To cut off 21/25 Brigades from sanctuary Commandant Leon Marais’s Combat Group Charlie was ordered to deploy near possible crossing points on the Vimpulo to prevent the enemy getting north to the Hube. Commandant Mike Muller’s Combat Group Alpha spread out in thick bush between the Mianei and the Vimpulo – where 16 Brigade’s tactical group had earlier spent much of its time in concealment – to be ready to hit the 21/25 force from the flank or rear once it was stopped by Combat Group Charlie and to prevent it breaking out eastwards.
By 13 November 59 Brigade was safely back across the Chambinga River, but it had left its tanks behind to support 16 Brigade and its tactical group. With 20 tanks at their disposal, 16 Brigade and the tactical group were able to form two defensive lines – one on the high ground between the Chambinga and the Hube, and the other just east of the Hube source.
66 Brigade had two battalions at the Chambinga bridge. But it had sent its third battalion down to an area northeast of the Cuito-Mianei confluence; this posed a real potential problem for Hartslief ’s Combat Group Bravo. The G-5s began pestering the 66 Brigade battalion as well as pinning down the 21/25 force on the Mianei and making life as hellish as possible for the Angolan forces moving to and fro across the Chambinga bridge.
Though most of the tanks and a thousand or so men of 21/25 Brigades were still just to the north of the Mianei, a pioneer 21/25 unit with tanks had pulled back well north to the source of the Vimpulo. Its role was obviously to cover the impending retreat by the 21/25 force. So Ferreira decided the pioneer group would have to be destroyed before a big attack could be made against the main 21 and 25 Brigades concentration.
★ ★ ★
While Charlie and Alpha manoeuvred from the northeast towards their new positions, responsibility for keeping the heat on Fapla fell yet again on the SAAF and the artillery. The three G-6s moved onto the Chambinga High Ground just south of the Cuatir River on 13 November and began shelling Cuito Cuanavale, lying 28 km to the southeast. It was a grave shock to Fapla to discover that the South Africans’ much dreaded heavy artillery had moved well to the north of Cuito Cuanavale. The first day of G-6 shelling damaged three Soviet radar installations in the Fapla-held town.
The two G-5 batteries were, however, beginning to suffer from severe stress. Three of the big guns were completely out of action because of fractures to vital parts, and nearly half of the batteries’ support vehicles were beyond repair. The MRL battery had temporarily withdrawn from the Mianei for repairs and to replenish its ammunition. This put exceptionally heavy pressure on the remaining guns and equipment. Weapons fatigue and problematic logistics would from now onwards cause more and more headaches for the SADF.
Late in the afternoon of Friday 13 November 21/25 Brigades surprised the South Africans by unexpectedly beginning a rapid withdrawal northwards from the Mianei. ‘21 Brigade withdrew so fast that we couldn’t stay with them,’ said Hartslief. ‘As well as moving rapidly, they were also going into territory which was relatively strange to us.’
Ferreira ordered Marais to accelerate Combat Group Charlie’s redeployment to the Vimpulo. The Commandant’s instructions were to deploy a big ambush force to stop 21/25 Brigades crossing the Vimpulo, and then to hit the enemy hard on its flank. Marais in turn ordered Captain Piet van Zyl’s company of 32 Battalion bush fighters to lead the 4 SAI armour and infantry to ambush positions at possible crossing points across the Vimpulo. ‘I asked Marais for a precise RV (map reference point) because I suspected it was where [Major Lourens] Du Plessis and I had had the problem with the mines in mid-October,’ said Van Zyl.
Six possible crossing points had been identified on the Vimpulo. Two of the most likely were near a deserted hamlet called Sandumba, and these were indeed the fords where Van Zyl had had his adventures with the mines. Van Zyl’s men began leading Combat Group Charlie into ambush positions during the night of 14/15 November and went on constant alert for the anticipated imminent arrival of 21/25 Brigades.
The SADF was now about to make one of its worst blunders of the war. Ferreira ordered Marais to deploy Charlie’s main ambush force near Sandumba to hit 21/25 Brigades as they went for the crossing.
‘Vos and I got to the Vimpulo late in the day [of 14 November],’ said Van Zyl. ‘We did a six kilometre reconnaissance and suggested that the main ambush should be laid two kilometres southeast of the Sandumba ford.’
But Combat Group Charlie, which had made a headlong dash of more than 20 km from the headwaters of the Cunzumbia to the Vimpulo, instead deployed some six kilometres southeast of Sandumba. ‘During the night Vos and I went patrolling north of the Vimpulo and we met up with Piet Fourie and Frenchie during a terrible storm,’ said Van Zyl. ‘They said they couldn’t understand our stratagem because the best crossings were clearly further west, as near as possible to Sandumba.’ Then through the noise of the storm they heard tank engines. The tanks were already on the north bank and heading northwards. ‘21 and 25 Brigades had used the cover of that storm to cross the Sandumba fords and escaped unnoticed by Combat Group Charlie,’ said Colonel Ferreira. ‘They continued moving north rapidly towards the area of the Hube River source.’
There was a terrible storm also in the SADF brigade HQ as UNITA generals and SADF staff brigadiers and colonels demanded to know how 21/25 Brigades had been permitted to spring the trap. SADF spokesmen are reluctant to this day to say on the record where responsibility lay for the huge blunder. But the night’s events provided rich fodder for those with deep faith in the cock-up theory of history. Whoever made the critical mistakes had cost the SADF the opportunity to wipe out another whole brigade plus a battalion of Fapla. Instead, 21/25 Brigades would survive to fight again yet another day and kill more South African and UNITA soldiers.
The Chambinga Gallop: Part 1 – The Escape of 21/25 Brigades, 13/17 November 1987.
Combat Group Charlie now made an emergency high-speed traverse to the source of the Hube to prevent 21/25 Brigades from going around it and swinging westwards towards the Chambinga bridge. Combat Group Bravo was ordered to leapfrog up from the Mianei to support Charlie, while Combat Group Alpha stayed south of the Vimpulo to monitor any stray Fapla units left behind.
The game-plan of 21 and 25 Brigades was to manoeuvre around the western edge of the 1,270-metre-high Viposto High Ground (see map) and either cross the Hube or turn eastwards along the southern bank of the river, keeping to the treeline, until they could make a dash around the Hube source. Combat Groups Charlie and Bravo intended to squeeze 21/25 Brigades into the anhara between the treeline and the Hube River and destroy them there.
21/25 Brigades failed to find a crossing point on the Hube, and so came around the northern edge of the Viposto High Ground. Just after 10 am on Monday 16 November heavy fighting erupted as the Fapla forces began their bolt towards the river source and safety. Within 90 minutes three SADF men were dead and two of their vehicles had been destroyed. On the plus side the Commander of 21 Brigade, Captain Nguleica, had been seriously wounded when his BTR-60 armoured personnel command vehicle was shot from under him.
Little else was going well for Combat Group Charlie. It had deployed further south of the river than ordered by Ferreira and had given away its presence to the 21/25 force by using noisy plofadders to breach a minefield and had then fired mortar shell illumination flares to light its way into position, thus breaching basic SADF operational principles of silence and stealth. Back in Brigade HQ eyebrows were raised particularly high when Charlie ran into the minefield, because maps had been captured during the attack on 16 Brigade which showed precisely where the mines were between the Chambinga and Hube River sources.
‘My company moved on foot between a squadron of armoured cars,’ said Piet van Zyl. ‘There was a company of 4 SAI infantry in front of us, the squadron of Olifant tanks to our right and Hannes Nortmann’s Ratel squadron behind us. There were more units away to the right of the tanks. To the left of us was a UNITA infantry battalion.
‘Soon after we made the first contact, heavy fighting had spread along the whole line. It was all very confusing and unnerving. Their Stalin Organs were really letting rip, and the rockets were hitting the ground in front of us and skidding between the men on foot and the tanks and armoured cars. We had to order our men to walk behind the tanks or they would have been blasted to Hell or Heaven. As it was, one of my troops got hit by shrapnel when an 82 mm mortar shell hit a tree right behind us. His face was covered in blood. We carried him back so that a Rinkhals armoured ambulance could come forward and pick him up. Then Vos got hit in the shoulder by shrapnel: he refused to go back, so we put him in a Ratel so he could watch the rest of the fight.
‘Wessie (Corporal Wessels) and I steered our men towards Jurg (Human) and Thai (Theron). Two of their guys had been killed by a mortar shell, so we helped put their dead and wounded into a Ratel. To the left the 4 SAI infantrymen, all white national servicemen, were involved in a very heavy scrap and the Olifants started moving in to support them.’
The Olifants quickly shot out four T-54/55s and a BM-21 Stalin Organ which was little more than 200 m from the South African lines. ‘The Stalin Organ started burning and exploding. Its rockets were flying everywhere. We were flat on the ground and the Olifants leapfrogged back a bit to avoid damage.
‘By then we were still only at a point near the edge of the anhara, which was meant to have been our startline at the break of day. We began passing enemy dead and then we captured three young Fapla guys sitting in a trench shaking with fear. Their eyes were wide and they thought we were going to shoot them. But we sent them back in a Ratel to HQ for questioning.
‘We at last reached the edge of the anhara way behind schedule some time in the early afternoon. The Fapla infantry began running across the anhara to get to the Hube, just as 47 Brigade had done on the Lomba. The Olifants and Ratels came forward and began to kill them with anti-personnel rounds. Browning light machine-guns were firing at them and our mortars were just beginning to pinpoint them when a message came through that there were enemy tanks to the rear (south) of us. Our tanks and Ratels turned around through 180 degrees to see what was happening. They chased back and we ran between them, but we couldn’t see a thing. It was Hannes Nortmann, just to our southwest, who first confronted the Fapla tanks.’
With the exception of Nortmann’s armoured car squadron, Robbie Hartslief had held most of his Combat Group Bravo back in reserve as the South Africans manoeuvred into positions from where they could force 21/25 Brigades out into the killing ground of the anhara. The Fapla tanks had advanced towards the anhara from just behind Hartslief ’s HQ area inside the treeline. When the alert was raised Nortmann raced back towards his mother combat group to give protection.
‘Nortmann came through and engaged the tanks about 50 m in front of my command group,’ said Hartslief. ‘He shot out three of them. He obviously still had some of his nine lives in hand because to take on a tank with a Ratel is really quite something and Hannes had done it again and again in this war.’
Nortmann used up at least one of those lives during the encounter. He spotted a tank gun barrel moving in the treeline trying to acquire a target and thought it futile to try to silence the tank with the 20 mm gun of his own command Ratel. When the gunners of his nearby Ratel-90s failed to understand his radio instruction, he leapt out of his vehicle and walked, apparently oblivious to the danger from flying metal, to the nearest of the armoured cars, pointed out the tank by hand and then watched the 90 mm rounds slot home.
Hartslief too got in a few shots at the tanks, but then his Ratel-90 broke down with gearbox trouble and got stuck in a deep gully leading from the treeline into the anhara. ‘I could see the tanks burning that Hannes had shot out. The other Fapla tanks broke contact and burst from the left through the middle of my headquarters area. The bush was so thick that I don’t think they saw any of us as they crashed through. My Ratel was so comprehensively stuck that I couldn’t exercise control and had to hand over command of Bravo to Commandant Marais (of Charlie).’
Hartslief ’s Ratel was jammed in the gully along with a Withings armoured recovery vehicle with a seized-up Rinkhals ambulance in tow. An enemy BM-21, desperate to get around the Hube source to safety, noticed the struggling SADF vehicles and fired a whole pack of 40 rockets at them horizontally from just 300 m, hitting only the Rinkhals. Two South Africans were wounded by shrapnel. Sergeant Willem Labuschagne, the Withings driver, carried the most seriously wounded man, medical orderly Lance Corporal Redelinghuis, 50 metres under heavy machine-gun fire to one of Nortmann’s Ratel-90s. The Ratel driver dismounted to help Labuschagne lift Redelinghuis into the armoured car. A T-55 then opened fire and the driver dived for cover in the bush. Labuschagne, a 46-year-old regular soldier, got into the Ratel and drove it off to a medical post. Labuschagne had acted with high courage and selflessness, but Lance Corporal Redelinghuis died later from his wounds. (Labuschagne was subsequently decorated with the Honoris Crux for his bravery.)
‘During the encounter with the Fapla tanks our Olifants and Ratels began to run low on fuel and ammunition. One Olifant ran out of fuel in mid-battle,’ said Van Zyl. ‘And UNITA units fighting alongside us had taken a terrible number of dead and wounded. Everywhere I could see them carrying their own corpses and wounded on improvised stretchers made from wood cut from the bush.
‘In the late afternoon we were ordered by Commandant Marais to break contact with 21 and 25 Brigades. Then we withdrew eastwards for some 12 km to get new supplies and carry out repairs. There the tiffies were fantastic. They had been busy all day on and behind the battlefield fixing things. Now, as usual, they just settled down to work right through the night servicing the tanks, the Ratels and the trucks.’
‘But we shouldn’t have moved so far away,’ said Van Zyl. The SADF had made yet another critical mistake. As Combat Groups Charlie and Bravo began withdrawing, so Fapla’s 21/25 Brigades had themselves pulled back westwards to regroup and dig in defensively. On the basis of reports by commandos from 5 Recce Regiment the SADF intelligence analysis was that the Fapla consolidation exercise would take some six hours or more. But 21/25 Brigades sprang yet another surprise. Despite the abundant evidence that the enemy force had a full box of tricks, the South Africans were caught on the wrong foot again. As Charlie and Bravo were settling into their laager area, 21/25 Brigades quickly packed up their wares and sprinted for the source of the Hube and were round it during the night of 16/17 November, helped by another thunderstorm, before the South African combat groups reacted.
The 21/25 rabbit, penned in so that it was ripe for shooting and skinning, had with one mighty bound sprung free again. This headlong flight towards the safety of the Chambinga bridge, which had really begun with 16 Brigade, became known to the SADF men as the Chambinga Gallop.
Official SADF records so far made public do not record the scale of the consequent row at Brigade HQ where one field commander in particular caught most of the flak for not pressing home the attack more vigorously.
★ ★ ★
The fighting on 16 November cost Fapla 130 dead and seven tanks and several other vehicles destroyed, against four SADF men killed, 19 wounded and two Ratels, a Rinkhals and a Withings destroyed. But on balance of confidence Fapla had won the day. The South Africans’ morale had been badly dented by the succession of errors; there were many long faces in the laagers. On the other hand, with its Great Escape now nearly completed, Fapla’s mettle had been strengthened.
After their bolt during the previous night, the soldiers of 21/25 Brigades dug in on high ground on 17 November between the source of the Chambinga River and the source of the Hube River. They provided a defensive screen for 16 Brigade and its tactical armoured group which from first light began retreating northwards across the Chambinga bridge.
Colonel Ferreira decided that another attack must be made on the enemy on 17 November, this time with Mike Muller’s Combat Group Alpha as the spearhead supported by the tank squadron and two 32 Battalion companies detached from Combat Group Charlie. The guess at SADF 20 Brigade HQ was that Fapla forces remaining southeast of the Chambinga bridge had very little resistance left in them. Faced with yet another South African attack they would break and retreat in disorder to the bridge; as the enemy funnelled towards the bridge, causing chaotic congestion, the G-5s, MRLs and 120 mm mortars would inflict terrible damage upon them.
Lieutenant Koos Breytenbach, the forward artillery observer at the Chambinga bridge, became known as the ‘Murderer of the Chambinga’ as he brought down endless G-5, MRL and 120 mm mortar fire on the crossing during the five weeks he spent there watching the Chambinga Gallop. The anhara floodplain on the southern side of the Chambinga crossing was about one kilometre wide. The retreating Fapla vehicles from 59, 21, 25, 66 and 16 Brigades were boxed up in a forested area of about six square kilometres just south of the floodplain awaiting their turn to approach the bridge.
The bridge consisted of one TMM mobile bridge across the main stream, with puckered wooden log roads approaching it over marshy ground and small rivulets. ‘The concentration area was a perfect target for our artillerymen who settled in for a highly productive – or, rather, destructive – period,’ said Jean Lausberg. ‘When the Faplas moved out onto the anhara they made an even better target for Koos, who became very close to the UNITA troops guarding him. They brought him water, washed his clothes and cooked his food.’
The UNITA men also gave their own names to the SADF artillery pieces. The G-5 was christened ‘Kafundanga’ after UNITA’s former chief of staff, Samuel Kafundanga Chingunji, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1974 during the war against the Portuguese but is still regarded by many UNITA followers as a man as mighty as Savimbi himself. The 127 mm MRL was dubbed ‘chindungu,’ meaning ‘the red pepper that bites.’
★ ★ ★
It looked to Deon Ferreira as though everything would evolve according to his plan after the G-5s’ opening early morning barrage. Koos Breytenbach watched in amazement as two companies of 16 Brigade’s infantry marched from the concentration area across the anhara towards the bridge, providing a perfect target for long-range artillery. Breytenbach brought in ten G-5 airburst fragmentation rounds onto the foot soldiers, followed by an MRL airburst ripple. Reconnaissance Commandos counted more than 60 dead 16 Brigade soldiers on or approaching the bridge.
The SADF artillery’s priority was to lay down patterns of fire which would keep the bridge blocked for as long as possible. An early G-5 salvo caught a vehicle on the bridge, forcing 50 or so other vehicles to pull back southeastwards while the obstruction was cleared.
The G-5s’ timely success was an encouraging omen for Combat Group Alpha as it set out from its laager area southeast of the Chambinga source. Piet van Zyl linked up with Mike Muller, who was shocked by the 32 Battalion captain’s refusal to ride inside the Ratel-20 armoured infantry carriers, or ‘coffins,’ as Van Zyl described them. Instead Van Zyl’s men took turnabout in riding on top of the tanks and walking between the tanks and armoured cars. ‘It had rained all night,’ said Van Zyl. ‘It was cold and every time we pushed through the trees we were showered from the wet leaves. The best place to be was on the flat area behind the turret of an Olifant above the exhaust. It was nice and warm. It was too noisy there to hear warnings of air attacks. But you could tell when the alarm had been given because you would see our infantry on the ground disappear into the Ratels at high speed.
‘As we advanced the tanks began firing ahead speculatively. It was an amazing sight. After an Olifant unleashed a 105 mm shell you saw a path opening up through the forest just like the Red Sea divided for Moses. We seemed to be doing well, but then UNITA warned us that a major minefield stretched ahead for something like ten kilometres. We had to stop while the sappers checked it out. It turned out to be just a few scattered small mines. That lost us at least an hour.’
Mike Muller had decided to attack 21/25 Brigades on the high ground between the Chambinga and Hube sources from the northeast, with Combat Group Bravo deploying further south as his reserve. Muller’s Combat Group Alpha found itself manoeuvring through unexpectedly continuous thick bush at snail’s pace, causing further delay. The roar of the revving tank and armoured car engines gave the 21/25 Brigade force warning of the impending attack, and elements began slipping away from their defensive positions towards the Chambinga bridge. When at last Alpha was in position to smite the enemy an air raid warning forced its vehicles to take cover. By the time the all-clear sounded, the whole 21/25 Brigade force had decamped and extended the distance between it and Alpha.
Only in late afternoon, two hours before nightfall, did SADF forces catch up with rearguard units of 21 and 25 Brigades about three kilometres southeast of the Chambinga bridge. Even then it was not the main Alpha group but Bravo which made the contact, with the amazing Hannes Nortmann leading his Ratels yet again to shoot out two T-54 tanks before Fapla broke contact and fled towards the Chambinga bridge.
‘We [Alpha] caught up with 21/25 Brigades about 1,500 m from the bridge,’ said Piet van Zyl. ‘Our Ratels had just hit one of their ammunition vehicles when UNITA gave us warning of another air raid. We took cover but the attack never came. By the time we began chasing them again it was getting dark and much of the 21/25 Brigade force had run for the bridge and crossed it. My infantrymen had made not a single contact all day. We were pulled back through the night many kilometres to the laager because they [senior officers] were afraid of attacks by Migs the next day. Fapla then just came from the north across the bridge and took out some of its vehicles. I felt despairing. We should have pressed on the following day and taken everything out. We just didn’t go for it.’
The Chambinga Gallop: Part 2 – The Pursuit to the Chambinga Bridge, 17 November 1987.
Van Zyl was right. Fapla had slipped yet another noose. Although the G-5s destroyed in the order of 300 Fapla vehicles at the Chambinga crossing on that day of Thursday 17 November 1987, the most stirring performance came from Fapla’s 59 Brigade which exercised impressive control, despite otherwise near anarchy at the bridge, and brought valuable equipment back north across the Chambinga River to safety.
The whole Fapla force was thus back across the river to safety at the end of the Chambinga Gallop. It was back in much the same position as it had started in July. A major phase of the War for Africa had come to an end. All Fapla’s offensive capability had been drained. In the fighting from 9 to 17 November the Angolans had lost 600 dead and at least that number wounded against 17 South African deaths and 41 wounded. The MPLA, admitting major losses in the Cuito Cuanavale fighting for the first time in late November in a statement issued in Luanda, said 4,000 of its soldiers had been killed or wounded since July ‘by the racist South Africans’. The SADF said more than 1,000 of this total were accounted for by deaths. SADF estimates of Fapla equipment losses in the same period included more than 90 tanks and armoured cars, 11 Sam-8 and Sam-13 missile systems, 20 BM-21 Stalin Organs and more than 300 assorted other vehicles.
In the numbers game the South Africans were the clear winners. But nevertheless 20 SA Brigade had not succeeded in its main aims of either destroying the Fapla brigades, before they could retreat to good defensive positions, or driving them from their last toehold on the east bank of the deep and fast-flowing Cuito River. SADF officers took comfort from the fact that Fapla had at least been pushed north of the Chambinga River. But the facts were that South African morale was low, equipment was failing with great regularity and SADF logistics were inadequate. For Generals Geldenhuys and Liebenberg and Admiral Putter, the question was what to do next.
★ ★ ★
20 SA Brigade had failed so many times to snare the Fapla brigades that it became necessary for the senior SADF generals and the government in Pretoria to do some fresh thinking. The enemy, capitalising on its series of narrow escapes, was now too well deployed and dug in over a limited area of good defensive ground to be chased off or destroyed by artillery alone. The generals decided there would have to be a deliberate attack on the Cuito River bridgehead. The politicians approved.
But that left a tricky question to be resolved. Would the new offensive be launched by troops already in the field, or would they be replaced with fresh soldiers?
For several reasons it would have been better to press on with the soldiers already in Angola. They knew the conditions; they were battle-hardened; and, because of November’s frustrating failures, they had a thing or two to prove yet. But one of the limitations of the South African military system was coming home to roost. The South African Army is essentially a conscript force. It has only 18,000 full-time career soldiers, mainly comprising the officer corps and the regular soldiers of the black battalions. The backbone of the fighting force is made up of 60,000 young white national servicemen, each serving two years of compulsory full-time duty,1 and about 140,000 Citizen Force members, civilians who on completion of their national service are obliged to report for a month or more of military service each year for the first ten years after their return to civilian life. Thus, the South African Army, while having only a small core of Permanent Force members, can mobilise the biggest army in Africa in time of trouble.
The Christmas holiday in South Africa is the most important of the year. It comes in the middle of the southern African summer. So, not only is it the time when families get together in the traditional Christian ritual, but businesses and factories close down for up to a month and mini-Great Treks begin to the beaches of Natal and the Cape, the game parks and the rest of the big outdoors. The Army releases as many national servicemen as possible for home leave, and those who have served their two years are demobilised in time to return to civilian life by Christmas. The whole process receives enormous attention from the South African press, and motorists are urged to give lifts to returning young soldiers who identify themselves at the roadsides with fluorescent orange sashes worn over army drabs.
Nearly all of the fighting men in Angola with 61 Mech and 4 SAI were national servicemen coming to the end of their two-year period of conscription. By Christmas they were due to be out of uniform and back home to resume their normal lives, studies and careers. Logically, in terms of the war, it would have made sense for their period of conscription to be extended so that the impetus of the SADF push was not drained too severely. But the South African public were still very badly informed about the War for Africa: disinformation, secrecy and censorship had combined effectively to hide the true scale of the conflict from the Republic’s citizenry. True, there were occasional announcements of the loss of yet another young serviceman’s life ‘somewhere on the border’. True, many people either knew or suspected that their country’s armed forces were involved in something very much bigger than the government was revealing. But it had ever been that way since the mid-1970s when the Cubans first entered Angola, the Western powers lost their nerve, and SWAPO began major cross-border raids from Angola into Namibia. An extension of the period of national service, against this surreptitious background, would set alarm bells ringing in Johannesburg’s plush northern suburbs, in the dorps of the Transvaal, across the bleak plateau of the Orange Free State, among the vineyards of the Cape and the banana and sugar plantations of Natal and possibly trigger a political crisis. The idea of defeating Cuban- and Soviet-backed communism in Angola was widely favoured among the white electorate; but the deaths of those voters’ sons in pursuit of the goal was deeply unpopular. The voters wanted victories, as long as they were easy; they could be expected to raise a hue and cry if the national service period was extended.
So in the end the generals and politicians decided it would be best if the national servicemen were stood down, as scheduled, and that others take their place. The decision was greatly resented by the field commanders, to whom it made no military sense at all. The replacement batches of 2,500 national servicemen scheduled to join 4 SAI and 61 Mech in Angola had all completed just one year of military service with training battalions. They had no experience of real warfare and each would need several weeks of special training and acclimatisation after their arrival before they would be ready for battle. It would give Fapla a big bonus window of time to organise its defences, build up supplies and rethink tactics.
‘The training period in my Combat Group (Alpha) greatly reduced our momentum,’ said 61 Mech’s Commandant Mike Muller. ‘My officers had to cope with a complete changeover of 1,100 men. From the time they began arriving from 30 November onwards, the new soldiers had to get used to a new climate and entirely new physical conditions. They also had to learn to fight at very much closer quarters than they had been trained for. In Angola, it was bushy terrain, but back in the Republic they had been tutored mostly in open veld. On the training ranges you shot out “enemy” tanks at 1,000 metres. In Angola we had been shooting them out for real as close as 10 to 15 m.
‘Command control in the Angolan terrain was very difficult. We had to train the newcomers in the special kinds of co-ordinated formations we needed to keep: in that thick bush if one bloke made a slip then half of the combat group could be lost to the commander, and then you had to stop and re-group before you could go forward again. You lost precious hours that way. It was tough work training new men in what we had learned only by hard experience. It took time. We scheduled three weeks for training to get them battle-ready, but it took longer.’
So, although there would be scarcely a dry eye among South African vrouens and moeders (wives and mothers) as they rushed out onto their stoeps before Christmas to welcome home their husbands and sons from the war, the combat group officers were left gnashing their teeth with frustration.
Colonel Deon Ferreira had mixed feelings. ‘I knew the commanders were against the hassle of changing troops at such a critical stage,’ he said. ‘The organisation and retraining needed a big effort. In terms of the hassle factor I was against changing the troops. Ideally we should have finished the job with the old troops. But, on the other hand, many of them had seen more action in three months than many South African soldiers saw in the whole of World War II. Fighting spirit was down. Leon Marais and his people in 4 SAI had had enough. A lot of equipment needed replacing. And anyway there was no real choice once the generals had told the troops they would be home for Christmas. It would have been very difficult to remotivate those guys.’
As a compromise between the desires of the field officers and those of the waiting women, the generals decided that 20 SA Brigade would make one last effort before Demob Day on 30 November to push the Fapla brigades from their remaining patch of territory on the east bank of the Cuito River. Such an idea ran directly counter to the recommendations of the combat group commanders who said Fapla’s defences in front of Cuito Cuanavale were virtually impregnable to an attack from the east. They argued, more potently than ever, that the logical way to achieve victory was to attack Cuito Cuanavale from the west, isolate all the enemy’s eight brigades in and around the town, and then destroy them at the SADF’s leisure. Their wishes, first expressed in August and then again after the 3 October victory over 47 Brigade, were again proscribed.
There were several reasons why the hard-headed pragmatism of Robbie Hartslief, Mike Muller and Leon Marais was overruled. The generals knew something that the commandants were not aware of. Fidel Castro, fearing a military catastrophe for the Fapla forces, had ordered Cuban diplomats and MPLA officials accredited to the United Nations to contact South Africa’s UN mission in New York in order to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the Angolan conflict. Such an agreement, Castro suggested, should be linked to a resolution of the problem in neighbouring South African-ruled Namibia. Since this was the sort of formula South African Foreign Ministry officials had been working towards for the best part of a decade, the ears of Foreign Minister Pik Botha in Pretoria naturally pricked up. From now onwards the foreign affairs mandarins would have an ever greater input into the conduct of the War for Africa. The negotiations ball would at first roll slowly, uncertainly and in an unclear direction – but, eventually, it would turn with ever greater momentum and certitude along the sound tarmac laid by the SADF’s military successes until eventually the whole face of southern Africa would be transformed in a way that few people would once have thought possible.
Castro was also coming under severe pressure from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev whose reforms would lead in 1989–90 to some of the most profound changes in world history as the Marxist-Leninist ethic disintegrated under the weight of its contradictions in eastern and central Europe. As early as late 1987 Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroïka (reconstruction) were already beginning to have a major impact on Cuba. For nearly 30 years Moscow had underwritten Castro’s communist revolution by buying Cuba’s sugar at more than the world price and selling oil to it below the market price. Under Gorbachev such extravagant economic gestures, which had helped suck the Soviet Union dry, were being phased out. In a speech on 28 December 1987 Castro described the previous 12 months as one of the most difficult for Cuba since he came to power in 1959. ‘A year of many obstacles,’ was the euphemism he employed to describe the squeeze being put on him by Moscow. There were clear signs that Moscow was growing disenchanted with the burden of bankrolling the Cuban/MPLA war in Angola. On 11 November 1987, the 12th anniversary of Angola’s independence, Soviet television journalist Valeriy Grigoryev, in a 30-minute film report from Angola, launched an extraordinary attack on Moscow’s MPLA allies which could only have been sanctioned at the highest level. ‘There is no question that the war has become a heavy burden that the [Angolan] working people have to shoulder,’ Grigoryev told Soviet viewers. ‘More than half the country’s budget is spent on defence ... Corruption is at an unprecedented level. Inflation is rampant. Speculation and the so-called black market have become serious problems on a national level. The crisis can also be attributed to mismanagement. Because of the failure to reconcile government planning and the state budget, the deficit in the balance of payments continues to grow. Foreign debt is increasing. The state bureaucracy has been blown out of proportion, while the management of the economy and enterprises is terribly poor. Production discipline is very low. How can there be talk of fulfilling plans when more than one-third of the republic’s enterprises are idle while the rest are working at minimum capacity?’
The SADF generals concurred reluctantly with their diplomats’ views that a devastating attack on Cuito Cuanavale from the west would be foolish just as the Angolans and Cubans, urged by their Soviet bankroller, were beginning to seek a face-saving way out of the conflict. Yes, it would probably result in the destruction of the brigades at Cuito Cuanavale. But it might also lead to an uncontrollable escalation of the war on other fronts as the Cubans, impelled by the need to demonstrate Latin American machismo, and the Soviets – who, despite Gorbachev’s accession, still needed to fan gently the dying embers of Brezhnevian socialist internationalist solidarity before finding a respectable moment to douse them finally – sought to demonstrate their ‘unshakeable’ commitment to the MPLA. Already South African military intelligence had learned from the CIA that Castro had ordered the soldiers and pilots of one of Cuba’s finest divisions, the 50th, to Angola in mid-November to join the fighting in the event of the military situation deteriorating further.
The SADF generals had no doubt of their forces’ ability to take on the Cubans and beat them: but equally they had no doubt about the heavy cost this would involve in South African lives, equipment and domestic and international political controversy.
A kind of half-cock military plan was decided upon to conclude Operation Moduler before the national servicemen went home to their mums, wives and girlfriends. The troopies would not launch the ground attack from the west advocated so strongly by their field commanders. They would not, however, wait twiddling their thumbs in Angola before throwing away their uniforms and returning to civvie street. They would, the generals determined, launch one last attack from the east to try to drive the Fapla brigades back to the western side of the Cuito River, thus achieving the main aim of the hiccup-ridden chase of the enemy from the killing fields of the Lomba River: the generals reasoned – or, rather, Pik Botha’s Department of Foreign Affairs reasoned – that if the attack was successful it would exert just enough pressure on the Cubans and Fapla to transform the pre-negotiations into substantive talks.
The 20 SA Brigade HQ at Rundu now had dual and incompatible duties – to plan the eviction of Fapla from Savimbi-land by the end of November and to arrange the return home well in advance of Christmas of men who knew they would be fighting the last battle of their national service careers.
A forlorn task was made more difficult by the fact that Fapla itself was learning a trick or two. For example, one SADF artillery observer directing fire on the Tumpo Triangle logistics base grew increasingly frustrated at his inability to exercise accurate control because the rocket and G-5 shells were falling in an inexplicably irregular pattern. It took the observer specialists some time to work out that Fapla sappers had bamboozled the SADF by placing explosive charges in the ground which they detonated at random as their enemy’s shells fell.
Furthermore, the SADF generals knew that the forces at their disposal were inadequate in themselves to throw Fapla from its defensive positions. The hope was that an attack over the Chambinga High Ground might simply frighten Fapla into withdrawing right across the Cuito River in the belief that the SADF force was very much bigger than in reality. The reasoning at high level was that Fapla was so demoralised that it would have little fight left in it. Just the threat of one last major push by the SADF, with its formidable reputation enhanced by the Lomba triumphs, would be enough to make the Angolans cut and run.
To say that the field commanders were sceptical about this plan is to do scant justice to their bitter opposition to it. Time and again, as this book was researched, these officers, who are still serving loyally with the SADF, asked the author to switch off his tape recorder while they gave him their off-the-record opinions of what they had been asked to do. ‘Fundamentally stupid,’ said one highly decorated officer who argued that Fapla, despite its many shortcomings, had often fought with a degree of determination that South African soldiers in the field respected. The field commanders knew from their warfare textbooks and from hard, bloody experience that the Tumpo Triangle into which the Angolans were slowly being forced was ideal defensive terrain; that the enemy had used the time given to them, by the SADF’s inability to attack immediately, to organise three defence lines between the Cuito River and the Chambinga High Ground; that the Fapla brigades would not readily give up the terrain they now held, especially as their confidence had been lifted by recent small-scale successes; and that there were two Fapla brigades, the 8th and the 13th, and several Cuban companies in reserve just across the river around Cuito Cuanavale. The SADF force, numbering scarcely 3,000 men at that stage, would be attacking more than 5,000 enemy soldiers on the Cuito Cuanavale east bank who had withdrawn into well-prepared defensive positions. Unanimously the commandants of the three combat groups continued to argue that, whatever the political and diplomatic considerations might be, attacking Cuito Cuanavale from the west was the only option that made any sense militarily.
The SADF attack was delayed until Wednesday 25 November, primarily because of the requirement that the tanks, G-5s and other bits of weaponry first be fully repaired and operational with adequate back-up spares, fuel and logistics in place. Commandant Mike Muller highlighted one of the many logistics problems that were being experienced: pins he needed for the tracks of the tanks arrived only just in time to enable the Olifants to take part in the fight with a degree of confidence that they would not be knocked out by their own lack of spares. This time the main attack was to be carried out by UNITA forces, with SADF units in support and follow-up roles. The main thrust was aimed against 25 Brigade at the Chambinga bridge. Robbie Hartslief ’s Combat Group Bravo received the tank squadron under Mike Muller. The early rules of Operation Moduler combat were that SADF forces were to destroy the Fapla brigades before the enemy crossed the Chambinga bridge, but that the South Africans themselves were not to cross it. Now the bridge would have to be traversed in contravention of the original operational guidelines.
The principal aim of the attack of 25 November was to drive the Fapla brigades from the east bank of the Cuito River by Saturday 28 November. Two days after that the 4 SAI and 61 Mech national servicemen were due to start demobilisation. The minimal aim was to achieve domination of the Chambinga bridge by the end of the young soldiers’ last battle.
The attack, with Combat Group Alpha deploying to the northeast to distract 59 Brigade’s attention from the main thrust against 25 Brigade, was launched with a series of hiccups. The initial artillery barrage was scheduled for 4 am, but began three-and-a-half hours late. The UNITA/ SADF ground assault also started late because UNITA recces failed to meet Combat Group Bravo’s forward elements at the agreed rendezvous.
The plan called for UNITA’s 3rd and 5th Regular Battalions to push over the Chambinga High Ground just to the north of the Chambinga River and then turn north to push into the Tumpo area with Combat Group Bravo following up close behind and Combat Group Charlie securing the Chambinga bridge.
Robbie Hartslief found that his Ratels of Combat Group Bravo and Mike Muller’s tanks were able to advance at only a leaden pace because of the thickness of the bush. Vision was so limited that the armoured vehicles had to use electronic navigation, and the vegetation was so dense that the Ratels and Olifants were unable to rotate their turrets.
The noise and the pace of the South African advance enabled Fapla forward units to retreat to safety almost at leisure. At 11 am Bravo ran into a minefield which, while it inflicted no damage, robbed the advance of yet more momentum. Meanwhile, behind, Charlie had come under heavy 120 mm mortar attack and lost three men wounded.
The Last Unsuccessful SADF Attack of Operation Moduler: 25/26 November 1987.
By 3 pm Bravo was still struggling through heavy bush, having advanced only 800 metres in the previous four hours. For a while forward momentum stopped completely as the vehicles encountered vegetation almost as impenetrable as a brick wall. The tanks were pulled out to high ground to the northwest to function in a purely observation role.
It was only at 5 pm that Bravo reached Fapla’s outer positions after UNITA had pushed the Fapla forward elements westwards at heavy casualty cost to Savimbi’s 5th Regular Battalion. Bravo was at last ready to attack, but during a reorganisation halt the combat group suffered a particularly heavy and accurate Fapla artillery attack. One mortar bomb fell right through the open hatch of a Ratel, killing the gunner, and two other South African soldiers were seriously wounded by shrapnel.
Having sustained serious casualties, with Muller’s Olifants unable to manoeuvre, the bush showing few signs of thinning out, and the light beginning to fade, Commandant Hartslief decided to call off the attack for that day.
Combat Group Charlie, with Mike Muller’s tank squadron attached, became the main SADF attack force the following day, Thursday 26 November, with Bravo reverting to the reserve role.
Charlie was even more out of luck than Bravo. During the night Fapla reinforced its positions at the Chambinga bridge with another ten tanks. The South African force again moved off later than planned and was held up unexpectedly by a minefield. Then Leon Marais’s men came under a fierce artillery barrage, particularly from big Soviet M-46 guns positioned at Cuito Cuanavale. Marais was forced to withdraw to the Chambinga source. The whole attack was called off with the South Africans having failed to achieve even their minimal aim of capturing and securing the Chambinga bridge.
The generals declared Operation Moduler at an end, with the enemy having been driven back all the way to its July starting point. The national servicemen in the front line began heading for civvie street. Staff officers began planning a full-scale attack on the Fapla bridgehead at the Cuito River with fresh SADF troops and weapons reinforcements. The new operation, designated Hooper, would begin officially on Sunday 13 December 1987.
★ ★ ★
It was not only national servicemen who exited the War for Africa with the conclusion of Operation Moduler. Others’ war was over too.
Captain Piet van Zyl, who had been called back into action from his Natal farm by Colonel Deon Ferreira, had been worrying for some weeks about the way his big property was being managed in his absence. The key maize planting had begun on 20 October and had been handled inefficiently. As a result, both the sheep shearing and potato harvesting had fallen badly behind schedule, threatening Van Zyl with potential losses of many tens of thousands of rands. Van Zyl, essentially a man of action, was chafing at the bit at the prospect of a long period of inaction between the end of Moduler and the launching of Hooper. ‘I got a message from the farm on 8 December saying a lot of things were going wrong,’ he said. ‘It seemed also to me that our generals had reached a point of indecision about the conduct of the war. It was obvious that the new national servicemen would need a lot of retraining before we would be ready to press on. Our tanks would need a lot of servicing, and there would be a long wait before reinforcement tanks arrived. So I asked Colonel Ferreira if he minded if I returned to the farm.’
It was almost a re-enactment of scenes from the Boer War when individual Afrikaner commandos would break off from battle when the mealie (maize) planting season came round. Ferreira willingly but sadly let one of the finest fighting officers he had known fly out by helicopter to put his farm back in order.
Ferreira himself, after more than three months of exhausting work directing 20 SA Brigade, was relieved by Colonel Paul Fouché for Operation Hooper.
Another comrade of Ferreira’s from his days at Fort Buffalo as Commandant of 32 Battalion was also out of the war. Sergeant Mac da Trinidada, the black Angolan recce group leader, had continued to enjoy an exciting life after the decisive 3 October battle with 47 Brigade on the Lomba.
‘My team was sent north after that to track Fapla’s 59 Brigade on the western side of the Cunzumbia River and 21 Brigade on the eastern side,’ said Da Trinidada. ‘We were there for something like three weeks with our artillery bombarding their positions, and their artillery bombarding the SADF positions. With other recce teams and small infantry groups we were hitting their logistics routes from behind with mines, hit-and-run guerrilla ambushes and automatic ambushes.
‘We reconnoitred possible crossing points on the Cuito River, scouted for Commandant Hartslief on the Mianei, and then after a short leave back at Fort Buffalo we were assigned to Mike Muller’s Combat Group Bravo. On 11 November we led Commandant Muller’s 61 Mech units into positions south of the Vimpulo while Combat Group Charlie tried to stop 21 and 25 Brigades crossing the river. There were lots of enemy patrols in the area because 21/25 Brigades were retreating fast from the Mianei towards the Vimpulo. I went out with Corporal Branco on 12 November to try to locate the enemy concentrations, but we couldn’t get to close quarters because of the heavy patrolling. The next day we got near and we brought in our Mirages to bomb them and then brought in G-5 fire. Branco and I followed 21/25 Brigades as they retreated, trying to bring 61 Mech in on their tracks from behind to complement the big Combat Group Charlie ambush on the Vimpulo.
‘On 14 November 21/25 Brigades began another sprint towards the Vimpulo at about 4 pm. Branco and I followed their tank tracks for about four kilometres before I radioed to 61 Mech that they should get ready to attack. What I hadn’t realised at first was that 21 Brigade had left some of their tanks behind at their old position to the south. We moved towards it and they shot at us with 12.7 mm guns mounted on top of the tanks. We were only two guys, so we weren’t an easy target.
‘We radioed Mike Muller to tell him not to come in after all, and then Branco and I started working our way eastwards with the eventual intention of moving northwards to link up with another recce team. We were wearing Fapla uniforms, and as we withdrew on the eastern side in the early hours (on 15 November) we ran into UNITA. Two hundred men were setting up an ambush there and we hadn’t been warned about it. They opened fire on us. I felt my AK-47 fall down from my right hand as I was on the radio to my people telling them I was pinned down in a UNITA ambush and somebody had better order them to stop shooting. Then there was heavy shooting again all around me. Branco and I “bombshelled” away from each other and started running. I had to drop my heavy kit, including my radio. I stopped after I’d run about two kilometres. It was only then that I became aware of the pain. A UNITA bullet had gone through my forearm and shattered one of the bones. There was a lot of blood and several nerves had been cut, although I didn’t know it at the time. I decided to treat myself from the medicine in the small emergency survival kit we carry in a special pocket in case you lose everything else. It ensures you can last for two days.
‘I injected myself in the muscle with morphine to cut off the pain. I bandaged it and then assessed my position. All I had was my big pocket knife, my survival food, a small compass and my maps. So I knew where I was, but without the radio I couldn’t communicate my situation to base. I ran south all day towards a 32 Battalion post 17 km from where I had had the contact with UNITA. All the way I was losing a lot of blood. I had to keep stopping to strip bark from chimwanje trees to use as rope to renew the tourniquet I had tied at the top of my arm. I wasn’t too worried at first about the wound, but I didn’t want to look at it. Later I began to get dizzy and I started thinking: when am I going to find people to help me?
‘I reached the 32 Battalion post at about 5 pm. Captain Jako Potgieter (an artillery officer) was in command and I asked him for a cigarette. He had to hold it for me because I couldn’t keep it steady. At first, the captain thought I was shot in the body because there was blood everywhere and my trousers were soaked with it. Then there was an argument between the captain and the doctor. Potgieter wanted me to tell him what had happened, but the doctor wanted to start work on me. The captain said: “Let me have a quick word with him before you put him under the anaesthetic.” All I remember telling him was to change the radio codes because I’d lost my code booklet and that I’d left a flask of whisky in my kit. I always carried it to put in my coffee when it was cold.
‘In fact, Potgieter already knew it was UNITA who had fired on us. UNITA had reported they were involved in a contact with a whole battalion of Fapla, although it was only Branco and me. UNITA had picked up my kit, weapon and webbing and then realised we weren’t Fapla.
‘The doctor put me under at about 7 pm and I woke up just before 6 pm the next day [Monday 16 November] with my right arm and hand entirely encased in plaster. I was in the military hospital at Rundu. They had flown me there by helicopter at about three o’clock that morning. The next day I was joined by the Lieutenant [de Villiers Vos] who had been wounded in his shoulder in the battle against 21/25 Brigades on the Hube. I was on a drip, but the Lieutenant sat talking to me. He said Sergeant Mendes [of the 32 Battalion recces] had got my kit back from UNITA but had drunk all of the whisky in my flask.’
On Wednesday 18 November Da Trinidada and De Villiers Vos were flown to military hospital in Pretoria for further treatment. Da Trinidada began an extensive course of surgery to mend the shattered bone in his forearm and to stitch together severed nerves, although the doctors quickly abandoned hope of restoring movement in the little finger of their patient’s right hand. Two metal pins will stay in Da Trinidada’s forearm for ever and, although the micro-surgery on his nerves will continue for years, he was back on active recce service with his battalion within nine months of the shooting.
‘When Frenchie and Piet [Fourie] heard I’d been shot they flew down to Pretoria to see me in hospital,’ said Da Trinidada. ‘They got a pass for me to go out for a meal with them at the After Dark nightclub. I ordered a very big medium-rare steak. When the food came I found that although I could eat the chips OK I couldn’t cut the steak because my arm and hand were still covered with plaster. I knew Frenchie and Piet would pretend not to notice my problem. And there was no way I was going to ask them to help; they would have had even more fun at my expense. There was also no way I was going to pick up the steak with my good hand to eat it. It wouldn’t have been polite. In the end, I got a waitress to cut it for me. It was the first time in my life I’d thought about the possibility of taking a wife. Marriage doesn’t really suit my type of work because I’m not often at home. But that evening I needed a woman to cut my steak and I began thinking about asking my girlfriend in Rundu to marry me.’
For Robbie Hartslief, who had spent more than four months at the front, the winding up of Operation Moduler meant the end of his war on the eastern front. But it was not the end of his war. He was about to embark on an entirely new adventure elsewhere.
1 This was reduced to one year following President F W de Klerk’s reform blitz of 1990.