47 Brigade had been subjected to a constant artillery barrage since it came around the Lomba source at the beginning of September. Its early speedy progress eastwards had been slowed to barely a kilometre a day as the SADF G-5s, MRLs and 120 mm mortars pounded it all night and later began to hit it for short periods during the day. Once the most dangerous and aggressive of the enemy brigades, it was now the most vulnerable. It had planned to link up quickly with 59 and 21 Brigades to receive new ammunition and fuel supplies, reserves of which were beginning to run low.
Ferreira’s strategy was to exhaust the brigade and draw it into a ‘killing ground’ where the advantage would be with his small force which, like the Boer armies of old, aimed to keep the enemy off balance with fast-moving, unorthodox and aggressive manoeuvres until Fapla began to make major mistakes.
One of Ferreira’s first decisions was that the SAAF had to begin supporting the artillery with ground bombing attacks. The first strike by Mirage F-1AZs, Buccaneers and Canberras was planned to take place at first light on Friday 11 September.
Major Pierre Franken was sent out with Special Forces of 5 Reconnaissance Regiment and a UNITA unit to place phosphorescent flares to identify the position where 47 Brigade, exhausted by the constant artillery fire, had dug in four kilometres south of the Lomba-Cuzizi confluence. As well as identifying the target, Franken’s team marked the path of the bombing run after being given the necessary co-ordinates by the SAAF. In darkness this was a dangerous and difficult but vital mission.
‘We got all the flares in place, and then they said they were cancelling the raid,’ said Franken. ‘Then they changed their minds and said they were coming, only to cancel the raid once more. Everybody in the team was furious, and it didn’t help when I had to send some of the recces and UNITA soldiers back again to bring the flares out because I was under orders not to let them fall into Fapla’s hands. UNITA was meant to carry out a harassing raid that day on 47 Brigade, but they refused after the SAAF failed to arrive.’
What Franken did not know at the time was that the SAAF’s attack plan had been overridden by President P W Botha at the last moment. Diplomatic negotiations had reached a critical stage on a prisoner exchange involving SADF reconnaissance commando Captain Wynand du Toit, captured by Fapla in 1985 while preparing to lead an attack on a US-owned oil refinery in the northern Angola province of Cabinda. The President did not want anything to foul up the release of Du Toit, whose capture some 2,000 km beyond South African-administered territory had caused great embarrassment to Pretoria.
Du Toit was swapped for some 170 Fapla soldiers captured by UNITA and the SADF. According to sources close to Amnesty International, all the Fapla soldiers were executed for failure in battle after they had been returned by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Luanda, Angola’s capital.
47 Brigade, unable to retreat and increasingly desperate to link up with 59 and 21 Brigades, was now in danger of getting bogged down in the position south of the Lomba-Cuzizi source. Its commander made a desperate attempt to join hands with 59 Brigade which led to the 13 September battle with Hartslief ’s Battle Group Bravo. Ferreira drew up new plans for another assault to try to finish off 47 Brigade. He received assurances from Pretoria that political considerations would not cause another last-minute cancellation of a major airstrike he planned for Wednesday 16 September. The strike would soften up 47 Brigade and then Commandant Bok Smit’s Combat Group Alpha would enter the war for the first time in an attempt to wipe out the beleaguered Angolan force.
Again 5 Reconnaissance recces were sent in on the thankless task of marking the east-west bombing run and targets for the air strike planned for the early morning of 16 September. Pierre Franken was not with them this time. He had set up an observation post on a hill to the north of the Lomba to bring in artillery fire throughout the night before the air raid and Combat Group Alpha’s attack.
Commandant Smit planned to hit 47 Brigade from behind, and so his force of assorted Ratels moved out at 4 am on 16 September, passing south of 47 Brigade and then swinging north to attack from the west. Against a force of more than 1,000, Smit was attacking with only 250 men. ‘It was 4 to 1 against us, compared with textbook recommendations of 3 to 1 in the attackers’ favour,’ said Ferreira. ‘But we had no choice.’
Sitting on his hillside, Franken watched four Mirages strike just before 6.30 am and drop clusters of fragmentation bombs among 47 Brigade positions. A follow-up bombing run by three Buccaneers was cancelled when they were picked up on the Angolan radar. Franken instead called in a devastating G-5 bombardment which led 47 Brigade’s commander to report to Cuito Cuanavale that the brigade was in serious trouble.
But 61 Mech was also in trouble.
Laurence Maree said: ‘We manoeuvred for more than four hours until we got around behind them on their tracks. But then we found the bush was much denser than we had expected. We could see hardly further than ten metres. We could only move very, very slowly and had to stop often to confirm that the vehicles were keeping within sight of others. It was nearly midday before we began to make contact with elements of 47 Brigade.’
Pierre Franken realised too late that 61 Mech had misjudged also its line of attack. Through his binoculars he watched as the Ratels advanced west-east along a line too much to the north of the brigade. When contact was made it was not directly with the main body of 47 Brigade but with a flanking element, giving the enemy officers time to organise a response to the SADF intrusion.
‘Their flanking force opened up with small-arms fire and RPG-7 rockets, and then we came under heavy artillery attack from BM-21s, D-30s and 82 mm and 120 mm mortars,’ said Major Maree. ‘We were looking for the enemy but we just couldn’t see them because they were so well dug in among the thick bush. At the same time Commandant Smit had a fearful job keeping all the Ratels together.
‘Because there were so many trees a lot of enemy shells and bombs detonated among the heavier branches, causing more shrapnel problems than we had anticipated. Whole trees fell on to the Ratels and the infantrymen who had debussed spent most of their energy sheltering from flying debris. By late afternoon we had lost one infantryman killed and three wounded and, as far as we could tell, all we had knocked out was one of their mortar pits.’
Commandant Smit decided the attack had become a kamikaze mission, and just before sundown he asked Colonel Ferreira for permission to withdraw and attack again the next day.
61 Mech withdrew under a screen of white phosphorus laid down by the mortar teams. Ferreira weighed up the chances of success and ordered Smit to break off altogether. He decided to wait a bit longer for 47 Brigade to make a fatal error. In the meanwhile he would concentrate on demoralising the Fapla troops with Mirage F-1AZ fragmentation and delayed detonation bomb raids and artillery attacks. It became possible to inflict more damage than before because 47 Brigade, which had been moving forward in a five by five kilometre square, now dug in more permanently in an ellipse roughly two kilometres long and 1.5 km deep at its thickest point.
‘By then we had realised we would have to destroy 47 Brigade by confronting it with a mechanised force,’ said Franken. ‘They were digging in deep, and we knew from our own experience that it would take many heavy barrages to break them. I decided to economise with our G-5 ammunition, bringing in single shots only on vehicles that we could see. Between 17 September and 3 October we shot out two tanks and eleven trucks and armoured cars in this way’.
The earlier fiery encounter between Robert Hartslief ’s Combat Group Bravo and the armoured tactical group and forward elements of 47 Brigade had caused major fears back in Pretoria that 59 and 21 Brigades were about to push across the Lomba in force.
On the same day as Combat Group Alpha’s abortive 16 September attack on 47 Brigade, a whole planeload of top brass led by General Jannie Geldenhuys flew in to Mavinga to assess the ‘crisis situation’. It was not until late in the evening that Deon Ferreira joined Geldenhuys, Major-General Willie Meyer (the commander of the South West African Territory Force), Admiral Putter, Colonel Dick Lord, Jonas Savimbi and two of UNITA’s top generals, Demostenes Chilingutila and Ben-Ben Arlindo Pena.
They were surprised to find Ferreira in a jaunty mood, confident that the end was near not for the SADF-UNITA forces but for Fapla.
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When Fapla’s 21 Brigade abandoned its attempt to cross the Lomba it was ordered by HQ in Cuito Cuanavale to hand over the supplies it had for the beleaguered 47 Brigade to 59 Brigade to complete the delivery.
21 Brigade put a TMM mobile bridge across the Cunzumbia River and gave the materials to 59 Brigade, whose commander then sent a supply convoy with two battalions of infantry to a point just a few kilometres northeast of the Lomba-Cuzizi confluence to await the arrival of 47 Brigade on the south bank of the Lomba.
Pierre Franken, meanwhile, had established a more permanent observation post on the southeastern slope of the 1,260 metre-high Mucobolo Hill, just 800 m northwest of the Lomba-Cuzizi confluence. His team consisted of another artillery observer, Lieutenant Hans May, a young national serviceman; several UNITA guerrillas; and, when they had rested after their unexpected set-to of 6 September with 47 Brigade, Sergeant Mac da Trinidada and his recce team.
‘We had to monitor all three of the enemy brigades,’ said Franken. ‘From about 21 or 22 September we saw units from 47 Brigade bringing out logs from the treeline and laying them across the marsh to build a kind of road towards the Lomba. 59 Brigade started doing the same from the north and moving a TMM bridge southwards along it towards the river. Once we’d reported that activity, we were told our priority was to prevent 59 and 47 Brigades from joining up. We brought such constant artillery fire down on them that they were forced to work at night only.’
Franken and his men worked shifts in their lookout post at the top of a ten metre tree. ‘I wore a Fapla uniform,’ said Franken, ‘and I coated myself so thickly with blacking that I was more beautiful than Sidney Poitier. I’d forgotten everything my mother ever taught me about personal hygiene. I don’t think I’d washed for eight weeks. My trousers became so dirty and thick with grease that I wrote my calculations on them to work out target co-ordinates for our guns.’
Franken worked occasional 13-hour shifts in the tree, burdened with a 10 kg radio, map, compass, binoculars, night sight equipment, torch, protractor, rifle and ammunition. Every hour or so he would haul up a flask of water and a packet of protein biscuits at the end of a rope.