The national servicemen of 4 SAI moved from their permanent base at Middelburg in the eastern Transvaal to Army Battle School at Lohatla, in the dry expanses of northern Cape Province, where they underwent special training before moving off in mid-October towards the Angolan border.
4 SAI was joined by a squadron of 13 Olifant tanks from the SADF’s School of Armour at Bloemfontein, a second battery of eight G-5 guns, and a troop of three G-6 guns.
The G-6s, self-propelled versions of the G-5, were only toolroom prototypes because the production line for the huge mobile guns was not yet operational. The three 37-tonne monsters, the most powerful self-propelled guns on wheeled chassis in the world, were undergoing testing at the Artillery School in Potchefstroom when the surprise call to battle came. The G-6 has a top speed of 90 km per hour, and in Angola it was able to smash through the bush like the tropical equivalent of an icebreaker at speeds of up to 40 km per hour. From 1988 onwards the G-6, the envy of many of the world’s armies, began to enter service with all the SADF’s mechanised units after production line work began.
The powerful new attack force crossed the Kavango River from Namibia into a holding area some 50 km inside Angola on 20 October. Here there were intensive conferences between the different commanders to finalise logistics and co-ordination. Meanwhile, the troops endured more training in tropical warfare while the big-barrelled guns of the new G-5 battery, the G-6s and Olifants were ‘shot in’ so that they were battle-ready for the heavy fighting to come.
The tank crews were particularly eager to get moving towards the battle-front with 16 Brigade. South African tanks had not been to war for more than 40 years since Shermans of the 6th South African Armoured Division participated in the final northern Italian battles of World War II which led to the surrender of German forces on the Po Valley plains in May 1945.
The test would be important for the Olifants, based on 1950s-era British Centurion tanks bought in various states of repair from India and Jordan – despite the international arms embargo against South Africa – and transported across the Indian Ocean on giant barges to Durban for remodelling by Armscor. Their mobility was increased by ripping out the original petrol engine and fitting a more powerful West German diesel engine and transmission. The old 84 mm gun was replaced by a much heavier South African 105 mm gun based on the British Vickers company’s highly acclaimed L-7 tank gun whose specifications had somehow found their way to Armscor. Improved suspension, a new fire control system and Israeli laser range finder, and lots of other electronics from West Germany, Israel and the United States, together with equipment copied from Soviet T-54/55 tanks captured in Angola in 1981–82, brought the Olifant up to the same modern standards of Centurions that had been refitted in Israel and Switzerland.
After crossing the Angolan border the Olifants came off the transporters which had brought them northwards from Bloemfontein and Lohatla. With the G-6s they smashed a way for the convoy of 250 vehicles all the way to Mavinga, moving only at night so that Fapla did not know they were coming. The worst hazard on this journey was snakes that got shaken out of the trees into the confined tank compartments through open hatches. The Olifant squadron took its first casualty when an unfortunate young lieutenant found himself sharing his cramped space with a deadly black mamba highly upset at being dislodged from its tree home by a Boer tank. The mamba bit the soldier who lived to tell the tale thanks to quick work by SADF medical orderlies. After this, soldiers learned to thwart snakes which fell through hatches with fire extinguishers. A tank crew sergeant was the next loss, knocked out of the war before even reaching Mavinga when one of the many trees which came crashing down on the Olifants and their support vehicles hit him and broke several ribs. A helicopter was called in to remove him to hospital in Rundu.
The big convoy began to arrive on 30 October at Mavinga, where Combat Group Alpha was waiting. Commandant Leon Marais of 4 SAI, who had taken the new force up from South Africa, was told by Colonel Ferreira that he would lead it into battle under the name of Combat Group Charlie. With its tanks, Charlie was the strongest fighting unit to be put into battle in more than a decade of war in Angola. Charlie fielded two infantry companies totalling 300 men in Ratel-20s. Marais also had at his disposal Ratel-90s, Ratel-81s, Casspirs and 20 mm self-propelled anti-aircraft guns mounted on a ‘Ystervark’ mine-protected chassis powered by a West German-designed engine. The precious G-6 prototypes, G-5s and MRLs were placed under the direct command of Colonel Lausberg.
Despite the arrival of the strong new force, the SADF still had only about 3,000 men in Angola at this time against more than 15,000 Fapla soldiers in and around Cuito Cuanavale and to the east of the town.
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Piet van Zyl had arrived at and passed through Mavinga before Combat Group Charlie got there. However, the likely intensity of the coming push was obvious to him from the scale of SAAF activity at Mavinga’s dirt runway where half a dozen transport planes were landing each night plus several helicopters with military supplies.
This represented an increase in the normal level of busy air activity at Mavinga. For the whole eight months of the Cuito Cuanavale campaign Hercules C-130s and Transall C-160s of the SAAF’s 28 Squadron, supported by ancient Dakotas from other transport squadrons, made an average of three sorties a night into the Mavinga strip, guided only by UNITA’s improvised and unpredictable paraffin landing lamps.
‘Every night it was hellish hairy for the transport crews,’ said Colonel Dick Lord. ‘The war went on a lot longer than anyone expected. On the ground the logistics were tedious and very hard for the men and very expensive in vehicles. The Army couldn’t maintain the necessary rate of supply and the burden fell more and more on the SAAF.
‘It was a very demanding form of flying to keep landing those big C-130s and C-160s on the dirt strip in darkness. But getting the plane down safely was only the beginning of the work. There was no mechanised equipment at Mavinga for unloading supplies, and there was some very heavy equipment being brought in. It was really tough coolie work for SADF and UNITA men together. Everything had to be off and hidden by daylight and the plane had to be back home.
‘Also our Puma and Super-Frelon helicopters went into Angola every night of the war. They would leave just before sunset and find their way with their Doppler navigational radar. They flew at low level. There were no features to guide the pilots and during the rainy season, when the moon and stars were blotted out, it was pitch dark. To find a landing zone in the middle of nowhere when the night is black in the heart of Africa is a highly skilled job, believe me.
‘The daring of the helicopter pilots was one of the main reasons why our fatality rate was so low. We had good medics right in there with the fighting men. They treated wounded soldiers at the front line and then took them in mine-proof ambulances to helicopter landing zones. They knew that when darkness fell the helicopters would arrive unfailingly if called and get men back to the intensive care unit at Rundu. The very serious cases were flown on by C-130 to 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria.’
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Having re-equipped his company in Mavinga, Piet van Zyl moved north 75 km to the source of the Maquelengue River to prepare for the arrival of Combat Groups Alpha and Charlie. It marked the beginning of a short period of phoney war for Van Zyl and his men from which every inconsequential pleasure was remembered better and more lovingly than the details of battles. Van Zyl was joined by two 32 Battalion platoon commanders, Lieutenants Jurg Human and Thai Theron, both old friends.
They found a lagoon about 200 metres wide similar to many others which dot the floodplains of southeast Angolan rivers. Since neither Van Zyl nor Human nor Theron had washed themselves or their clothes for two months or more, they decided a session of prolonged self-purification was called for. ‘We bathed ourselves and washed our clothes and then sunbathed on a little beach,’ said van Zyl. ‘Then we made hooks and caught fish and braaied (barbecued) them. We swam and the water was beautifully clear. Our men tried to torment us by shouting “crocodile” every now and then. But nothing could have ruined those days. There are periods when you just get perfect peace. I’ll remember that time in an untouched place in the middle of the Angolan wilderness for the rest of my life.’
Friday 6 November marked the last day of Piet van Zyl’s ‘Club Mediterraneé’ holiday. That evening he sat with Thai Theron next to the lagoon musing about life, death and the hereafter, and he remembers part of the conversation with his friend: ‘Thai said the time had been very relaxing because water brings peace. Then for some reason Thai told me he would shoot himself if he lost a leg in the coming fighting rather than go on living.’
The idyll ended just after midnight when radio messages said the leading screen units of Combat Groups Alpha and Charlie were approaching and they would appreciate being met by scouts to guide them into Van Zyl’s vacation resort.
Colonel Ferreira began intense briefings, using sand models built on the forest floor by intelligence officers, on his plans for attacking 16 Brigade. The SADF’s EW teams had discovered that the Fapla brigades had been ordered to attempt fresh thrusts southwards and eastwards to re-activate the offensive against Mavinga. This scarcely worried the SADF high command at all. On 4 November the MPLA had issued a statement in Luanda admitting for the first time that Fapla had suffered ‘substantial’ losses in fighting in Savimbi-land. (The SADF estimated that 2,500 Fapla soldiers had been killed or wounded by early November 1987 out of some 18,000 deployed from Cuito Cuanavale from July onwards.) On the same day SADF military intelligence learned that General Pedro Benga Lima, the Fapla Chief of Staff, had been summoned to Luanda from Cuito Cuanavale and dismissed for his conduct of the campaign.
The new Fapla ‘offensive’ therefore looked more the result of a decision taken in desperation rather than one that had been coolly considered. The intelligence reports showed that 21 Brigade and 16 Brigade’s tactical armoured group were to join up with 59 Brigade and move south of the Mianei to a point where it would be possible once again to loop around the source of the Lomba towards Mavinga. The main 16 Brigade force was to pick up the old Portuguese dirt road which ran due east from the Chambinga bridge and forge east towards the Cueio River before turning south to Mavinga. This would put 16 Brigade on a direct course for the area where Combat Groups Alpha and Charlie were gathering at Van Zyl’s holiday camp at the Maquelengue River, a tributary of the Cueio. Radio intercepts showed that Fapla had no idea that the SADF had injected its biggest fighting force yet into the area and was preparing to attack 16 Brigade.
Ferreira wanted to strike as soon as possible, catching 16 Brigade off guard before it launched its own planned attack. 16 Brigade was in a relatively isolated position near the Chambinga River source. If it could be defeated as comprehensively as 47 Brigade had been on the Lomba River, 59 and 21 Brigades to the south could be cut off by SADF forces from their withdrawal route to safety – westwards between the Hube and Chambinga River sources, onwards across the Chambinga River bridge, and thence to Cuito Cuanavale.
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Ferreira sought assurances from his senior commanders that all units were battle-ready. Colonel Lausberg reported that he had received a disturbing report from the Artillery Regiment chaplain about the condition of the 150 men of the G-5 Quebec battery on the Mianei. ‘The gunners are so weary that they are ceasing to care,’ Lausberg told Ferreira. ‘They have been on active service, night and day, for more than three months. They are caked in dirt and their clothes are coming apart at the seams. They are no longer following the prescribed drills. They are not dropping the barrels of the guns and camouflaging them when there are warnings of enemy aircraft.’
Ferreira listened sympathetically to Lausberg. Both men knew how gruelling a gunner’s lot was physically and psychologically. Manhandling 43.5 kilogram shells and 23 kilogram charge, or propellant, packs into the breech was an exhausting task, made more arduous by the gunners’ equivalent of Boer machismo. They refused to use European-supplied shell carrying cradles (four men to a cradle) and instead favoured brute strength, hoisting each shell in their arms. When the gunners were not firing night and day – snatching only catnaps – they were chopping down whole areas of forest with axes each time the 50 vehicles of the battery made one of their frequent shifts to a new position.
Ferreira asked whether Lausberg had any answer to the problem. The artillery colonel said he had already put a plan into practice. He had consulted the Artillery Regiment doctor who had told Lausberg to get the Quebec battery men into a safe area for just one day and give them all the beer they could drink, all the meat they could eat, new overalls and enough water for each man to have a proper bath.
Lausberg had not been able to find the necessary several thousand rand in his budget to give 150 men a good Angolan Saturday night out. But, as luck would have it, Defence Minister Magnus Malan and several other cabinet ministers arrived at Mavinga for a fact-finding stopover. The ministers were accompanied by the chairman of Armscor, Commandant Piet Marais, and Armscor export director Mr Thielman de Waal, who were seeking to make a foreign exchange killing for South Africa from overseas orders for the country’s new generation of indigenous weapons on the back of their performance in the War for Africa. Also in the party was one of the best-loved generals in the South African Army, General Frans van den Bergh, a master gunner who in his supremo role as Director of Artillery had played a major role in the development of the G-5 from its Canadian prototype. Lausberg approached Van den Bergh, an avuncular, modest soldier known to artillery men as the ‘Gunners’ Godfather,’ and told him his problem.
‘General Van den Bergh summoned the Armscor men, and then Mr de Waal summoned me and told me to get the party organised for my G-5 men,’ said Lausberg. ‘Armscor would guarantee the bill.’
Lausberg immediately radioed his shopping list to Rundu and told the Quebec battery men on the Mianei to withdraw to Mavinga. At the same time he ordered new gunners and their teams from 4 SAI to move to the Mianei to take over the G-5s and incorporate themselves as a new unit, Sierra battery. Within 24 hours of becoming operational Sierra battery scored a direct hit on Fapla’s forward front HQ next to the Cuito Cuanavale runway. EW picked up a message from Major Ngueto, the Fapla front commander, to Luanda which said: ‘Enemy artillery making my position impossible.’
On the night of Thursday 5 November a Puma helicopter flew in loaded only with chilled Castle beer, frozen steaks, potatoes, fresh tomatoes, new overalls, soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste for Quebec battery. The 150 dog-tired men partied, ate, drank, washed and slept throughout Friday before moving north to take over, in the name of a reinvigorated Quebec battery, the new G-5 guns brought in by 4 SAI.