By the time 47 Brigade was approaching the source of the Lomba the officers on the ground had persuaded the generals of the seriousness of the situation, and they in turn worked on the politicians. Permission was given for a battery of G-5 guns to move into Angola in support of 32 Battalion. The G-5s, which the SADF claim as the finest artillery in the world, have a computer-controlled fire system. They can deliver a variety of 43,5 kilogram shells up to 42 km or as short a distance as three kilometres.
A battle-hardened SADF fighting force, 61 Mechanised Battalion, which had its main headquarters and training base at Oshivelo and Bittersoet in northern Namibia, was alerted to prepare to join in the action.
The SAAF was also given permission to step up its involvement beyond the Puma helicopters. C-130 transport planes began flying logistics into Mavinga at night. It was a very demanding form of flying. The old Portuguese airstrip at Mavinga is of uneven compressed red laterite. The night lighting system consisted of beer cans half filled with paraffin-soaked sand which UNITA soldiers lit at the sound of a whistle from the radio tent during the last minutes of a transport plane’s approach. The moment the plane touched the ground the lights were doused.
A technical improvement UNITA made to the beer can landing lights caused problems at first for the C-130 pilots. Instead of placing the cans on the ground at the edges of the runway, the UNITA men mounted them on hand-held sticks. Often the SADF pilots on their approach would swerve from side to side as they tried to line up for the landing. Unfortunately, as the plane veered, so the UNITA men swerved too, moving with their hand-held landing lights from side to side to line up with the plane. A couple of pilots had to abort their landings in the last few seconds when they realised the landing lights were off centre. After a corrosive exchange of words on the ground between allies, the advanced UNITA system was stabilised to everybody’s satisfaction and the pilots’ nerves were soothed.
Mirage-3 jets were also brought in to fly photo reconnaissance missions, each one escorted by two Mirage F-1CZ all-weather fighters for protection. The Mirage-3s, armed only with high-definition cameras, took off from Grootfontein in Namibia and once over Angola hugged the ground at about 50 m to avoid Fapla Mig-23 fighters and ground-to-air missiles and artillery. As they approached the photographic target area, they pitched up steeply spending as short a time on enemy radar as was necessary to take their photos, and then dived rapidly to the ground again to make their exit. The aerial photos of the brigades helped confirm the immensity of the Fapla thrust.
In an important South African escalation in early September, Pretoria committed to the war Canberra bombers of 12 Squadron, based at Waterkloof, near Pretoria, and Mirage F-1AZ fighter-bombers of 1 Squadron, based at Hoedspruit in the Eastern Transvaal.
The squadrons flew high across Botswana to base themselves at Grootfontein, the SAAF’s biggest airfield in Namibia, 220 km south of the Angolan border.
From Grootfontein the Mirage F-lAZs and the Canberras pounded Fapla’s 47 Brigade almost daily as it came round the source of the Lomba River and began heading east for Mavinga.
Captain Reg van Eeden, a dashing, dark-haired airman in his twenties with a black military moustache and the brisk politeness of air force men everywhere, flew one of the 12 Mirage F-lAZs which came to Grootfontein from Hoedspruit. Like all young pilots early in a war, he was pushing for sorties and was eager to apply against the enemy the special bombing techniques he had learned back home.
Early on, the SAAF high command decided it made no sense to use orthodox bombing methods against an enemy whose modern Soviet aircraft were technologically more advanced than South Africa’s warplanes, or against a wider range of Soviet ground-to-air missiles than even the Israeli Air Force had faced in its sorties into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and beyond the Golan Heights into Syria.
Instead of flying into enemy territory at great height and then diving precipitously beyond the speed of sound to drill bombs into the target, the SAAF did everything the opposite way round.
‘Our motto was: “Low level is survivability,”’ said Reg van Eeden. ‘Once the Army had given us a target grid reference, we would fly in towards it at 540 knots at no more than 30 to 80 m above the ground.
‘Everything was pre-briefed. As soon as we taxied out on to the Grootfontein tarmac we entered complete radio silence. It caused problems. Once there was an SAAF Dakota over Grootfontein running out of fuel at 2,200 metres as we prepared to take off on a sortie.
‘The pilot was frantic with fear because the controllers in the tower were forbidden to break radio silence, so they weren’t replying to him. Eventually one controller could bear it no longer and he sent a straightforward message: “For Christ’s sake, bugger off.” The pilot must have sighted the first of our Mirages streaking at ground level towards Angola, because he held on and eventually got down safely.
‘We had routes planned from all directions towards the target area, although the final run-in, over less than 30 nautical miles (55 km), was very specific. In our pre-flight briefings we would study the navigation features in great depth. The tracks through the bush were totally unreliable: new ones were springing up all the time, and most of the terrain was completely flat. There were no crossroads, towns or railway lines to use in lining up for attack. But the rivers were beautiful navigation features. There was one bend in the Lomba that made the outline of an exquisite woman’s breast – that was a honey and it became known as “David’s tit” after the pilot who first saw its possibilities. The shonas also stood out. After a while we knew the features so well that southeast Angola was like a general flying area.
‘We had recently updated computerised navigation systems aboard the Mirages, but we flew with 1:100,000 hand maps. Every time we were over an identifiable natural feature we fed corrections, usually of the order of about 0.1 to 0.2 kilometres, into the computer.
‘The Army provided us with an IP (initial point) grid reference from where to begin our bombing run. The shorter the distance between the IP and the target, the more accurate our attack would be: the less the distance was than 30 nautical miles, the more effective were our bombs on the ground.
‘In those last minutes in the approach to bomb release, everything started. Almost invariably you’d enter enemy radar range, and as soon as their radar illuminated you the systems in the Mirage would warn you. I used to wet myself with fear. But at the same time it made the adrenalin flow, and on the final run-in to the target I was concentrating so hard on all the different technical procedures and instrument and computer checks that there was no time to be frightened.’
The moment of truth had approached after hundreds of hours spent training day in, day out over the Transvaal in special ‘toss-bombing’ practice attack profiles.
The essence of the toss-bombing technique is to rise up steep and fast from ground level and release the bomb at a specific height during the climb so that it is lobbed on to the target. Given an accurate grid reference for the ground target, the right speed and angle of climb in relation to distance from target can be calculated in order for the bomb to be ‘tossed’ accurately from a distance of seven to eight kilometres.
‘All the data were fed into the computer and updated right up until the last moments,’ said Captain van Eeden. ‘The release cue was given by the systems of the aircraft. There was a moment of relief when you felt the bombs go – it kind of tickled your bum, and you knew immediately if the release mechanisms had worked or not.
‘Then the aim was to get out of the climb quicker than quick and get back to less than 30 m from the ground. Again, there was no time to be scared, but I was always very conscious of what was going on. All the time you had to be looking high for aircraft and low for ground-to-air missiles.
‘The manoeuvre was three-dimensional – rolling, pitching down and accelerating so that if an enemy aircraft got locked on to you during those 45 seconds of vulnerability at height you were moving away from him as fast as possible to the carpet.’
According to Colonel Dick Lord, the SAAF regional commander in Namibia in 1987–88, the F-1AZ pilots often began their return journeys home at speeds of more than 600 knots at less than 15 m above the ground.