Dingo Firestorm

by Ian Pringle

  It became obvious that if the Portuguese failed to contain FRELIMO in Tete, ZANU and ZAPU would move in, perhaps even threatening Manica Province to the south. This concern led to high-level talks between the two governments and set in train a Rhodesian military involvement in Mozambique that would last for the rest of the war.

  In December 1968, under strict secrecy, four Alouette helicopters of the RhAF led by Norman Walsh landed in the small hamlet of Bene on the Luangua Grande River, just off the main road linking Tete town with Zambia. Bene is very close to Tembue, the site of a ZANLA camp that would be the second target – known as Zulu 2 – during Operation Dingo, nine years later. Peter Petter-Bowyer, flying one of the Alouettes, remembers Bene only for its stench. The camp ‘architect’ had done one thing properly: he put the communal toilet downwind of the camp, but, unfortunately, it was right next to the helicopter LZ.

  ‘The latrine arrangement,’ recalls PB, ‘was one single trench line about 45 metres in length, over which a continuous wooden seat was set with at least 30 holes for users, who were afforded no privacy.’ It was so bad that the Rhodesians arranged daily ‘toilet flights’ in an Alouette to a nearby bald granite dome. The rock is part of the Granitos Castanhos range, which aptly translates as ‘brown granite’. The Portuguese were shocked at the eccentricity of these strange Anglo-Saxon types who used an expensive helicopter to go for a crap.

  Nothing they saw in Bene impressed the Rhodesians much, except for one piece of military kit: a 20-mm light cannon fitted to a Portuguese Alouette helicopter. The reason the cannon attracted such interest was that shooting a moving target from a moving platform with a machine gun is very difficult. But a cannon firing high-explosive shells that explode on impact and deliver shrapnel over a good radius reduces the need for pinpoint accuracy. This weapon was truly impressive, but it would take another four years for Rhodesia to circumvent the arms embargo and acquire the French-made weapon. This cannon turned the Alouette into one of the deadliest air-to-ground weapons of the war.

  The objective of the operation, codenamed Operation Natal, was for the Rhodesians to help the Portuguese reverse FRELIMO’s gains in Tete. An RLI captain, Ron Reid-Daly, who had served with Peter Walls in the Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS) in Malaya and would later command the Selous Scouts, was one of the first infantry officers to work closely with the Portuguese in Tete. The Portuguese army serving in Mozambique were mainly conscripts from Portugal, whereas most of the Rhodesian servicemen were born in Africa and believed their future lay in the continent. Despite cultural differences, well illustrated by the daily toilet trips to the Granitos Castanhos, and very different ways of seeing and doing things, the Rhodesians were determined to make it work.

  And they did. Clandestine Rhodesian military involvement in Mozambique began in 1968. Sometimes the Rhodesians combined with the Portuguese, but often they were on their own. The SAS were the first troops deployed in Mozambique, initially to help the Portuguese track FRELIMO, and later to attack FRELIMO directly.

  The Rhodesians would make life a lot tougher for FRELIMO.

  8

  Tongogara’s Phase 1

  It had taken Josiah Tongogara years to persuade Herbert Chitepo and the ZANU politicians of the need to wage war in three distinct and sequential phases – firstly, politicising the peasants, then engaging in hit-and-run battles to stretch the Rhodesians, before finally moving to conventional battles. The Dare reChimurenga eventually endorsed Tongogara’s plan in 1971, allowing him to begin Phase 1, which involved covertly infiltrating ZANLA insurgents into north-eastern Rhodesia through Mozambique’s Tete Province.

  Before Tongogara could dispatch his men into Tete, he first needed permission from FRELIMO, who were fighting an escalating battle with the Portuguese. FRELIMO had consolidated their position in Tete to the point that they were agreeable to the idea of Rhodesian guerrilla forces using Tete to enter north-eastern Rhodesia.

  Much to Tongogara’s frustration, however, FRELIMO invited its natural ally, ZAPU, to open a new front in the north-east. Meanwhile, the ZAPU war council was paralysed by a rift, with politician James Chikerema on one side, and military leader Jason Moyo on the other. Preoccupied with this power struggle, ZAPU ignored the offer of a new front in Mozambique, a move that would prove to be a massive strategic error. Zimbabwean history might have been very different had ZAPU accepted FRELIMO’s offer.

  Reluctantly, FRELIMO allowed ZANU to use Tete and work with them to gain war experience and learn how to organise the peasant population.

  By late 1971, Tongogara was ready to begin Phase 1. On the night of 4 December 1971, Amon Zindoga and Justin Chauke were the first ZANLA commissars to cross the Rhodesian border in the north-east, near Mukumbura, beating a pathway that thousands would follow in the years to come.

  Politicising large groups of people without attracting the attention of the Rhodesians would be a challenge, but for ZANLA there was a very effective way around this problem – the pungwe.

  For centuries, the pungwe, a gathering of people at night, was a time of spiritual encounter between families and clans, on the one hand, and on the other, it provided contact with the spiritual ancestors, who offer security, guidance, healing and renewal. The pungwe became especially significant during times of strife and hardship.

  Titus Presler, a scholar of Shona customs and culture, writes in his book Transfigured Night: Mission and Culture in Zimbabwe’s Vigil Movement: ‘The pungwe is a flexible but formative ritual phenomenon in Shona life. It is a movement of wilderness nights during which the people engage the major spiritual struggles of their lives, gain victory and so make of the wilderness a garden.’

  The guerrillas exploited the pungwe to great effect, using this age-old ritual as a means to preach the politics of ZANU while promising to restore the ‘wilderness’ of their overcrowded and overgrazed farm plots to a vast ‘garden’ of fertile land taken back from the white people.

  Usually, the pungwe consisted of an all-night vigil of drumming and singing liberation songs, interspersed with breaks for political speeches. The singing and drumming would usually last until first light. By combining spiritual, political and military concerns, ZANU had tapped the mother lode.

  The Rhodesians struggled to come to grips with Tongogara’s strategy, and it would eventually pave the way for a landslide election victory for Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party in 1980. The pungwe would be resurrected in a sinister form, but to great effect, long after the war was over to keep Mugabe in power for decades to come.

  ZANLA copied many of FRELIMO’s politicisation methods, and a number of Portuguese words entered the Shona language, such as povo (the populace/peasants) and parara (go to). Every encounter with peasants started with the chanting of simple slogans extolling the ideals of the struggle and condemning the enemy. The slogans would soon become a greeting ritual. Typically, the guerrilla commander or commissar would chant pamberi nehondo (long live the war of liberation). The peasants would respond pamberi (long live). After a host of pamberi chants, it was time to focus on the enemy: pasi nevatengesi (down with sell-outs).

  Pasi, chanted the peasants.

  Pasi nemabhunu. (Mabhunu is a derogatory word for ‘white people’.)

  Pasi.

  Pasi naSmith.

  Pasi.

  And so the chants would continue, accompanied by clenched fists for emphasis.

  The peasants in the north-eastern border area were descendants of the old kingdoms of the Monomotapa and Rozwi, and shared the same culture and language. To these people, the border between Rhodesia and Mozambique was of little consequence. FRELIMO were able to cross the border into Rhodesia to obtain supplies and avoid detection by the Portuguese. FRELIMO slowly garnered sympathy for their cause among the peasants in Rhodesia. By the time ZANLA arrived in the area years later, they pushed at an open door.

  Building on FRELIMO’s contacts, many of whom were schoolteachers and sympathetic local chiefs and headmen, ZANLA found a receptive au
dience for their propaganda. The FRELIMO support enabled the guerrillas to spread their message quickly and effectively across a sizable area of the north-east. Simultaneously, ZANLA was able to bring large quantities of war materials across the border and cache them in Rhodesia.

  ZANLA named this new war zone the Nehanda Sector, after the spirit medium who was a catalyst in the Mashona Uprising, or First Chimurenga, in 1896. The adjacent sectors east of Nehanda were named Chaminuka, after the most famous Shona spirit, and Takawira, after Leopold Takawira, ZANU’s vice-chairman, who died of diabetes in Salisbury Prison in 1970.

  The Rhodesian CIO soon got a whiff of Tongogara’s new strategy. ‘The lull in the war showed signs of being over in the latter half of 1971,’ recalled Ken Flower. ‘Intelligence reports coming from the northeastern districts indicated a guerilla presence in the border regions and fleeting contact was made with columns of porters passing southwards through the Mazarabani and surrounding areas … More and more frequently the words Chaminuka and Nehanda appeared in reports.’

  The risk was perceived to be low, which gave ZANLA the best part of a year to politicise the peasants. Flower recalled: ‘The guerilla presence and activity were not defined clearly enough for the Security Forces to react militarily.’

  9

  Phase 2: The hit-and-run war begins

  Within a year of the first ZANU commissars beating a path into Rhodesia, ZANU had managed to politicise pockets of peasants across a vast area stretching from Sipolilo in the north-west to Mtoko in the east, a distance of 170 kilometres.

  Making up a large chunk of this area was fertile commercial farmland along the Zambezi escarpment. Here, the Rukowakuona and Mavuradonha mountain ranges rise sharply above the Zambezi Valley, creating ideal conditions for summer rain, essential for growing tobacco and maize. The summer rains also filled the rivers and greened the bush, providing cover for Tongogara’s forces.

  Tongogara told the Dare in November 1972 that it was time to start the war in north-eastern Rhodesia. He chose one of his best commanders to organise the first attack, Soviet-trained Rex Nhongo, who was by now totally converted to the Chinese military way of doing things. Nhongo (real name Solomon Mujuru) slipped into Rhodesia in late November 1972 and blended into the Chiweshe Tribal Trust Land (TTL), ready to strike when the time was right. By that stage, the Chiweshe population had been well politicised by ZANLA, with the blessing of its most senior citizen, Chief Chiweshe.

  The TTL nestled in the centre of the major commercial farming areas of Centenary, Mount Darwin, Bindura and Umvukwes. From this ideal vantage point, Nhongo studied the lay of the land and in particular the commercial farms. Tongogara wanted multiple attacks on farms to take place between Christmas and New Year, when the Rhodesians would be enjoying the holiday and least expect an attack.

  Meanwhile, the Rhodesian SB was gaining ground in the intelligence field. The SB had pieced together information that would confirm the ZANLA presence in the north-eastern border area. Detective Inspector Winston Hart based himself in Bindura, a farming and mining town 70 kilometres north of Salisbury, and kicked off intelligence-gathering operations in the north-east and Tete. It soon became apparent to the SB, by working with the Portuguese military and intelligence services, that FRELIMO had firmly established itself along the Rhodesian border. More alarming was the discovery of ZANLA reconnaissance groups in the same area.

  Detective Section Officer Peter Stanton, who was seconded to help Hart, recalls: ‘One of the most important features of the ZANLA reconnaissance missions was to establish contact with the local Rhodesian border populace and gauge its standing and reception.’

  Stanton soon learnt of a FRELIMO camp at Matimbe, just across the Rhodesian border, and strongly suspected that ZANLA would be there too. The Portuguese, still sceptical about a ZANLA presence in Tete, reluctantly allowed the Rhodesians to recce and then attack the camp. In March 1972, the SAS, under Lieutenant Bert Sachse, attacked Matimbe and killed a number of defenders, but it was impossible to establish whether the dead were from FRELIMO or ZANLA. The SAS brought all the documents they could find for Stanton and his SB colleagues to sift through, but most of them were written in Portuguese or the local border dialect. Nevertheless, Stanton managed to find something: ‘I came across a small note written in English indicating that the “comrades” had arrived. The message was for a local inhabitant in Rhodesia.’

  This was the first documented evidence of a ZANLA presence in the north-east border area. That single note galvanised the intelligencegathering process, which became more intensive. It soon became apparent that ZANLA had already politicised vast numbers of local peasants, yet no hard evidence emerged of a ZANLA presence within Rhodesia. The cat-and-mouse game continued until three black members of the uniformed BSAP arrested three trained ZANLA insurgents in the Kotwa area, 20 kilometres west of Nyamapanda, a town on the border with Mozambique.

  Stanton, described by fellow SB officer Keith Samler as a ‘walking memory with an incredible knack for remembering names, places and circumstances’, interrogated the three and they were soon singing like canaries.

  They told him about a large arms cache north-east of Mtoko. Stanton took one of the captives with him and after much tramping about in the bush, they came to some small koppies on the edge of the Nyangwa mountain range on the border. ‘We found plaited bark and vine straps that had been made to carry weapons of war,’ recalls Stanton.

  The ZANLA captive also spoke about a ZANLA ‘letter box’ in a prominent tree. Stanton found the tree, and copied and replaced the letters before setting up an ambush. In the night, an unknown number of ZANLA walked into the trap and one perished. The next day, a wide search of the area revealed a massive cache of weapons, landmines and ammunition, which Stanton describes as ‘one of the largest arms caches of the war’. As Flight Lieutenant Dick Paxton recalled: ‘I flew heavy loads of war material in my helicopter to Mtoko.’

  Stanton’s efforts led to Operation Tempest, the precursor to Operation Hurricane. News of the setbacks to the ZANLA effort in the far north-east as a result of Tempest reached Nhongo at his secret base near St Albert’s Mission, and he decided he could wait no longer. He quickly chose targets, the first being Altena Farm in the Centenary area, owned by a 37-year-old tobacco farmer, Marc de Borchgrave. Nhongo’s primary objective of the first attacks was to study the reaction of the Rhodesian security forces. He delegated the initial attack to his deputy, who used the nom de guerre Jairos.

  The group of eight left Chiweshe under cover of darkness, marching in the night for 16 kilometres from the sparse TTL to the heavily cropped commercial farmlands of Centenary. Nhongo split from the group to observe the reaction of the Rhodesian forces. The main group arrived at Altena farmstead at midnight, cut the phone wires and laid a Soviet TM-46 landmine in the entrance road. In the early hours of 21 December 1972, Jairos fired the opening rounds of what white Rhodesians would mark as the beginning of the Bush War.

  The attack with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47 automatic weapons was brief. But De Borchgrave, fearing another attack, stole out into the night on foot to get help. For those in the house, the long wait for De Borchgrave’s return became unbearable. Eventually, a house guest spirited the kids into the car and, without turning on the headlights, they fled the farm in the dark, narrowly missing the landmine outside the farm gate. The De Borchgrave family were given refuge on a neighbouring farm, Whistlefield, owned by Archie Dalgleish.

  It was a bad choice: Whistlefield was attacked 48 hours later. This time, the hapless Marc de Borchgrave and his young daughter, Anne, were injured by shrapnel from an RPG that slammed into a window near where they were sleeping. Once again, the insurgents laid a landmine on the road to the farm.

  A massive explosion rocked the early-morning air when a truck carrying the RLI reaction force detonated the TM-46 mine. Corporal Norman Moore, riding on the tailgate, was flung high into the air and fatally wounded.

  The RLI immediately
started looking for spoor so that they could mount a follow-up. However, unlike in previous encounters with ZANLA, the spoor was very difficult to follow, a sure sign that ZANLA had learnt from their earlier setbacks.

  The attacks on Altena and Whistlefield shocked Rhodesians, just as the attacks on the Norton family had shocked the pioneers nearly 80 years earlier at the start of the First Chimurenga. Prime Minister Ian Smith had warned in a radio interview two weeks earlier that ‘if the man in the street could have access to the same information which I and my colleagues have, then I think he would be a lot more worried than he is today’. Despite the warning, the attacks still came as a shock.

  The intelligence services now understood why weapons were being brought into the country via Mukumbura, Mzarabani and as far as the Nyapakwe Mountains further east. And they had also learnt that many young people were leaving north-east Rhodesia to join ZANLA in Mozambique. The threat had indeed been underestimated.

  Stanton’s ultimate boss, Chief Superintendent Mike Edden, would later tell journalist David Martin in an interview: ‘We didn’t expect the ZANLA guerrillas to come through Tete and we didn’t know about ZANU’s new policy. If we had we might have taken FRELIMO and the threat from Tete more seriously.’

  Yet there were other powerful clues of this threat; they were provided by the RhAF. Peter Petter-Bowyer, who by now was commanding No. 4 Squadron, was not one to sit back and enjoy the trappings of the new rank. The new squadron leader got stuck in to developing visual reconnaissance, or recce.

  PB had become adept at studying human and animal pathways from the air, differentiating between what is normal activity and what is not. Flying at 1 500 feet between 10:00 and 15:00, when the sun cast the least shadow and the ground reflected light well, he was able to quickly spot unusual pathway patterns that indicated a temporary guerrilla campsite. These camps would usually be in bush cover and not far from a village, where the guerrillas would obtain food and female company.