East of Cuito Cuanavale, in the southeastern theatre of the War for Africa, there were only two centres of substantial modern construction which hinted that the Land Beyond the End of the Earth had heard of the twentieth century.
One was Mavinga, where a score or more of spacious, Mediterranean-style bungalows were spread out down two dirt roads which crossed each other and were lined by orange trees which gave abundant harvests in June. The houses were lived in by colonial district officers, traders and big game hunters who brought rich clients from the United States and Europe to what was until the mid-1970s perhaps the biggest and richest wild animal paradise in Africa. The exquisite little town was abandoned in 1975 when civil war intensified following Angola’s independence; by the end of the century, it may well have been entirely engulfed by the surrounding bush.
The other was the strong, steel-reinforced concrete bridge across the Cuito River. It provided access from Cuito Cuanavale to the only ‘road’ in the Land Beyond the End of the Earth, the sand track which wound some 160 km through the bush and across the rivers and anharas to Mavinga.
The Cuito River bridge was crucial to Fapla’s logistics operation in the War for Africa. And so from the very beginning the SADF was making plans to destroy it. Jan Hougaard’s early plan to send in 32 Battalion to blow up the bridge was vetoed because of fears of heavy South African casualties.
From mid-October, when the G-5 guns got into position south of the Mianei, the Cuito bridge took constant heavy punishment from the 155 mm shells. ‘The bridge was one of our top priority targets,’ said Colonel Jean Lausberg. ‘One problem was that it was narrow, and only direct hits on it were effective. The bridge was very strong and covered in tarmacadam, so normal high explosive shells were totally ineffective in weakening the structure. We got round that by using penetration shells with a delay detonation fuse which set off the explosion not on impact but half a second later, after the shell had penetrated.
‘Another difficulty we faced was getting observers close to the bridge. Forward observers were critical to the success of accurate bombing by the G-5s. But the area around the Cuito Bridge was crawling with Fapla soldiers and, later, Cubans. One of my artillery observers, Lieutenant Charles Fuch, got to within 600 m of the bridge and was able to make a very useful sketch of it. But it was too risky for him to stay there for long and guide our shells on to the target.’
The closest Lausberg could infiltrate a forward artillery observer was on high ground at the source of the Dala River, eight kilometres northeast of the Cuito bridge. ‘Major Cassie van der Merwe sat there for three weeks in November as we tried to seal off the Cuito crossing after the battle with 16 Brigade,’ said Lausberg. ‘He had a lot of UNITAs for protection. After a while Cassie reported that he thought he had malaria, but he point-blankly refused to return to base. He got through the fever after the doctor instructed him to take a hell of a dose of malaria tablets.’
The G-5 bombardments left the bridge in tatters but not down. Men died and tanks and supply trucks were destroyed on the bridge. But still the Fapla convoys continued to move across.
It was not only the G-5 artilleryman who tried to destroy the bridge. After 32 Battalion was denied permission to attempt its demolition, 4 Reconnaissance Commando came up with its own plan. Recce officers have refused to give an account of how the attack was planned and carried out, but some outlines of the operation from official sources have been published.1 Seven commandos were dropped by helicopter 40 km northeast of Cuito Cuanavale in late August. As night fell on 25 August 1987 they entered the river 24 km north of the Cuito Bridge and let the current sweep them downstream towards their target. The author can vouch personally for how straightforward this part of the operation must have been, for I have swum extensively in the same river further north with UNITA soldiers as my companions; the river is clear, deep and fast-flowing. No effort is needed to swim downstream. It is simply a matter of steering, which must have been a relief to the commandos with all the explosives, weapons and other equipment they were carrying on rubber dinghies.
How they avoided detection at the bridge and placed their charges may not be known for a long time. What is known is that the resulting explosions caused tremendous damage but failed to bring the bridge down completely. It did however limit the volume of traffic which could move across. All the men got out alive, although one missed the rendezvous, according to the one available account, because he had an encounter with a crocodile and had to stab the reptile in the throat in order to escape. He was picked up later at a reserve rendezvous point. The man has since been known to his comrades as Crocodile De Wet, after a small Cape Province town in the hinterland of Saldanha Bay, where recces undergo frogman training. They also train in Lake St Lucia, in Natal, and in its surrounding crocodile-infested lagoons.
The SADF high command grew desperate to bring down the bridge completely and make the enemy’s resupply operations more difficult. Armscor had at pre-production stage a highly secret ‘fire-and-forget’ airto-ground missile, so called because it is released at a distance from the target and then identifies the target and engages it by itself while the pilot and his aircraft are scooting back to base. Such weapons, incorporating state of the art microchip and sensor technology, are also known as ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ weapons. Nothing is known about the Armscor H-2 project, which remains classified to this day. A sister programme has developed laser-guided bombs for the South African Army’s mortar batteries.
Though no specifications have been released of the H-2, it must have an initial rocket system to take it to within a certain range of the target. At a set distance and height the bomb’s own ‘intelligence’ automatically takes over and independently searches for the kind of specific target it has been programmed to seek out. Once the target is identified, the bomb veers unerringly towards it under its own guidance system, with millions of computations passing through the microchip by the second.
The technology is difficult and takes years to perfect, so the Air Force could not have been confident of success when the H-2 was dragged prematurely from its Armscor womb and delivered to Grootfontein to be fired in anger.
The Buccaneer, a British warplane which had seen more than 20 years of service with the SAAF, was selected as the launch platform for the H-2. The aging Buccaneer’s great virtue was that it could fly fast, far and easily at the very low level at which the H-2 would be launched. The Buccaneer would be accompanied by other Buccaneers and Mirage F-1AZs to act as decoys and give protection.
Six planes, including the Buccaneer, took off on the first H-2 raid just before dusk on 10 December 1987. The planes returned without releasing the bomb because of unspecified technical problems. Further raids on 12 and 13 December went even more sadly wrong. On both occasions H-2s were launched which proved to be ‘unintelligent’. Both plopped into the Cuito River well short of the bridge.
The New Year brought a change of luck. On 3 January an H-2 Buccaneer and its escorts, four Mirages and another Buccaneer, took off from Grootfontein early in the morning but had to return without launching the smart bomb when it was reported that enemy Migs were already flying dawn patrols around Cuito Cuanavale.
The same team took off from Grootfontein four hours later to try again. Two patrolling Mig-23s acquired the raiding party on their radars, but for some unaccountable reason broke off and returned to Menongue. The strike Buccaneer pressed onwards and released its H-2 which this time acquired the target and homed in on it relentlessly. A 20 m length of the bridge disappeared in the resultant explosion. The Fapla command reported to Luanda that the bomb had been delivered by a remote piloted vehicle.
The Cuito Bridge was not rebuilt during the War for Africa. However, Fapla was still able to get trucks and tanks across the river using TMM bridging equipment and pontoon ferries.
1 Helmoed-Romer Heitman, War in Angola (Ashanti Publishing Ltd, Gibraltar, 1990).