Dingo Firestorm

by Ian Pringle

  ‘Cyclone 7, you are clear to lift off, cross runway zero six and route direct destination low level, call leaving the control zone.’ PB replied to Salisbury air-traffic control with a crisp ‘Roger, Cyclone 7 clear lift and cross’.

  PB lifted the collective pitch lever, increasing the rotor pitch, and soon the Alouette eased effortlessly off the ground into a hover. After a few more checks, he edged the cyclic stick forward to achieve forward flight, pulling gently on the collective lever to establish a climb into the prevailing north-easterly breeze. Once at a safe height and speed, PB banked the helicopter left onto a westerly heading, passing near the civilian airport complex.

  Soon they were flying over the southern suburbs and industrial areas of Salisbury, which gave way to the fairly flat but productive commercial farmland of the Mount Hampden area. To the right of track stood Mount Hampden – a koppie that had been the intended location of Fort Salisbury when pioneers first arrived in 1890. They found a better supply of water near another koppie, however, 20 kilometres south-east of Mount Hampden.

  The Alouette continued across farmland rimmed to the west by the Great Dyke, a band of narrow ridges and hills running north–south for about 500 kilometres through Rhodesia. Visible from space, this feature was formed 2.5 billion years ago when molten rock forced its way through the original surface strata, later eroding and leaving behind this unique, dyke-like structure rich in minerals, including chromate, nickel, cobalt, gold, silver and platinum. PB started a gentle climb to crest the top of the Dyke, and descended on the other side.

  ‘That’s Trelawney on the nose; we are spot on track with 13 minutes to run,’ PB said to Sorrell over the intercom. At their two o’clock position, the imposing grain silos of Banket stood out – 20 massive concrete storage bins in a long row. It was late April, and harvesting was in full swing. The bins were being filled, a process that would continue until June.

  Banket is a town at the centre of the Lomagundi area, one of the most fertile farming regions in the world. Enormous quantities of maize, cotton, tobacco and beef were produced there. Much of the produce from Lomagundi, and Rhodesia’s other farming areas, was for export, earning the bulk of the nation’s foreign currency.

  Although he didn’t know it at the time, PB was flying to Sinoia to engage ZANLA insurgents bent on destroying the commercial farming sector in this land of plenty. They would eventually succeed, but it would take them about 40 years to smash the breadbasket and precipitate one of the fastest economic declines in world history.

  Sinoia loomed large as the Alouette crossed the Hunyani River to the south of the town to set up an approach into the Lomagundi Police HQ. After landing in the police station car park, PB began reversing the helicopter starting process, winding the machine down. After the urgent scramble from Salisbury, the apparent lack of urgency in Sinoia seemed a bit odd.

  The officer in charge of Lomagundi District, Police Superintendent John Cannon, met the crew and invited them to join him and his wife for a leisurely lunch. After a pleasant meal, Cannon, a former Lancaster Bomber pilot during World War II and holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross, got down to business and briefed the helicopter crew about the situation.

  An armed group of ZANLA insurgents had botched an attempt to blow up a main-line electricity pylon near Sinoia. Cannon explained that field intelligence revealed that 21 ZANLA insurgents had crossed the Zambezi from Zambia near the border town of Chirundu and split into three groups of seven. Cannon was most anxious to apprehend the group that had tried to blow up the power pylons. He called this group the Armageddon Gang. Cannon was candid with the helicopter crew. ‘I have no idea where to start looking,’ he said. ‘But it seems a good place to start would be at the site of the sabotage attempt.’

  They flew there in the Alouette. The inspection revealed the saboteurs had a poor understanding of explosives and demolition techniques; the damage was only superficial. Other than the evidence at the base of the pylon, there were no obvious signs pointing to where the saboteurs had gone. Cannon assumed they would not be far, so he asked PB to deploy sticks of his regular and reserve police force by helicopter so that they could sweep the area and flush out the gang.

  With Sorrell left on the ground to make room for the rather large police reservists, mostly farmers, PB’s first human deployment nearly ended ignominiously. Although he had been well trained to fly the Alouette safely and accurately, little of PB’s training time had been devoted to landing at maximum weight in a tight landing zone (LZ).

  Landing a lightly laden helicopter is a fairly straightforward process. The pilot slows the machine down, aiming for an upwind landing spot. As the machine gets closer to the spot and the ground, the pilot slows both the forward and downward speeds until both are effectively zero, ideally entering a stable hover a few feet above the spot on the ground. When the machine is heavily loaded, however, a lot more power is required to arrest the descent and hold the hover. If a heavy machine is allowed to descend too fast, the power available is insufficient to stop the descent, and it will bang to the ground – a bad outcome euphemistically known as ‘settling with power’. Once committed to a landing, or, in other words, past the point of no return, all the pilot can do to cushion the impact is pull the last trace of power from the rotors. But there’s one problem: the gearbox can only take so much strain, or torque, after which it will start shearing itself to bits.

  PB was committed to the landing. All he could do was pull collective power past the torque limit of 1.0 and brace himself for the inevitable hard landing. The Alouette landed heavily, its tough undercarriage flexing to absorb much of the shock. The machine seemed to have survived intact, though. That ‘arrival’ – in air force speak, anything other than a gentle touchdown is denied the dignity of the word ‘landing’ – taught PB a poignant lesson. From that day forward, all new helicopter pilots would, as a matter of routine, learn to operate at the extremes of the helicopter’s performance envelope.

  The police swept through the bush but found nothing, not even a trace of the insurgents. With ideas running out, PB and Sorrell flew off to try to spot the gang from the air. They flew low and slow, searching various likely hiding places – a very dangerous way to look for the enemy, as it presented the unarmed helicopter as a big, fat sitting duck. But the air force men knew no better; there was no precedent. Luckily for them, but frustratingly, there seemed to be no trace of the Armageddon Gang. The mood back at the police complex was sombre. The question on everyone’s mind was, how are we going to find these bastards? Then the phone rang.

  The call was from the Police Special Branch (SB), a unit of dedicated detectives, who would be integral to the Bush War. The SB had an undercover agent working within ZANU, and this man happened to be the Armageddon Gang’s main contact in Rhodesia. Even better news was that he was due to meet with the gang the next morning just outside Sinoia. This intelligence simplified things for Cannon. Once the undercover agent had ended his meeting with the insurgents, Cannon’s force of regular and reserve policemen would pounce and engage the enemy in a classic police cordon-and-search operation.

  But as they gave it more thought, Cannon and PB became worried that a vehicle seen tailing the spy’s car might scare off the gang. Always the solutions man, PB had an idea: ‘Sir, may I recommend we use a high-flying helicopter to track the agent’s car all the way from Salisbury? I am certain that a chopper at great height will not upset the contact man or the terrorist group.’ Cannon liked the idea.

  PB called his HQ in Salisbury. He received not only the tailing helicopter, but also three additional Alouettes. PB’s common sense, and his experiences from the previous day, told him that a single helicopter and a bunch of policemen were not enough. They were about to confront a fully armed insurgent group, not a few escaped prisoners.

  Sinoia Police Station was bristling with activity that late April morning in 1966. Police reservists arrived from their farms in their typical gear – short-sleeved shirts, short
s, floppy hats and veldskoens with no socks. Meanwhile, Air Lieutenant Murray Hofmeyer was tailing the undercover agent’s Ford Anglia in his helicopter at 6 000 feet. Once the Anglia passed Banket, three other Alouettes, flown by Squadron Leader John Rogers (officer commanding of 7 Squadron), Gordon Nettleton and Dave Becks, landed there to await a call to move forward.

  Superintendent John Cannon commanded absolute attention as he briefed his force of regular policemen and reservists, the latter now dressed in their dark-blue riot-control uniforms. He told them that a gang of seven insurgents was hiding in the bush across the nearby Hunyani River. The plan was simple: the reservists would be dropped by trucks on two sides of the insurgents in a V-shape and would sweep towards the insurgents, driving them into a stop line at the top of the ‘V’.

  The plan seemed perfect, until Hofmeyer’s call from his 6 000-foot perch interrupted proceedings: ‘The occupants of the vehicle have gone into the bush on the south side, repeat south side, not north, as expected.’ The original plan and briefing were now redundant. Time was running out. But being a sceptic, PB had already worked out alternative deployment plans. The best option was a mirror image of the original plan. However, the snag was that one side of the V-formation could not be reached by road, so PB suggested helicopter deployment.

  Cannon quickly ordered one of the road groups to get over to the sports field on the double. For many it would be their first helicopter flip. By now the three Alouettes from Banket had landed and were ready. Paradoxically, PB, the newest helicopter pilot, was now in charge of the airborne operation, which meant even giving instructions to his boss, Squadron Leader John Rogers. But the pilots were unfazed by this and accepted PB’s leadership.

  Hofmeyer called with the news that the undercover agent and his Anglia were now leaving the area; the Battle of Sinoia was about to begin. The impending confrontation on Thursday 28 April 1966 would mark for ZANU the official beginning of the Second Chimurenga.

  Although 70 years had passed, it was again the British South Africa Police (BSAP) who would respond to the threat. In 1896 the BSAP had been the only military force in Rhodesia; by 1966 there was both an established army and air force. This mattered little to Police Commissioner Frank ‘Slash’ Barfoot, however, who insisted that the insurgents were criminals, and, therefore, ‘this [was] a matter for the police’. He reminded everyone that the BSAP, which was descended directly from Rhodes’s British South Africa Company Police, was, after all, the ‘senior service’.

  Although John Cannon and PB knew that these regular policemen and reservists were not properly trained to fight an armed gang in thick bush, Barfoot remained unmoved. By pure coincidence, however, and without Barfoot’s knowledge, the army did get involved.

  Major Billy Conn, a Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI) officer, and his quartermaster, Sergeant Moore, just happened to be driving through Sinoia en route to Kariba when they popped in to say hello to John Cannon. Seeing all the activity, Conn pulled his Land Rover up next to PB’s helicopter and asked, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ A highly experienced infantry officer, Conn quickly persuaded Cannon to let him join in. His participation would make a difference.

  The operation began as the first helicopter, flown by PB, lifted off to deploy a stick of six excited policemen, soon followed by the other helicopters, with Hofmeyer also joining in. While PB was shuttling additional police reservists into position, he spotted a lone man standing under a tree. Without warning, one of the reservists suddenly opened fire from his seat in the helicopter; fortunately, the bullets missed the whirling rotors. PB was so incensed that he unceremoniously dumped the stick on the first LZ he could see – the bridge over the Hunyani River.

  Shortly afterwards, a member of the gang broke cover and opened fire on PB’s helicopter. The unarmed Alouette could not respond, but, fortunately, Hofmeyer’s helicopter was armed with a crudely mounted infantry machine gun that his technician, George Carmichael, could fire from the left-rear doorway. When a helicopter is moving forward, direct aiming with a conventional sight is useless. What is needed is an offset sight that in fact aims behind the target. Even then, the altitude of the helicopter and its speed have to be taken into account or at least standardised – but such refinements were not to come until later. After many bursts from the helicopter, Carmichael used the position of the dust caused by the bullets striking the ground to adjust his aim and eventually bring down his quarry. Godwin Manyerenyere became the first ZANLA casualty of the war and the air force’s first kill. There were to be many more.

  A major problem soon became apparent: the helicopter radio frequencies were incompatible with the police sets on the ground. At one stage, two police groups were unwittingly converging on each another, and police-on-police fire was imminent. Dave Becks took the initiative by hovering his Alouette close enough to the policemen to enable his technician to use hand signals, thereby preventing a clash. It was a miracle that nobody was shot by friendly fire that day.

  In another incident, a stick of reservists shot and killed a member of the gang, and in their excitement went to inspect the body in a group, breaking one of the most fundamental infantry rules. Observing them from the bush were two insurgents, one about to toss a grenade into their midst. The reservists were unaware of the danger, and, luckily for them, Major Billy Conn shot the grenade thrower just in time. The Russian grenade fell to the ground and exploded, finishing off both the ZANLA men. Without Conn’s intervention, there would certainly have been Rhodesian casualties that day. The police muddled through and, slowly but surely, managed to flush out and eliminate the entire Armageddon Gang.

  The jubilant policemen returned to the HQ complex to celebrate their victory over ZANLA. Although the operation had clearly been a success for the former Lancaster Bomber pilot Superintendent John Cannon and his untried police force, there were many who didn’t see it that way. The army was particularly incensed that it had not been kept in the loop, and the air force castigated Hofmeyer and Carmichael for using far too much ammunition (147 rounds) to bring down one enemy.

  Nevertheless, plenty of useful lessons were learnt. First, good intelligence proved to be vital. Second, the advantage of the helicopter as both a troop carrier and a gunship was demonstrated. Good and compatible communications were also shown to be essential.

  Although none of the participants realised it then or later, this engagement laid the foundation for counter-insurgency operations. Over the next eight years, the concept of heli-borne troops and helicopter gunships would be refined and honed to form the most lethal weapon in the Rhodesian arsenal, and one that would be used on a grand scale in Operation Dingo: the Fireforce.

  5

  New strategy for ZANLA

  After the Battle of Sinoia and further costly encounters with the Rhodesian forces, the mood at the ZANU headquarters was dark. Herbert Chitepo was licking his wounds and pondering the consequences of sending his forces across the Zambezi to certain death. He needed material and political support, especially as the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the host country, Zambia, officially supported Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU.

  Chitepo gambled that if ZANU started the war they would steal a march on ZAPU and sway opinion within the OAU. Therefore, the Armageddon Gang and other insurgent groups had been rushed prematurely into Rhodesia in 1966. The result was the loss of their best-trained men, which seemed in vain, as neither the OAU nor Zambia budged, and they made it clear they wanted a single, unified liberation movement. The Soviet Union, a key backer of liberation movements, supported ZAPU and did not recognise ZANU. The party had a choice – merge with ZAPU or seek help elsewhere.

  ZANU was fortunate because the Chinese government was keen to assist, but there were difficulties. China and the USSR were competing for influence in Africa, and Zambia was wedded to the Soviets, rendering China unwelcome there. ZANU would have to find a host country where China did hold sway. That country was Tanzania.

  Chitepo established a training base in so
uth-west Tanzania at Itumbi, an abandoned farm and gold mine dating from German colonial times. Chitepo simultaneously sent small groups to China for training. The first group went in 1963, led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, who would later become one of the most powerful and feared men in Zimbabwe. The initial training in China focused on teaching the trainer the skills of military instruction. Little time was spent on military strategy.

  But that changed when a group known as the Nanking Eleven returned from China shortly after the Battle of Sinoia in 1966. This group had just completed training at the Nanking Military Academy in Peking, where they were taught the critical elements that contributed to Mao Zedong’s communist victory in China – mass mobilisation, guerrilla warfare, military intelligence and control of the mass media.

  Leading the Nanking Eleven to Peking was a tall and charismatic Shona military instructor by the name of Josiah Tongogara, who grew up on a farm near Selukwe in Rhodesia’s Midlands. In one of those amazing ironies of history, Tongogara’s parents worked for a farmer called John Smith, the father of future prime minister Ian Smith. To earn pocket money, the young Josiah would retrieve tennis balls when Ian played matches on the farm court during his school holidays. Little did Ian Smith suspect that one day this polite ballboy would become his arch-enemy and the prime target of one of the biggest battles of the war: Operation Dingo. The two would not meet again until many years later in 1979, when they faced each other across the negotiating table in Lancaster House in London. Despite the history and animosity, Tongogara never showed any personal hostility to Smith. In fact, he would often embrace Smith as a friend at the start of the day’s negotiations in London, to the intense irritation of Robert Mugabe.

  In 1963 Tongogara joined ZANU and started recruiting young black Rhodesians, mainly from his Karanga clan, for military training. Tongogara also underwent military training in Tanzania before his stint at the academy in Nanking. With his newfound knowledge, Tongogara could see that the tactics employed by Chitepo were wrong: there was no point fighting the enemy entirely on his own terms.