On Christmas Day 1962, Katangese gendarmes fired at a UN helicopter flying overhead in Elisabethville. They hit something vital and the chopper fell out of the sky near the golf course. The crash killed an Indian second lieutenant called Kang. Gendarmes beat survivors lying in the wreckage.
‘This is the last time,’ said Brigadier Reginald Noronha, an Indian soldier decorated for bravery in the Burma campaign and current UN commander in Katanga. ‘Next time there are going to be fireworks.’1
The Katangese and UN had been skirmishing since the summer. In July, UN jets shot down a DC-3 doing transport work for Tshombe; in September, a UN aeroplane was brought down by ground fire, killing two passengers; a firefight between Katangese and UN troops near Elisabethville the same month left two gendarmes dead; Swedish flyers refused orders to shoot down more Katangese aeroplanes in November but compromised by photographing the pilots, to Zumbach’s discomfort; gendarmes in Elisabethville kidnapped Tunisian soldiers and arrested UN civilian interpreters for alleged embezzlement; mercenaries hijacked trainloads of UN supplies and diverted them to Kolwezi. More roadblocks, more antagonism, more Belgians spitting at the boots of patrolling peacekeepers.
Tommy Nilsson experienced the bitterness first-hand when he arrived back in Katanga with the 18th Battalion Swedish UN after a year at Malmö Police Academy. On an Elisabethville boulevard, he encountered a Belgian man with whom he had shared a friendly beer back in the first months of the secession. Nilsson greeted him and held out his hand.
‘So’, said the Belgian. ‘You came back.’2
Then he turned and walked away.
‘I should like this Christmas 1962,’ Tshombe said in a radio broadcast, ‘to be a Christmas of unity and trust’. He advised the Katangese people to turn their eyes towards the star of hope.3
But there was little unity or trust in Katanga that December. Belgium and Britain were leaning on Tshombe to accept reconciliation, and UMHK already had a man in Léopoldville negotiating tax splits with Adoula. France was getting closer to Mobutu every day. Secretary General U Thant was making plans to cut Katangese rail, post and telephone links with the outside world. The UN chief had to work fast: money was running out and corruption seeping into his 12,000-man operation. An Ethiopian soldier charged with stealing 200 front doors told the court martial he had converted them into crates to ship home loot for superior officers.
In Washington, Kennedy got jumpy when agents reported that Moscow had approached Mobutu. The Soviets offered to invade Katanga within two months if the Congolese strongman broke with America and ditched Adoula, who had become so unpopular that he slept in a paratroop compound to avoid assassination. Mobutu remained loyal but Kennedy had to send a military mission under Lieutenant General Louis W. Truman, second cousin of the former president, to help plan the end of Tshombe’s secession; in response, a mob of Africans and Europeans charged through Elisabethville carrying banners with the slogan ‘No GIs in Katanga!’
The CIA supplied Mobutu with T-6 fighters and six Cuban pilots, all veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion but officially employees of Florida-based Caribbean Aeromarine Co. The pilots decorated their Léopoldville office with signs showing the distance to Miami, counted their $800-a-month salaries and rehearsed attacks on Katangese targets while they waited for the T-6s to be armed with rockets for the real thing.
Through it all, Tshombe continued to believe that Katanga could survive if he bluffed the UN for long enough and held off the 7,000 ANC and Balubakat Jeunesse besieging his enclaves in the north. He played his opponents like a fish on a line, one moment loose, the next tight, never breaking the thread. Munongo encouraged him to keep UMHK obedient with occasional threats of fire and scorched earth.
‘Everything will be destroyed,’ Tshombe said. ‘Everything.’4
But morale was starting to crack. In November, Major Jerry Puren watched two Belgians, red faced with anger under their mahogany tans, drag a mercenary pilot to a tree near the Kolwezi landing strip. They cocked their Uzi sub-machine guns. Colonel Kimwanga stood by.
‘Colonel, please let’s talk this over,’ said Puren. ‘You can’t just shoot this man like that.’
‘Why not?’
The pilot had been in northern Katanga on a mission to take Kimwanga and the mercenaries from Kongolo to M’Bulula. Instead, he flew his aeroplane all the way back to Kolwezi to avoid risking his life on the crumbling front against the ANC. Now he was shaking with fear against a tree.
‘Damn it,’ said Puren, ‘he hasn’t paid his hotel bill.’5
Colonel Kimwanga had a sense of humour. He let the pilot go. But everyone knew the 500 mercenaries in Katanga valued their skins more than the secession. Some had begun to slip over the border, first individuals then small groups, an exodus of rats the surest sign Tshombe’s ship was holed below the waterline. Their departure infected the morale of the Africans they left behind.
When Puren made a supply run to M’Bulula’s grass airstrip in late November, he found the Katangese garrison had pulled out, leaving only a local militia group under Chief Kitengetenge. Puren took command and led them towards the riverbank that formed the front lines. On the way, they ran into a retreating group of Katangese paracommandos.
‘What’s going on here?’ asked Puren.
‘1st Parachute Battalion from Kongolo. We are retiring.’6
The battalion’s white mercenary advisors had vanished and the Katangese refused to man the front lines without them. After a stand-off, Puren let the paracommandos go and directed his men forward. He held the position for four days, watching ANC mortar shells smash the village on the other side of the bank, until paracommando commander Colonel Mbayo shamed his men back into the front line.
The Groupe Mobiles of Schramme, Denard, Antoine and Tavernier remained loyal. They chased the ANC out of their territories and back into the jungle; Zumbach’s pilots flew in ammunition and flew out gendarmes with legs mashed by machine gun fire. But they could not save Kongolo and M’Bulula, which fell to the ANC on 5 December after a five-month siege. Even the ultras in Elisabethville realised that Katanga would not survive without compromise. Tshombe’s Romanian advisor George Theodoru pushed him to hand over half the copper revenues to Léopoldville. The president was defiant.
‘I have 30,000 men in arms,’ Tshombe said.
‘What you have is 30,000 uniforms,’ said Theodoru, ‘but that does not make an army. Do not let it come to a trial of strength.’7
Tshombe agreed to return to negotiations, not understanding that Léopoldville had no trust left. He made concessions but the Congolese government accepted only a few items, and then pressured Adoula into cancelling the agreement within days. The politicians in the capital knew the secession would be resolved using force, not words.
‘No longer a statesman,’ said Belgian Foreign Minister Spaak about Tshombe, ‘but a powerful rebel’.8
On Friday 28 December, fighting began again in Elisabethville. Locals called it ‘L’Affaire Simba’.9 Drunken Katangese gendarmes opened fire on innocent Ethiopian soldiers or drunken Ethiopians climbed the Union Minière slag heap and opened fire on innocent Katangese, depending on the allegiance of the storyteller. The shooting escalated and Elisabethville rocked to the noise of machine guns and mortars. Bullets flew past a Christmas tree standing in Post Office Square.
Electricity, water and telephone communications failed. Residents who had lived through Unokat had already filled baths for drinking water. They watched from their windows as United Nations troops drove into the capital. A journalist asked the UN’s Robert Gardiner why his organisation was not doing the Christian thing and turning the other cheek.
‘The other cheek has been held out long ago,’ said Gardiner.10
Tshombe claimed that his gendarmes were innocent victims of UN aggression. Indian troops took him to the Elisabethville golf course to watch multicoloured Katangese tracer fire slash through the evening dark towards Gurkha positions. When Tshombe tried to leave, Brigadier Noronha physically stopped him and demanded the removal of all Katangese roadblocks in the city. Tshombe agreed to try but escaped to Rhodesia that evening in the back of a black Comet sedan. On the way, he ordered a ceasefire but his own men would not listen to him.
Gendarmes dropped mortar bombs on Ethiopians in the Lido and Gurkhas near the golf course. U Thant authorised the UN to take self-defensive measures. Bullets and shrapnel smashed the windscreens of parked cars. Some Belgian women braved the fighting to queue for bread and meat at the few shops still open. Others stayed in their apartments, huddled under tables with crying children, Christmas decorations still hanging on the walls. Residents of the Hôtel Léopold II slept in corridors, away from the windows. At night, the gunfire sounded like a rainstorm. With no Faulques and few mercenaries in Elisabethville, the resistance was chaotic.
‘They are mad,’ a Red Cross official said about the Katangese. ‘They are killing their own men.’11
Belgian ultras took to the streets and handed out mimeographed leaflets supposedly from Tshombe, which stated: ‘The Katangese people will defend themselves to the death. Everywhere the UN and its troops will be fought as our worst enemy. We shall resist them by every means until the total destruction, as we have announced, of our economic potential.’12
There was hand-to-hand fighting in trenches around the airport. Gendarmes set up mortar positions in the hospital gardens before a vicious firefight cleared them out, bullets smashing windows and hitting patients. Away from the fighting, Ethiopian soldiers shot dead the wife of a UMHK official as they searched her house for beer.
‘This was the last time I wore a Katangese uniform, watching from a foxhole in the backyard of President Tshombe’s palace,’ said Victor Rosez:
They were ready to attack us but finally they didn’t … I think that this was the luckiest day of my life … 120 poorly armed guys against a full UN contingent … However the commanding officer Major Mbajo decided not to surrender … and after a few hours the UN withdrew … The same night I left the presidential palace and went to Ndola with some friends.13
The next morning, Major Jerry Puren discovered that the UN planned to bomb Kolwezi airfield. He and Zumbach had already dispersed some aeroplanes but most remained in their hangars. Puren assembled his pilots, chilly morning mist lying low on the runway.
‘Gentlemen, we have received information that the airfield is to be bombed at dawn. That gives us exactly … one hour forty minutes to clear the decks.’14
He had six T-6s in the air before Swedish Saab jets came screaming in over the runway, shooting up Vampire jets, the remaining T-6s and a DC-3. The Cubans of Caribbean Aeromarine Co. would not be needed: most of Avikat’s combat aeroplanes were destroyed on the ground. Puren jumped into a trench to fire a machine gun at the attackers, knowing it was useless.
‘Perspiration, cordite, grease, frustration, noise and stifling heat: the old story.’15
Zumbach and Gisèle were in Angola with other Avikat aeroplanes at the time of the attack and decided not to return. Puren raged that the Pole had abandoned Katanga. The two men had never liked each other: Puren blamed Zumbach for spending his time in Europe when he should have been flying missions; Zumbach treated the lanky South African as a lackey and got his name wrong the few times they spoke.
Muke ordered Puren to Jadotville at noon. Puren drove past a flow of refugees on buses, bicycles and trucks, their possessions piled high in the back of their vehicles, children and barking dogs sitting on top. Swedish Saab jets buzzed over the refugee columns, sending civilians and soldiers scrambling into the red dirt of roadside ditches.
As he drove, the news came in. Elisabethville had fallen. At least fifty civilians had died in the fighting. UN troops occupied the presidential palace, issued ration cards and demanded Tshombe order a ceasefire. He refused.
‘Everywhere, the UN and its troops will be fought with traps, with poisoned arrows and spears,’ Tshombe said from somewhere in Rhodesia. ‘We will resist by all means, including the total destruction of all our economic potential.’16
U Thant directed his peacekeepers take the rest of the country. He called it Operation Grand Slam.
The story of Katanga’s last months comes from UN Document (S/5053/add.15), Puren’s Mercenary Commander, interviews with Tommy Nilsson and Victor Rosez, Time magazine, and assorted UN and US documents. Leif Hellström’s The Instant Air Force (VDM Verlag Dr. Muller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, 2008) has the full story of the CIA’s Cuban pilots in the Congo.
1 ‘The Congo: Round 3?’, Time, 4 January 1963.
2 Tommy Nilsson, email 2011.
3 UN Document (G-1936).
4 US Document (Department of State 95/01/13 Foreign Relations, 1961–63, vol. XX, Congo Crisis, p. 346).
5 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 145.
6 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 148.
7 Colvin, The Rise and Fall of Moïse Tshombe, p. 128.
8 Mummendey, Beyond the Reach of Reason, p. 85.
9 ‘The Congo: Round 3?’, Time, 4 January 1963.
10 Mummendey, Beyond the Reach of Reason, p. 86.
11 ‘The Congo: Round 3?’, Time, 4 January 1963.
12 UN Document (62-30765).
13 Victor Rosez, email 2012.
14 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 153.
15 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 154.
16 ‘The Congo: Round 3?’, Time (4 January 1963).