The battle of 14 February against Fapla’s 59 Brigade and the skirmish on Highpoint 1251 of 20 February had forced the Angolans and Cubans back into their last 30 sq km bastion on the east bank of the Cuito River, the Tumpo Triangle.
The SADF’s enemies had built strong defences, with two lines of intricate infantry trenches and sandbag bunkers running north-south between the sources of the Dala and Tumpo Rivers. Breach one stout trench line and there was the dispiriting prospect of another one to go. Fapla had also laid extensive anti-tank and anti-personnel minefields in front of the trenches. For Fapla riflemen and artillerymen there was a clear field of fire out across the almost treeless flatland of the Anhara Lipanda, which varied in width from west to east from about four to six kilometres.
Fapla’s M-46 and D-30 guns and BM-21 Stalin Organ MRLs were placed on the west bank of the Cuito River, where the land was considerably higher than that stretching from the Tumpo Triangle across the Anhara Lipanda to the foot of the Chambinga High Ground. It was like a shooting gallery in which the guns had all the fun because the odds were stacked entirely in their favour. Suddenly, the Cuban/Fapla artillery, which further south had been ineffective compared with the G-5s because of its lack of range and poor use of forward observers, was on equal terms with the South African artillery.
Fapla’s big guns and BM-21s – some 60 of them in all – had been widely spread in ones and twos. This gave their crews multiple lines of fire and meant it was difficult for the South African gunners to select priority counter-bombardment targets. Despite all the best efforts of Hougaard’s and Hartslief ’s marauders south of the Menongue-Cuito Cuanavale road, big quantities of supplies had got through with the convoys and there was no shortage of ammunition for the enemy gunners.
The SADF objective now was to drive the Fapla/Cuban forces from the Tumpo Triangle and let UNITA take over the abandoned positions. This would deprive Fapla of the bridgehead it needed for any future offensive against UNITA’s Mavinga and Jamba strongholds.
On staff officers’ and politicians’ maps it all looked so very simple. But the field officers knew they faced a formidable task. Get through the minefields and the trenchlines and then you would become sitting ducks for the artillery. At the same time the enemy warplanes would be overhead all the time, and your own Air Force would be unable to help out because, despite all the skills, ingenuity and courage of South Africa’s pilots, the Mirage obsolescence factor outweighed all the qualities the SAAF’s men could bring to bear in the Tumpo Triangle. If the SAAF had tried to fly into the Triangle too often in close ground support its planes would have been swallowed up as though in some evil black hole.
It would be left to the infantrymen and the tank and armoured car soldiers on the ground to assault the enemy stronghold. Some men had begun to see similarities between their situation and that of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, but the charge would have to go ahead if the generals so ordered.
Commandant Mike Muller of 61 Mech drew the first short straw.
★ ★ ★
Muller’s battle plan was passed up through all the layers of command, including the Chief of the Army, General Kat Liebenberg, to Defence Minister Magnus Malan – another illustration of how every move the SADF attempted to make was subject to diplomatic and political factors outside the battlefield officers’ knowledge or control.
Muller’s combat group was formed around his own 61 Mech Battalion, which was to be the main attack force consisting of 20 Olifant tanks, a mechanised infantry company in Ratels, the troop of four anti-tank Ratel-ZT3s, a team of 120 mm mortars, a Parachute Regiment assault pioneer platoon, a group of anti-aircraft specialists with Sam-7 missiles and 20 mm guns, a strong party of engineers and UNITA’s 800-man 5th Regular Battalion.
For support Muller also had a flanking force made up of a Ratel squadron, a troop of three tanks, a mechanised infantry company and a 120 mm mortar group; three companies of more than 300 infantrymen from 32 Battalion; and UNITA’s 3rd and 4th Regular Battalions totalling some 1,400 men.
4 SAI, which had lost its commander, Cassie Schoeman, to yet another dose of hepatitis, was held in reserve.
Muller, a thin, wiry man with a dark moustache, had to take his force across the Chambinga High Ground to launch the attack. There were only two viable routes across the hilly terrain. The first was up the long gentle eastern slope and then down the short, steep Heartbreak Hill, from where the attack against 59 Brigade had been made on 14 February. The second lay further south, where the western slope of the High Ground was somewhat longer and not so severe as at Heartbreak Hill. The route led down to an area where the old Portuguese ‘road’ from Cuito Cuanavale to Mavinga stretched out across the Anhara Lipanda.
‘Road’ is something of a euphemism, because the grandest highway east of the Cuito River consisted of nothing more than a deeply rutted track through the sand, which was abandoned for another course each (frequent) time it became unmanageable.
It was the second route that was chosen for the attack.
Muller wanted to attack the first defence line, formed by Fapla’s 25 Brigade, from the south and work along it, destroying installations, and wiping out troops, before turning south again to attack the second defence line from the same direction. The 32 Battalion companies, led by Major Tinus van Staden, would launch the opening assault from the south, leaving 61 Mech to press home the main attack. UNITA’s 5th Regular Battalion would attempt to distract Fapla by pressing home an attack further north along the defence line and Savimbi’s 4th Regular Battalion would launch a feint attack to the west of 32 Battalion on the Tumpo River.
The whole combat group assembled to the east of the Cunzumbia River source, some 45 km from the first Fapla defence line, on the evening of 24 February ready to launch the attack on Saturday 25 February 1988.
Through the night, moving up the eastern slope of the Chambinga High Ground, Muller’s battle group was led by a navigation Ratel. The 32 Battalion companies began infiltrating towards Fapla positions at the source of the Tumpo River from the southeast before the sun rose. But when they reached the objective they found that all the Fapla soldiers of 25 Brigade were abandoning their positions and running away.
‘Then our G-5s and 120 mm mortars opened up and the enemy artillery replied,’ said Muller. ‘Their air force appeared shortly afterwards and subsequently there were Migs in the sky all day.
‘My command vehicle was an incongruous sight. I was using the Olifant which had lost its gun barrel on 14 February. If the enemy had ever seen it we might have won before lunch: they would have died from laughing at the exploded stump.
‘Recce commandos took us along a path they had marked through a minefield until we were just 1.5 km from the enemy’s first outlying positions which were being tackled by 32 Battalion. At this stage I was keeping just inside the treeline for cover at the eastern edge of the open Anhara Lipanda, manoeuvring slowly southwards and waiting for the right moment to attack.
‘We opened into tactical formation, but after another 100 m we ran into another minefield laid just inside the treeline that our recces had not discovered. I was about 20 m behind the first line of Olifants, but my tank was the first to be hit. It was one of the new Soviet M-57 anti-tank mines, much more potent than the M-58s or M-49s. It took the track off my tank and damaged the suspension unit and shock absorbers. I switched to a Ratel as my command vehicle for the rest of the battle.’
The mine explosion gave away Muller’s position to the enemy. ‘Soon we were engulfed by the biggest Fapla artillery barrage of the war,’ said Muller. ‘It was bloody hellish. They put down M-46, D-30, BM-21 and ZU-23 fire on us. They knew where the minefield was and they could see us in the edge of the forest. Our G-5s had stopped firing because there was always two, three or sometimes four Migs in the air and our artillery could not afford to betray their position. The UNITA Stingers should, in theory, have brought down as many as four Migs that day, but for reasons I’ve yet to understand the missiles weren’t available.’
Soon three other tanks had lost tracks to mines and suffered damage to their suspension units as Muller tried to withdraw in 20 m leaps only to discover that the minefield was much more extensive than he had first realised.
The combat group then took its first casualty. ‘My anti-aircraft troop was deployed 1,500 m to my north,’ said Muller. ‘It fired at some Migs. Enemy forward observers picked up the position and laid down M-46 fire, whose shrapnel killed one of my Sam-7 corporals, Hendricks, as he was trying to shoot down a Mig. One of the Withings recovery vehicles trying to pull out the stricken tanks to the rear was struck directly by a 130 mm round from an M-46; it burned out completely.’
Muller’s situation was so desperate that he called up one of the Casspir-launched mine-breaching plofadders which had so far failed every time they had been used.
The string of explosive sausages again failed to explode. A Ratel tried to detonate the plofadder with a hail of fire from its 20 mm cannon. When that failed the only thing to do was to call up a section of nine men from the assault pioneer platoon and ask them to go forward to the far end of the plofadder, detonate it there and open a safe lane through the minefield for the combat group.
‘Lieutenant Louwtjie Louw led the assault pioneers through the minefield, using sticks and mine-detectors to feel their way forward under heavy artillery bombardment, marking each mine they found with a flag,’ said Muller. The tension was so great it was almost visible. It was a very difficult and very slow action. Every metre they advanced took five minutes. They detonated the plofadder at about 11.30 am and by about 12.30 the tanks were moving through the cleared lane towards the objective. We had lost more than five hours stuck in that minefield.’
[Louwtjie Louw and all the members of the section were awarded the Southern Cross Medal for this action.]
Muller’s force advanced across the Anhara Lipanda towards the outer positions at the source of the Tumpo held by a battalion of 25 Brigade which 32 Battalion had attacked and found deserted. ‘The trenches were freshly dug,’ said Muller. ‘There was an intact BTR-60 (armoured car) standing there and knapsacks, webbing and water bottles abandoned and scattered all over the ground.
‘UNITA’s 3rd Regular Battalion moved up the trenchline ahead, but they sent back radio signals saying that they too, like 32 Battalion, found that the Fapla soldiers had gone.
‘Everything seemed to be going so smoothly that, instead of continuing the sweep along the first defensive line, I decided to push on to the second which began a little way further westwards where a tributary ran into the Tumpo. An advance company of 32 Battalion put down yellow smoke to mark their position so that we could integrate. That was a mistake because it drew heavy and accurate artillery fire.
‘By 3pm five of my Ratels had received direct hits. One M-46 bomb explosion ripped off the door of a Ratel-90; the commander had both his legs sheared off and his gunner was wounded. Five 32 Battalion blokes had also been wounded. All our ambulances and recovery vehicles were busy taking the dead and wounded to medical posts in the rear.
‘Later, one of the tanks still stuck in the minefield with a damaged track came under heavy M-46 fire as the crew was trying to get it ready to be pulled out. The crew dived back into the Olifant. But the corporal driving the tank didn’t get his hatch closed in time. A shell hit the sloping armour just in front of the hatch and he was killed outright.’
Muller’s force reached the southern end of the second defence line, more than one kilometre into the enemy objective, but the Fapla troops had fled from there as well. ‘Since I couldn’t call in our artillery to counter theirs, I told Colonel Pat McLoughlin it would be difficult to press on with the attack. We had cleared out the first line of their defences. But we had taken losses and the delays meant the setting sun was now in my gunners’ eyes.’
McLoughlin gave permission for Muller to pull his force back. But as it crossed the Chambinga High Ground in darkness an M-46 scored a direct hit on a big mine-proof truck carrying mortar shells. The whole truck and its ammunition burnt out in a series of spectacular explosions.
‘The driver, Sergeant Koekemoer, started steering the truck away from the rest of the column after the shell hit it,’ said Muller. ‘Thanks to him, no one was hurt. But when all the mortar shells began to cook off he had to drop out of his cabin into a deep foxhole and let the truck burn.’
Muller later discovered from a forward SADF observer, who had watched the whole action, that he had counted some 1,350 ‘accurate’ Fapla artillery shots on Muller’s combat group in the course of the day. Some 1,000 of these had come from the big M-46s.
The army definition of an ‘accurate’ artillery shot is one that falls inside a military formation within 20 m of a vehicle or fixed position. ‘They certainly hammered us that day,’ said Muller. ‘Seven of our vehicles were knocked out and two were burnt out completely.’
★ ★ ★
In the early days of February 1988 Major Tinus van Staden, training commander of 32 Battalion, gave more thought to his second job as the unit’s nature conservation officer than the war in Angola. Most of the battalion was absent on the Menongue operation with Commandant Robbie Hartslief. Other companies, held in reserve, were only in light training in case they were asked at any moment to expend their energies on one of the Angolan battlefields.
Van Staden was able to spend his afternoons and early evenings at the Buffalo Battalion’s infantry training base on the banks of the Kavango watching marsh harriers and white and chocolate fish eagles sweep the great river’s wide waters. It gave him time to think about new projects for the further ecological upgrading of the battalion’s 650 sq km base, set in thick forest at the western end of Namibia’s Caprivi Strip.
One of the finest nature reserves in southern Africa had gradually been created since Colonel Jan Breytenbach, the battalion’s founder, took the forest over in 1976 as a base in which to mould 2,000 ill-disciplined guerrilla refugees from Angola into one of the finest fighting units of the SADF. Breytenbach, younger brother of the exiled poet and African National Congress member Breyten Breytenbach, was an ardent conservationist who grew increasingly appalled by the alleged elephant poaching activities of some SADF units inside Angola in co-operation with UNITA’s trade officials.
Major van Staden, a career soldier in his early thirties from the Orange Free State, was the latest in a succession of battalion conservation officers who had built up the wild elephant population of the Fort Buffalo base from less than 100 in the late 1970s to some 900, one-fifth of the entire Namibian population, by 1988. The wild buffalo population had grown from less than 50 to more than 600. Impala, which were absent from the forest before Buffalo Battalion arrived, were returning. A population of just three rare sable antelope had grown to 27.
It was a brave poacher who stepped into the reserve in pursuit of meat, hides or ivory. Van Staden trained his men in tracking and other arts of warfare by sending them out on anti-poaching patrols throughout the base. It was not easy to convince the black troops that buffalos should be preserved, not eaten.
‘Our guys had been brought up so close to nature that they believed it was their privilege to hunt,’ said the Major. ‘But they got better year by year. Back in 1981 they themselves poached seven elephants and sold the tusks. After that they found it more and more fun to stop Botswana and Kavango poachers. We used to hand them over to the civil authority. I had to restrain our guys at first from taking the law into their own hands: they would have ended up spending more time in Namibia’s civil courts than doing the job in Angola they were paid for!’
Van Staden’s big contribution to Buffalo Battalion’s conservation programmes was the drilling of boreholes to create watering places in dry areas, financing them from battalion funds for ‘training purposes’.
Van Staden particularly loved one waterhole his ‘notorious’ black infantrymen had created ten kilometres from the Kavango. ‘We finished it in June, in the middle of the dry season,’ he said. ‘By the end of the second day of pumping there were eight centimetres of water in the pan. I watched a lesser jacana [a long-legged lily-trotting bird] come in, and I had never seen one at the river. I went back on the third day and there were two types of duck, a yellow-billed duck and a red-billed teal, resting on the water. Later there were dabchicks on the water and a purple roller drinking at the waterside, and I watched lion, kudu, spotted hyena, steenbok, civet cats, warthog, red lechwe and bushbuck go there to drink.
‘I was like a little child. It was a conservationist’s paradise, and I know that properly managed the area could take ten times as many animals.’
But much as Van Staden liked ducks and big mammals, his greatest love was tiny feathered birds. If anybody would listen, he waxed ecstatically about the white-browed sparrow weaver or more especially about the enchanting beauty of the tiny jet black and virgin white Bontpiek, or Arnot’s Chat, which he spent most of his spare time observing. There was not a single black Angolan soldier who passed the training programme of Tinus van Staden, much feared by his underlings, and entered skirmishes and battles in Angola without knowing there were 400 species of bird in their home base, of which nearly 200 had been spotted by their Major and 50 of which were unique in southern Africa to the Caprivi Strip.
But Tinus van Staden, a lean man of medium height with a long wound down one cheek resembling a duelling scar, had attributes other than a Franciscan tenderness towards birds. In August 1981, during the SADF blitzkrieg named Operation Protea into southwest Angola, the then Lieutenant van Staden had leaped on to an enemy T-54 tank, discovered it was empty and begun to draw fire from bush at the side of the road. Van Staden and other soldiers in his patrol returned the fire.
From the treeline emerged Soviet Sergeant-Major Nikolai Pestretsov with his hands raised above his head ready to be taken to South Africa as a prisoner-of-war. Behind Pestretsov lay the still warm body of his dead wife clad in Soviet Army uniform. Next to Mrs Pestretsov lay two dead Soviet lieutenant-colonels and one of their wives, also in uniform. One of the lieutenant-colonels was in charge of the Soviet-Fapla-SWAPO garrison at Ongiva, which had attempted to evacuate northwards but had been overtaken by South African ground troops.
It came as no surprise therefore to Van Staden, with his combat reputation, when his bird-watching activities on the Kavango River were interrupted by an order to move three companies of his black infantrymen into Angola and prepare them to take part in a major battle.
From Fort Buffalo Van Staden’s force of more than 300 men was flown the 250 km to Rundu by C-130 transport planes. At Rundu Van Staden transferred to a Puma helicopter, which took off just before dusk on 16 February and crossed the Angolan border and flew him at 50 m to Mavinga. It landed after dark by the light of one paraffin-soaked cotton wick implanted in a sand-filled baked bean can.
‘That scared me more than any lion at a waterhole or any fighting I ever did in Angola,’ Van Staden told friends.
Van Staden moved by truck to the Brigade tactical HQ, east of the Chambinga High Ground, to join Pat McLoughlin and Mike Muller in planning and co-ordinating the Tumpo One attack.
Van Staden’s infantrymen flew into Mavinga three nights later through bad weather in darkness at 150 m on the cabin floors of two Transall-160s and a Hercules C-130. The Hercules shaved off the tops of two trees as it lined up to land with the guidance only of dimly lit paraffin pots at the side of the runway.
The soldiers were disoriented when they stepped out of the plane into pitch blackness: the ‘landing lights’ had been extinguished within a second or two of the plane’s wheels touching the red laterite of the airstrip. They were led by UNITA soldiers holding their hands to overnight bunkers. The planes, their engines still running, loaded casevacs, broken equipment and personnel for the return trip across the black treetops to Rundu.
When his men joined him at the tactical HQ, Van Staden told them their main task would be to go in ahead of Mike Muller’s main force, attack the trenches and bunkers of Fapla’s 25 Brigade at the source of the Tumpo and create a bridgehead through which 61 Mech’s tanks would penetrate the enemy lines.
The 25 Brigade trenches curved around the Tumpo headwaters in the shape of a scorpion’s tail, with the tip on the southern side of the river’s source at a low rise known as Hill 1208. Van Staden decided his men would make an approach on foot to the target from the Viposto High Ground, 16 km to the southeast of the Tumpo source. The 32 Battalion men would hit the scorpion’s tail at its tip and then move along the defence system clearing it out until they were at the Tumpo source and could signal to the Olifants to come through.
Van Staden sent out a team of three 32 Battalion recces to establish exactly where 25 Brigade’s point positions were. He wanted to move up from the south inside the western treeline of the Anhara Lipanda for as long as possible before he exposed his men on open terrain. At the Chambinga River the recces liaised with UNITA’s 4th Regular Battalion at its forward base just north of the river.
‘The recces needed someone from the 4th Battalion to guide them in towards the Tumpo,’ said Van Staden. ‘My men wanted only to be taken to within range of the enemy. They would then have moved in by themselves under cover of darkness to plot exactly where the enemy lines started. But UNITA refused to take them and in the end my men couldn’t get close enough to give precise co-ordinates.’
Van Staden and his 300 moved out on a Ratel and eight trucks from tactical HQ in the late afternoon of 23 February for the Viposto High Ground. Two of the trucks broke down on the way, and Van Staden had to leave them behind with a captain and 70 fighting men. The trip through the lush tropical vegetation to the south of the Chambinga High Ground gave Van Staden time to indulge in some game viewing.
There were several troops of baboons and a lot of small buck. But the major was most interested in the abundance of birds. The binoculars he always carried slung around his neck were as much for bird-spotting as Fapla-viewing.
‘In a trailing branch I saw a bosloerie, a narina trogon, perhaps the most beautiful bird in Africa, metallic emerald green with a scarlet breast,’ he said. ‘I had never seen one before. I ordered the Ratel driver to stop and reverse a bit so I could train my binoculars on it.’
But soon it was back to war. ‘We knew we would have to cross the Chambinga River swamps that night to avoid detection by the Angolan Air Force,’ said Van Staden. ‘We left the remaining vehicles under heavy camouflage at Viposto and walked towards the swamps lining the Chambinga. We arrived there at about 5 am on 24 February just as the first tinge of grey was appearing in the east.
‘There was only one way through the swamps, and that involved walking in single file. It was a very dangerous time with 230 people spread out in line without cover in an area of open water and thick mud two kilometres wide. For the most part, the route was knee to waist-deep mud, but we had our fun when people disappeared completely beneath the sludge from time to time in unexpected holes.
‘I took 90 minutes to get across. I was near the front, and when I reached firm ground to the north of the Chambinga it was fully light and the last people were just starting to go into the swamp. I prayed that no aircraft would appear, and luckily none did. Quickly afterwards we moved into the treeline to lay up and wait for the attack the next day.’
On the morning of 24 February Van Staden asked the commander of UNITA’s 4th Battalion to attack and destroy a small but troublesome Fapla forward post about five kilometres south of the Tumpo which lay directly in Van Staden’s planned line of advance.
Again UNITA refused to help. ‘Instead I called in a bombardment from our G-5 artillery at about 4 pm,’ said the Major. ‘At 5 pm I ordered my guys to start marching towards the Tumpo. I said we had to take a chance, and if the Fapla forward post was still there we would have to go right over it. But luckily the Faplas had withdrawn after the bombardment, and we went past without any trouble.
‘At that stage I don’t think the Faplas realised what was going on. Over a period of about two weeks beforehand UNITA had staged a series of small pestering attacks, so I don’t think they understood a big assault was building up.’
UNITA’s 4th Regular Battalion had by now spared two of its scouts to guide 32 Battalion towards the target. Van Staden marched his men through the night until the scouts estimated they were about three kilometres south of the tip of the ‘scorpion sting,’ on Hill 1208, of 25 Brigade. Van Staden told his men to rest, and to sleep if they could.
He roused them at 3 am on Saturday 25 February to begin the attack. ‘It was very dark. There was no moon. It was very difficult to control the movement of 230 men spread out over 500 to 1,000 m in extended line in very thick bush. I was moving by compass only and I had to believe in it. My biggest worry was that we wouldn’t hit the sting at the end of the curve. If we missed it we could find ourselves walking parallel with enemy fortified positions without knowing it.
‘I had calculated direction and distance as much as I was able the day before. I also had an Artillery Regiment forward observer with me to help bring in heavy bombardments if we needed them. He was a captain. When I estimated we were at the target I asked him to bring in white illumination 120 mm mortar shells which released flares on little parachutes. They gave a lot of light. It was like daylight and I saw that we had hit exactly the spot I had aimed for.
‘We were about 600 m from the enemy lines and we could actually hear them scrambling and running. Soon there was a hell of a noise as they started up vehicles and began moving away. They were too far off for us to use our small arms, so we carried on moving forward in the darkness with the 120 mm mortars continuing to fire the parachute daylight flares. The whole time we could hear the Faplas running and driving away in front of us.
‘When daylight appeared we were out in open anhara. We could see Cuito Cuanavale just eight kilometres away. But we were still short of the Fapla lines on Hill 1208. We knew there had been several hundred Faplas in the defensive positions. The only thing to do was to charge Hill 1208 as fast as we could run. Anyone who was still there would see clearly and get in lots of accurate fire against us. But we had to complete our task of securing the position to let the tanks come through.
‘My men all ran like cheetahs. They had no idea what weapons the enemy might have. I felt like a general that morning watching 230 men run at top speed in extended line across open space towards the objective inside the bushline on the hill. It was unbelievable! 230 men may not sound a hell of a lot, but it was exhilarating to watch them. I told them that if we hit the enemy running we might be able to go right through them.
‘We came round the base of the hillock, because that’s all it was, and saw a truck moving on the other side. I ordered a staff sergeant to take it out, and he destroyed it with an RPG-7 from 400 m. Soon we were in the Fapla trenches, but there was nobody left there. Other than the shot-out truck, there was a BTR-60 abandoned intact. We could see they had left in a hurry. There were shoes and clothing lying around where they had been sleeping and boxes of ammunition stacked up all over the place. When the guys realised what they had done they started whooping and cheering like crazy. They had stormed an enemy position of several hundred men and taken it with just one RPG-7 shell and without losing any dead or wounded!’
Van Staden settled down his men – ten whites and 220 blacks – in all-round defensive positions to await Mike Muller’s Olifants and Ratels, scheduled to arrive at 7 am. ‘We could hear our tanks coming,’ said Van Staden, ‘but when I spoke to Commandant Muller he said he was having trouble getting through the minefield. We must hold our position and wait.’
The Fapla artillery on the west bank of the Cuito River began to lay down fire on 32 Battalion. At first it was light and inaccurate, but as the D-30s and BM-21s found their range it became very heavy.
‘Although our orders were that we mustn’t take shelter in the Fapla trenches because they might be booby-trapped, we took a chance and dropped into them,’ said Major Van Staden. ‘I reckoned that the Faplas had run so quickly that they could have had no time to lay explosive charges. It turned out to be the right move. We were pinned down in the artillery bombardments for nine hours that day. It was just bombs, bombs, bombs all day.
‘I had a hell of a headache, and everyone else must have had as well, especially from the D-30 shells passing overhead through the sound barrier. But the worst were the BM-21s which never seemed to stop firing. They went on and on and on. I understood why they scared the African troops so much in the first round of Angolan fighting back in 1975–76.
‘If you could hear whistling you knew you were OK – their 122 mm shells had gone right over. But if there was no whistling you knew the shells were on target or falling just in front of you. At first it was terrifying, but there came a stage when the terror faded because you’d just got used to the constant noise. We took casualties, but they would have been much heavier if we had not taken to the enemy trenches.
‘At one stage I was crouched with a signaller in a very narrow part of the trenchline about two metres deep when a huge high explosive bomb landed and detonated just a metre from the lip of the trench. We were talking on the radio at the time, and, although we were half-buried and our ears were singing for weeks afterwards we weren’t hurt. If the trench had been wider and more shallow we might not have been so lucky. The sand absorbed a lot of the bomb’s force.
‘Bombs landed within three metres of soldiers out in the open and they were uninjured. A bomb would penetrate, and the compacted sand around it would force the explosion upwards. Within a metre, out in the open, it would get them. Further away they were OK; but if it had been hard ground they would have been dead. And if the enemy had had our type of airburst shrapnel fragmentation bombs, I’m sure we would all have been wiped out.
‘We were bombed from all sides and from the air that day. The Fapla Migs crossed our positions 56 times dropping bombs, but they were very high and the closest their bombs fell were about 100 m away. We were lucky. We had no support from our own Air Force, but every time a Mig swept low the Fapla anti-aircraft guns tried to clobber it on the assumption that it must be one of our planes.’
While half of Van Staden’s force was sheltering in the Fapla trenches, the other half was spreadeagled on open ground and beginning to take casualties. Three men, one of them seriously maimed with leg and abdomen wounds, were treated by the battalion doctor and his medical assistants.
One lieutenant, out in the open with his troops, later related how the soldiers complained all the time that they should move into the trenches. The lieutenant in his heart agreed, but hid his desperation as he waited for an order from Van Staden by affecting the utmost imperturbability by sitting against a tree with his hat over his eyes and pretending to be sound asleep.
‘But tranquil he was not,’ said Van Staden. ‘I organised the trenches to make room for those outside, and when I gave the order for his company to take cover he was suddenly very wide awake and running as fast as any of his men.’
When 61 Mech’s armour finally moved through the minefield in the afternoon, Van Staden fired two red flares to indicate his positions to Mike Muller. The main force was to move through the 32 Battalion area to press home the attack, leaving Van Staden to prepare his withdrawal.
As the armour passed through, things began to go wrong. ‘Infantrymen from UNITA’s 3rd Regular Battalion were sitting on the tanks, and as they drove between the trenches they started shooting at us,’ said Van Staden. ‘It was very dangerous. Our black guys had no great love for UNITA, but they knew they couldn’t shoot back. The lieutenant who had been stuck out in the open was struck on the front of his helmet by a bullet; luckily, it didn’t penetrate, but ricocheted away.
‘There was lots of yelling and screaming to try and get the UNITAs to stop shooting. And then some of our guys followed a standard drill and threw yellow smoke grenades to indicate that “own forces” had come together. But they didn’t do any lateral thinking: it was a stupid move at that time. The smoke just hung there for several minutes and was a good target indicator for the Fapla artillery on the other side of the Cuito River.
‘Soon all the enemy artillery was shooting at us. It was worse than bad. They hammered us. The armoured people just closed their hatches, but a lot of the UNITA guys got swept off the tanks by the enemy fire. We were packed into the bottom of the trenches like tinned anchovies, but only two more of my men received wounds.’
In normal 32 Battalion operations the soldiers wear cloth bush hats. For this battle they had been ordered to wear reinforced steel helmets which saved the lives of the lieutenant and one of the troopies. The troopie was struck on the side of the helmet by a piece of flying shrapnel the size of a fist. The soldier had a few cuts on the face, but without the helmet he would have been dead.
Muller told Van Staden to withdraw his men. The 32 Battalion commander also heard Muller telling Colonel McLoughlin by radio that the armour was pulling back too: it was by now 5 pm, and, with the main force only at the beginning of the objective, there was no chance of going right through the target area before darkness. Major Van Staden asked Muller to take his five wounded men and the Artillery Regiment captain in his Ratels to the main medical post.
‘The captain was in a very shaky state,’ said the Major. ‘He was freaking out as though from some kind of shell shock. He had been at or behind the front line for three months without a break. That’s too long, and the day’s concentrated shelling finally proved too much for him.
‘He was very good at his job, but battle fatigue had got to him. There was no way I felt he could last the tough 16 km walk back to our vehicles.’
After some three kilometres of walking, the exertion and tension of the day and the previous nights began to work on some of the Major’s men. ‘We had drunk hardly any water all day,’ said Van Staden. ‘It had been very arduous and exhausting. Some of the guys began to drop from heat exhaustion. It was still light, about 6 pm. We had another 13 km to go, including re-crossing the Chambinga swamps. So I allowed the really shattered people to rest for a while and drink.
‘The problem was that we had gone into the attack with very light gear; each troopie had only a litre of water in his pack, and most of them had drunk all their ration. I allowed them to break open their transfusion solution bags and drink from them. It was against the rules, but I decided the chances of anyone getting wounded in artillery or Mig attacks that late in the day were fairly low.’ [The solution, rich in essential body salts, was carried in polythene bags to be used in an emergency as a substitute transfusion for blood plasma.]
A military intelligence major attached to 32 Battalion for the Tumpo operation was delirious with exhaustion and dehydration. ‘He was so bad that he couldn’t stand and he didn’t know where he was,’ said Van Staden. ‘The guys made a stretcher for him with tree branches and carried him for four kilometres. We slept that night on the north side of the Chambinga and crossed the swamp next morning just before first light when everybody had rested.
‘My Angolan troops made me laugh so much that night: they have a good sense of humour. All night our artillery was bombarding the Fapla positions. The shells were coming over our heads making the same whistling noise as we’d been hearing all day from the Fapla artillery shells. Eventually they were all making the whistling sound together when they heard a shell coming. And then they broke into fits of giggles and started slapping each other’s hands, thighs and backs. They were just showing me that their spirits weren’t broken after spending all day under fire from artillery and airplanes in terrible heat.’
Major Van Staden and his troops walked to their camouflaged vehicles on the Viposto High Ground on 26 February and drove back to tactical HQ without mishaps or interruptions – except for those caused by Van Staden reaching for his binoculars to identify some eagle which had landed and other feathered birds.
‘We were pretty pleased with ourselves when we got back to the tactical HQ,’ said Van Staden. ‘We were the only unit which had achieved its goal, and we did it with only one shot fired in anger. I’m sure that if the armour hadn’t got stuck in the minefield we could have finished the whole Tumpo thing that day, because the Fapla infantry just ran. They weren’t willing to fight.
‘I was pretty proud, too, of how cool and sane the men had stayed during the artillery barrage. There were nearly 60 heavy guns and rockets firing on us all day from across the Cuito. Brigadier Fido Smit, at brigade staff HQ in Rundu, had made academic studies of warfare and he told me later that more artillery and aircraft bombs had fallen around us that day than in the whole battle for Delville Wood.’ (Some 2,700 South African soldiers died in the five-day First World War Battle for Delville Wood, in northern France, in July 1916.)