold, manganese, iron ore, vast quantities of hardwoods, enormous offshore fishing resources and a host of other commodities. Almost overnight this all landed in Moscow’s lap.
Naturally, the Americans were alarmed. With some justification, they feared the same kind of domino scenario that had affected Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. Angola’s northern neighbour, Congo-Brazzaville, was lurching towards radical totalitarianism; Zaire had become ungovernable and was beset with secessionist issues and, further east, both Zambia and Tanzania were flirting with Moscow and Beijing. It was not surprising, therefore, that in the winter of 1975 Pretoria, at the behest of American secretary of state Henry Kissinger, launched Operation Savannah, the biggest invasion task force seen in Africa since the end of World War II1. It was a massive effort and involved several thousand troops, artillery, helicopters, jet fighters and bombers as well as squadrons of Eland armoured cars and a dozen C-130 transport planes. In the end, the South African Army was able to progress northwards, almost to the gates of Luanda.
However, as history has proved, it was too much, too far, too soon with too little preparation. Pretoria simply had no answer for the kind of hardware that Moscow pumped into Angola to stem this advance and it was done on a massive scale. They established the first air bridge across Africa since the Ogaden debacle, some years previously, when Moscow had created an air bridge to supply arms and ammunition to Ethiopia after Somalia had invaded the Addis Ababa’s Ogaden Region, claiming it as part of ‘Greater Somalia’.
The wherewithal that arrived by sea and air included long-range artillery, BM-21 rocket launchers, a range of heavy 12.7mm and 14.5mm machine guns (some of them two- or four-barrelled weapons) BRDM personnel carriers, T-54/55 tanks and a plethora of fighter jets and helicopters. The materiél passed on by the Soviets wasn’t the most advanced in Moscow’s armoury, but it was certainly ahead of anything possessed by Pretoria at the time.
Three additional factors militated powerfully against the South African war effort. The first was allies, or rather, an alarming lack of them: UNITA, it will be recalled, was still a fledgling guerrilla body. The second was Holden Roberto’s Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola or FNLA, chosen willy-nilly for South Africa by the Americans rather than by Pretoria itself.
Although it was the largest military group in Angola that was still outside the Soviet ambit, it carried no clout. Roberto’s ill-trained, badly disciplined army was supposed to have the support of Washington and it got that, but in name only.
Finally, the biggest issue was the number of troops opposing South Africa. By the time Castro had consolidated his forces in this vast West African state, he had at least 50,000 troops on the ground—there are those who maintain that the real figure was closer to 80,000, but we’ll never know the truth. More salient, this was no rag-tag bunch of barefoot illiterates. While not an accomplished military force by Western or South African standards, the Cubans at least knew how to handle the hardware passed on to them by the Russians, whereas the African components of the struggle did not. Many of the aviators who flew Soviet jets sent into Angola were Russian, East German or Cuban.
At the end of the day, there were simply not enough South African troops in Angola to stem this flood. After several months of campaigning and demonstrating the kind of initiative and military panache for which the ‘Boers’—as Pretoria’s detractors would refer to them—became known, they pulled back. They had made the point that it was possible to make gains against a vastly preponderant force, but at heavy cost. Once the South African forces were back behind their own lines, it was a time for the licking of wounds and a comprehensive assessment of the shortcomings of both the army and the air force, taking into account that black nationalist hostilities were creeping inexorably towards the south and the Rhodesians were battling to cope with their own insurrection.
Within months, Pretoria had embarked on the biggest arms modernisation programme yet seen on the continent of Africa. This culminated in the development, in some cases with Israeli expertise, of a range of sophisticated weapons including the introduction of the R4 infantry rifle (a clone of the Galil), an anti-mine troop carrier called the Buffel, a new generation of infantry fighting vehicles like the Ratel and the Casspir (which was actually a South African Police initiative) and the revamping of antiquated British Centurion tanks into sophisticated fighting machines (that included laser sighting devices—also Israeli) called Olifants. This revamped main battle tank eventually proved more than a match for Soviet T-54 and T-62 armour fielded by the Angolan Army.
Also developed were the 155mm G-5 and G-6 artillery series, still among the most advanced weapons of this type. With base-bleed ammunition the G-5 has a range of 42km and over several decades has been marketed in many countries, including Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Many of the mine-proofed vehicles like the Mamba—today deployed in the Middle East, Iraq, several Asian and South American countries and Afghanistan— were originally developed by South African weapons manufacturers.
Not all of it was for foot-sloggers though. Some of the more advanced long-term projects included RSA-2 and RSA-3 medium-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as six atom bombs, ostensibly for arming those projectiles, and concurrently developed.2At that stage South Africa was the ninth nation in the world to successfully build nuclear weapons, and it did so without Israeli help and in half the time it took the Pakistanis to achieve the same results.
There were several test firings of RSA-3 missiles, although most of the details remain classified. What we do know is that missiles from the first two launches across the Indian Ocean, from the Overberg Test Base in the southern Cape near Bredasdorp, travelled almost 1,500km and achieved a Circular Error Probable (in relation to missile strike accuracy) of 275 metres when they splashed down in the sea adjacent to the Prince Edward Islands.
South Africa’s arms development and procurement programmes were so successful that within two decades the nation had become the eighth biggest weapons exporting country in the world. Well into the New Millennium and decades after Border War hostilities had ended, it was still marketing a variety of arms abroad.3
This, then, was the environment into which Neall Ellis and his associates were thrust as the Border War escalated into what finally threatened to become a nuclear showdown between Pretoria and a radical Luanda regime backed by its Eastern Bloc allies. In effect, it was no longer a bush war. With the backing of Havana and Moscow, hostilities escalated to the point where some of the campaigns fringed on conventional warfare, even including tank battles. Warfare in Af
rica had suddenly become more intense and progressively more sophisticated.
Each year, for more than a dozen years, before the pre-Christmas summer rains set in, hostilities in the southern half of Angola would be moved up a notch or three. Luanda would muster its combined ground and air force assets to try to dislodge the UNITA rebel guerrilla leader Dr Jonas Savimbi from his isolated bush-based headquarters at Jamba in the extreme south-east of the country. Tens of thousands of Angolan soldiers, backed by squadrons of MiG and Sukhoi jets, as well as Mi-24 gunships, would stream out of all major Angolan cities and head south. They would take with them as much heavy artillery as the dismal Angolan road system would allow and, more often than not, scores of sophisticated Soviet SAM systems which were effective enough to stop the South African Air Force from making significant gains.
On the ground, Pretoria would vigorously oppose these efforts and every year the Luanda government and its allies would be beaten back. Year after year, almost like clockwork, FAPLA, the huge Angolan Army, would arrive en masse to occupy huge swathes of territory formerly held by UNITA, fight scores of battles and then, as their losses mounted, would be forced to abandon hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated Soviet military equipment as they retreated.
More than once, the Angolans dropped everything (including their rifles and sometimes their uniforms) and ended up leaving behind extremely sensitive hardware. This included a few systems that the West had never before been able to examine, such as the Soviet P-15 ‘Flatface’ early-warning radar and a complete SA-13 missile battery. Codenamed ‘Gopher’ in NATO parlance, it was the first to be seized by a pro-Western government. Most was passed on to the Americans for ‘evaluation’.
By the middle of 1983 Neall Ellis again found himself on the Angolan Border. The war had escalated into the most difficult phase yet as the Soviets had introduced more advanced military aircraft such as the MiG-23.
A UN-imposed arms embargo prevented the South Africans from countering these advances, and they were unable to upgrade their air force, principally because of the government’s racially dictated apartheid policies. Apartheid had made the country into a pariah nation and the South Africans had to be circumspect about operating in Angolan air space. They consequently had no answer to Moscow’s advanced front-envelope airto-air missiles.
Already there had been several major cross-border strikes, including Operation Protea (where $500 million worth of Soviet military equipment was captured), Operation Daisy, Operation Askari and, as we have already seen, Operation Super. Then, in July and August 1983, came Operation Meebos, which was launched during a period of intensive peace negotiations that ultimately came to nothing.4
South African military intelligence sources had indicated that the SWAPO central area headquarters was located in an area known as Evale. This information was fine-tuned and the command centre was eventually pinpointed in the hills just outside Mupa, a few hundred kilometres north of the South-West African border. In order to strike at this base, a South African TAC HQ was established in Ongiva, the biggest town in the region.
While the Portuguese were still around, Ongiva had been a major administrative centre, with moderate-sized office building, banks and shopping centres. The ensuing war had laid waste to it all.
Just then, as Nellis recalls, he was concerned about a new trend that seemed to be developing within the army. This involved the transfer of senior officers, with limited operational experience, from comfortable desk jobs back home to the war front on three-month tours to take command of external operations. As he says, it was an absurd move, like appointing a pilot with only small plane experience to take command of a modern passenger jet. It was also irrational, because the people making these decisions in faraway Pretoria were playing with the lives of many young South African soldiers who were doing their compulsory two-year draft, commonly known as National Service. Nellis comments:
What worried those of us with good combat experience was that these people tended to be rather conventional in their planning. They had no real understanding of the vagaries of modern warfare and their decisions were predictable, both to us and to the enemy.’
The overall commander of the TAC HQ for Operation Meebos was Colonel Pieterse, an officer who had worked his way up through the ranks in anti-aircraft operations. The troops allocated for the operation were two 32 Battalion companies, under the command of Captains Eric Rabie and Tinus van Rensburg, and a company from No. 1 Parachute Battalion, commanded by an old hand in both conventional fighting and counter-insurgency operations, Major Jab Swart.
To ensure that the Luanda government would not intervene after we crossed the border—it was known that there were Angolan FAPLA elements nearby—a Combat Group of 61 Mechanised Brigade, under the command of Commandant Roeland de Vries, was put on standby. Air support took the form of seven Alouettes: six gunships armed with 20mm cannon and a single command-and-control trooper.
For airborne troop transport, there were nine Pumas and a clutch of French-built C-160 and American-supplied C-130 transport aircraft. These could be tasked for airdrops, while the older Dakotas were used solely for resupply. To give the onslaught a bit of muscle, should that be deemed necessary, two squadrons equipped with Mirage fighter aircraft arrived at the Ondangua air base and stayed there for the duration of the campaign.
Operation Meebos’ first attacks were launched in the last week of July, 1983 and continued sporadically for a week. The object was to hunt for isolated groups of SWAPO insurgents and uncover arms caches. A number of minor contacts occurred with the enemy, but their elusive headquarters was never found. Several times 32 Battalion reconnaissance teams would discover enemy camps but, once the main body of South African troops arrived, they would either find a hastily deserted base area, or hear the last of the guerrillas leaving the camp by truck.
Captain Harry Anderson and Major Pete Harvey, both flying gunships, made contact with a small element of SWAPO’s eastern area headquarters and, after a short sharp action, 15 insurgents were killed and two captured, with the majority of fatalities being caused by gunships. The captives said afterwards that they were the last elements in the camp, with orders to clean up and destroy anything that might give the South Africans a lead to their new position.
The period was fraught with numerous frustrations, both for the chopper crews and the men on the ground. The intelligence picture was confused and there was a clear lack of experience with both army and air force staff officers at the TAC HQ. Matters were not helped by the air force restricting the use of helicopters in combat.
As Nellis wryly commented afterwards, orders came through that prior to any attack, each target had to be clandestinely surveyed by furtive squads on the ground for AAA potential. All reconnaissance work was carried out at night and the order proved impossible to implement. It was a rather stupid tactic for a fundamental reason: the moment enemy troops found evidence of reconnaissance teams during their early morning security patrols, the camp would be vacated within an hour. As a result, numerous opportunities were lost because senior commanders would not allow the men on the ground to make the kind of decisions that had always produced good results in the past. Under the new system, attacks came too late to be of any use.
To aggravate issues, the TAC HQ was situated too far from the area of operations. Flying time by gunship from Ongiva to the nearest troops was almost an hour and necessitated a refuelling stop at a mini-HAG before contact could be made. Nellis explains:
If you allowed 15 minutes for a fuel stop, the soonest that any call sign would be likely to get effective fire support would be at least 75 minutes. As a rule of thumb, an insurgent on the run, very much aware that his life was at stake, could easily maintain a rate of 10 or 12kph because those buggers were both fit and strong. By the time helicopter support was overhead the original designated area, they would be miles away.
Finally, a day or two before the campaign was due to end, Captain Willem Rutter, the 32
Battalion reconnaissance commander located the missing SWAPO command post. He’d earlier been deployed in the forward area to establish whether a suspect camp was ‘alive’ or not and first reports were optimistic: enemy manpower was approximately 150 strong, with several anti-aircraft positions that included 23mm and 14.5mm AAAs. Also, the entire base was well dug in, with an elaborate system of trenches and underground bunkers, typical North Vietnamese style.
The basic plan was to drop a full company of airborne troops to the north of the camp from a C-160 Transall, and parachute hour was designated at 05h00 the following morning. While the Parabats moved into position, more soldiers from 32 Battalion would be taken in by Puma helicopters and dropped at first light on three of four sides of the enemy camp. Nellis’ gunships would already be in place for close air support, but only after the AAA threat had been eliminated. Neall Ellis takes up the story:
I was wakened at 04h45 by a C-130 Hercules aircraft flying low overhead on its way to the drop zone. Unable to sleep, I went through to the operations room to monitor the position. Captain Rutter was on the radio requesting that the air drop be held off as his men were experiencing problems in marking the DZ. Apparently, while crossing a river—which was deeper than anticipated— the homing beacon for marking the target area had fallen into the water and had not been recovered. As fate would have it, time doesn’t stand still and when TAC HQ realised what was going on, the transports were circling over the SWAPO camp in search of the DZ. It was already too late to order the plane to move to another position.