While Combat Groups Charlie and Alpha prepared for the 9 November attack on 16 Brigade, Commandant Robbie Hartslief ’s Combat Group Bravo on the Mianei was going about its foremost task of protecting the G-5s of Quebec battery, and afterwards Sierra battery, bombarding Cuito Cuanavale.
Hartslief ’s situation during the 16-day wait for his comrades’ assault against 16 Brigade was extremely precarious. His small force faced two enemy brigades supported by the tactical armoured group of 16 Brigade. If Fapla had made a concerted and determined attack on Bravo in the last week of October, following Alpha’s move to Mavinga, it is doubtful whether Hartslief ’s men could have held the line. The G-5 battery, in turn, would have had to retreat far southwards out of range of Cuito Cuanavale and the vital Chambinga bridge, over which logistics were coming to the forward Fapla brigades. When SADF reconnaissance commandos dug in around Cuito Cuanavale reported that three new TMM bridging vehicles had arrived at the town from Menongue, Hartslief sent scouts from 32 Battalion to identify potential crossing points on the Cuito River from which Fapla might try to get at the guns from the west.
But, just as the Fapla Command HQ at Cuito Cuanavale failed to appreciate that a strong SADF force was beginning to gather north of Mavinga, so it failed to appreciate how weak the South Africans had left themselves on the Mianei. Consequently 59 Brigade did not grasp the opportunity within its reach. Its will had been greatly weakened as a result of the serious casualties inflicted upon it by daily G-5, MRL and SAAF bombardments; under this pressure 59 Brigade’s morale had been sapped much as 47 Brigade’s had been at the Lomba. A symptom of its lack of heart was its feeble patrolling south of the Mianei where 32 Battalion’s bush fighters had laid mines and set out devilish automatic ambushes triggered by tripwires and a variety of other nasty devices.
So grave were 59 Brigade’s losses in the bombardments that the Fapla field command HQ, just north of the Vimpulo, permitted the brigade to withdraw and lick its wounds after it was noticed that Combat Group Alpha had moved off to Mavinga – precisely the time when Hartslief ’s Bravo had been rendered most assailable. Senior Fapla commanders at Cuito Cuanavale were aghast at the disengagement decision; they countermanded it and ordered 59 Brigade not only to stay on the Mianei but to move beyond it and press on with its task of wiping out the G-5s. Elements of 59 Brigade which had moved 20 km north to the source of the Hube River to hand over wounded men turned back with fresh supplies of food and ammunition brought in from Cuito Cuanavale across the Chambinga bridge by 25 Brigade. One of 25 Brigade’s three battalions was detached to reinforce 59 on the Mianei.
The indecisive Fapla commanders were beset by further uncertainty when on 31 October a strong SADF force crossed the border from Namibia’s Ovamboland, several hundred kilometres to the west of the southeast Angola war theatre, and struck 200 km into Angola to hit a big SWAPO base near the Angolan town of Cuvelai. More than 150 SWAPO guerrillas were killed in several hours of fighting in deep bush. The raid was a continuation of the SADF’s long-running cross-border war with SWAPO whose military camps were in southwest Angola. But the attack was also designed to create fear among the Fapla commanders of the possibility of a major South African thrust from the west on Menongue and Cuito Cuanavale.
The Cuvelai raiders pulled out on 2 November, having succeeded both in destroying the SWAPO camp and worrying the Fapla high command. However, there was a high price to pay for the marauding. Twelve SADF soldiers were killed at Cuvelai – most of them in a single mortar-bomb explosion – and back in the Republic it was immediately widely assumed that they were casualties of South Africa’s war against the Angolan and Cuban Armies on behalf of UNITA. Remarkably, the South African government was still denying at this time that its forces had anything to do with the Angolan fighting, although two British newspapers – The Scotsman and the Sunday Telegraph – had blown the gaff a few weeks earlier to international audiences.
UNITA’s fiction, backed by Pretoria, that it alone was winning ‘great’ victories in southeast Angola was deeply resented by the SADF’s fighting men. ‘Hell, our guys were dying there and no one back home was being told how or why’, said 61 Mech’s Major Laurence Maree. ‘On one of the occasions when President Botha and most of his cabinet visited the troops at Mavinga, with enemy Migs flashing high overhead, officers were telling him very bluntly how annoyed the troopies were that UNITA was claiming success while South Africa denied involvement. The soldiers saw nothing to be ashamed of in what they were fighting for. They were proud of what they were achieving and they resented risking their lives every day for a story that wasn’t being told.’
Hartslief and Bravo on the Mianei bluffed their way through October – on few other occasions in the war would the SADF’s situation be potentially so perilous – but out of the blue, on Sunday 1 November, 59 Brigade made its long-threatened big move towards the G-5s with explicit orders to raze the guns. Recces reported that several 59 Brigade units had advanced with tanks five kilometres south of the brigade’s previously known position.
With only the G-5s themselves, an MRL battery, 400 infantrymen and Major Hannes Nortmann’s eight Ratel-90s immediately available to Hartslief to stop a thrust by nearly 2,000 Fapla soldiers and 16 tanks (from the combined force of 59 and 21 Brigades, plus 16 Brigade’s tactical group and the battalion from 25 Brigade), Colonel Roland de Vries (acting brigade commander while Ferreira was absent for a short break) quickly detached a company of 61 Mech infantry and a platoon of Ratel-90s from Combat Group Alpha in Mavinga as reinforcements.
The lead tanks of 59 Brigade came around the source of the Mianei in the late afternoon of 1 November to get among the big guns of Quebec battery. ‘There were 36 sorties by enemy aircraft south of the Mianei that day trying to find and destroy the G-5s,’ said Jean Lausberg. ‘It made the task of the artillerymen more backbreaking than ever. Every time they got warning of the Migs coming, they had to lower their guns’ massive barrels, camouflage the battery and drop into their foxholes, and then reverse the process after the all-clear to resume firing.’
Colonel de Vries, greatly alarmed by Quebec battery’s sudden precarious predicament, ordered Lausberg to move it 24 km eastwards to a safer position about ten kilometres southeast of the source of the Mianei.
‘It was a hell of an operation to move 50 big vehicles through rough terrain and bush,’ said Lausberg. ‘The gun tractors had to break their own paths through the trees and undergrowth. The tractors had been in Angola for more than three months. They had developed clutch problems, so movement was very slow. Quebec battery began its move eastwards at 11pm (on 1 November) and by first light (on Monday 2 November) it had only covered half the distance to its new position and was situated due south of 59 Brigade.
‘I ordered the battery commander to keep moving even though daylight had come. But the first Mig sortie arrived shortly afterwards and neutralised the movement because the battery had to disperse and camouflage. They started up again, but by now the clutches of the gun tractors were burning out and the tanks of 59 Brigade were warming up their engines to begin moving south.
‘We got four of the guns away, but the other four were lame ducks directly in the path of 59 Brigade’s T-54/55s. It was then that Hannes Nortmann with his Ratel-90s and 400 infantrymen engaged the advance motorised infantry elements of 59 Brigade. They had almost a dozen contacts in the course of the day which stemmed the advance. Hannes had two Ratels damaged by direct hits, but no casualties. He only broke contact just before dusk when the enemy tanks began to come through. They were only slightly more than a kilometre from our stranded guns, but heavy mortar and MRL fire and an SAAF raid held the tanks up and they did not press onwards in the fast fading light.
‘We sent in recovery vehicles during the night and pulled the other four guns to safety in the thick bush of our new position. The day was, I think, both the worst and the nicest experience of my life. 59 Brigade came within a hair’s-breadth of destroying the G-5s, in which case we would have been in real trouble with our generals. On the other hand, we had managed to attract the attention of the whole of 59 Brigade to the south when we were actually going to launch our main assault on 16 Brigade from the northeast; that was a proud achievement for such a small force.’
59 Brigade moved back to its original position just a few kilometres to the north where it was joined by 21 Brigade with the tactical group.
Another attempted Fapla push seemed inevitable. Hartslief established a defence line just to the southeast of the Mianei source, expecting an attack the next day, and then the next, but it did not come ... The tension became almost unbearable for the South African soldiers holding the thin Mianei line as they waited for Combat Groups Charlie and Alpha to get in position, some 50 kilometres to the northeast, and relieve the pressure by attacking 16 Brigade.
4 SAI’s Combat Group Charlie at last moved northwestwards out of Mavinga on 3 November to Piet van Zyl’s ‘Club Mediterraneé’ staging area. 61 Mech’s Combat Group Alpha followed on 4 November. As Alpha began moving Hartslief was ordered by Ferreira to prepare Bravo for an exploratory attack against 59 Brigade on 9 November – the day of the scheduled Charlie-Alpha strike against 16 Brigade. Bravo’s mission was to launch its foray three hours in advance of the main attack to divert Fapla attention so that the big punch to be slung from the east would be as devastating as possible.
Bravo began its diversionary assault, as planned, in the early morning darkness of Monday 9 November. But instead of being greeted with the expected fireworks when his combat group reached the enemy’s plotted positions, Hartslief found that 59 Brigade had folded its tents and gone. Military intelligence discovered that the brigade had packed up and moved 20 km north over the Vimpulo during the night. When Fapla’s armoured tactical group also moved north on 9 November to support its mother 16 Brigade against Charlie and Alpha, this left only 21 Brigade and the battalion from 25 Brigade on the Mianei.
Just before sunset on 9 November the 21/25 Fapla force attacked Bravo with ten tanks and two battalions of infantry. Hartslief, under strict orders not to ‘mix it’ with tanks, withdrew. But his paramount task of drawing attention away from Charlie’s attack had been fulfilled. Hartslief ’s luck continued to hold because the 21/25 force withdrew to its laager areas just north of the Mianei instead of pressing on with the attack.
In the next 24 hours 59 Brigade continued its headlong retreat north. Radio intercepts showed that the brigade had been called all the way back to the Tumpo Triangle, a small area on the eastern bank of the Cuito River directly opposite Cuito Cuanavale. The Tumpo Triangle, bounded by two small tributary rivers of the Cuito called the Tumpo and the Dala, was the staging area for the Fapla brigades after they had crossed from Cuito Cuanavale and put their first foot into ‘Savimbi-land.’
Bravo was called upon to make another diversionary foray against the 21/25 force prior to Charlie/Alpha’s second attack on 16 Brigade on 11 November. Hartslief deployed a company from 32 Battalion north of 21 and 25 Brigades which proved sufficient to distract them during the battle between 16 Brigade and Combat Groups Charlie and Alpha.
By the night of 11/12 November 59 Brigade had reached the Chambinga bridge. Its escape was therefore assured, along with 16 Brigade which Combat Group Charlie had failed to annihilate.
The question now was whether the 21/25 force could be cut off and destroyed south of the Hube before it too reached the Chambinga bridge and then the haven of the Tumpo Triangle.