Commandant Jan Hougaard, who had been sent back to Rundu in late October to prepare his secret mission, completed his planning and organisation by late November. The generals, having several times rejected attacks on Cuito Cuanavale from the west, had decided that something had to be done from that direction, not least because convoys of 300 vehicles or more were constantly arriving in Cuito Cuanavale with supplies and new weapons from Menongue, 200 kilometres to the west. The regular replacement from the west of weapons and spares simply mocked the sweat and blood SADF and UNITA troops had shed in the east in destroying great quantities of Fapla equipment. The knowledge of the convoys’ arrivals was greatly undermining the morale of the South African soldiers, many of whom shared their officers’ desire to attack Cuito Cuanavale from the west.
But though they had now conceded the necessity of a western operation, the generals’ idea fell far short of what the field commanders were urging upon them – a full-blooded attack from west of the Cuito River to isolate the Fapla brigades in Cuito Cuanavale and across the river to the town’s east. Instead, Hougaard’s brief was to organise a clandestine military operation along the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale road with minimal forces to disrupt enemy logistics severely while the main SADF force continued to press home attacks from the east. As usual, there was an additional stipulation: minimum casualties.
Hougaard first had to gather intelligence about Fapla along the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale axis (see map) and then raise a suitable force to carry out the mission. There was no doubt in his mind that the men of his own 32 Battalion were the best suited in the SADF for the stealthy, deep-penetration task. It was how they had been earning their pay for years. However, most of 32 Battalion was tied up in the east in Commandant Hartslief ’s Combat Group Bravo. The winding up of Operation Moduler solved that problem. Hartslief and his 32 Battalion men would be stood down from the east and made available to Hougaard. However, they would leave their frontline positions in mid-December, and after resting, repairing, re-equipping and being briefed would only be ready to infiltrate the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale area in mid-January 1988.
The Sideshow: December 1987 to March 1988.
Hougaard’s orders were to move a force into the area by early December. He needed soldiers to serve in the interim until Hartslief and his men could take over. Hougaard was given a company of 120 men from 101 Battalion, which was made up of black soldiers from Ovamboland in northern Namibia. The MRL battery which had been with Hartslief on the Lomba/Mianei since July 1987 was pulled out well ahead of the rest of Combat Group Bravo so that it could go in with Hougaard from the beginning of the new mission. From among sundry national servicemen and 32 Battalion elements who had been held back in reserve at Fort Buffalo, Hougaard put together a support company with 81 mm mortars, jeep-mounted 106 mm anti-tank cannons and Milan anti-tank missiles.
‘During the planning phase I had to wait for some Special Forces guys from 1 and 5 Reconnaissance Commandos to join us,’ said Hougaard. ‘Our own 32 Battalion recces were really buggered by that time and so they needed additional support.
‘This was a very high risk operation. With real determination the enemy could have cut us off there with battalions they had in Caiundo and Baixo Longa.
‘On the plus side the whole area between the Cuatir and Luassinga Rivers was controlled by UNITA’s First Regular Battalion, which many of us thought was one of Savimbi’s finest units. They were everywhere. I found them a good source of information and early warning. Moving only at night, and with UNITA guiding us, we took the whole convoy north through the bush between Caiundo and Baixo Longa. We split the procession up so that we were only in small groups moving from point to point. Sometimes we laid up for 48 hours and sent out recce teams ahead to establish the next place where it would be safe to stay. By day we made no movement whatsover. We were heavily camouflaged and we lit no fires. It was dense forest all around.
‘We were told we would be in there for two months and that we would have to take with us nearly all of the logistics we’d need for that period. There would be no regular airlift of supplies, as at Mavinga. Just very irregular helicopter forays at night. So before we could do anything we had to move in tons and tons of equipment, ammunition, food, fuel and so on and make big caches which we left UNITA to guard.
‘The move north took us a long time, and while everyone waited for us to get into position the SAAF made several raids on the convoys. They were quite successful, but never strong enough to interrupt the logistics flow seriously and give our guys on the eastern side of the Cuito River a better chance.’
[In a typical SAAF raid by four Mirages on 22 December 1987, on a static convoy of 318 Fapla vehicles, including 35 tanks, at Longa, only eight were destroyed.]
Hougaard’s first task after getting his supplies into the area was to gather as much intelligence as possible from along the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale road. Recces from the Special Forces, 32 Battalion and UNITA quickly had the whole length of the road covered.
‘It was December by then and the rains were heavy every day, which worked to our advantage. The road was only a narrow strip of tar. They couldn’t move off it with the vehicles or tanks or they would have got bogged down. That made their progress tortuous, and because they were restricted to the road they were quite vulnerable. On the other hand, there was always a complete brigade of nearly 1,000 men – usually Fapla’s 8 Brigade – protecting the convoy, while our force was never stronger than 120 men.
‘Pretty soon we knew where the convoys were every minute of the day. And Fapla helped us by leaving in place all the kilometre stones placed there in the old colonial days by the Portuguese. So by reading the stones the recces knew exactly where they were all the time.’
Sergeant Piet Fourie and his team of three black recce colleagues from 32 Battalion spent two months on the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale road. ‘Sometimes I sat just 400 m from the road making coffee as I watched the convoys,’ said Fourie. ‘Massive convoys with hundreds of vehicles in them would stop right in front of me. The bush was very thick, and Fapla’s typical reluctance to leave the road and come in behind us through the forest worked to our advantage. Only occasionally would they deploy flank foot patrols at the side of the road. Then we just moved back out of the way.
‘We would sit there sending statistical information on a convoy by radio – how long it was, where the front was, the position of the back-marker, the types of vehicles in it. Then our guys would come in with the Mirages and bomb them. We were flat on our stomachs, because those bombs were bad news. Everything in the convoy was firing as they heard the Mirages come in. Then we saw the trucks burning and the firing went on for five to ten minutes after the planes had gone.’
Piet Fourie had a high opinion of the SAAF after seeing them fly many times over enemy brigades with missiles exploding all around them in balls of fire. His admiration was not shared by his fellow 32 Battalion recce leader Sergeant Frenchie, who complained: ‘Many times we pinpointed the enemy convoys but when we sent the co-ordinates to the Air Force and called in a strike they often replied that they couldn’t come because it was too dangerous. We used to feel: What about us then? Why have we been ordered to risk our lives for every minute of the day when others are not required to do the same? It was very frustrating. We knew we’d done our part of the job properly, but it was useless because other people weren’t doing theirs.’
Frenchie’s disillusionment extended also to the logistics supplies: ‘Every night we used to lay landmines, tunnelling under the tarmac from the side of the road. But they had only limited effectiveness. They would destroy just one vehicle or throw the track from a tank. I wanted to lay automatic ambushes which cause much greater devastation. But the logistics were a big balls-up. I sent the message back for the equipment to be sent in on the next helicopter run. But when I checked the stuff that UNITA brought up by truck (from the helicopter night landing pad) half of the things were missing. There were many things like that. For me they all added up to an unsuccessful operation.’
In the operation’s early days Hougaard relied on the Air Force bombing raids and the recces’ mine-laying to disrupt the convoys. Having set up his logistics base some 100 km south of the road, he had to scout for a forward base from which to launch ground attacks against the convoys which would not be detectable by Migs and helicopters during the day. Eventually he divided his force between two bases set up in dense forest near two small streams, the Bambi and the Gimbe, about 30 km south of the road. The SADF bases were completely separate from those of UNITA who had one particularly big base on the Cuatir River south of the tar road. But in all its major movements the SADF force was preceded by a protective screen of several hundred UNITA guerrillas who provided intelligence and early warning. With Hougaard at all times was a guerrilla liaison team headed by a UNITA brigadier and a major. Settlements in the dense forest between the Cuatir and the Luassinga were sparse, but Hougaard said such peasant people as there were had long ago thrown their support behind UNITA because of the movement’s prolonged control of the area.
After the initial orientation and organisation phase, Hougaard began manoeuvring his artillery towards the road, deploying the eight MRL launcher vehicles in such a way that some 50 km between Cuatir and Longa were covered. However, Hougaard did not permit the MRLs to fire in the early weeks of the operation. Instead he used UNITA’s 120 mm mortars to hit the convoys in liaison with the recce mining teams and the SAAF. ‘I held the MRLs back because I knew the first time we used that stuff Fapla would know the South African Army was there,’ he said. ‘That might have caused problems for us because they had a lot of forces available in Menongue. They suspected something was going on because there were Migs above every day looking for something. We kept so still that we hardly breathed.’
While waiting for the right moment for a major ground attack, Hougaard’s team worked on making the SAAF raids on the convoys more effective, again using the ‘toss-bombing’ technique to thwart the enemy’s Mig-23s. ‘The Air Force sent in two or four Mirages at a time, hugging the river valleys and forest canopy before pitching up to lob their bombs. We found that if we could radio the SAAF with precise references on the convoy’s location and its mid-point the pilots could land their bombs slapbang on the road and take out that part of it.
‘We had to wait for the right moment because although our guys came in low there were enemy Migs in the air at nearly all times, either going from Menongue to bomb our forces east of Cuito Cuanavale or coming back. Hanging around with them at very high levels were “top cover” Mig-23 air superiority fighters bristling with missiles which outmatched anything we had if engaged in straight combat. The answer was for our guys to sneak in while the enemy planes were still on the ground or fool them while they were in the air.
‘My EW team was always listening to their frequencies. We also had recce teams near Menongue who radioed us every time planes prepared to take off or came in to land. One small problem was that we only had recces on the southern perimeter of Menongue. I wanted observation posts established on the other side as well, but that was north of the latest line that the politicians and generals had drawn as the limit for SADF penetration into Angola.
‘On one occasion there was a flight of eight Migs coming in to land at Menongue after a mission to Cuito Cuanavale. As usual we were listening in on all their frequencies. The first two landed routinely. But the third guy had problems: every time he came in he made a bugger-up of it. The guy in the control tower kept telling him to go back and come back in. Then the controller started swearing at the pilot, saying, “You’re keeping the other planes up. They’re very low on fuel. If you don’t touch down soon they’ll have to ditch or go to another airfield.”
‘It was a stroke of luck for us. A big convoy had concentrated at Cambambe, just 15 km out of Menongue. It was the first overnight resting place for the convoys. They joined up with other elements there from Bie, to the north, and Cuchi, about 100 km to the west of Menongue. They used to sort themselves out and reorganise before pushing on again. They made a perfect target and we had already called in our planes. One had taken off from Grootfontein when the SAAF controllers called off the attack because they said it was too dangerous. They had spotted the eight Fapla Migs coming back from Cuito Cuanavale.
‘The more the Mig pilot failed to approach his landing correctly the more he started to lose his cool and panic. I contacted brigade headquarters at Rundu and said the Mirages should take off from Grootfontein again and the raid should not be cancelled this time because the enemy was hors de combat. So our Mirages came in and took out a lot of vehicles from the convoy while they had Migs in the air just a few seconds flying time away.’
By mid-January 1988 the SAAF raids were inflicting much more comprehensive damage, either striking in the early morning or slipping in under the high-flying Migs heavy with armaments on their way to Cuito Cuanavale. On 9 January, in the early morning, four Mirages caught a 170-vehicle convoy protected by Fapla’s 8 Brigade about two kilometres west of the Cuatir River. Recces counted 40 vehicles left behind burning. The time had come, Hougaard decided, to unleash his MRLs.
‘By the afternoon of the following day the convoy was approaching a Fapla base at Longa, about 100 km out from Menongue. A tremendous thunderstorm broke, so I decided to hit them with UNITA’s 120 mm mortars and several ripples from our own rocket launchers. Because of the storm the Migs were not able to provide protection, so we could afford to hit them for slightly longer than the five minutes we scheduled for attacks. Our philosophy was: Shoot and scoot. It was a direct derivative of the SADF doctrine for fighting in Africa. Having good intelligence, being highly mobile and never staying in one place, and hitting the target at the right time with maximum effort and firepower.
‘When we stopped firing we didn’t wait to find out how much damage we’d done. We packed up and withdrew out of the area as fast as the bush would allow to positions 100 kilometres south of the road out of range of inevitable follow-up counter-attacks. The recces stayed behind, and later they reported that we’d taken out 60 or more vehicles. It was not as destructive as I wanted, but it was a lot of logistics we’d destroyed and that was important. From that point onwards it was open season on the convoys, hitting them with everything we had whenever good opportunities arose, even putting in UNITA infantry ground attacks right along the road. We found that when we hit a convoy heavily with artillery part of it would move away. The rest was left behind with a protection element, and we hit that with a straightforward close-range infantry attack.
‘That 10 January attack spelt the end of my field involvement in that theatre. Commandant Hartslief had his 32 Battalion guys ready to take over and press home the attacks much more regularly. I was back in Rundu by 21 January to begin planning new operations at brigade headquarters.’
Hougaard felt the Menongue operation was going reasonably well, given the severe limitations placed upon it by the generals. He may not have achieved all the objectives, but he had fulfilled one imperative – not to lose any equipment. Neither had he lost any SADF men in the frontline fighting. There were two deaths, however, and a tragically serious injury among a team of three national servicemen operating a 20mm anti-aircraft gun at one of the task force’s logistics bases. One day, when the bulk of the force had left base to deploy near the road, they had grown bored and wandered out to inspect the nearby wreckage of a Fapla Mig out of curiosity. The Mig proved to be booby-trapped and in the resultant explosion two of the young men were killed instantly and the third lost both of his eyes and both arms.
Hougaard, despite satisfaction that he had set up the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale operation reasonably effectively, still shared his fellow-officers’ disappointment that no decision was forthcoming from on high to launch a major operation against Cuito Cuanavale. ‘We were practically begging for orders to attack (from the west),’ he said. ‘The assault from the east looked more and more like a stand-off situation. Everybody was pretty frustrated because they wanted to go for Cuito Cuanavale. Everybody’s hopes had been built up when the Cabinet came to see us at our tactical HQ north of Mavinga (in late November 1987) with the Migs flying overhead and bombing all around. The President (P W Botha) was there and (defence minister) Magnus Malan and Pik (the foreign minister, Pik Botha). P W said then that we would get everything we needed and he said: “You people must go on.” But it didn’t work out that way. There were limitations put on us all the time, and as a result a lot of enthusiasm drained away.
‘Robbie Hartslief and I knew that with the kind of force we’d been given for the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale operation we couldn’t go on hitting the road indefinitely. But with a few extra men and resources and permission from on high we could have switched to other tactics which would have inflicted very serious damage. With bigger ground forces we could have attacked the convoy concentration points and taken them out completely, or we could have gone west and north of Menongue and taken out many of the supplies coming by road before they even reached Menongue.
‘Robbie and I also asked for G-6s which with their firepower and great mobility would have inflicted terrible damage on the convoys. But at the time the top brass was afraid about that type of equipment getting captured. (The three pre-production G-6s which had bombarded Cuito Cuanavale from the northeast during Operation Moduler were withdrawn from Angola at the end of November 1987, never to return. One of the guns which had blasted the town was subsequently sent to an international arms exhibition in Chile, where several export orders were placed for the production weapon).
‘With bigger forces and more weaponry we could also have begun taking out the big Soviet planes which were flying men and weapons into Menongue. The big Ilyushin-72 transports were particularly juicy targets. We knew we had the weapons and techniques to hit them. UNITA tried with their Stingers, but they weren’t successful. However, a UNITA colonel managed to shoot an MI-24 (helicopter gunship) out of the air near Menongue with an RPG-7. The Ilyushins used to arrive very high right above Menongue. Then they spiralled down to land. It was impossible for us to penetrate far enough inside their defences to bring the Ilyushins down. But there were ways of doing it with more planning and latitude of manoeuvre.
‘We had worked out one method with the Air Force and on one day towards the end of December (1987) several Mirages had actually taken off from Grootfontein to bomb Menongue, where there were up to 40 Migs on the ground at any one time as well as transport planes. But for some reason they were called back after they were on their way. We’d planned it well, so we know they would have got through. We believed it was a high-level political decision to pull them back at the last minute: someone up there (in Pretoria) said Menongue and other big targets must be left out. We heard that another possibility was that they were afraid of provoking bigger Cuban involvement, because there was a whole regiment of Cubans there in Menongue, and their planes and pilots would have been among those wiped out. We heard Cuban pilots all day long speaking Spanish and Russian on their radios. Aeroflot (the Soviet state airline) used to fly the logistics into Menongue. Once we heard a Cuban bringing in his Mig to land when he developed trouble with his undercarriage. There was an Aeroflot transport sitting over Menongue and the Soviet pilot started giving the Cuban precise instructions in Russian on how to sort out the problem. So obviously the Russian had flown Migs and wasn’t a mere commercial pilot.
‘The Cubans were much better pilots than the Angolans, and I doubt whether our leaders wanted to lure them into deeper involvement. The poor training of the Fapla pilots was working in our favour. Theirs was probably the worst trained air force in Africa. They had technologically more advanced planes, but the superior training of our guys closed the gap. But it seems that someone on high didn’t want to escalate the war on another front at a time when the South African Army already felt stretched.’