Katanga was falling fast. UN armoured cars rolled into Tshombe strongholds across the country. Gendarmes, paracommandos and mercenaries abandoned their positions and fled. Kasongo Nyembo, the once-loyal Baluba chief, contacted Swedish soldiers to arrange his surrender. Tshombe reached out to other African leaders, even unsympathetic ones like Ghana’s Nkrumah, for assistance. They refused. Munongo was in Mokambo with a hard core of ultras and mercenaries, issuing desperate orders for gendarmes to keep fighting.
Kipushi and Kamina fell on 30 December. Muke tried to organise a defence around Jadotville but the town was a whirlpool of lost commands and lost hope. Puren refused to send his T-6s into the sky against the faster Swedish Saabs. Christian Tavernier’s Marsupilami group held off the UN by exploding a truck halfway across the main bridge into town. Then most of Tavernier’s men deserted.
Évariste Kimba ordered Bob Denard to stop the UN advance, giving him command of a sector covering Elisabethville, Jadotville and Kolwezi. But Denard had been in Elisabethville collecting Groupe Bison’s monthly cash payment and was separated from his unit when the UN troops took over. By the time a French friend supplied fake press passes to get through UN checkpoints, Denard’s men were already falling back through the bush.
On 1 January, mercenaries and Indian UN troops fought a vicious gun battle outside Jadotville, leaving four peacekeepers dead. The Indians captured two mercenaries, a Belgian and an American army deserter born in Hungary. Their interrogations brought out talk of confusion, desertions and disgust with the Rhodesian and South African mercenaries who had abandoned them to the UN.
‘Big bug-out artists’, they said of their former comrades.1
Tshombe left Rhodesia and set up his headquarters in a redbrick Kolwezi villa. He contacted the UN for negotiations and authorised National Bank of Katanga staff to talk with Léopoldville about UMHK foreign exchange proceeds. Too little, too late. U Thant told journalists there would be no further negotiations.
The bridge blown by Tavernier had halted the UN on the other side of the River Lufira and U Thant issued orders to hold their position. For a moment it seemed Katanga might still survive. Tshombe ordered Schramme’s Battalion Léopard to make the long journey from Kansimba to reinforce the town, but Indian troops ignored U Thant, claiming their radios were not working, and built giant rafts to transport their vehicles over the river.
Two hundred Belgians protested outside the US embassy in Brussels, blaming Washington for the fighting. They may have been right. Jonathan Dean, US consul in Elisabethville, had urged the peacekeepers to crush the secession.
‘I was advised by our intelligence representative not to do this,’ said Dean, ‘but I felt that it was the right thing under the circumstances that there would be endless troubles if the Katangans were only pushed back a few miles and could continue the war against the United Nations.’2
Jadotville fell to the UN on 3 January. Tavernier’s mercenaries blew the Union Minière control board at the mine, then headed for Kolwezi with Denard, Puren and the rest of Tshombe’s forces. ANC troops and Bulabakat Jeunesse followed the UN, burning villages in the bush.
Even as his empire crumbled, Tshombe thought he could still win with charm and threats. On 8 January, he drove into Elisabethville to negotiate with the UN, the Belgian consul from Salisbury at his side, leaving Kimba and Kibwe in charge at Kolwezi. After a few hours of smiles and conciliatory phrases, Tshombe excused himself and drove across town to a press conference, where he threatened to destroy UNHK’s facilities in Kolwezi if Operation Grand Slam did not halt: ‘We have decided on a scorched-earth policy, we shall apply it thoroughly, and I think that it is not in the interest of ONUC or of Katanga to continue these useless acts of destruction.’3
Then he was smiles and co-operation again with the outraged UN negotiators. Despite the press conference, Tshombe had already changed his mind about scorching the earth, thanks to heavy pressure from British Consul Derek Dodson and Belgian advisors like Dr Joachi Frankiel, former rector of Elisabethville University, and René Clemens, the once-expelled head of the Bureau-Conseil. On 10 January, Tshombe escorted UN troops to Mokambo, where he calmed down Munongo and the ultras around him.
Down in Kolwezi, Denard took Tshombe’s threats seriously. His Groupe Bison blew the bridges into town, wired up the Lufira power plant and the Nzilo dam, which provided 80 per cent of Katanga’s electricity, and planted explosives in every mining facility they could find. Local UMHK big shots were holding a board meeting when Denard’s mercenaries barged into the conference room carrying dynamite and detonators.
‘They went a little pale,’ said Denard.4
Other Groupe Bison mercenaries were skirmishing with the UN outside of town. In the confused front lines a patrol drove their jeep into a pit near Gurkha positions. The peacekeepers thought they were Swedes and helped rescue the jeep until one of Denard’s men spoke French and the bullets started flying. All but one of the patrol escaped, desperate not to be captured by Indian soldiers. Both sides expected the worst of each.
An English-speaking mercenary interviewed by a BBC radio correspondent explained the situation:
If I captured any European UN troops, as they have behaved reasonably honourably throughout the entire conflict I would take them as prisoners and treat them as decently as possible until such time as I can have them repatriated. I certainly wouldn’t like them to fall into Katangese hands. As for Ethiopian, Tunisian and Indian troops, who have behaved like animals out there, quite abominably, I would shoot them out of hand.5
And what treatment did he expect from the UN? ‘From Europeans I would have a hard time, but I would probably live. From the coloured troops I would be tortured and shot very quickly.’
On 12 January, Tshombe returned to Kolwezi, where he discovered that UMHK had abandoned the secession. Company representatives had done a deal on taxes with Léopoldville but begged Tshombe to keep it quiet so as not to provoke the mercenaries, who still had their hands on the detonators. In Kolwezi’s streets UMHK officials, pale and worried, told anyone who would listen that blowing the dam would cause a natural disaster. Outside of town, the mining men had tea with Brigadier Reginald Noronha, planning the best way to hand over Kolwezi without damage.
Most of the 140 mercenaries still in Kolwezi cared only about their wages. They lived separately from the gendarmes, preferring to spend their time in bars rather than on patrol. The 2,000 Katangese soldiers they once commanded lived in requisitioned school buildings, looted whatever they wanted and only reluctantly obeyed orders. Refugees swarmed the town. No one listened to Muke as he drove around trying to organise resistance. Journalists’ press passes were useless.
‘Passes won’t do you any good,’ said a white mercenary calling himself ‘Jean Marie’. ‘We are armed and we have trouble looking after ourselves.’6
The mercenaries were divided, Belgians distrusting French and Rhodesians distrusting Belgians, although they all admired ‘Madame Yvette’, the blonde Belgian wife of a mercenary who wore make-up and camouflage as she drove her ambulance. Rumours that Denard and his French friends had extorted 200 million francs from UMHK not to blow the dam curdled the atmosphere further.
In a flat near the Hôtel Bon Auberge, Jerry Puren proposed to his girlfriend Julia, then went back to interrogating Jean Zumbach’s friends. He was working on a report about embezzlement: the Pole was rumoured to be in South Africa selling Katangese aeroplanes to cover his expenses.
Shinkolobwe, home to a long-dead uranium mine, fell to the UN. On 14 January, Indian UN troops found the single remaining bridge into Kolwezi and crossed it after a firefight with gendarmes and mercenaries. Their armoured cars halted at the city limits to wait for orders.
Tshombe contacted the UN in Elisabethville and officially ended the secession. Munongo angrily left Kolwezi for Rhodesia, promising to carry on a guerrilla war. He returned a few days later. Even he could see the night falling on Msiri’s empire.
In the late afternoon of 17 January, Tshombe and Munongo were back in Elisabethville negotiating surrender terms with the UN. There would be an amnesty: gendarmes were not to be treated as prisoners of war, mercenaries were not to be prosecuted. Adoula and the UN agreed to the first two points.
Schramme’s Battalion Léopard, packed into eighty lorries, twenty-four jeeps, eight vans and an ambulance, did not reach Jadotville before the UN took the town. He heard the news from pilot Jacques Demoulin.
‘The UN broke the ceasefire and attacked Jadotville,’ said Demoulin. ‘The “volos” [volunteers, i.e. mercenaries] have retreated in disorder. It’s all going to hell.’7
‘What do you think?’
‘We’re lost. Good luck, Schramme.’
The Léopards headed south through Pweto, Mitwaba, trying to connect with someone. The radio was silent. Nothing from Elisabethville. A Katangese jeep collided with Schramme’s car on a narrow jungle road. Schramme, aching and injured from the crash, kept trying to make contact. Nothing at Bunkeya. The civilians seemed demoralised.
It rained constantly, the roads turned to mud. It took ten days to drive 25 miles. In Lubudi, sad-eyed civilians wished them luck. Near Bukama, they passed Camp Mariel, where Schramme had started his Katangese adventure as an instructor. The battalion arrived in Kolwezi on 19 January.
‘Where did you come from?’ asked a tense Denard. ‘We’ve been waiting for you for days and days.’8
‘For days and days I’ve been expecting you on the radio,’ said Schramme. ‘Why were you silent?’
All senior mercenaries and gendarmes in Kolwezi were summoned to a meeting at Tshombe’s villa. Over the last few days the Katangese president had been driving back and forth between Kolwezi and Elisabethville, convincing the UN that he would surrender, the mercenaries that they would get their back pay, and Katangese true believers that he would carry on the fight from over the border in Angola. Senior UN man George Sherry thought Tshombe seemed ‘a tired and sad man’, although he beamed his usual face-splitting grin for every camera.9 In a crowded room at his villa, Tshombe announced that Katanga was finished.
‘How many days at maximum can we hold?’ he asked Schramme.
‘No more than ten, Mister President.’10
Tshombe announced that the Katangese armed forces would pull back over the border into Angola. He and his Cabinet would stay. Schramme got a promotion: he would be in charge of the army in exile. Puren had to fly out what was left of the Katangese Air Force, along with supplies, fuel, weapons and the treasury. Denard interrupted.
‘Mister President, we can’t just be thrown out of Katanga without showing our real displeasure. We must do something.’
‘Like?’
‘Like blowing up the hydroelectric plant at Nzilo.’
Tshombe thought about UMHK and money and his future.
‘That would be criminally irresponsible,’ he said.11
Gendarmes, stripped to the waist in the sun, rolled barrels of fuel into aircraft, loaded boxes of weapons, crates of supplies. Other equipment left for the Angolan border by train. Belgian farmers shot their livestock. Tshombe’s men sealed the Katangese cash reserves into wooden crates and flew them to Angola. The president’s luxury DC-3, bought from a Puerto Rican millionaire and his French cabaret singer wife in August 1962, transported Katangese soldiers into Angolan exile. The Belgian pilot tried to sell it to cover his unpaid wages but Portuguese secret police got their hands on the plane first.
Rhodesian spies helped smuggle Katanga’s gold reserves over the border. Kibwe had invested heavily in gold during the secession as a hedge against Katanga’s foreign accounts being frozen.
Mercenaries, gendarmes and paracommandos prepared to leave for Dilolo by train and plane. Mortars and machine gun fire could be heard from the outskirts of Kolwezi as UN troops mopped up gendarmes in nearby villages and towns.
‘I can tell you,’ said Swede Tommy Nilsson, ‘most of them were happy to go back to a civilian life with their wives and children. On one occasion, we disarmed 1,500 gendarmes, paid their salary and said goodbye to them. Not one single shot was fired – good for all of us.’12
Tshombe radioed the garrison at Baudouinville, still holding out against UN and ANC troops, and ordered them to surrender. Indonesian paratroopers rode the barge into Baudouinville at daybreak on Sunday to discover that the gendarmes and most of the population had fled. A pocket of gendarmes under Colonel Makito near Kongolo, east of the River Lualaba, finally surrendered to Nigerian and Malaysian UN troops.
Discipline broke down in the last days of Kolwezi. Two of Denard’s men tried to steal Puren’s jeep while he took a shower. He chased them down the street, wearing only a towel. One pulled a knife from his boot. Puren was saved by Verloo, the man with whom he had escaped from UN custody back in August 1961, who appeared with a sub-machine gun.
‘Come on Jerry. Nothing personal’, said Denard when he heard. ‘We just need transport.’13
Late on Saturday 20 January, Puren and Julia were married in a white-walled Kolwezi church by a stammering American Methodist priest. The streets were deserted when they walked out. Denard and Schramme had already gone, heading a river of Katangese gendarmes, paracommandos and their families moving towards the Angolan border by train, lorry and jeep. The couple held a celebration in the Hôtel Bon Auberge for the few friends still left in town. At dawn the next day, the Purens left in a Tri-Pacer light aircraft from Kolwezi airstrip.
At 1 p.m., Indian UN armoured cars entered Kolwezi. The locals waved. ‘Jambo, Jambo UN!’ they cried. Welcome, welcome UN.
The UN lost ten men in Operation Grand Slam, mostly Indian. In the chaos of the Katangese retreat no one was counting casualties, although a figure of 276 African dead, most civilians, was floated to journalists.
On 21 January, Tshombe signed an official declaration that the secession had ended. Along with Munongo, Yav, Muke, Kimba and Kibwe, he dined with UN officials in Kolwezi.
‘Atmosphere friendly’, a UN man telegraphed to Léopoldville, ‘but throughout our conversation we felt Tshombe and Cabinet are extremely REPEAT extremely bitter about Europeans in general, Belgians in particular.’14
Munongo publically renounced any further resistance or guerrilla warfare. Tshombe announced that he was prepared to work with Léopoldville to solve the Congo crisis. On Tuesday, Joseph Ileo arrived in Elisabethville to take over the province for the central government and Tshombe returned to the presidential palace to await his fate. UN and Congolese flags flew over Katangese towns.
Since 1960, the UN had lost 135 men in the Congo, including fourteen Irish soldiers (nine of those killed by Baluba at Niemba), thirty-nine Indian, nineteen Swedish and forty-seven Ghanaian soldiers.15 Only around half the total died at the hands of the Katangese. Baluba, the Léopoldville ANC and Gizenga’s men killed the rest. On the other side, perhaps only thirty-two mercenaries were killed in action during the secession. No one counted dead gendarmes, but they must have been in the low thousands. Civilian deaths on all sides amounted to at least 10,000 and were probably much higher.16
In Léopoldville’s boulevard Albert, 600 students chanted ‘Tshombe to the gallows!’17 Others stormed the British embassy as Congolese police sat in their jeeps and laughed. Léopoldville agreed an amnesty for Tshombe and his men. The UN soon discovered that the gendarmes were only prepared to surrender if no ANC men were in the area. Kasa-Vubu gave a speech:
Officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the former Katangese Gendarmerie, in addressing myself particularly to you this evening, I do so on behalf of the entire country, the entire nation, to congratulate you and pay you a tribute for your patriotism because it was thanks to your understanding and to your refusal to use the murderous weapons placed in your hands by foreigners that the secession was ended, without too great a loss of human life or shedding of blood.18
On 25 January, the last of the Katangese armed forces crossed the border into Portuguese Angola. They would return, but to fight for a different cause and against a different enemy.
Katanga had failed as a country.
Information on the secession’s final days comes from UN Document (S/5053/add.15), Puren’s Mercenary Commander, Lunel’s Bob Denard: le roi de fortune, Schramme’s Battalion Léopard, Time magazine and other UN documents.
1 ‘The Congo: The UN Drives Implacably Ahead’, Time, 11 January 1963.
2 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Ambassador Jonathan Dean interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy. Initial interview date: 8 July 1997.
3 UN Document (S/5053/Add.15).
4 Lunel, Bob Denard: le roi de fortune, p. 199.
5 UN Document (ONUC 66 OPI 1162).
6 ‘Sitting on a Powder Keg’, The Knickerbocker News, January 1963.
7 Schramme, Le Battalion Léopard, p. 121.
8 Schramme, Le Battalion Léopard, p. 125.
9 UN Document (G-166).
10 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 158.
11 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 158.
12 Tommy Nilsson, email 2011.
13 Puren, Mercenary Commander, p. 160.
14 UN Document (Bunche from Gardiner: ELLE0227).
15 Dobbins et al., The UN’s Role in Nation-Building, p. 233.
16 Clarke, The Congo Mercenary, p. 33, n. 50.
17 ‘The Congo: Tshombe’s Twilight’, Time, 25 January 1963.
18 UN Document (G-225).