Colonel Pat McLoughlin decided that next time the way to overcome the problems encountered on 25 February would be to launch a night attack against the Tumpo Triangle. McLoughlin again asked Mike Muller to lead the assault.
McLoughlin’s rationale was that the SADF’s greatly superior night fighting techniques and training would at last achieve the final SADF military goal of driving the last living Fapla soldier from the east bank of the Cuito River. Night combat would enable the South African artillery to come into play and would neutralise Angolan Air Force superiority over the Tumpo battlefield.
[Although the SAAF was balked at Tumpo, it continued raids elsewhere. On 19 and 25 February waves of Mirage F-1AZs, flying low over dried-up river beds, broke through the formidable Fapla radar and missile defences in southwest Angola and struck at the important airbase town of Lubango, 300 km inside Angola, and at Ongiva, further south.
The targets were SWAPO bases – in revenge for the planting of a bomb by SWAPO at the First National Bank at Oshakati, the SADF’s northwest Namibian HQ, which killed 20 people and badly injured six others, including the daughter of the pro-SWAPO Lutheran Bishop of Ovamboland, Cleophas Dumeni.
The prime target for the SAAF was the Tobias Hanyeko Training Centre, SWAPO’s most important military training institution ten kilometres from Lubango, where more than 20 people were killed. The SAAF seems to have broken through a ‘window’ when much of the enemy radar system was out of action for routine checking. Captain Banca Armindo Fraternidade, commander of Fapla’s 35 Brigade, admitted to Jan Raath, a southern Africa correspondent with The Times of London, that the radar was sometimes ‘rested’ for maintenance.]1
Muller this time was to take the northern attack line, coming through from the laager area 40 km east of the Chambinga High Ground, up the gentle but thickly forested High Ground eastern slope, and then down Heartbreak Hill towards the Tumpo Triangle. At his disposal Muller had two squadrons of Olifant tanks, a Ratel-90 squadron, a company of mechanised infantry in Ratels, two 32 Battalion infantry companies, an engineer section, a mortar platoon, an EW team, a medical unit and two battalions of UNITA infantry. 4 SAI was again kept in reserve, except for four Ratel-90s and a platoon of 30 mechanised infantry who were to deploy southeast of the Tumpo Triangle as a deception tactic.
McLoughlin scheduled the attack for the night of Monday 29 February 1988, to continue into the Tuesday.
‘We began moving out of the laager later than scheduled because the mine rollers (special flails attached to the front of a tank to detonate land mines) had not arrived,’ said Muller. ‘Eventually they found two of the rollers and by 9 pm we were on the Chambinga High Ground approaching the summit of Heartbreak Hill. Soft rain was falling and it was very misty, with visibility only 20 to 30 m. Five of my tank drivers reported faulty night periscopes, and when the rain fell harder I requested permission to delay the attack until first light.’
McLoughlin reluctantly agreed to the delay. Muller’s main force began moving again before first light and by 10 am had crossed the Anhara Lipanda and had pushed about 1,000 m along the southern bank of the Dala River from its source and entered an area of very thick bush inside the Tumpo Triangle.
‘I was puzzled and uneasy about how quiet everything was,’ said Muller, who had denied permission to his tank gunners to fire at identified Stalin Organ positions on the Cuito west bank for fear of giving away the position of his advancing force. The Fapla artillery was inactive except for a few Stalin Organ ripples which posed no threat to us. I slowed our movement down, going forward in bounds of just 100 m at a time and, later, even less.
‘By late morning we were about four kilometres northeast of the Cuito bridge and were very nearly at the edge of the bushline bordering the Cuito floodplain. It was then that our friend, the cloud cover, began to lift, and just before midday we were warned that the first wave of Mig-21s and Mig-23s was on its way. Fortunately, they bombed their own positions and ZU-23 emplacements opened up to frighten off their own planes. One of the Mig-23s was hit and crashed. I thought it had been hit by one of Fapla’s 23 mm guns. UNITA thought it had been hit by a Fapla ground-to-air missile. Our SADF intelligence blokes were convinced it was taken out by a UNITA Stinger.’
As Muller continued to probe forward his lead tank, equipped with a mine roller, began to detonate mines in the bushline. The noise drew very heavy ZU-23 and 120 mm mortar fire.
‘The M-46s were not involved because by then we were within their minimum range. I ordered my tank and Ratel commanders to spread out for a fire belt action against the Fapla gun emplacements. That lasted for fifty minutes with support from our G-5 artillery who picked off some of their gun positions. We advanced to within about 3,000 m of the Cuito bridge. Other weapons, including 82 mm B-10 recoilless anti-tank guns, AGS-17 fragmentation grenade launchers and Sagger anti-tank missiles, opened up against us until we had fire from some 20 gun positions coming at us from in front and on both flanks.
‘I can’t begin to describe to you how incredibly heavy the encounter was, but I was assured afterwards by senior officers that in terms of shell volume it was one of the biggest and toughest engagements fought by the SADF since World War II. We fired many hundreds of rounds from the Olifants, the Ratels and our mortars, and gradually we began to pick off their gun positions.
‘The enemy’s 23 mm guns were again particularly daunting. UNITA suffered very badly. They were our main infantry, responsible for killing enemy infantry carrying RPG-7s on the ground within range of the Olifants while our tank and Ratel guns concentrated on the enemy tanks and artillery emplacements.
‘Those 23 mms were just wiping the UNITA blokes off the tanks. If I close my eyes now I can still see it clearly. The first 23 mm fire we drew came from the west bank of the Cuito and it went over our heads. Then a burst came between the Olifants and the Ratels. You only see the 23 mm tracers. There’s so much other noise that you don’t hear the shots. In front of my command Ratel there was an Olifant with five UNITA infantrymen sitting on its engine plate. When that 23 mm burst came they began leaping off to take cover. As they jumped off one of them was hit in the face with a 23 mm shell. His head just disintegrated.’
All through the fire belt action Muller’s force was standing in the middle of a heavy minefield. It was a big headache for him, but plenty of other problems were developing. He had set out on the Tumpo Two adventure with only 16 of the 22 Olifants in the two tank squadrons available because of maintenance problems and logistics incompetence.
Even before the force had drawn enemy fire five of the tanks had broken down and been removed to the assembly areas by ARVs. ‘Their oil and fuel filters were clogging and the engines were overheating,’ said Muller. ‘They had fought for more than 800 hours through several battles without servicing, mainly because none of the heavy jack and lifting equipment had arrived, equipment the tiffies had been continually requesting from Pretoria.
‘No other tank in the world could have gone on for that long in those conditions and with all that dust without major servicing. We were very proud of them, but it was unfortunate that they began going through their threshold of endurance during this battle. The tiffies got no rest. They worked all night fixing up the vehicles. Then they fought all day with us in the ARVs ready to repair vehicles or pull them out. They performed miracles, but some marvels were beyond their powers.
‘Our logistics were very stretched. Some spares were too heavy to be brought in by aircraft or helicopter. Our replacement power packs (engines, plus the attached automatic transmission) for the Olifants had to be brought in on transporters all the way from Rundu for hundreds of kilometres by night through the bush. By the time they reached us most of the power pack units were badly damaged. Sometimes the units had fallen through the floor of the transporter because of the bad terrain and the poor driving.
‘The control was poor. There were no senior officers with some of the convoys. The young blokes just got in and drove like they were in stock cars. It needed old heads to remind them all the time to slow down, and to jump on them if they took no notice.’
Muller decided to pull back for 700 m out of the minefield to regroup and try to find a route for bridging the obstacle with a minimum aim of destroying all the 23 mm gun positions. During the withdrawal one Ratel detonated a mine, but the tiffies repaired the damage and had it back in action after 30 minutes.
By the time Muller had regrouped, his tank commanders were reporting to him that only five of the Olifants were now working as one after another they passed through the ‘serviceability’ threshold. To add to Muller’s woes, the artillery commanders were reporting similar problems with the ailing G-5s.
Muller withdrew a little further to consider his options. Taking into account his intelligence briefing of the night before that there were at least 10 tanks inside the Tumpo Triangle to be dealt with, Muller decided to ask permission to break off the engagement. The odds were too much in favour of the enemy.
On return to the laager, military intelligence gave Muller an updated report that sent his spirits plunging. ‘They said they had discovered there were not ten enemy tanks but only two in the Triangle. If I had known that we would have continued right through and settled the whole matter.’
1 The Times, London (29 February 1988).