Commandant Robert Hartslief set up his unit HQ for his new Combat Group Bravo command a few kilometres into the treeline southwest of the confluence of the Gombe with the Lomba. According to the intelligence he was being given, the most likely point at which 21 Brigade would try to cross the Lomba was just to the west of the Gombe confluence. There was no bridge, but UNITA had identified a good fording point: a successful crossing there would put 21 Brigade within 35 km of Mavinga with scarcely a natural obstacle in their path.
However, no immediate crossing was expected. The intelligence forecast was that 21 Brigade would wait for 47 Brigade to forge eastwards, and only then would a bridgehead be established to allow the two brigades to link up for a joint thrust on Mavinga.
Under the SADF’s heavy artillery bombardments, 21 Brigade had ceased to move en masse. Against standard Soviet tactics, it had dispersed into units of battalion strength. Its commander was also sending out small probing teams; these tended to clutter the general intelligence picture, and specialists like Herman Mulder concentrated their attention on the main formations.
21 Brigade, by now some 125 km from its Cuito Cuanavale starting point, was also having logistics problems. 16 Brigade had abandoned all pretensions of acting as an offensive force and was concentrating on assisting 25 Brigade in ferrying logistics to its badly stretched comrades in 21 Brigade.
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Everything suggested the optimal time was some way off for 21 Brigade to attempt to cross the Lomba. So it came as a great surprise to Commandant Hartslief when, late in the afternoon of Wednesday 9 September, UNITA’s 3rd Battalion reported that two 450-men infantry battalions of Fapla’s 21 Brigade had crossed the Lomba on foot to establish a bridgehead.
Hartslief sent a small reconnaissance force to the crossing point at Cariata, a small abandoned African village 16 km to the west of where the SADF was waiting for the Angolan force. The 21 Brigade battalions had set up a foothold base just in the treeline about three kilometres to the south of the Lomba. The UNITA 3rd Battalion had forward foxholes about 500 m from Fapla’s outer trenches.
The reconnaissance force consisted of a troop of four Ratel-90 anti-tank armoured cars and two 120-strong companies of 101 Battalion riflemen in 30 Casspir infantry combat vehicles. Hartslief was still waiting for the arrival of his own Ratel-90 command vehicle fitted with four radios, tape recorders, a map table and air conditioning to cool an interior super-heated by the equipment packed into it.
On the morning of Thursday 10 September, with the 21 Brigade bridgehead still in place, Ferreira ordered Hartslief: ‘Sort them out.’
Hartslief launched his attack with the two companies of 101 Battalion and the four Ratel-90s. Further back, in reserve were eight Ratels under the command of Major Hannes Nortmann of 32 Battalion. Nortmann, a tall, wiry, dreamy-looking man in his late twenties, was a career officer on the verge of establishing a reputation as one of the most formidable armour fighters in the SADF.
At first light on 10 September, shortly after Hartslief had commenced his attack, Nortmann was astonished to spot a TMM mobile bridge across the river about one kilometre to the east of the 21 Brigade positions. As the sun rose higher, Nortmann saw Fapla engineers putting finishing touches to the mobile bridge while infantrymen stood around very casually hands in pockets watching the work.
From his position in the treeline, Nortmann watched the enemy activity at the bridge across a three kilometre-wide stretch of flat, marshy grassland. All the time he was providing a running commentary to Ferreira in the Brigade HQ.
Ferreira ordered Nortmann to hold back. ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ said Ferreira. ‘Let’s see what’s going to happen here. If they come over that open space they will commit suicide.’
Then a BRDM armoured scout car rolled towards the bridge. The moment Nortmann reported the armoured car was on the bridge, Ferreira ordered: ‘Shoot it.’
A South African ZT3 anti-tank missile, making its debut in warfare and fresh off the first production line, sped across the grassland. It destroyed the BRDM, and all the soldiers standing around it were killed. A second ZT3 destroyed the giant Soviet GAZ truck which had been adapted for laying the bridge.
The ZT3s, untested in battle until that day in September 1987 and still on the official secret list to this day, was developed by Armscor in the teeth of the international arms embargo. It has a range of 3,5 km which is claimed by the SADF to be longer than any other modern anti-tank weapon. It has possibly been developed from NATO’s Milan missile with the help of some of the many West European weapons engineers hired to develop the Republic’s fast-growing arms industry.
Nortmann commanded the only four Ratel-90s which at that time had been adapted to fire ZT3 missiles. A special turret had to be built for those Ratel-90s which were converted to Ratel-ZT3s.
After shooting out the BRDM and the GAZ truck, Nortmann was shocked to notice five T-54 tanks already on the south bank of the Lomba and heading westwards to ambush Hartslief ’s force which was embattled with the two 21 Brigade battalions a kilometre away. With his Ratel-ZT3s and four conventional Ratel-90s, Nortmann immediately attacked the tanks, knocking out three of the tanks within minutes while the other two retreated back across the river.
Meanwhile, Hartslief ’s fight with 21 Brigade went on throughout 10 September, with G-5, MRL and 120 mm mortar teams providing artillery support. The ground battle continued into 11 September; one Fapla battalion had virtually been destroyed while the other retreated in disarray to the north of the Lomba River to regroup.
For many days afterwards vehicles and tanks from 21 Brigade kept forming up in the northern treeline and probing to find crossing points across the Lomba. The SADF deterred them with Ratel-90, Ratel-ZT3 and artillery fire.
While this cat and mouse game went on, Ferreira deduced from intelligence reports that one of the main objectives of 21 Brigade’s efforts was to locate and destroy the SADF’s G-5s.
‘The G-5s were giving them a lot of problems, so day-in, day-out they had been trying to locate them with their Migs and Sukhois,’ said Jan Hougaard. ‘But they flew too high and our daytime camouflage was too good.’
The G-5 teams had plenty of warning of the approach of enemy aircraft. Recce commandos hugging the African earth near the runways at Cuito Cuanavale and Menongue immediately reported by radio every time Fapla warplanes took to the sky.
Hougaard said the recces’ early warnings were vital: ‘The G-5s had started shooting during the day. It had become necessary to take the risk as 21, 59 and 47 Brigades continued pushing forward. But it’s not easy to camouflage a whole G-5 battery. It takes a lot of activity because there are a lot of support vehicles, so the alerts in good time by the recces were well appreciated.’
A piece of intelligence that worried Ferreira heavily, however, was that Soviet military advisers had suddenly become very active on Fapla’s artillery fire control radio networks. One Russian voice in particular was clearly directing the whole artillery support plan for 21 Brigade. ‘Even though the bridge and the vehicles had been destroyed, they were still preparing for a big attack,’ said Hougaard. ‘We could hear the Russians talking about how they were going to use a lot of artillery and bring in a lot of airstrikes.’
Deon Ferreira was particularly worried that the Soviets might give Fapla permission to use gas, especially in view of his own forces’ limited ability to combat it.
Then on 22 September, SADF radio engineers picked up a message that Fapla had decided to use gas against the South Africans. ‘I checked the wind direction, and immediately ordered the movement of all SADF forces 15 km eastwards,’ said Ferreira. Hartslief and Nortmann were very upset at what they saw as an unnecessary retreat when they held the advantage over 21 Brigade.
However, soon after the tactical withdrawal had been completed, Fapla launched a massive artillery bombardment on the vacated South African positions. ‘It was the biggest and best co-ordinated attack they carried out in the entire war,’ said Jan Hougaard. ‘Their planes and artillery came in for four hours.’
The SADF picked up radio messages indicating that 21 Brigade believed the South Africans had suffered heavy losses and that the survivors had withdrawn. ‘The Boers have gone,’ reported one Fapla commander. The radio intercepts indicated that 21 Brigade was preparing to move its remaining forces back across the river to the south bank of the Lomba.
Ferreira wanted to move Hartslief ’s Combat Group Bravo back quickly to 21 Brigade’s crossing point to staunch a potential deadly wound in the body of the SADF-UNITA defences. But he was still worried that gas had been used, and, when he sought the locations of the specialised chemical detection teams, he learned that they were too far back to arrive and do their work in time to permit Hartslief to move in quickly enough to stop 21 Brigade consolidating a position on the southern Lomba.
The SADF soldiers who now drew the short straw were 32 Battalion’s own reconnaissance commandos, introduced as a new arm of the unit by Ferreira when he was the Buffalo commander. He chose them to probe the bombed positions and report whether gas had been used.
Two men were taken in a Ratel and then dropped to walk forward into the abandoned SADF trenches, strung out through the treeline for some three kilometres.
Much to their surprise and relief the recces found a small group of UNITA soldiers sitting in the trenches smoking, having survived the whole enemy bombardment. When the astounded commandos asked the UNITA men whether they felt sick or something similar, Jan Hougaard said they replied: ‘No, we’re fine, but that bombing was a big, big, heavy story.’
The UNITA troops said they had watched a Fapla reconnaissance team cross the river and explore the distant western end of the trenches before returning to 21 Brigade.
Word that all was well was sent back quickly by the 32 Battalion recces to Colonel Ferreira, who ordered Combat Group Bravo to return to the crossing without delay.
Hartslief ’s forces were moving back among the abandoned trenches as 21 Brigade formed up on the north bank and started to advance across the Lomba by yet another unsighted mobile bridge.
Hougaard recalled: ‘We couldn’t believe it at HQ as we got the reports from Commandant Hartslief at the front. He said he could see at least two battalions of infantry stretched out single file, with tanks among them, coming across the river.’
Hartslief waited until the infantry were strung out across the anhara flood plain, some three to four kilometres wide, to the south of the river. Then he ordered a bombardment by the G-5s, MRLs and 120 mm mortars, while the ZT3s aimed for the tanks. As the Fapla troops began retreating in fear and panic across the plain, with its alternating patches of firm and marshy ground, Hartslief released the 30 Casspirs of 101 Battalion and the Ratels of 32 Battalion. The 101 Battalion troops poured rifle fire through the portholes of the Casspirs while the 32 Battalion troops sprayed the retreating enemy with 7,6 mm machine-gun and 20 mm high explosive cannon fire.
‘They were running into the marshy areas and trying to hide among the reeds,’ said Jan Hougaard. ‘But our guys were riding behind them and killing them in the water. They were crying and shouting and pleading not to be killed. Most of them were just youngsters and they couldn’t believe what was happening to them.’
Robbie Hartslief went on: ‘They presented fine targets for our machine-guns, mortars and artillery. The G-5s destroyed the mobile bridge. Our machine-guns mowed down their infantry as they fled into the mud and struggled.’
At the end of the short encounter, the South Africans quickly counted more than 300 dead on the battlefield from 21 Brigade, but estimated the enemy’s total losses in all the September encounters at 400 to 600 dead. The SADF had suffered only one man slightly wounded from shrapnel.
21 Brigade, although partly emasculated, continued to make desultory efforts to cross at the same point, but were easily repulsed by Battle Group Bravo. Ferreira, well-acquainted with the inflexibility of Soviet military doctrine, nevertheless marvelled at the futility of the exercise: ‘It is unbelievable that a tenet can be so rigid that it can force people to commit suicide all the time.’
It was only when the battle was over that Hartslief at last took delivery of his command vehicle.