Dingo Firestorm

by Ian Pringle

  Samler preferred wounded captives because they were generally easier to ‘turn’, a term used when a guerrilla would willingly switch sides, usually after a short period of acclimatisation. Whenever possible, Samler would move the wounded captives to his Selous Scouts’ ‘fort’, at the end of the airstrip at Rusape:

  Wounded captures would be taken to the medical tent and attended to by a ‘doctor’, actually an army medic with a stethoscope, and given an immediate injection of saline. They loved injections – the instant cure for all ills. I would give the capture a cigarette. His eyeballs would pop out, and you could almost hear him thinking ‘where is the noose and the firing squad?’ If he could eat, a white waiter would appear with the biggest plate of food imaginable and a Coke; questioning would begin a few minutes later. The answers flowed like a torrent.

  Usually, the captured guerrilla would be met by turned comrades, who would accuse him of being a skuze a’ po (Selous Scout). This was a dreadful accusation, implying he was the worst possible type of traitor, and in most cases it motivated the captive to assert his true credentials by revealing as much as he could about his life with ZANLA. This subtle double-crossing worked extremely well.

  Samler tells a story of a brilliant sting operation in his area:

  After a contact near the Mozambique border, a Selous Scout callsign ‘recovered’ a ZANLA cadre who had become detached from his comrades during a contact and was disorientated. He was blindfolded and brought back to the fort at Rusape by truck and put into a tent with no other outside contact. Waiting to meet him in the tent were former ZANLA comrades who had been through the ‘turning’ process and were now members of the Selous Scouts.

  While he was receiving over-the-top medical treatment, I was lighting his cigarette and holding it for him to puff on. I was wearing East German rice-fleck camouflage kit with a Cuban-style military forage cap, as were my colleagues. After the cigarette, Coke and sticky-bun treatment, we debriefed him over four days. The whole time, the ZANLA man believed friendly forces had taken him back to Mozambique.

  The intelligence we obtained had a significant bearing on subsequent contacts with the remainder of his group. It also provided information which assisted in formulating plans to attack terr bases in Mozambique, especially Chimoio.

  When the capture discovered he had been duped, apart from being somewhat shell-shocked, he was thoroughly impressed and his induction into the Selous Scouts had begun.

  It was during this time, in 1976, that Samler started hearing about a major base in Mozambique called Chimoio, sometimes referred to as Vanduzi East or New Farm. Captured political commissars often revealed they had attended Chitepo College at the base. Samler fed this information back to his HQ. There were similar reports coming in from the Repulse (south-east) and Hurricane (north-east) operational areas. All the signs pointed to a large and very important camp in, or near to, the town of Chimoio.

  Peter Stanton was attached to the SAS and worked closely with Major Brian Robinson, the SAS commanding officer, and Captain Scotty McCormack, Robinson’s SAS intelligence officer. Robinson was itching to continue neutralising ZANLA camps in Mozambique, building on his success in Tete Province. ‘Find the camp, quickly’ was Robinson’s simple request.

  McCormack engaged high gear, often accompanying Stanton and other SB officers to interrogate captures, particularly if a link to Chimoio was suspected. The information they were gathering was slowly turning into real int. Now all they needed to do was find this camp.

  Stanton explains how there were three ways to locate the camp: ‘We could take a captured gook with us to show us the camp, but managing the gook in the field has all sorts of risks. Another way would be to send in our own recce team to find the camp, but the chances of being compromised in a heavily populated area were high. The third method is to fly it, take aerial shots.’

  Stanton and McCormack went to meet Bill Buckle of the Joint Services Photographic Interpretation Staff to put in a bid for photographic support, competing with many other requests. McCormack and Stanton told a compelling story, with the result that soon a Canberra jet bomber from No. 5 Squadron was on its way to photograph the area the captives had indicated. When flying very high, a Canberra is virtually invisible to the naked eye and barely audible. Stanton hoped that No. 5 Squadron would hit the jackpot, as they had for the Selous Scouts over Nyadzonia.

  And they did. The Canberra returned with lots of good pictures. When the photographs were developed, they shocked everyone. The camp complex was far bigger than the intelligence had suggested. It was occupied by thousands of personnel.

  The pictures debunked the belief that ZANLA was cohabiting with FRELIMO at their brigade HQ in Chimoio Town. Instead, they revealed the autonomous, integrated complex that Edgar Tekere had started developing 18 months earlier. There were parade grounds, rifle ranges, admin buildings, hospitals, facilities for vehicle servicing and repair, and a host of support structures linked by roads and wellmaintained pathways. There were hundreds of mud-and-thatch huts used for sleeping accommodation and bigger ones used as support infrastructure, which were supplemented by canvas marquees. Defence trenches and anti-aircraft pits criss-crossed the area. It was pretty obvious this was the New Farm or Chimoio that ZANLA captives had been telling SB about.

  The SAS now had high-resolution pictures of the ZANLA nerve centre in Mozambique. This was the largest staging post in Mozambique for trained guerrillas arriving from China, Ethiopia and Tanzania before entering Rhodesia. It was also the main reception centre for new recruits heading the other way for training.

  The astonishing fact was that ZANLA was brazenly running its main HQ barely 70 kilometres from the Rhodesian border. The HQ was fully staffed. Mugabe, Tongogara, Tekere and Nhongo spent much time there. Oppah Muchinguri, who survived the war to become one of Mugabe’s most loyal ministers, was a secretary there. ‘I was a member of the general staff,’ she told the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) in November 2010, ‘where I worked as secretary of the high command. We had several bases at Chimoio – farming, medicine, commissariat, etc. … Chimoio was the headquarters.’

  Chimoio was without any doubt the ZANLA target in Mozambique, and where the most damage could be inflicted on the guerrilla movement. Brian Robinson wasted no time. His first port of call was the office of his good air force friend, Group Captain Norman Walsh.

  Walsh had long seen the big picture, realising early on that simply waiting for ever-increasing numbers of enemy to enter the country was the wrong strategy. As air staff director of operations, Walsh had the ear of the Operations Coordinating Committee (OCC), essentially a high command made up of the commanders of the army, air force and police, and the heads of Internal Affairs and the CIO.

  He argued passionately for the need to attack ZANLA and its supply lines in Mozambique using a two-pronged strategy. This comprised, firstly, slowing the movement of the enemy and disrupting his supply lines by systematically destroying bridges, railways, roads and other infrastructure in Mozambique and Zambia, and, secondly, reducing the enemy numbers able to infiltrate Rhodesia by taking the war to them, by attacking the large external camps.

  Walsh’s plan made perfect strategic sense, yet some senior members of the OCC were dead against external attacks, fearing political backlash and a widening of the war. The choice was stark: attack the enemy in his own backyard or wait for him to come to you. Those opposed to Walsh’s strategy, reinforced by Western and South African political pressure, won the day. His plans were shelved for the time being.

  Walsh was not one to give up, though. When Brian Robinson visited him in November 1976 to show him pictures of the Chimoio complex, the two men got straight down to planning Rhodesia’s largest and most daring air and ground attack of the war.

  ‘Brian Robinson and I had planned several minor operations together in the past,’ recalled Walsh. ‘We worked well together as a planning team.’

  The admiration was mutual. Brian Robinson had immense r
espect for Walsh as an airman and military thinker. He later paid a great tribute to Walsh: ‘I had a fantastic friendship with him, although he outranked me by miles. He would have made an outstanding SAS officer.’

  It was Walsh’s ability to see the bigger picture that made him stand out. Peter Petter-Bowyer describes him as ‘a battle-experienced pilot with outstanding qualities in leadership and bags of common sense’.

  Wing Commander Hugh Slatter, who would later serve as Walsh’s chief of air staff, takes it further:

  He was a true natural leader, and a quiet man of action. He possessed an extraordinary ability to see through the non-essentials and very quickly arrive at the right solution. While serving on the joint planning staff, Norman would have his instinctive solution to the problem almost immediately, whereas the formal process required the preparation of a service paper, which meticulously considered all relevant facts and aspects of the situation, before coming up with a recommended solution, which took anywhere from three to five days of investigation and writing, and never, in my memory, did it come up with a solution different from Norman’s. This almost uncanny ability of his served him well, especially when it came to planning and executing operations.

  18

  Planning Dingo

  ‘No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.’

  – HELMUTH VON MOLTKE, NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENERAL OF THE PRUSSIAN ARMY

  Scotty McCormack was delighted with the photos of New Farm. He chose the best ones and had them enlarged as big as they would go. Then he called in a mapping expert, Captain Jacques du Bois of the Rhodesian Intelligence Corps, who when not in uniform worked for the government mapping department.

  Away from prying eyes in the SAS headquarters, Kabrit, in the Salisbury suburb of Cranborne, Du Bois beavered away with maps, photos, papier mâché, ink and paint to produce a professional, largescale model of the entire ZANLA complex at New Farm, Chimoio.

  During their intelligence gathering for Chimoio, SB told McCormack that they had picked up int about another big base deep inside Tete Province, almost on the Malawian border. ZANLA captives in the Op Hurricane area called it Tembue; this was the main ZANLA base in Tete Province.

  Tembue operated as a staging point for trained guerrillas before they were deployed into the Hurricane area. It also had a specialist training facility and served as a reception point for new recruits. Tembue was far – 185 kilometres – from the Rhodesian border, nearly three times as far as Chimoio. Nevertheless, McCormack ordered and received aerial photos, then asked Du Bois to make a model of Tembue too.

  Now it was time to begin the serious planning. Brian Robinson, the SAS commander, is modest about his role in planning Dingo: ‘I can only take credit for the concept of parachute vertical envelopment. This came about because I realised we would never have sufficient helicopters to go around.’

  Robinson called on his pal, the commanding officer of the Parachute Training School, Squadron Leader Derek de Kock, to work out the finer detail for the mass paradrop. ‘We had learnt that the closest we should drop troops to the target was 1 000 metres,’ recalled De Kock, ‘mainly because the gooks seemed to be able to run 1 000 metres in a minute and would escape.’

  The next challenge was to ensure that the aircraft and paratroopers remained clear of each other. De Kock explained:

  The line-astern formations of the Daks were such that they were staggered slightly vertically and slightly to starboard. The troops were dispatched very slowly, not faster than one man per second, to ensure that each Dak load would cover at least 1 000 metres. Each man out was counted and this was broadcast, so that the pilot of the next Dak in line switched on his green light as the count reached 19.

  Robinson went back to his HQ and continued planning. ‘The SAS style of planning,’ says Robinson, ‘was to develop a plan with the officers. That made them part of the planning from the start. They would take immediate exception to be just given a set of orders. This does not mean that the SAS was a Chinese Parliament which put operational matters to the vote. However, freethinkers had to be given the opportunity of contributing to the plan.’

  Operation Dingo was no different, he explains: ‘The administrative plan was done by my second in command at the time, Mike Graham. All the troop commanders, including Grahame Wilson, assisted him. This was done in minute detail and could serve as a model for any operation of this size in the world.’

  The air effort

  The whole operation depended on the air force: every soldier would go there and back – alive, dead or injured – by air.

  Before the troops arrived, the target had to be softened with a heavy aerial assault, and, vitally, the anti-aircraft sites had to be neutralised to protect the big, slow paratrooper Dakotas and the trooper Alouettes, or G-cars. After the paratroopers had been dropped, the jets would need to provide top cover, which meant remaining above the target ready to strike ground targets to support the troops. Walsh also had to ensure he had at least one fighter jet armed for air-to-air combat in case the Mozambican air force decided to intervene with its Russian-built MiG jet fighters.

  The challenge was that there were only eight serviceable Hawker Hunters in the entire air force and one needed to be on standby. All seven would have to fly to the target at low level to avoid enemy radar, which guzzles fuel in a jet. They needed to be over the target almost simultaneously to achieve surprise and neutralise the anti-aircraft weapons quickly. With fuel and ammunition being the constraining factors, there would be times when there was no Hunter top cover, a dangerous situation.

  Walsh had to devise a plan to ensure there was uninterrupted top cover. He quickly came to the conclusion that the ancient Vampires of No. 2 Squadron would have to be used to fill the gap while the Hunters returned to base to refuel and rearm.

  The de Havilland Vampire, a stubby little jet with a twin tail boom, came into service with the RAF just at the conclusion of World War II. Armed with four 20-mm cannons and rockets, the Vampire packed a punch. But it became dated when better machines, notably the Hawker Hunter, had come into service in the mid-50s, rendering the little jet obsolete. The RAF withdrew it from front-line service in 1955. At the time of Operation Dingo, 22 years later, the Rhodesian Vampires were the only ones still flying combat missions. And they would fill the void perfectly.

  Planning a massive airborne assault requires great detail and accuracy. The only given for the planners was the location of the target. As the crow flies, New Farm was 279 kilometres from New Sarum, Salisbury, from where most of the aircraft would depart. The distance for the Hunters leaving from Thornhill, Gwelo, was 388 kilometres.

  Norman Walsh had to factor in the range of speeds from the slowest to the fastest aircraft. The difference was 340 knots, from the Alouette helicopter averaging 80 knots to the Hawker Hunter barrelling along at 420 knots.

  Using his experience of standard procedures with the squadrons, Walsh worked out the precise strike times, down to the second, and the attack direction. The rest was up to the pilots. ‘All individual squadrons were left to plan their own routes, strike plans and recovery,’ said Walsh.

  This put an enormous burden of responsibility on the squadron leaders. For example, if the Hunters arrived 30 seconds late, they risked shooting down the Canberras and putting the Dakotas at serious risk from anti-aircraft fire. The knock-on effects of getting the timing wrong were huge.

  The same issues of precise timing applied to the helicopters. Their task was to deliver 40 men to the target, which required 10 Alouette helicopters. Another 10 would be in the gunship, or K-car, configuration to complete the target envelopment. And Walsh himself needed a command helicopter, necessitating 21 helicopters in all.

  The biggest challenge would be recovering a total of 184 paratroopers and returning them to Rhodesia, together with their chutes, prisoners, captured weapons, documents and, of course, any injured personnel. The 10 G-cars would have to fly 46 sorties to the target just to retrieve the men,
four at a time. Another 13 sorties were needed to get the parachutes out – with sanctions, nothing was wasted – and probably another 20 sorties for prisoners, documents and weapons. All in all, each G-car would have to do 10 trips to and from the target, assuming no losses. In itself, this was not insurmountable, but the problem was that the extraction phase could only begin once the battle was over, which may well be in the late afternoon, thereby compressing the available time. It was a big task, especially as the RhAF only had 24 serviceable Alouette helicopters at the time.

  Another problem was that the Alouette had a very limited range with a full load, which meant that refuelling staging points would be needed – inside enemy territory. Walsh worked out the details down to each helicopter and plotted the staging points on a map. It would be tight.

  Armed with the impressive models of the target and a well-thought-through ground and air plan, Robinson and Walsh invited the OCC to a briefing at the SAS HQ. The philosophy behind Dingo was a no-brainer: big camps, like this one, full of ZANLA guerrillas ready to pounce on Rhodesia presented a very clear and present danger. Something had to be done.

  Robinson and Walsh outlined their idea. They would surprise the target with a massive air strike and then quickly surround it with paratroopers and helitroopers, a tactic known as vertical envelopment.

  Attacking camps in Mozambique wasn’t a new concept. The SAS had been wreaking havoc in Tete Province for years; the Selous Scouts had destroyed ZANLA’s Nyadzonia camp in Manica Province; and in the south-east, the Scouts, backed up by the RLI and the regular army, had taken on ZANLA in Gaza Province. But an attack on the scale being planned for Chimoio (codenamed Zulu 1) and Tembue (Zulu 2) in some ways resembled an invasion of Mozambique, rather than a series of pre-emptive skirmishes. Nevertheless, Robinson and Walsh hoped the leadership would see beyond the diplomatic hurdles and approve the plan, especially as large numbers of enemy were poised to enter Rhodesia with the imminent summer rains.