EARLY DAYS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN AIR FORCE
Since an early age, Neall Ellis had been interested in all aspects of flying, including reading about aircraft and World War II combat heroes and, of course, talking to the occasional pilot he would encounter while serving in the Rhodesian forces. Had he not queered his own pitch by a series of untimely comments, he might even have tried for the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF).
Having moved to South Africa which, because of historical ties, regarded Rhodesians (as well as other whites from neighbouring territories) as de-facto Southern Africans, it was a lot easier to enlist in the various arms that made up the South African Defence Force (SADF). That included the South African Air Force (SAAF).
I joined the South African Air Force in 1971. Because of my military service in Rhodesia, I was exempted from the usual three months basic course at Swartkops, the air base on the southern outskirts of Pretoria. It was a good thing, as I dreaded being thrust in at the deep end with a bunch of rookies, not that I was much older than most of them.
Instead, since I had volunteered for pilot training, I was shipped off to the Cape to undergo a formative course at the Saldanha Military Academy, a South African version of Sandhurst and West Point. The idea was that I, and a bunch of like-minded recruits, would be prepared for the necessary at the nearby air force base at Langebaan Road.
It wasn’t the happiest of situations to begin with, in part because Afrikaans was the lingua franca throughout and my appreciation of the language was somewhere close to zero. Not that I had anything against Afrikaans, I’d just never had much need to use it before then.
It was an interesting experience nonetheless, but the academics soon bored me, which was why I started playing hockey and made the academy team. The move wasn’t without the usual ulterior motive. Basically, if you played sport you usually got to go to Cape Town on a weekend pass, which made a change from Saldanha which lay 150 dusty kilometres north of the Mother City. During that period I also met my wife Zelda, and we were married two years later in 1973.
My time at the academy was little more than transitional, which was probably just as well. Saldanha was basically a fishing village with few features worth mentioning. The only restaurant in town was beyond the limited resources of us new recruits and when the wind blew in from the fish factories that lined the coast, the entire area stank, sometimes for days at a time. Also, the surrounding ocean, which should have offered some kind of diversion to those of us who might have been off duty, was not only uninviting but could also be dangerous.
Although Saldanha stood on a great natural lagoon—where, through two world wars, Allied ships would gather to form convoys before proceeding north—the ocean was freezing cold almost all year round, in large part because of the icy and sometimes treacherous Agulhas current that sweeps in from the Antarctic.
Most of my colleagues didn’t complain. Our accommodation on ‘The Kop’, a windswept, barren hill, was reasonably comfortable and, anyway, this was the year that the movie MASH appeared on the circuit and, one and all, we were addicted. Like the rebel doctors in the movie, we named our bungalow ‘The Swamp’ and we tried to emulate some of our limited excesses according to what we’d viewed, although the only ‘war’ we had at Saldanha was with our instructors.
Not long after I passed through the military academy at Saldanha, I was ordered to grab my things and head a few miles down the road to Langebaan Road, one of the country’s largest air force bases, where most young pilots were put through their paces. Like a handful of others, I was actually being taught to fly by a host of experienced aviators, some with combat experience in Korea, and a few old timers from World War II.
Almost overnight, I was in my own special kind of heaven. Moreover, it wasn’t just any old plane I was climbing into each time I went aloft. My friends and I were put through our paces in South Africa’s newly acquired Impala jet trainer/fighter, a solid sophisticated machine well suited to the African environment in which it operated.
The Impala was my first aircraft, and I spent so much time in these delightful little jets that I got to appreciate their quirks and foibles very well indeed. They are certainly among the most reliable planes I have ever flown.
Not many people are aware that outside the United States, the ‘Imp’—or more correctly the Italian-designed and built Aermacchi MB-326—remains one of the most successful jet trainers ever built. There were more than 600 of them wheeled out of factories in half a dozen countries including Australia, Brazil and South Africa. Pretoria ordered 165 of them and, except for the first 40, they were all built locally by Atlas Aircraft Corporation, which had its facilities adjacent to the old Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. It is called Denel Aviation today.
The plane’s performance specs—with a lifespan of about 5,000 hours—were awesome. An Imp would take off at maximum load in 800 metres and, in doing so, could clear a 15-metre obstacle at the end of the runway. At light weight, it needed only about half that much runway. Its maximum speed was upwards of 500mph and it could achieve a rate-of-climb rate of 3,000 feet-per-minute. The plane set many category records including one of the very first for a small, single-engine jet fighter/trainer: an altitude record of 56,807ft (17,315m) set in March 1966.
I achieved a great sense of satisfaction in getting on to the training programme and was only made aware much later that I was a member of a pretty exclusive little band of trainee pilots. There had originally been more than 5,000 applicants. Of them, only 250 were chosen for the second selection phase, of whom only half went to the academy and half again—or 60 pupils in total—were accepted for actual pilot training. By the time it was all over, only 27 of our original group got their wings.
Learning to fly jets at Saldanha was never an easy option. Langebaan was exposed to the sea and the winters could sometimes make things a little hairy. With north-west storms constantly roaring in—the region lies in a winter rainfall area—cross winds and down drafts were routine. When the quirks of some of our mentors were added into the equation, things got more complicated still.
My first instructor was Budgie Burgess, an experienced pilot who preferred to shout his orders at you instead of telling you what was required. I just couldn’t take his bellowing and ended up doing the unthinkable for a new recruit: I asked for somebody else to teach me. It says a lot that I wasn’t kicked off the course, which suggested that someone higher up must have spotted a little promise from this Ellis boy.
Burgess was clearly upset, but the order came down that I was to be handed over to another flying instructor and after that, there were no problems. In later years, Budgie and I ended up being good friends. In fact, he was of immense help when I landed in a spot of serious bother in the Congo (Brazzaville) many years later.
Langebaan Air Force Base always promised to be a tough regime for us youngsters, enthusiastic as we no doubt were. But then, as aviators of all generations will tell you, flying is also a great leveller. There was an inordinate amount of pressure on each of us to succeed and our instructors during the 13-month course—from ground school to getting our wings—were demanding as well as tough. They were all professional aviators and totally non-judgemental. Apart from flying, everyday rigmarole at the air base was coupled to a measure of military discipline that would sometimes make newcomers blanche.
Add to this a series of lecture sessions, regular exams, fatigues and being completely base-bound with no weekend passes to get away to Cape Town, all of which made my time there more than challenging. Having said that, always being head of the pack when it came to getting things done, if I did not get a pass to leave the base, I simply went AWOL every weekend and headed for Cape Town and Zelda. Interestingly, I never got caught, although I had my share of close calls. I would almost certainly have been bumped from the course had I been, because others were.
Fortunately, towards the end of the year the instructors relaxed somewhat, which was more than a good thing. I was sneaking down the back stairs of our quarters one evening when Buck Buchanan, my instructor, was heading up them.
He asked: ‘You going to visit Zelda?’
I said: ‘Yes.’
‘Have you got a pass?’
‘No,’ I replied quite brazenly.
‘Well, then I don’t think I’ve seen you, have I? Have a good time!’
For all that, I wasn’t the best student in our class. In terms of reference (I discovered much later) my overall performance was rated as mediocre. However, my instructors were aware that while I might have occasionally struggled with maths and physics, I appeared to adapt almost naturally once I was strapped into a jet trainer and prepared for take-off.
Then, as I was to learn rather dramatically, it wasn’t only pupil pilots who made mistakes. There were times when the instructors would blunder, and more than once there were lives lost, once almost my own. This was one of about four occasions in my life when I’ve felt this really could be the end. When it happens, as I know from my own experiences and those of others who have survived a critical moment, you just accept it. Not that you don’t keep trying, of course, right on up to the last moment …
That incident took place during a routine training exercise one August winter morning. We’d taken off in an Impala from Langebaan Air Force Base and had found ourselves in some fairly heavy cloud. At that point, my instructor came through on the intercom and said he didn’t want to do a controlled let down. Moments later he spotted a gap in the huge bank of cloud somewhere over the Hopefield Bombing Range and decided to spiral down. However, the trouble was that when circling down like that, the aircraft’s speed increases exponentially. Add to that the fact that the radius of the aircraft’s turn also increases and we found ourselves right back into cloud.
The instructor was on visual when suddenly the Impala inverted. Ideally, he should have rolled it level and gone up again, ending with a controlled approach. Instead, he took the plane down almost vertically, his intention, I imagine, being to complete the last part of a giant loop. By the time we’d dropped below 1,000ft, I told myself to eject. However, by then we were pulling so many Gs that I could barely move my arms to get my hands onto either of the two ejection handles. That was when I also realised that had I actually pulled one of those handles, I would have probably been hurled straight into the ground. I had no option but to stick with the aircraft.
We were well clear of cloud when we finally emerged from the loop and all I could do was hold my breath. We must have cleared the ground at around 100ft, or perhaps it was 50 … we will never know. It was so close that I remember seeing the low scrub bushes only feet below us. My instructor wasted no time in getting our plane back to base and once we’d landed, he was speechless. He just got out of his cockpit and left it to me to switch off. With that he simply walked away. However, he did come back a while later to apologise. Even today, when I see him, he always jokes: ‘Remember that day? I almost got you killed …’ I usually remind him with a smile that we both almost pretty well caught it on that flight.
During the latter stages of our training we learnt the fundamentals of night flying, something that I’ve always regarded as a unique experience. This training was to stand me in good stead many years later in Sierra Leone when I had to go up on my own and, literally, drive the rebels from the gates of Freetown. More to the point, in Sierra Leone, while flying the Air Wing Hind—which was used to halt the rebel advance—I initially did so without night vision goggles (NVGs).
I recall the many times I flew over the South Cape, the rolling South Atlantic Ocean on one side and rows of hills on the other, often on pitch black, no-moon nights at something like 32,000ft. I always experienced an incredible loneliness. Most times when we went up in the dark there was nobody manning the radio back at base. However, the stars, quite brilliant and incandescent above our heads, made up for the solitude.
Following the completion of the flying course at Langebaan, in 1972, and the award of our wings, we went on leave. On return, I was posted ‘to the tower’ for air traffic control training, but halfway through was ordered back to Langebaan as a ‘station pilot’ which, in the lingo, is half-a-step ahead of a gofer aviator and a ferry pilot. Basically, my job was to be on round-the-clock standby.
This work wasn’t without its share of experiences, not all of them pleasant. Captain John Wesley and I once had to fly an Impala 1,000 miles from the Cape to Atlas Aviation in Kempton Park. There we picked up another Impala, which had just been serviced, and headed back south. We’d re-fuelled at Bloemfontein, and then suddenly found ourselves caught in a massive storm between Kimberley and Upington, which lies on the Orange River.
We were flying at about 37 000ft and we picked up comms from a nearby Learjet at 45,000ft, which reported that it was only just above the weather. Meanwhile, we were getting thrown around at altitude as if we’d landed in a maelstrom: we ended up with bank angles of up to 60 degrees and severe up and down nose pitching. At one stage, I felt a kind of twitching in my ears, almost as if they were being flicked. It was a peculiar sensation and I thought: ‘What the fuck is this instructor playing at?’ It was as if I was back at school and the science master was flicking my ears with a wax taper when my concentration started to lag. For a few moments I thought he was flicking my ears from the rear seat. Then I thought again. I was wearing a flying helmet so of course he couldn’t flick me. Eventually, I realized that the sensation was from static sparks coming through the radio system, my first experience of St Elmo’s fire. The hues—muted greens and yellows—and the radiance coming off the nose of the aircraft all added to it. It was really quite eerie.
We got out of the storm eventually and after we’d landed at Langebaan, we noticed that our vertical stabiliser had a two centimetre hole burned right into it. There was also something that looked like blobs of solder scattered all over the wingtip tanks where the static charges had been breaking away. Hail had destroyed some of our navigation lights, and there were dents on the wings from these projectiles which, considering our flying speed, must have hit with considerable impact. There were even dents on our nose cone.
The stress limit for an Impala is 7.5Gs (or seven-and-a-half times the force of gravity), but we’d apparently hit almost double that. The plane wasn’t flyable thereafter so they trucked it back to Atlas and basically pulled the aircraft apart for a completely new overhaul. Captain John Wesley, who taught me many of my flying skills in those early days wasn’t all that phased by the experience. A real gentleman aviator, he left the air force soon afterwards, enrolled at university and qualified as an aeronautical engineer.
Still a second lieutenant, Neall Ellis was next posted to Bloemfontein with orders to join 8 Squadron, which flew Harvard T-6s, a World War II vintage prop-driven trainer. With the Border War in the north-west gathering a sudden momentum of its own, Air Force Headquarters in Pretoria needed pilots to be trained for conversion to Impala jets, which could be used in cross-border support strikes into Angola.
The T-6 could be a tricky plane to land. However, when I arrived at my new posting, the first Impala jets had been delivered and I was spared the Harvard conversion. So I just continued flying jets.
Life at 8 Squadron under Major Hans Conradie, our officer commanding, was good. Although keen for ‘Border Ops’—as the counter-insurgency conflict was referred to—only helicopter pilots were then being sent north on Alouette 111s and I didn’t rate. Instead, I trained with a bunch of Citizen Force (CF) pilots, among them a major who’d served in the Korean War.
The unit had a unique set of Standing Orders, one of the most important being that every Thursday night everybody had to be in the pub. Even if you drank only coke, no excuses were accepted. In a peculiar way, that and other quirks under good leadership made for great camaraderie in the squadron. However, with a serious war threatening from Black Africa to the north, the good times couldn’t last.
In 1974, the youthful Neall Ellis was posted back to the Cape and Langebaan Road for an operational training course. Almost overnight, he was introduced to air combat manoeuvring, rocket-fire in combat, aerial bombing, air-to-ground attacks and so on. Because of the war, a new dimension had been created for the air force, which had been considered a ‘peacetime air force’, and the training reflected that.
At heart though, young Ellis was still a schoolboy. During a return visit to the Saldanha Military Academy, he was challenged to climb the ship’s mast on the parade square and place a beer can on the top.
Of course, after I had done the dreaded deed we had a crowd of military police on our tail and we ducked out towards the rear of the establishment. The bottom line is that I drove off, had an accident, and while trying to get my gear out of the car, the police arrived and, as it is phrased in the lingo, I ‘thumped a cop’ for being impertinent.
Not unsurprisingly, Lieutenant Ellis was arrested and, after blood tests to establish his alcohol level, he was taken to the Wynberg Military Hospital in Cape Town to be treated for torn ligaments in his leg which came with the altercation. ‘They put me in an empty ward and then just forgot about me. Next morning I had to hobble out and search for food and some attention.’ Nothing came of the fisticuffs, though. Taken off the course as medically unfit, he went back to Bloemfontein for a couple of months to recuperate, and then went on to finish the course.
There were four of us doing this advanced training, which included a pilot attack instructor’s course, or PAI, as well as operational training. We’d been advised earlier that we had one weekend off a month and for that we’d be given a pair of aircraft. This allowed us to head out Fridays after lunch and report back for duty the following Monday.
But then, towards at the end of the course, they cut the availability of planes to a single machine and, being the junior, the major said that I had to stay in the base. At which point, I suggested that he strongly resembled a part of the female anatomy. That, in brief, terminated my stint in what we had started to refer to as the ‘Junior Space Club’ and instead of heading on to the next phase, where ‘suitable’ pilots would fly sophisticated French-built Mirage supersonic fighters, I was ‘relegated’ to helicopters.
The year was 1975 and Angola was in a state of protracted civil war. Cuban troops had entered Angola in their thousands and Moscow was pushing offensive weapons into the region as if there was no tomorrow. Clearly, I had done myself an enormous favour.
The operational conversion course on helicopters, to which Nellis was assigned, took place at Ysterplaat in Cape Town. The air base had strong World War II link, as many British and Commonwealth airmen had their basic training there. Quite a few of them went on to make names for themselves in the great upheaval then taking place at the far end of the African continent.
The men who were in charge when the still-obstreperous Nellis arrived were among the best aviators in Africa, and included men such as Captain John Church, who ultimately retired from the SAAF with the rank of general. Bloemfontein followed Ysterplaat, where this by-now reasonably experienced helicopter pilot was attached to B Flight, 16 Squadron.
Time spent operating out of the Free State air base involved intensive flight training in the mountains, which meant lengthy spells in the Drakensberg Mountains and advanced training in navigation (of the type that pilots would eventually put into use when they were deployed with their Alouettes in the semi-arid regions of northern South-West Africa), gunnery skills, trooping drills and a lot else besides.
With trooping drills, SAAF choppers followed some of the principles already in operational use in Rhodesia, where that guerrilla war was escalating far too quickly for Ian Smith’s government to be able to adequately cope with it, which was one of the reasons SAAF pilots were sent to help out government forces fighting ‘terrorists’.
South African Alouette helicopters would usually board four soldiers at a time, five at a pinch, which was just beyond the specified weight limitations of the machine as detailed by Aérospatiale, its French manufacturers. Basically, the ‘Enplaning Drill’ for an operation—colloquially termed ‘Fire Force’—was simple. The troops would approach the chopper in echelon from the pilot’s one o’clock position, the ‘stick leader’ having raised his right arm to show that his group was ready to board and having had a ‘thumbs up’ from the pilot. To avoid confusion, the ‘stick leader’ would be the last to board and in the Rhodesian Air Force he would sit facing towards the rear and the rest of his squad, with the MAG gunner to his right. In that war, the troops always had loaded magazines in their weapons and, more often than not, one up the spout. Any additional packs carried by the soldiers would be held in their laps during flight.
In the early days of the war airlifted troops were allowed to retaliate to ground fire while still aloft, but that was soon stopped to prevent their FNFAL spent cartridges ejecting upwards into the chopper’s rotor blades. The MAG, in contrast, ejected downwards, or, in later modifications, the brass was captured in leather pouches attached to the gun.
Neall Ellis was sent to Rhodesia for his first operational bush tour in the winter of 1975. Normally, he would first have spent time in South Africa’s then escalating Border War, adjacent to Angola—usually two months at a stretch—but conditions in Rhodesia’s guerrilla war had deteriorated alarmingly and he was needed as a stop-gap. Seconded to 7 Squadron Rhodesian Air Force, Nellis and his group went into the neighbouring territory as part of what was termed ‘clandestine assistance’.
Prior to departure, the entire flying group was taken to Defence Headquarters in Pretoria and briefed. They were told they could take no South African identification, money or any other documentation which might disclose their origins if they were shot down. Everything had to be left behind, even their uniforms. Instead, each man was issued with Rhodesian money and told to be at Swartkops air force base in civilian clothes at four o’clock the following morning. There, they were loaded into an unmarked DC-3, flown to the Rhodesian base at New Sarum, again briefed, this time by a Rhodesian officer, given Rhodesian uniforms and identity cards and ordered not to speak Afrikaans. ‘But nobody told the poor Afrikaans guys in our group, almost all of whom spoke in broad and unmistakable South African accents … it was actually a bit of a farce’, Nellis recalls.
Within days, the South African newcomers had relocated into rugged bush country to the north of Salisbury and been told to get on with the war. Neall Ellis was put at the controls of a G-car, which was a trooper. The trooper, unlike the gunship, was armed only with a light machine gun and was used to ferry troops into position. It was in this G-car that Neall experienced his first hostile action against what he soon came to accept was a tough and resilient enemy.
Although described today as a low-key struggle, the Rhodesian War could be extremely hairy at times, especially if the enemy was about, which was often enough. Throughout, it was not nearly as intense or as widespread as similar wars then taking place in South-East Asia. Altogether, about 1,500 members of the security forces died during the course of Rhodesian hostilities. Of the 25,000 people of African origin who were killed, roughly two-thirds were insurgents. The rest were civilians, mostly tribal people, caught in the crossfire of a conflict that many of them did not even begin to comprehend.
Air support—so crucial and so often decisive—was provided by the eight squadrons of the Rhodesian Air Force. There were sufficient Hunter ground-attack fighters, Canberra light bombers and Vampire fighter bombers armed with cannon, rockets and locally manufactured blast, shrapnel and napalm bombs to devastate external camps and other targets. To this tally the RhAF defied international arms sanctions imposed by the United Nations (UN) and added light aircraft for liaison, reconnaissance and light attack. Most important, though, was a small squadron of French Alouette helicopters. With time, more would be acquired, including some from Spain, and others loaned to the Salisbury government by South Africa.
The 1978 clandestine acquisition of elderly Agusta-Bell 205s from Israel gave the helicopter forces greater range and load-carrying capability and was to play a vital role in enabling the security forces to cut off and surround guerrilla units on larger bush operations.
In a report on the war, appropriately titled Rhodesia: Tactical Victory, Strategic Defeat1, U.S. Marine Corps Majors Charles M. Lohman and Robert I. MacPherson provided an insight into the country’s aviation assets. The Rhodesian Air Force, they said, was able to call on 25 ground-attack aircraft (nine Hawker Hunter FGA9s, a dozen antiquated but still-effective Vampires and four OV-10 Broncos) as well as 11 T-55s. There were also 19 trainer reconnaissance aircraft (nine BAC Provosts and 18 Cessna-337s) and 30 counter-insurgency/reconnaissance planes (12 Al-60s and 18 Cessna-337s). Transports included a single Be-55 Baron, six BN-2 Islanders and ten DC-3 (C-47s).
Top of the list were the 77 helicopters fielded by the Rhodesian Air Force. These comprised 66 Sud-Aviation SA 316/-318 Alouettes as well as the Bell 205s bought from Israel. Lohman and MacPherson tell us that the air service was composed of approximately 1,300 personnel, which, considering the paucity of numbers and the extent of the war was remarkable. The two officers reported:
Pilot training was unique by American standards, but it followed British traditions. The pilots and crewmembers were trained to become individually proficient in the maintenance of particular parts of the aircraft. If the aircraft experienced a malfunction, the entire crew was able to perform fairly sophisticated levels of maintenance. This system included the incorporation of maintenance technicians as members of helicopter and transport carrier crews.
In 1978 the serviceability of the Rhodesian Air Force was 85 per cent. This is exceptional when 60 per cent is generally considered as ‘good’ throughout the West. This is a greater accomplishment considering the international sanctions levelled against Rhodesia in 1965 and 1970. The majority of its military re-supply was built upon a system of improvisation and invention.
Seminal to the Rhodesian war effort was the Alouette 111, which followed the Mark 11, an early-era combat helicopter that in 1958 set a new world record for rotary craft at more than 36,000ft. The frail look of these choppers was deceptive. Armed with single- or twin-barrelled heavy machine guns poking out the open port door, they could give much more than they got. However, the Alouette did have a chink in its armour, and that was speed. It could maintain a maximum of only 105 knots at sea level and cruise at about 85 knots fully loaded with troops or, in the case of a gunship, loaded to the gunwales with 20mm ammo.
Because of the country’s Central African altitude, Rhodesian Alouettes flew at between 65 and 84 knots, with a range of 210 nautical miles. That meant that on distant operations—into Mozambique or the south-eastern or south-western districts of the country—refuelling was vital.
The mainstay of the helicopter Fire Force attack team was what was referred to as the ‘K-Car’ (Alouette gunship), armed with a 20mm cannon and manned by three crew members. With 600lbs of fuel, it had an endurance of between 75 and 90 minutes. In contrast, the trooper, or ‘G-Car’, with only 400lbs of fuel and a crew of two packing a 7.72mm MAG machine gun, was able to uplift a ‘stick’ of four fully equipped troops. The men were usually dropped straight into a contact, the chopper itself often taking hits from the ensuing firefight.
There was no question that the Alouette 111s were always regarded as excellent combat machines for this kind of low-key counter-insurgency war. Both burnt jet fuel, but in emergencies could operate on diesel or gasoline and paraffin for short bursts. They were also able to absorb astonishing amounts of punishment.
Almost overnight, Neall Ellis found himself in an African environment that was like nothing he had experienced before. Although he had grown up in Rhodesia, the region in which the war was being fought was very different from the Bulawayo area, or even the nearby Matopos Hills.
North-eastern Rhodesia, then and now, was a world of undulating bush and huge granite outcrops, some as tall as skyscrapers. The countryside provided the kind of ground cover that tended to favour insurgents rather than helicopters. Also, it was a war that came in brief, intense spurts and firefights that did not always leave bodies behind
Most of our actions came from sitting perhaps 50ft above ground and looking for targets that were elusive and deadly. The AK-47 was obviously no match for our 20mm cannon, but there were sometimes an awful lot of Kalashnikovs, along with the occasional blast from an RPG-2 or, in later phases, the more ubiquitous RPG-7.
I don’t like to use the phrase ‘adrenaline rush’—I think it’s overused and more than a little facile—but there is no other way to explain the sensation felt when you’re in somebody’s sights and there is green tracer all around you. More to the point, nobody had ever used either me or my machine for target practice before. In short, I’d never come under fire before.
It didn’t take us long to get into the war: only hours, in fact. We’d gone out, following an urgent call from a Rhodesian African Rifles fire force, a mainly black unit with white officers, better known as the RAR.
Once over the combat area, with the gunner and three or four troops in the back, I couldn’t have been more than 10 metres off the ground when there was a sudden rattling in the cockpit, like three or four people banging away at typewriters. I turned my head around towards the engineer—which is actually quite difficult when you’re wearing a flying helmet—to ask him what the hell that noise was. However, the spectre that greeted me was one of sheer terror. All those sitting behind me had their bodies pressed up hard against rear bulkhead as tracer fire came through the door. Tracer fire was whizzing through, right between them and the two soldiers in front with me.
Their eyes weren’t exactly the size of saucers, but I got the message. Volleys of rounds continued coming at us from the bush below. What was astonishing was that the first salvo—probably an entire ammo clip—didn’t hit any one of us. Talk about luck! For me, the experience was sudden, unexpected and, frankly, terrifying. But then when you’re at the controls, flying low with a chopperload of people on board and other gunships in the air in the immediate vicinity, you cannot allow yourself to become distracted.
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.