Commandant Robert Hartslief moved 36 km northwest from the UNITA logistics base to the tactical HQ of 1 Recce Commando at the source of the Mianei River. Hartslief ’s own command vehicle at this time was a makeshift affair – a Buffel anti-mine personnel carrier, packed with communications equipment. Hartslief moved through the thick bush and across the grasslands at night, to avoid detection by enemy planes, and he left his MRL battery at the source of the Lomba about 20 km south of his position.
From the Mianei, Hartslief sent out Sergeant Mac Da Trinidada to gather more intelligence about enemy movements.
Da Trinidada set out with his 32 Battalion recce team to locate the brigades precisely: ‘We went north of them so that we could follow in their tracks. Before we left we’d been told there were four tanks with each brigade. But the first time we crossed the tracks of 47 we got a big shock: there were 22 tanks with the brigade, plus a lot of other armoured assault vehicles. I radioed Commandant Hartslief and he didn’t believe it. He said it was not possible.’
Da Trinidada turned to Pierre Franken, a tall, blond, excruciatingly shy Afrikaner artillery major attached to the recce group as a forward observer, and insisted that he speak to the Commandant. Hartslief got the message and prepared to fire the first South African shots in anger.
‘The intelligence appreciation I received was that it was now obvious that a major thrust would be made down the Cuzizi to cross the Lomba well to the west where the river headwaters were not a major obstacle,’ said Hartslief.
On 19 August, 47 Brigade and elements of 59 Brigade assembled in an area of particularly thick bush on slightly raised ground known as Catato about seven kilometres northwest of Hartslief ’s forward HQ. That evening Hartslief moved up his MRL battery from the source of the Lomba to open ground 14 km south of Catato to prepare for a night bombardment.
‘We brought a first ripple of MRLs in on the enemy, and then another, but neither was very accurate,’ said Mac da Trinidada. ‘We must have put down about 200 shells on them, but we probably missed them by about 100 m.’
After that opening failure, Hartslief moved his headquarters and his artillery rapidly south of the Lomba. He knew that the sheer weight of his bombardment would have alerted Fapla to a South African presence and that his tiny force could not confront an enemy armoured brigade. Meanwhile, Mac da Trinidada, his recces and Pierre Franken got on the tail of 47 Brigade. Also with the five men was an Angolan with whom Franken worked closely – Lieutenant Ventura, UNITA’s liaison officer attached to the South African artilleryman.
‘Some of the time, on the first day as they pushed out of the Catato bush, we were as near as 30 m to their troops and vehicles,’ said Da Trinidada. ‘Major Franken was amazed. It was the first time he had seen enemy forces as close as that. There were 1,600 men in the brigade.’
Franken’s memories are of Da Trinidada insisting that they keep not only within visual range of the brigade but that they stay close enough to pick up voices and snatches of enemy conversation and even the barking of dogs, brought by Fapla to warn them of UNITA infiltration units. Da Trinidada moved parallel with 47 Brigade, keeping the enemy force between himself and the river. A big worry was that a mechanised infantry company moving far behind the main convoy as a protection element might move suddenly to engulf the recce group. Franken was grateful for the scattered platoons of UNITA soldiers who were deployed to give early warning to Da Trinidada of any movement of enemy forces from the rear.
The next day 47 Brigade moved due south so exceptionally fast that Da Trinidada and his men were unable to keep up with them.
Sergeant Da Trinidada ordered his team to move southwestwards because he was certain 47 Brigade would eventually turn in that direction to go round the source of the Lomba. But 47 Brigade continued heading south along the west bank of the Cuzizi, and Da Trinidada had to double back to pick up the Brigade: ‘One of the reasons we wanted to beat 47 to the source of the Lomba was to get water. By the time I realised we would need to turn back towards the Cuzizi, we had already marched 28 kilometres that day. We had no water left, and we were very thirsty. We were carrying big and heavy packs – several days of rations, all the ammunition, weapons, everything.’
After its rapid drive south, 47 Brigade assembled on a wide area of higher ground about six kilometres to the northwest of where the Cuzizi flowed into the Lomba.
Unbeknown to the 47th, they had come within range again of 32 Battalion’s MRL battery at its new position south of the Lomba. Franken, worried at one stage that the 47th would assemble so far south that it would be too close for the MRLs which have a minimum firing range of eight kilometres, was determined this time that the SADF artillery barrage would be accurate and inflict damage. He and Da Trinidada worked their way on to the western edge of 47 Brigade’s higher ground by about 6.30 pm, just as the sun was going down.
‘We could see them clearly in their night base, even without binoculars,’ said Da Trinidada. ‘But you need binoculars to pinpoint what is on top of the trucks and where they are keeping their food.’
Using the eight metre rope he always carried, Da Trinidada tried to climb into the crown of a tree for a better view of all the trucks so that he could pass on a precision RV (grid reference bombing target, and sometimes a rendezvous point) to Hartslief ’s artillery. As he climbed, with his Soviet-made AK-47 rifle over his shoulder, a branch snapped loudly and attracted the attention of a small Angolan patrol which moved towards the noise. Da Trinidada slithered down the tree and rapidly organised an ambush. Just as the recce group was about to open fire, Lieutenant Ventura recognised the Angolans as a UNITA reconnaissance group. Da Trinidada shouted at them in Portuguese, and they identified themselves as UNITA.
It was a bad moment. Not only had they nearly shot each other, but if the firing had begun 47 Brigade would have been alerted and the planned artillery barrage would have had to be aborted.
Franken was furious. UNITA groups were not meant to be in the same vicinity without prior notification by radio or other means. He radioed Hartslief urging a tightening up of SADF-UNITA liaison.
That night Franken and Da Trinidada brought down two MRL ripples, each ripple consisting of 192 60-kg fragmentation shells fired from the eight rocket launchers in precisely computerised but apparently random sequence.
The first ripple came in at about midnight on 23–24 August. ‘We got back from our EW (electronic warfare) people, listening in to the enemy radio communications, that the western side of the brigade had been hit, and we made a small correction eastwards in mid-ripple,’ said Franken.
‘There was a bit of chaos there because we could see vehicles burning and two tanks went up. Commandant Hartslief told me that radio intercepts indicated that some of their artillery had been hit.’
The whole of 47 Brigade began dispersing northwards in a broad fan. Its BM-21 ‘Stalin Organs’, of which the SADF’s Valkirie 127 mm MRLs were a much improved development, moved northwest to a small shona – an area of open grassland – and began firing on the SADF artillery position.
‘It was not an accurate attack,’ said Franken. ‘I think their technical and forward OP (observer post) skills were not up to standard. Knowing that, we could take risks even within their artillery range throughout all the months of the campaign.’
Franken brought in another ripple at 5 am on 24 August, and then moved out rapidly with Da Trinidada’s recce team as 47 Brigade sent out big tactical search groups. ‘Moving around in that bush was very difficult because there are very few clear landmarks,’ said Franken. ‘For two days we were completely lost as we moved or hid, and sometimes went between enemy ambushes.’
The recce group, now out of rations, had to make up its mind whether to call in a helicopter to pull it out or to make its own way back to Hartslief ’s tactical HQ. Da Trinidada decided the helicopter option presented too many risks. So he led his team across the headwaters of the Lomba, where the swamps were reasonably narrow, and found a UNITA unit which gave his exhausted men a lift 25 km along the south bank of the Lomba to Hartslief ’s HQ. There food, clean clothes, rest and encouraging news was waiting for them: according to the EW radio intercepts, Fapla was reporting several damaged vehicles and tanks as a result of the second MRL bombardment.
Now the 32 Battalion recce baton was passed to one of Mac da Trinidada’s fellow sergeants, a former French Army marine commando known inevitably as ‘Frenchie’, who has since left the SADF to work as a game ranger.
‘Frenchie’, a diminutive, cheerful man who had fought many battles inside Angola with 32 Battalion, soon got lost as he took his group of Angolan recce ‘buddies’ across the Lomba. First they were stuck in exceptionally heavy swamps at their chosen crossing point, and then for five days Frenchie was unable to trace 47 Brigade which, unknown to him, was heading determinedly west to go round the Lomba source as he manoeuvred eastwards towards the Cuzizi.
47 Brigade’s persistence in advancing, even after Hartslief ’s damaging artillery attack, necessitated a major reassessment of the battlefield situation by SADF commanders in the field.
Various tactics, other than the artillery bombardments, had been tried to unnerve and dissuade 47 Brigade. Hougaard formed a special anti-tank group of about twenty Reconnaissance Commando men who tried to get into the brigade’s defences with jeep-mounted and hand-held weapons to knock out a few tanks. ‘But we couldn’t get close enough because they had infantry moving well in advance of the tanks,’ said Hougaard. ‘At night they dug in well in front of the armour, forming a whole defence laager around it.’
Try as it might, the anti-tank group was unable to manoeuvre into positions where it could fire its 106 mm recoilless guns, RPG-7 anti-tank rockets and Milan anti-tank missiles effectively. SADF officers always turn coy or enigmatic when asked how they managed to acquire the Milans, NATO’s standard advanced anti-tank missile, which is theoretically denied to South Africa under the international arms embargo. The SADF seems to have received virtually unlimited supplies of the weapon.
UNITA was retreating tactically in front of 47 Brigade, hitting the Fapla troops with mortar fire at night and planting mines ahead of them. Hougaard was impressed by UNITA’s grit and optimism: ‘They told us we mustn’t worry. They were going to pull in the 47th far from its logistical support and at the farthest range of Fapla’s warplanes, and then destroy it. It made sense tactically, and we listened to UNITA because there were people in our SADF group who said we must start attacking Fapla seriously north of the Lomba. Colonel Oelschig, working with UNITA, was one of our guys who strongly opposed that idea.
‘But we knew UNITA’s actions were all small stuff. We knew UNITA could never stop those brigades. They didn’t have the weapons capability.’