Convoy commander
In my first operation after Savate I got to be convoy commander on an operation with Willem Ratte and his Recce Group to the north-west of the Omauni base.
I had to bring extra Buffels out from Rundu to Omauni and had lined the convoy up in the middle of the big Rundu army base with myself positioned in the middle. Never having been a convoy commander before, I thought this was the logical spot to place myself in – besides, I was pretty sure that this is where Field Marshal Rommel would have placed himself. Having completed a radio check with both the lead and the tail-end vehicle, and with Rommel firmly in mind, I barked the command to advance. As the convoy began to rumble out of the base, a shout went up from the rear. Looking back I saw ‘Jan Ops’ had exploded out of the Battalion HQ command bunker and was running wildly towards me shouting … “Leuitnant wag … Leuitnant WAG!” (“Lieutenant wait … Lieutenant WAIT!”) Thinking a great calamity was about to befall us, I barked into the radio, “Convoy … HALT!” (… that Rommel thing again). The entire convoy ground to a halt and with all the vehicle engines idling away, dozens of eyes watched me expectantly.
I looked down from my Buffel at Ops Jan as he drew up alongside me, wide-eyed and out of breath. Raising his voice above the rumble of the big diesels he said, “Lieutenant … your girlfriend phoned to say … (pant, pant) … that your elder brother … (pant, pant) … has just had a baby daughter”, and then put his hands on his knees to get his breath back. Ops Jan used to take all the phone calls coming into the HQ. I never knew what my girlfriend used to say to him when she phoned, but she certainly struck the fear of God into him! He always came running to find me wherever I was and interrupt whatever I was doing, at any time of day or night. Looking at the guys in the Buffel with me I could see wry smiles, smirking at my embarrassment … quietly discarding the Rommel act, I cleared my throat and instructed the convoy to advance again.
Having headed west and got the convoy safely from Rundu to Omauni, we then deployed to the north-west of Omauni. Willem Ratte and a small team went in on foot to recce a suspected gook base. Once it was identified, Willem was to call us in to assault the enemy camp. The cool thing was that travelling in the Buffel meant I didn’t have to carry everything in my Machilla backpack, so I had every luxury I could lay my hands on. As it was July and freezing cold at night, I had two sleeping bags, a sack full of cool drinks, fistfuls of chocolate and another sack full of tinned fruit I had raided from the chefs back at base. I called these ‘Morale Boosters’ and I had great fun handing them out at any opportunity to anyone passing my Buffel.
The operation as a whole was good fun as we tried to use some ex mounted-infantry horses the recce guys had found roaming in the bush. These were to resupply Willem and his recce teams – no giving the game away by sending in the noisy Puma helicopters! Some innovative logistics guy organised high protein hay from a mounted infantry unit off to our west somewhere. Overcharged with their energy boost from the hay, the horses took off like rockets as each guy hit the saddle, disappearing at full gallop into the bush. All but one rider was thrown off. One guy fell off when the horse did a right angle turn to miss a bush; another got swept off his horse by a branch … ! The horses bolted for home with stirrups flapping and so we went back to using helicopters.
The recce guys had also come up with another innovation; they took the seats out of a Buffel, laid sandbags in the floor recess and mounted a captured Russian 14.5mm anti-aircraft gun (it might well have been the one from Savate). It was a great idea in that it gave our convoy some comforting firepower. However, it had a few practical shortcomings. It only fired out of one side of the Buffel and it could only fire two or three rounds at a time. Every burst of fire made the whole back section of the Buffel sway back and forwards like a seesaw. The gunners would sit there with stupid grins on their faces waiting for the swaying action to stop so that they could fire another burst.
There was another recce team out there led by Lieutenant Eric Rabie. He was a small guy with a huge heart. His Machilla was almost bigger than he was … how he carried it without it pulling him backwards I could never work out. He had a great sense of humour and a wonderful laugh, but he was seriously pissed off with me by the time he caught up with the convoy. I had been giving him his instructions over the radio for the first few days, sending him seemingly aimlessly all over the place looking for the gooks. What he didn’t know was that I was simply relaying these orders from Willem Ratte, who was also out in the bush somewhere. When he stormed up to me standing next to the command Buffel, he let me have it … “Who the fuck do you think you are sending me all over the fucking place … etc, etc?!” I took it on the chin, as I thought it would be really lame to try and blame Willem. I left him to work it out for himself, which I am sure he did.
A few days later, Willem and his small team finally identified a spot where they believed the gooks to be operating from. He instructed me to attack the base in a Buffel mounted cavalry charge! Jolly good idea … I was not into these frontal infantry attacks anymore after Savate! Feeling every bit like Rommel again, I stood in the command Buffel with the rest of the vehicles in line abreast formation to my left and right. Choosing my moment, I gave the imperious command to attack.
With two helicopter gunships circling menacingly above, I desperately tried to manage and co-ordinate the attacking Buffels as they thundered through the bush. It soon degenerated into a shambles as our inexperience in ‘armoured attacks’ came to the fore. The Buffels had to swerve around the trees and our nice straight extended line became ragged chaos. I soon gave up trying to keep control and hoped for the best, leaving every Buffel for itself. A few of the Browning machine-guns mounted on the Buffels opened up briefly and the gunships overhead fired a few encouraging bursts, but it didn’t take long for us to discover that no-one was home … it was a ‘lemon’. Maybe this was a good thing as I am sure old ‘Rommel’ would have had one hell of a time trying to co-ordinate his mechanised force should it have developed into a sizable contact. The only casualty from this escapade was a local ‘PB’ (‘Plaaslike Bevolking’, the Afrikaans term for local civilian). At the start of our attack, he had taken fright and was shot when he started running back to his kraal, sadly mistaken for an escaping gook. The guerrilla strategy of the ‘war of the flea’ had worked well for the enemy again as yet another family became irreparably scarred with an enduring hatred of South Africans.