In the days following the first round of peace negotiations in London, Fidel Castro concluded that it would be just a matter of time before the ‘internationalist mission’ in Angola of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces would have to end. ‘The peace process has become irreversible,’ he later explained to his national Council of State.
Pressure from the Big Powers, the cost of the Angolan War in Cuban lives, diminishing confidence in the purity of the MPLA’s revolutionary fervour, recognition that UNITA had sufficient support, determination and guerrilla skills to go on fighting for decades more, and the accelerating deterioration of the Cuban and Angolan economies had convinced him that it was necessary to get out or face eventual disaster.
But it was not in the nature of Fidel Castro to quit anything with a whimper, let alone the Angolan mission which from 1975 had been the equivalent for him of a sacred Crusade.
Both he and General Rafael Del Pino had been appalled by the Soviet decision in early 1987 to encourage the MPLA’s desire to launch another military offensive into the ‘great black hole’ of southeastern Angola. As the Fapla force suffered the inevitable reverses that both he and Del Pino had foreseen, the Cuban leader realised that defeat for the MPLA would also be seen as defeat for his Revolution, even though his military men had been involved in the early stages mainly in advisory and technical roles. The Cuban Revolution could not be defeated; therefore, the MPLA could not be allowed to face defeat while Cuban troops remained on Angolan soil.
In Moscow on 7 November 1987 Castro met Angolan President Eduardo Dos Santos and the two decided to increase the Cuban troop presence in Angola and replace inexperienced soldiers doing compulsory service with crack regular troops, in particular those of the 50th Division which acted as Castro’s personal force and had never served in Africa.
‘We ourselves understood that even though we were in no way responsible for the errors that had led to that situation,’ Castro later explained, ‘we could not sit still and allow a military and political catastrophe to occur.’1
By 15 November 15,000 Cuban reinforcements, including the country’s best pilots, had begun arriving in Angola. The most prestigious generals within the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Major-General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, Major-General Leopoldo Cintra Frias, Brigadier-General Patricio De Laguardia Font and Brigadier-General Francisco Crus Borsao, who had all been involved in the 1975–76 fighting, directed the counter-offensive, with Fapla’s commanders forced into a subordinate role to the Cuban generals.
The first Cuban fighting men entered combat in defence of Fapla’s 59 Brigade on 14 February 1988, and by the time of the third Tumpo battle on 23 March Cuba had a whole regiment stationed around Cuito Cuanavale and a tactical tank group positioned inside the Tumpo Triangle. With the aid of SADF mistakes and Pretoria’s refusal to escalate the war beyond a specific level, Castro and his generals helped ensure that Fapla held the line in front of Cuito Cuanavale.
But Cuba did not send its troops into Cuito Cuanavale only. Ochoa Sanchez, in daily communication with Castro, also began moving units southwestwards down towards the Namibia border opposite Ovamboland, more than 400 km from the fighting in the east.
By late January 1988 some 3,500 Cuban troops had deployed into southwest Angola. This began to worry the SADF. The Cubans had stayed north of a line roughly 300 km north of Ovamboland since 1984, when South Africa withdrew from southern Angolan territory it had captured in the big Operation Askari between December 1983 and February 1984.
The SADF withdrawal was made to allow the MPLA to reoccupy the region, provided both the Cubans and SWAPO stayed 300 km to the north. In practice, SWAPO returned and the South Africans made regular raids across the border to hammer its camps. The Cubans stayed away, but their return southwards at the beginning of 1988 threatened the opening of a western theatre of the War for Africa should they get mixed up in one of the regular SWAPO-SADF scraps.
The Cuban force in the south grew slowly, but the situation deteriorated badly in April when Cuban units began to intervene in SADF cross border raids on SWAPO concentrations. In one clash about 50 km across the border from Ovamboland on 18 April an SADF major was killed by a Cuban unit which intervened on behalf of a SWAPO group which was being pursued by the South Africans. During the fighting a medical orderly, Corporal Du Toit, lost contact with the SADF 51 Battalion force. On returning to search for Du Toit, soldiers found his body in a shallow grave.
The decision had already been made that something would have to be done about increased SWAPO activity, made possible by the Cuban advance southwards, when, on 4 May, the final day of the first peace talks in London, a Cuban force again attacked a South African unit inside Angola.
Neither South Africa nor Cuba said anything in London, but once they returned home details of the serious fighting began to emerge. The South African force from 101 Battalion had been reconnoitring some 50 km inside southwest Angola, near the Cunene River, when they were ambushed by the Cubans. A lance-corporal, Henrik Jacobus Venter, was killed and another, Private Johan Papenfus, was missing.
The Cubans later announced that Papenfus was a prisoner-of-war in a Havana military hospital where he was being treated for serious wounds to his left leg. The Cubans had scored a propaganda goal, but also provoked the SADF into speeding up preparations for major retaliation.
Commandant Jan Hougaard was again ordered, as he had been in the east and at Menongue, to do the preliminary planning and scouting for the attack on the Cubans and SWAPO in the western theatre of the War for Africa.
‘The people who came back from the 51 Battalion and 101 Battalion contacts all said they had run into armoured cars, tanks and artillery,’ said Hougaard. ‘They were only in platoon strength in Casspirs and trucks. They were surprised, because we thought we controlled the area opposite Ovamboland. Whenever we detected SWAPO guerrillas moving south into that area we used to go in and sort them out, and the Faplas stuck to their bases and avoided contacts with us during the operations.’
After flying 450 km westwards from Rundu to Oshakati – the Brigade HQ of SADF forces operating in Ovamboland and across the border directly opposite – in late April, Hougaard was briefed by military intelligence. The assessment was that a big SWAPO force was concentrating in and around Techipa, a small Angolan town to the west of the Cunene River and about 50 km north of the border, before attempting to infiltrate into Namibia.
‘We were ordered to go and attack the place,’ said Hougaard. ‘But I persuaded the Brigadier [Chris Serfontein, in charge of the Ovamboland sector] to let us put in a couple of recce groups first to get a more accurate picture of what was happening on the ground. I felt it was important because we knew the Cubans were pushing even more men into the area. They were upgrading the airfields at Cahama [125 km north of the border] and Xangongo [65 km from the border]. They were also rebuilding a 300 m bridge across the Cunene at Xangongo which we had blown up during Operation Protea in 1981. These were exactly the essential kinds of things they needed to do to reactivate their 5th Military Region and open up a western war front.’ [Fapla and the Cubans had divided Angola into ten military regions. The 6th Military Region took in the whole eastern front war zone, stretching from Menongue, through Cuito Cuanavale into ‘Savimbi-land.’]
The SADF high command had long speculated that Fapla and the Cubans might open up a new front in order to divide South Africa’s military capabilities while it was busy fighting alongside UNITA in the east. The runway at Xangongo was upgraded sufficiently to allow heavy transport planes to land. But Cahama gave the most cause for alarm: Mig-23s could now operate from there instead of from Lubango, the main southern Angolan warplane base 300 km north of the border.
‘For the first time, Cuban Mig-23s and Mig-21s were flying across the border over Namibia,’ said Hougaard. ‘They were coming within 20 km of Oshakati and Ondangwa [the SAAF’s airbase in Ovamboland]. They were too high to intercept with our [French Cactus] ground-to-air missiles. They never attacked, but people were asking why the SADF was not reacting.’
Colonel Dick Lord, speaking to the author after the war, said 26 enemy aircraft approached Oshakati and Ondangwa during April and May 1988. ‘Although we did think they might attack the bases, the high altitudes they were flying at were not conducive to surprise. They were always within our radar cover,’ he said. ‘I think we made the correct analysis of the extent of the threat. We decided that they wanted to test our pilots’ reaction times. For that reason we were reluctant to scramble, but often we couldn’t because we didn’t have any suitable fighters situated there!’
Hougaard moved to Ruacana, on the Angolan border, on 9 May to set up his tactical HQ and make preparations for infiltrating two four-man teams of 32 Battalion recces towards Techipa. Sergeant Piet Fourie and the three regular Angolan members of his squad made up one team. Hougaard decided to drop Fourie and his team by helicopter in the Devangulo mountain range, about 20 km southwest of Techipa; from there the recces were to move around Techipa and approach it from the north to gather intelligence.
‘I gave Piet six days to do his job, and told him that the capture of one or more of the enemy should be high in his priorities,’ said Hougaard. ‘The going proved much rougher than we had expected. The mountain terrain was very difficult. It was semi-desert, with lots of rocks and sparse bush cover. Since the local population there was hostile to us, it made the chances of going undetected very slim. The recces had to be completely self-dependent. They carried everything they needed on their backs, including enough food and water for six days.
‘I sat in the tactical HQ at Ruacana throughout the operation, keeping in regular touch by radio. Piet found he could only move at night. During the day the team had to split up and lie low; they couldn’t move at all. After three days Piet said to me that by the time they reached Techipa they would be completely buggered and be too tired to do their job properly. Also they were running low on water.
‘I agreed with Piet that the risk had become too high. After the Papenfus incident, we couldn’t afford to have anyone captured, let alone a recce. So I told them to get to a safe place in the mountains and sent two Alouettes there to get them out.’
Hougaard was disappointed with the failure of the first recce mission. Hard intelligence was desperately needed. Information from other sources suggested that the Cuban and SWAPO build-up was reaching alarming proportions. There seemed to be even more forces around Techipa than originally thought and the Cubans were pushing down the Cunene Valley. They had advanced to within 25 km of Calueque, the site of an incomplete dam 12 km inside Angola which the SADF had controlled since 1975 and from where water was drawn to supply the whole of Ovamboland.
A crisis within the ranks of Cuba’s own generals in Angola also made the SADF fearful that Castro would launch a major attack to restore his wounded pride.
On 27 April Major-General Francisco Crus Borsao was killed in Angola as he attempted to follow in Brigadier-General Del Pino’s footsteps and defect with several other military officers to the United States. In an operation called Camilo Cienfuegos – after the best loved hero of Cuba’s revolution (other than Castro) who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1970 – Crus Borsao took off from Huambo in an aircraft, probably an Antonov-24 transport plane, on a routine flight which diverted towards Namibia.
American intelligence had made arrangements for the general and many of the other 26 people aboard to be taken from there to the US. However, a senior defector from Cuban intelligence said in Washington that the radio frequency used for Operation Camilo Cienfuegos’ communications had been detected and the pilot was ordered to land soon after take-off.2 He refused and the plane was shot down, probably by Mig-23s.
On 28 April Fidel Castro announced the general’s death and said his plane had been shot ‘accidentally’, making no reference to the Washington reports that Crus Borsao had been trying to defect.
General Del Pino, however, felt SADF fears were exaggerated. Through intelligence channels from his ‘safe house’ in the southeastern USA he told SADF generals that the Cuban Army was not capable of mounting a successful full-scale attack. In his carefully argued assessment, Del Pino said the Cubans did not have the training, the organisational ability, the communications system or the logistic capacity to carry out a full-scale frontal attack.
Fidel Castro was fully aware of the reality underlying his own bluster. His adoption of an imperious and aggressive stance was an attempt to give military weight, albeit ephemeral, to the Cuban negotiating position at the peace talks. Del Pino said there was no doubt in his mind that if the Cubans mounted a full-scale offensive against the SADF they would be very heavily defeated. The consequences at home would be very serious, because casualties would be on a scale unacceptable to the Cuban people and military leaders.
The SADF should be confident of its ability to defeat Castro’s army, said Del Pino. However, he warned that Castro had defeated the previous Cuban dictator, Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, and had maintained the Cuban people’s revolutionary fervour for more than two decades because he was an audacious swashbuckler. He enjoyed taking risks and for a long time many Cubans had enjoyed the adventure despite the hardships. Therefore, Del Pino said, a Cuban attack could not be ruled out despite the fact that it would be a grave gamble for Castro.
Military victory against the odds would give the Cuban public and military, weary from 13 years of Angolan warfare, something to show for it at last; it would breathe new life into Castro’s increasingly banal, cliché-ridden charisma and put off the day of reckoning for Cuba’s economic, moral and social decay.
While Piet Fourie and his team recovered from their gruelling experiences in the Devangulo mountains, Hougaard prepared to send them towards Techipa from another direction. ‘I decided to put them in through the flat, rolling country to the southeast of Techipa,’ said Hougaard. ‘The problem was that although there was some bush cover, it was in isolated clumps. Recce teams who had been into that kind of country before said there was no question of moving during the day; you just had to lie up in the bush.
‘But it was dangerous. The enemy knew we had recce teams in there almost permanently, so they moved tanks in a platoon formation of four and whenever they saw an isolated clump of thicker bush they would send two of the tanks to drive backwards and forwards through it over and over again. A recce, no matter how well he was camouflaged, could end up as flat as a swatted mosquito.’
Fourie and his team were taken across the Cunene River by truck, over a low-level, concrete bridge, just downriver from the Calueque Dam. Two Mercedes-Benz trucks drove as far towards Techipa as they dare, simulating a mobile patrol. At last light Fourie and his three men jumped off. The trucks headed home while the recces walked through the night towards Techipa before laying up in undergrowth for the day.
It took three days for the patrol to reach a point about four kilometres east of the town from where Fourie intended manoeuvring around Techipa and approaching it from the northeast. At about 9 am on the fourth day Fourie’s men noticed there were two enemy soldiers behind them, apparently unaware that there was anybody else ahead.
‘We flattened ourselves in the long grass to check them as they approached,’ said Fourie, still under orders to take enemy prisoners. ‘My heart was pounding. There were a lot of huts scattered around with local population living in them. As the two guys walked past we jumped up and told them in Portuguese to raise their hands.
‘We were scared, but we looked more horrifying then they did. I looked like a devil with my hair long and my face blacked. They were Faplas. One guy was so scared that he shot off like Ben Johnson and we couldn’t stop him. The other guy was rooted to the spot with terror.
‘It was a problem. Since one guy had escaped, it was just a matter of time before patrols came searching for us. We questioned the other guy a bit, in a military kind of a way. At about 4 pm artillery opened up from Techipa on the position where we had taken the prisoners, but since then we had been moving south all day.
‘That night I and one of my guys made the prisoner lead us into the enemy base. We followed the bed of the Techipa River (which flows eastwards through the town). It was quite dark. The moon was just new. The prisoner kept quiet because he was really scared. We told him: “Make one false move and it’s your last day on earth”. He had no difficulty in believing us because we were really tensed up. I was shaking with tension at times.
‘Soon we could hear Cubans talking. That was important intelligence. They hadn’t been in Techipa before. Then we could see them. They were eating, making a lot of noise as conventional forces do, especially with tins. We were able to creep around several of their vehicles and check them out. We absorbed as much as we could and then started moving out with the prisoner. On the way back we hit a deep trench system and I realised we had gone through their outer defence perimeter without knowing it. I found myself thinking “Oh shit, what now?” We had a quick look at it and then got out.
‘We joined up with the others and moved back through the night to the southern side of a big shona about 10 km southeast of Techipa. I checked in with HQ and I could hardly believe it when they told me to let the prisoner go – I won’t go into this, I don’t think it’s wise to talk about the reasons I was given. So we let him go after we had checked the shona for any enemy presence.
‘There were tracks of a big patrol which had passed recently and I thought “Hey man, this is not a healthy place to be.” We pulled out another four kilometres south and stayed there for the rest of the day. In the evening we started moving south again, moving parallel with a dirt road from Techipa to the Cunene. We picked up an enemy outpost at a waterhole just off the road and got near enough to hear Spanish voices and see some of their vehicles.
‘I got through on the radio and at HQ they seemed to think I was talking shit because they didn’t believe that the enemy could be that far south. As a recce, you always know that they’ve got other sources of intelligence. But it’s quite depressing when they don’t want to listen to you because you’re telling them something entirely different.’
Fourie was suffering from the normal paranoia of someone coming to the end of yet another high-risk mission, feeling unappreciated and knowing that men in starched uniform at HQ were downing the occasional ice-cold beer while he and his men tried to make their final litre of warm drinking water last out.
Hougaard sent in Alouette helicopters to pluck the Fourie team out by night. The recces’ work was esteemed more than they realised. Their work, coupled with other intelligence information, had enabled the SADF to put together a very full picture of the scale of the threat.
★ ★ ★
Until November 1987 the Cubans had no more than 2,000 soldiers stationed in southwest Angola, and the nearest significant concentration to Namibia was more than 180 km north of the border. By early June 1988 more than 11,000 Cuban infantrymen were stationed in the southwest and some were patrolling to within 20 km of the border. The infantrymen, from Castro’s elite 50th Division, were backed by more than a hundred T-55 and more advanced T-64 tanks. A full array of Soviet mobile radars had been moved south. An anti-aircraft regiment equipped with a whole family of high-altitude anti-aircraft missiles, including Sam-8s and Sam-13s, and a full artillery regiment had also moved into the southwest.
The South Africans had detected three integrated Cuban-SWAPO battalions. One, consisting of 200 Cuban soldiers and 250 SWAPO guerrillas, had moved into Techipa; it was the one into whose midst Piet Fourie had wandered. The battalion was supported by tanks and artillery. The other battalions, similarly composed, were based at Xangongo and Mupa, further to the northwest.
The integration of Cuban units with SWAPO meant war, as far as the SADF was concerned. The Cubans were providing a shield for SWAPO to move back into an area from which the guerrillas had been driven. The Cubans were also breaking the unwritten code that SWAPO and the SADF should be left alone to fight their own battles.
★ ★ ★
Hougaard was ordered to attack Techipa. Military intelligence believed the HQ for the whole Cuban operation in the southwest might be located in the little town because of the sprouting of antennae and the presence of other specialist equipment. Subsequent harder information confirmed this.
Hougaard was initially given a force of only 500 soldiers – three companies of 32 Battalion infantrymen. Much as he admired the fighting qualities of his own battalion, Hougaard knew they could not engage in a conventional battle against the weight of armour and the number of infantrymen the Cubans had assembled. He told Brigadier Serfontein in Oshakati that the best he could do with the 32 Battalion force was to fight a holding operation while a bigger conventional force was being prepared and moved to Ruacana.
Commandant Mike Muller had taken his 61 Mechanised Battalion out of southeast Angola in late March after the Tumpo Two battle. The battalion returned to its training headquarters, at Omuthiya in Ovamboland, where its weary tanks were subjected to comprehensive repairs and servicing before the crews flew off for several weeks leave in the Republic.
It had looked as though 61 Mech’s war was over, but now, as the only full conventional battalion permanently posted in Ovamboland, it was ordered to get ready to do battle once more.
On 8 June General Geldenhuys said a general mobilisation from their workplaces of Citizen Force soldiers, numbering more than 140,000, had begun as the Cubans crept to within 12 km of the border in some places. ‘We have the forces to handle the situation, although the situation is more serious than it was,’ Geldenhuys told reporters in Pretoria. ‘The Defence Force is ready to cope with any eventuality.’ The SADF chief said it was vital that the Ruacana Falls hydro-electric scheme, on the Cunene River 55 km south of Techipa, be protected against Cuban attack. It provided electricity for the whole of Namibia and water to Ovamboland.
Jan Hougaard could have been forgiven a raised eyebrow in the direction of Geldenhuys as he went about the task of holding off more than 11,000 Cubans and perhaps 2,000 SWAPO guerrillas with his 500 ‘ruthless killers’ from 32 Battalion.
Shortly after General Geldenhuys had made his ‘they shall not pass’ remarks to the press, Hougaard sent his three 32 Battalion companies across the low-level Calueque bridge aboard ten small Mercedes Unimog trucks tightly packed with men who swayed like stands of ripe wheat during the bumpy ride. Besides rifles, each company had 81 mm mortars, 14.5 mm machine-guns and a 106 mm recoilless anti-tank gun as support weapons. All in all, the composition of the force was very similar to those on countless other 32 Battalion raids into Angola through 12 years of warfare. But this time they were up against something altogether bigger than they had tackled alone in the past.
‘I ordered each company to work independently on the enemy’s flanks, in its lines and behind its lines,’ said Hougaard. ‘I wanted information and prisoners. Their orders were to engage in the kind of guerrilla warfare 32 Battalion is good at, interrupting logistics, taking on small groups of enemy, especially SWAPOs, and laying mines. I told them: “Just maintain the situation until 61 Mech gets here.”’
Two of the companies were deployed south of Techipa, from where they began reconnaissance patrols. But at that time the general staff believed the main Cuban thrust might come from Xangongo down the Cunene River valley to Calueque. So the third company was sent to an area 20 km southwest of Xangongo overlooking the Cunene River.
In fact, the Cubans proved to be most active at Techipa, moving out frequently with tanks and armoured cars to within 12 km of Calueque and Ruacana. ‘The probes were quite careful and cagey,’ said Hougaard. ‘Their artillery would lay down a barrage in front of them just in case there were SADF men there. But sometimes 12 or 13 tanks supported by infantry would push southwards with Mig patrols overhead.’
The 32 Battalion companies gradually extended their activities. Reconnaissance teams north of Techipa watched Cubans moving freely and confidently along the dirt road to Xangongo, sometimes in single jeeps or tanks, or a diesel tanker or two, almost as though they believed there was no possible SADF threat.
‘Our recce teams also picked up the Cuban advance posts,’ said Hougaard. ‘Following typical Russian doctrine, 100 to 200 infantrymen supported by three or four tanks would dig in four to five kilometres in front of the main force concentration. So you would have to deal with that outpost first, which would give the main force early warning.
‘Once our companies had located all the enemy positions, I decided we must start giving the Cubans some headaches. If we could rough them up a bit, then maybe they would react and we could help build up the intelligence picture for 61 Mech.’
There were two main Cuban outposts, both about 15 km from Techipa, one to the southwest and the other to the southeast. Southwards from Techipa between the outposts ran the dirt road towards Calueque. Hougaard and the commander of one of the 32 Battalion companies, Captain Maurice Devenish, decided to provoke the southwestern outpost with some mortar fire in the hope that a relief column would be sent from Techipa which Devenish’s men would then ambush.
‘The company did its reconnaissance and moved in at night because enemy vehicles moved every day between Techipa and the outpost,’ said Hougaard. ‘Devenish took 90 men on two Unimogs. They had two 81 mm mortars, two heavy machine-guns and a 106 mm recoilless gun. Early in the morning the mortars were in position to start firing on the outposts and the roadside ambush had been laid. As they waited for orders to fire, they saw five white engineers walking towards them sweeping the dirt road with mine detectors. They could hear vehicle noises, but they were far away. So they decided to hit those Cubans. They killed them with one sustained burst, and then saw a big patrol of Fapla infantry coming along the road. They charged the Faplas in a typical 32 Battalion “avanca”.
‘The engagement had just begun when they heard armoured cars moving towards them from nearby. They pulled back. They knew they were in trouble, but they didn’t panic. They had the mortars about two kilometres behind them, and they began calling in a curtain of shells between them and the armoured cars while they sprinted back to the Unimogs. After a short while four BRDM-2s erupted from the bush. Our guys killed the white commander standing up in one BRDM turret with rifle fire. That made the BRDMs pull back to reorganise, but then things really began to go wrong.
‘As they ran they could hear tanks starting up not far away. There was another Cuban outpost there which the recces hadn’t discovered, and Devenish had set up his ambush within 1,000 m of it without realising! They were in big trouble because most of the country was fairly open with only small clumps of trees here and there.
‘Devenish’s aim was to get back to the Unimogs, fling all the kit on the trucks and let them go, and then split up in different directions. The kit we carry is very, very heavy, and with it they wouldn’t have been able to run as fast and as far as they were going to need to do. As they came to the Unimogs the BRDMs and the tanks were coming at them from two different directions.
‘They were busy throwing their kit on to the vehicles when the first one was hit at the back and began burning. The driver moved off and the Unimog fell into a warthog hole. The second Unimog was behind. The driver couldn’t brake in time and smashed into the one in front. The radiator was spurting water. It was like something out of Fred Karno’s Army, so they decided to leave both vehicles and everything in them and bombshell in different directions. They obeyed the old 32 Battalion dictum: when necessary run faster than a lily-livered cheetah.
‘Devenish had run almost ten kilometres before he stopped to contact me by radio. He had to break off and start running again and his next contact was in early afternoon. I asked him if anybody had been killed or captured, because I knew that was the first thing Brigadier Serfontein was going to ask me. Devenish was a very experienced company commander, and I knew he would have arranged things to get his men back together again. He told me he was unable to account for 11; they were missing and he wasn’t sure where they were because no one had been able to hang around when the tanks and BRDMs came with supporting BM-21 rocket fire.
‘At that stage neither Devenish nor I knew whether they were alive or dead. The government was very sensitive at that time. Papenfus had just turned up in Cuba, and the last thing Pretoria wanted was to have to announce that 11 South African soldiers had been killed in southwest Angola. I was ordered to give priority to recovering them, which was unnecessary because we do that as a matter of principle in 32 Battalion.
‘I think the order from Pretoria was something like: you will get those people. Then they asked me to confirm who was dead and who was alive. I said: “I don’t know. Give me a chance. These people are in trouble in a foreign country fighting a conventional force. Let me concentrate on getting the guys I know about to a safe area, and then we can sort things out about the guys who are missing.”
‘I had my third radio contact with Devenish in late afternoon, by when his party had outrun the Cubans. I suggested to him that since 11 of his men were missing some of them must be dead. He replied: “No, definitely not.” He’d talked to all the guys in his group and by radio to other groups, and they confirmed that they had not seen anyone killed or stuck behind with the trucks. They were sure everybody had got away.
‘I believed him because I knew him and his troops. Escape and evasion are things we practise day in, day out because you must know how to look after yourself, how to disperse and then come together again, in that kind of situation.
‘I wasn’t too worried about the men. I knew they could handle themselves. But I was worried about the stuff they had left behind. There was a lot of state-of-the-art frequency-hopping signalling equipment our Armscor people had developed which we didn’t want falling into enemy hands. Devenish actually doubled back to the scene of the contact to scout for his missing men. He found none, but did report that both Unimogs were completely burnt out, much to my relief.’
Hougaard ordered Devenish to get the men who were with him, or he was in contact with, back to safety. ‘I was convinced by then that the others would find their way out,’ said Hougaard. ‘Brigadier Serfontein was very calm about it, but there were a lot of other people on my back. I put a Bosbok 3,000 m up above Ruacana to try to pick up radio signals from the lost guys. There was nothing. We waited all night and then the first group of six arrived at Calueque about six in the morning. They were totally exhausted. They all had their rifles but only had ten rounds of ammunition left between them.
‘All day I had to keep telling people to keep calm and that the other five would return in due course. Then, as sure as hell, they turned up at Ruacana at about six that night. They had run north around the Cuban positions and then westwards into the mountains to avoid the local population. It was quite some journey: in two days and a night they had trailed 100 km. It was good to show the top brass that our training paid off, but it was a bigger relief that the nagging stopped!’
★ ★ ★
Serfontein had by now decided that the Cuban force was too big and powerful for even 61 Mech to attack it successfully in its Techipa stronghold. There was also the big Cuban force in Xangongo, 70 km further east, which could, if necessary, come to the rescue of the Techipa garrison. Instead, it was to be back to old Boer commando tactics: 61 Mech would come in and try to take out the Cuban forward posts one by one and hope to draw the main force out of Techipa into the open.
As the SADF’s main task force assembled south of the Calueque Dam under the command of 32 Battalion’s officer-in-chief, Colonel Michau Delport, Hougaard wondered what to do about intelligence a recce patrol had brought back from east of Techipa on the road to Xangongo. They had seen big missiles. They hadn’t been able to get close enough to identify them precisely, but they were obviously anti-aircraft ground-to-air missiles.
‘The recces radioed the intelligence to me at four o’clock one afternoon,’ Hougaard said. ‘I told the Air Force and they said the missile system must be destroyed as soon as possible. We agreed on seven the next morning.
‘I told the recces to carry out a final reconnaissance and be ready to bring in the air attack by radio the next day and mark the target direction with flares and mini-beacons. They did all the preparation and then the Air Force came to me and said it was too dicey. There were too many Migs in the area and there was a ban on air-to-air combat which might escalate the war.’
Hougaard told the recces to retrieve the flares and beacons and get out of the area. Then the SAAF came back to him and said they had made a fresh assessment. They would attack the missiles that night. Hougaard said it was impossible; the recces they needed to guide the planes in had left the area and were out of contact because their main high-power radio net was inactive while they were on the move.
However, Hougaard knew the recces kept their smaller ground-to-air radios turned on at all times and he volunteered to go up in a Bosbok to call the men on the ground in an attempt to rescue the mission against the missiles. The SAAF approved the idea, but gave the pilot strict instructions that he was not to climb above 1,000 metres or go too far north into Angola where he might enter the ‘effective envelope’ of known enemy missile systems.
‘So I went up in a Bosbok, sitting in the back seat, from the airstrip at Ruacana,’ said Hougaard. ‘It’s a light little thing weighing scarcely more than a tonne. I just about doubled its mass! We stuck to the SAAF rules at first, keeping under 1,000 m and only pushing 20 or so kilometres into Angola north of Calueque. It was night and I was sitting with my book of radio frequencies reading it with a torch and calling my guys over and over again.
‘I couldn’t raise them, so I kept urging the pilot to go higher. He refused, so I said “Man, go higher for God’s sake or we’re wasting our time.” So he went higher, and then higher, and all the time he was drifting further north over Angola, although I didn’t realise it. I still couldn’t contact our guys, so I urged him even higher. And he did so, although it was right against standing procedures.
The final Cuban-South African battle in the War for Africa, between Calueque and Techipa on 27 June 1988.
‘I remember asking him where we were, and just as I asked he said “Look, there’s a flare.” I looked out and said “That’s no flare, it’s a Sam.” I didn’t know where it had come from, but I saw it shooting in the air and then turn and come for us. By that time the pilot was diving straight down like mad. My binoculars, torch, map and everything were flying around the plane and hitting me in the face.
‘Through the perspex canopy I could see this thing coming directly at us. If you’ve ever been driving on a road and seen a car coming straight at you with its headlights blazing, that was the kind of feeling I had. I kept yelling, “It’s coming for us.” Then it passed over us – I don’t know how – by, I would guess, about 20 m. And then we heard a big “vroom” as it exploded over Ruacana and broke a lot of windows on the ground.
‘There was a panic in Ruacana because they thought we had been shot down. We landed in quite a state of shock. The pilot was in double shock because he knew he had flown beyond permitted limits and he would have to answer for it.’
After Hougaard’s dice with death, that night’s planned air attack with Impalas on the missile site identified by the recces was cancelled and rescheduled for the following morning. Hougaard sent the Bosbok up again, with the same pilot, but this time with 32 Battalion’s intelligence officer Captain Herman Mulder in the communications hot seat at the back.
‘My task was to co-ordinate communications with all the companies in the bush and Commandant Hougaard and the Air Force,’ said Mulder. ‘I established communications with all our teams except for the most forward observation post, who could see the target with naked eyes. The higher you go the better your VHF communications. So we kept pushing higher and higher. We were about 40 km from Techipa, and we knew the enemy would pick up the plane possibly with binoculars but certainly on radar. But despite the Commandant’s adventure the night before we believed the most powerful missile they had was a Sam-3 and we knew we were ten kilometres outside its effective range. The first two Impalas took off from Ondangwa to hit the missiles and we climbed to more than 4,000 m to maximise communications with the ground. We’d smashed all the rules and authority we’d been given.
‘We were flying west to east into the sun when I saw the sun flash on metal or glass in the southern part of a big shona surrounded by little koppies [hills] 35 km to the north. I told the pilot to change course so I could show him what I thought were two vehicles.
‘Next moment I saw a blue welding flare which seemed to hover above the ground for a split second. Then it was coming in our direction like a streak of lightning. I screamed to the pilot to go down. He just dived vertically and I think we free fell from more than 4,000 m to less than 2,000 before we levelled out a bit. Everything was flying around. The missile flashed past us. It was only the Hand of God that saved us. Then I saw that the Bosbok’s canopy was riddled with gaping cracks. I looked round and two of the flare rockets carried by the Bosbok to mark ground positions had jerked out of their pods during our dive and embedded themselves in the canopy.
‘We did two short circles at low level and by the time I landed I was trembling like a butterfly. That pilot was in real trouble again. The Impalas rolled in for their attack, but several missiles were fired at them, so they broke off. We have good early warning electronics, so they got away.
‘At Ruacana we evaluated all the evidence and realised we were up against Sam-6s, powerful long-range missiles which are effective at distances of up to 60 km. This was serious. Those missiles had given the Israelis a lot of problems in Lebanon and Syria. All our aircraft movements were stopped for quite some time while our Air Force guys worked out the implications.’
★ ★ ★
The Cuban use of Sam-6s helped General Geldenhuys decide that 61 Mech must move with urgency across the Cunene at Calueque towards Techipa.
After their exertions opposite Cuito Cuanavale and their long leave in April, Mike Muller’s men were worked hard through May to get them battle-fit again. By early June both men and machines were ready and Muller began flying regularly from 61 Mech’s training headquarters at Omuthiya, in southeast Ovamboland, to Oshakati for planning meetings with Brigadier Serfontein, Commandant Hougaard and Colonel Michau Delport.
An early decision to take 61 Mech’s tank squadron across the Cunene meant a big engineering job had first to be undertaken. The problem was that the low-level concrete bridge 200 m to the west of the Calueque dam was strong enough to take only one Ratel or one G-5 at a time; an Olifant tank was too heavy for it.
There was a seven metre-wide road across the top of the 30 metre-high dam. But work on the project had stopped when civil war broke out with Angola’s independence in 1975 and approach roads at either end of the bridge had never been completed. Since Muller intended putting most of his complete combat group across the river in one night to catch the Cubans unawares, ramps sufficiently strong to take a whole squadron of tanks and all the other vehicles in convoy would have to be built at both ends of the bridge. However, surprise would be sacrificed if the Cubans detected the construction work.
The problem was handed to the Commandant of 25 Field Engineer Squadron, whose men had laboured manfully throughout most of the eastern theatre campaign building wooden river bridges, laying mines, drilling waterholes, building defensive earthworks, demolishing stricken vehicles and sweeping constantly for enemy mines.
The Commandant sat in his Oshakati HQ thinking through the problem beneath an adage on his wall of American World War II hero General George Patton: ‘I want you bastards to remember that no damn fool won a war by dying for his country. The aim is to make the enemy damn fools lose by dying for their country.’
The Commandant presented his plan: his engineers would move into Calueque with bulldozers and earthmovers under cover of darkness and begin constructing massive earth ramps strong enough to allow the tanks and the rest of Muller’s mechanised column to cross. By first light each day all work would stop and the ramps and heavy equipment would be camouflaged as though nothing had changed since 1975.
While the engineers built the bridge Muller gradually assembled his 61 Mech force. Finally it consisted of one squadron of 11 Olifant tanks plus a command Ratel; two companies of infantry in Ratel-20s; a platoon of eight anti-tank Ratel-90s; twelve mortar-mounted Ratel-81s; and a troop of four 120 mm mortars.
Units from other battalions were added to Muller’s force. The Artillery Regiment provided a battery of G-5 guns. From 51 Battalion came four G-2 heavy guns. The Parachute Regiment sent a company of its crack fighters to protect Muller’s headquarters group. There were two companies of infantry from 202 and 701 Battalions of the South West Africa Territory Force. Several infiltration and observation teams from the Reconnaissance Regiment implanted themselves in forward areas.
32 Battalion, as always, had men in the thick of things. It provided Muller with the troop of the SADF’s only four anti-tank ZT3 guided missiles mounted on Ratels, plus one lone Ratel-90; a troop of four MRLs to support the G-5s and G-2s; two recce teams; and four companies of infantry and a light artillery support company.
The Ratel-ZT3 troop was commanded by the amazing Major Hannes Nortmann, who at times seemed to be fighting the War for Africa almost single-handed. His troop was pulled out from its protection role on the eastern front in mid-June to be a spearhead of the attack on the western front.
‘We were never sure of the precise Cuban strength in Techipa,’ said Muller. All we knew was that they were in a very aggressive frame of mind. ‘Their armoured patrols pushed 25 km and more south of Techipa, keeping within the range of their artillery cover, but they avoided approaching nearer than 20 km from Calueque.
‘The local population was not well disposed towards us, but some, realising that something big was coming, moved south into our area of control. They said the Cubans were saying to the local people: “Tell those Boers to come and get their arses kicked.” It was all part of the cat-and-mouse game. We wanted to lure the Cubans as far away from Techipa as possible.
‘In working out a strategy I had to take into account the fact that the vegetation was not so dense as in the east. And since it was winter there were no leaves on the trees, so the natural camouflage against Migs was not there.
‘A major problem was that (subsequent to Piet Fourie’s foray) few of the reconnaissance teams were able to get really close to the enemy lines at Techipa, so “eyes on the ground” observation posts were thin, which is not the way we like to operate.
‘Early on I thought there was only a Cuban battalion at Techipa. Then we got information about a Cuban military convoy that moved 400 km down from Lubango to Xangongo, and it was so long that it was passing all night. Finally, when Herman Mulder drew a Sam and it was identified as a Sam-6, we abandoned any lingering idea of attacking the Cubans in Techipa.
‘The priority became preventing the Cubans from taking Calueque. I was also pressed to inflict maximum Cuban kills as quickly as possible if they came right out of their stronghold fighting.’
Mike Muller may have been unhappy with the inadequate intelligence from inside Techipa, but he did know the Cuban HQ was inside the tiny town and that there was a Sam-6 battery at a water-pumping station three kilometres to the east of it. Muller had drawn up several alternative battle plans, but he finally decided to commence with a massive artillery barrage from the G-5s, G-2s and 120 mm mortars.
The aim was to inflict devastating damage on the HQ area to incite the Cubans so much that they would finally make their big move south and find three lines of armour and motorised infantry lying in wait for them in terrain of the South Africans’ choosing.
On 16 June 1988 the G-5 battery moved across the low-level bridge at Calueque to deploy eight km further to the northeast where there was some reasonable tree cover for Muller to establish his forward HQ. Three 120 mm mortar teams established themselves 12 km south of Techipa, within range of the Cuban outpost to the southwest of the town. Two 32 Battalion companies moved up to the south of Techipa to carry out intensive reconnaissance missions as near to the town as possible.
Major Pierre Franken, who moved up with a 32 Battalion recce team to establish an observation post near Techipa from where he would be able to bring in artillery fire on the town, found the journey extremely irksome and disagreeable. ‘The population was so hostile that when we passed too near to their kraals and the donkeys brayed the villagers would beat on drums and cooking pots to give away our position to enemy patrols,’ Franken said.
‘On one occasion we had to pass a horse at night and we knew there was a Fapla patrol lying up in a dip just to our left. The horse kept still until we were past it, and then it whinnied and galloped away. We pushed on a bit, stopped and then we heard people running at us from behind.
‘We froze, slipped the safety catches on our rifles and waited standing up straight in the open. It was quite dark and four or five Fapla soldiers went straight past us. The nearest one must have been about ten metres from us, but they didn’t see us.’
On Wednesday 22 June one of the forward 32 Battalion reconnaissance platoons reported big dust columns moving south. It looked as though the Cubans were moving out to do battle. 25 Field Engineers had only just completed the giant earth ramps at the Calueque dam. Muller moved his tanks and the rest of his main force, named Combat Group Charlie, across the dam that night.
Muller divided the force into three combat teams. They deployed forward to designated positions. Combat Team One, with a Ratel-90 squadron, two mechanised infantry platoons, and six Ratel-81s as its core, moved up to within 12 km of Techipa. Combat Team Two, with a core of one mechanised infantry company, three Ratel-90s and six Ratel-81s, deployed four kilometres further south. Combat Team Three, with the tank squadron, the four Ratel-ZT3s, two 32 Battalion infantry companies protecting Muller’s HQ Ratel group, and a mechanised infantry platoon as its core, was yet another six kilometres to the south.
On 23 and 24 June Muller’s forward observers reported Cuban artillery bombardments which seemed to be designed to mask the latest cautious move southwards of the enemy armour. On 25 June Muller did his final planning and co-ordinating and at first light on Sunday 26 June all three Combat Group Charlie teams and the artillery batteries began advancing towards the Cubans.
‘The most forward elements, from 32 Battalion, were spread out along a 12 km front,’ said Muller. ‘My plan was to open proceedings with a massive artillery barrage just before darkness. So we moved forward very slowly to avoid kicking up dust and betraying our positions. In the middle were the Olifants flanked by two infantry companies. In front of them were eight Ratel-90s and four Ratel-ZT3s. Right out in front the infantry blokes from 32 Battalion were to monitor Cuban movements. Everybody was in position by just before 6 pm.’
It was almost time for the artillery barrage to begin but first Jan Hougaard, on a hill just north of Ruacana, had to implement a planned ruse.
‘First the Impalas took off from Ondangwa in combat formation to activate the enemy anti-aircraft positions,’ said Hougaard. ‘As they approached the border the G-5 battery inside Angola and another gun position at Ruacana released weather balloons dragging aluminium foil tails. As the balloons rose the Impalas climbed high as though preparing to attack and then broke off southwards. The Cubans fired six Sam-6s at the balloons. Our artillery observers immediately plotted three Sam-6 launchers and the barrage began from the G-5s, G-2s, MRLs and 120 mm mortars. The Cubans in Techipa were blasted non-stop for about six hours.’
The enemy reaction was desultory. Despite the presence in Techipa of a whole Cuban artillery brigade, it fired only ten artillery shells in response. ‘We inflicted very heavy casualties on the Cuban HQ and its personnel,’ said Hougaard. ‘Its communications were completely cut off and in the morning we could see black columns of smoke from Techipa and targets we had pinpointed to the east and southwest of the town.’
Hougaard was deeply satisfied with the effects of the artillery bombardment. But up front near Techipa his 32 Battalion men were having a torrid time.
Lieutenant Tshisukila Tukayula (‘TT’) De Abreu, a veteran Angolan member of 32 Battalion, and the 36 men of his infantry platoon had led an Artillery Regiment observer into a position two kilometres southeast of Techipa to identify bull’s-eyes for the SADF guns. Just before the artillery opened up on the evening of 26 June, TT’s platoon moved east and spotted tanks on the ground.
‘They seemed to be waiting for me, because they started their engines,’ said TT. ‘I radioed Commandant Hougaard and told him that in ten minutes we could be in trouble. It was open ground and we could be cut off. The Commandant replied “Nao problema [no problem]. Just give us the co-ordinates and we’ll bomb them with the G-5s”.’
Covered by the heavy guns and with dusk falling, TT moved two kilometres away during the night. But at first light one of his patrols reported, to TT’s horror, that the tanks had picked up the tracks and managed to follow the platoon.
‘I radioed HQ and someone there told me “They must be South African tanks.” I told him not to give me shit, they were Russian and we needed help. It was completely open country for three kilometres to the south, so we couldn’t go that way. When they started shelling all around our last temporary base I decided we had to split up, so I told my sergeant to take half of the platoon northwards while I decided which way to take the others.
‘The sergeant complained that he would be moving deeper into Angola away from ultimate safety, so I said “Look man you can’t go south or else you’ll be shot to pieces; you can’t go west because there’s a lot of nasty T-54 tanks there; if you go east that’s the direction in which they’re already following our tracks; they won’t expect you to go north, in which case you might get out alive”.’
‘Then some of the guys wanted to stand and fight, but I told them 36 men with rifles and two RPG-7s against tanks had no chance. I ordered: “No shooting. We’re going to have to rely on God and the speed of our legs”.’
Back in Ruacana Jan Hougaard feared that TT, whom he had fought alongside for many years, and his platoon would soon be destroyed and killed. ‘TT kept calling me on the radio, out of breath and saying in Afrikaans, English and Portugese: “Commandant, please help us”,’ said Hougaard.
‘We had the G-5s ready, but the tanks came up on him constantly and he had to move on again before we could consult and get his position. All we knew was that he was moving northeast towards the Techipa River. At the same time I was trying to dissuade the captain, a white guy, commanding the company from going in to help TT’s platoon. I told him to pull out. We had plenty of other problems that day we needed him to attend to! But he went nonetheless and tried to distract the tanks.
‘It went on for hours with TT coming on the radio briefly and then saying he had to move on because the tanks were cutting him off. He had run something like 20 km when he came on and said that this time they were in big problems, they were completely surrounded by tanks and armoured cars and they were finished, please bring in the planes.
‘But we couldn’t do that with only Impalas available and Cuban Migs in the air. I said: “For God’s sake, give me your position and we’ll blast the place with the G-5s so you can make a run for it!” So he gave me the reference and said: “Start shooting right on it or we’re dead”. So we let go with the G-5s and when the first rounds fell TT came on the radio and I asked him what correction was needed. He said “Never mind that, just sweep and search”.’
‘So we pounded the hell out of that position and somehow they got out because of it and we didn’t lose one of them. It was amazingly hairy. They ran for hours and hours, always hearing the tanks and occasionally seeing them behind.
‘You may wonder how anyone can find the energy and strength to run like that all day. But when you’re running in front of unfriendly tanks you’re a very worried man. Somehow you find enough adrenalin at the time to do it, I can assure you.’
Mike Muller moved his artillery batteries a tactical leap southwards when the massive barrage of the evening and night of 26 June came to an end in case the enemy armour deployed aggressively to destroy them. As the sun rose on Monday 27 June there seemed to have been no Cuban reaction, so Muller ordered Combat Group Charlie to move cautiously northwards again.
‘At about 4 am I had heard the distant sound of engines to the north,’ said Muller. ‘But I knew 32 Battalion was up front to give early warning, so I thought the noise was from the G-5 battery still moving south. At 5 am one of 32 Battalion’s platoons picked up tanks moving south but suffered a radio failure and was unable to warn me.’
Meanwhile Hannes Nortmann was leading a big group of Ratels northwards through slightly undulating country to the east of the Techipa-Calueque road. Before gaining each crest, Nortmann clambered onto his turret and peered over the top of the ridge to ensure that no foes lay in wait. By about 9 am he was 18 km south of Techipa and, having carried out his routine lookout task, was taking his hunting pack of eight Ratel-90s, 12 Ratel-20s, four Ratel-ZT3s and eight Ratel-81s down the grassy northern slope of a hill towards the bush-covered valley floor before creeping up the next rise.
‘When the Ratels were at the bottom of the dip, several RPG-7s were fired from a range of 25 m just inside the bushline,’ said Muller. ‘One rocket destroyed the gearbox of a Ratel-90 and totally immobilised it. The crew had to abandon it. There were armoured cars in the bush with Cuban and Fapla infantry. A company of T-54 tanks shot over the top of the hill from the north to join in the rumpus. It was at that moment that the forward 32 Battalion platoon at last made radio contact to say enemy tanks were on the way. I replied “I know. We’ve been busy fighting them for the last 15 minutes!”
‘It was a big enemy force. More kept coming. There were a lot of Cuban tanks, 26 BMP-2s (mechanised infantry armoured cars mounted with Sagger anti-tank missiles), and many Cubans on foot carrying RPG-7s. They were very aggressive. We were outfired in terms of armour. Nortmann had real problems getting his force organised. The Ratel-ZT3s, in a bush-covered valley, were in the worst possible position to fire their missiles, so the Ratel-90s had to pit themselves against the tanks. They shot out a T-54, two ZU-23 guns on tracked armoured chassis and several trucks.
‘Machine-gunners on the Ratels were shooting the enemy infantry between the tanks. They killed at least 60 of them. But a 100 mm shell fired from a T-54 hit another Ratel-90, killing one of our blokes, Lieutenant Meiring, and wounding three of his crew.’
Second Lieutenant Muller Meiring, from the little Orange Free State market town of Verkeerdevlei, was aged just 19.
Mike Muller continued: ‘I redeployed the Olifants to strengthen the combat team. The Ratels began to pull back. Nortmann, despite being wounded by shrapnel in the neck and left hand, manned the machine-gun on top of his turret to give them cover. The Olifants arrived as the Cubans, too, were breaking contact. Two Olifants fired together at a T-54 with a dozen infantrymen on top. Both shots hit, destroying the tank and killing all the enemy infantry.
‘The Cubans began to withdraw. I didn’t give chase because I received intelligence that another two enemy tank companies [11 tanks to a Cuban company] were heading towards us, one to the west and the other to the east. And the middle one started to come forward again after it had regrouped.
‘We were not strong enough to combat the enlarged enemy force head on. The secret in such a situation is to disengage neither too early nor too late. We zig-zagged backwards tactically for several hours, keeping the enemy in sight all the time. Platoons of 32 Battalion mechanised infantry provided cover for our withdrawal and acted as observers to bring G-5 and G-2 fire on the enemy all the time.
‘The middle column was stopped when the G-5s knocked out two support vehicles. But the 32 Battalion guys opposite the eastern column drew fire, and it became clear that the third column was driving aggressively to cut us off in the west. I received permission from Brigadier Serfontein to move southeast to establish a compact front on the high ground ten kilometres to the north of Calueque. It was just before 3 pm. I was about to order the movement to Calueque when we picked up eight Migs, two flying top cover and six flying low towards us. We gave early warning to HQ.’
★ ★ ★
Minutes later Jan Hougaard, seated in his tactical HQ at Ruacana, got a radio message from a nearby hilltop observer post that several Mig-23s had flown low over them in the direction of Calueque. ‘I flashed a warning by radio to Brigade HQ and then ran outside to see eight Mig-23s turn over Ruacana and then six of them levelled out south of the river towards the Calueque dam. Then I heard explosions and saw palls of smoke and dust.’
The Cuban Migs had hit their target with precision bombing in the most successful Cuban/Fapla bombing raid of the War for Africa.
‘It was a very deliberate, well-planned, attack,’ said Colonel Dick Lord. ‘All eight Mig-23s had come from Cahama, 120 km north of Calueque. Two flew very high looking out for possible SAAF fighter interception. The other six hugged dirt roads at 100 m until they hit Ruacana where they flew past the airfield before lining up in pairs southwest to northeast along another dirt road on our side of the river towards Calueque.
‘The first pair overflew the dam at just under 300 m to “acquire” the target and then climbed up to high altitude to call the other guys in. The other four attacked the dam wall in pairs straight and level at 400 m, first from southwest to northeast at a cross-angle and then from east to west.
‘Each plane dropped two 250 kg parachute-retarded bombs on each pass. They flew very slowly. It was a very academic attack in which they ignored any threat from our air defences, and in fact it was only as they made their second pass that our 20 mm anti-aircraft guns and Sam-7s opened fire.
‘They placed six of their 16 bombs on the dam wall and the ramps leading up to the road across it, which is not a bad percentage. There were two soldiers on top of the dam during the attack. One was quite badly hurt by flying concrete and shrapnel, but the other had a miraculous escape. He leaped something like 15 m to get away. He only sprained his ankle and was able to carry on running to safety.
‘On the second attack run one of the bombs fell short of the dam near a Buffel standing next to the big steel pipeline which takes water off from Calueque to Ovamboland. There were 11 guys from 8 SAI (8th South African Infantry Battalion) on a supply mission sitting around among their vehicles under the trees eating their lunch. The blast was massive and they were all killed instantly’.
It was the SADF’s worst single loss in the War for Africa. With the death earlier that day of Lieutenant Meiring, seven of the 12 dead were aged 19, four were aged 20, while the veteran among them was 23-year-old Lieutenant Noah Tucker, from Germiston on the East Rand.
In South Africa it caused waves of wrath, anguish and fear as international newspapers blazoned such headlines as ‘Angola War: Pretoria’s Plans Go Awry,’ (International Herald Tribune, 13 July 1988), ‘Military Balance Shifts Against Pretoria,’ (The Times of London, 16 June, 1988), ‘12 South Africans Die in Angolan Border Clash,’ (Washington Post, 29 June 1988) and ‘The nightmares of Pretoria’s generals are coming true ... South Africa’s whites for the first time are starting to feel the effect of casualties in a distant war of which they are told very little,’ (Africa Confidential, 15 July 1988).
Heated questions were asked about why the SADF had allowed the enemy to make such a deliberate attack on a vital installation.
‘They maintained radio silence and so achieved surprise,’ said one ‘senior SAAF officer’ to Mr Willem Steenkamp, the doyen of South African military correspondents. ‘Very few air forces can withstand this sort of attack; you can do very little but provide ground air defence. Their bombing accuracy was very good under the circumstances, very accurate.’3
That was not quite how Commandant Mike Muller saw it. His official report later said local warning to the anti-aircraft crews had been too slow. In the eastern theatre Muller and every other unit commander had attached to them senior Air Force officers at the head of Mobile Air Operations Teams.
‘One member of the MAOT was an operations officer and the other bloke was an SAAF intelligence officer,’ said Muller. ‘Whenever a Mig took off from an enemy airfield our MAOT guys would know and they would tell us: “There is a channel active.”
‘We immediately went to a state of readiness and when the enemy planes came within range we were already on “red alert”, camouflaged and ready to fire at them as necessary. At Calueque-Techipa we had no MAOTs on the ground, so the warnings of enemy warplane take-offs went through ordinary operations channels which took a critical three to five minutes longer.’
It is probable therefore that South African anti-aircraft guns and missiles would have been ready for the Cuban Migs on their first slow and deliberate approach to the dam had there been MAOTs with Muller’s Battle Group Charlie to the north of Calueque. As it was, the 20 mm guns hit one of the Mig-23s on the second bombing run. After several of the smoking Mig’s systems had petered out, it crashed just north of Techipa, probably after the pilot had ejected.
Hannes Nortmann could not help being involved in this action too! He was being treated for his wounds in a Rinkhals ambulance parked near the 8 SAI vehicles at the dam site which moved off with the 32 Battalion major aboard only minutes before the Migs made their attack.
★ ★ ★
Back in Angola, Mike Muller’s Combat Group Charlie now had another problem. Some of the Mig-23 bombs dropped at Calueque had destroyed one of the earth ramps leading to the road at the top of the dam. The Olifants could no longer get out of Angola that way.
‘I was about to give the orders for the withdrawal to a tight laager ten kilometres north of Calueque when the Migs went in to bomb the dam,’ said Muller. ‘Now the only way out for the tanks was across a bridge at Swawek, 40 km to the southwest. It was in that direction that the western Cuban tank column was trying to cut us off.
‘I redeployed the Olifants slightly to the west. I left the Ratels and mechanised infantry to keep an eye on the central and eastern Cuban force while I concentrated the whole of our artillery on the western column. The G-5s shot out eight of the enemy vehicles and they stopped advancing.
‘I then ordered the G-5s to Calueque to cross the low-level bridge one at a time under cover of darkness followed by the Ratels and other vehicles. Then I moved westwards with the Olifants along a dirt mountain road with one motorised infantry company and a mortar group for protection. We had no problems and crossed the Swawek bridge into Namibia.
‘It was lucky the Cubans didn’t know Swawek was strong enough to take tanks or they would have bombed it as well. Then I would probably have had to dump the Olifants in the River Cunene.’
From Swawek Muller moved eastwards through Namibia to take up position south of Calueque while 25 Field Engineer Squadron reconstructed the earth ramp at the dam to allow the Olifants to move north again to re-engage the Cubans. Just before midnight on Monday 27 June 1988 Muller received orders to withdraw all his forces from Angola.
Commandant Jan Hougaard, on whom responsibility fell for getting the last protective and wandering 32 Battalion platoons back to Namibia, said: ‘I was told in no uncertain terms that from that night onwards not a toe was to be put across the border into Angola.’
★ ★ ★
More suddenly than it had begun, the War for Angola was over.
Sixteen days later, on an island in New York harbour, South Africa, Angola and Cuba agreed on 14 principles as a basis for peace in Angola and Namibia requiring the linked withdrawals of the SADF from Namibia and the departure of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba from Angola.
All was solemnly sealed at the UN headquarters in New York at 10 am on 22 December 1988 when South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha, Angolan Foreign Minister Afonso Van Dunem and Cuban Foreign Minister Isidor Malmierca Peoli signed the trilateral New York Accords which would transform a continent.
By November 1989 the last SADF troops had left Namibia and the country became independent in March 1990 after UN-supervised multi-party elections. The last Cuban soldier was due out of Angola by 1 July 1991.
1 Speech to Cuba’s Council of State in Havana, 9 July 1989.
2 Major Florentine Aztilloga Lombard, former Cuban intelligence officer, made the remarks in a radio interview in Washington on 29 June 1988.
3 Willem Steenkamp, South Africa’s Border War, 1966–1989 (Ashanti Publishing), p.165.