A Bitter War in Angola
‘The Portuguese Forces (in Africa) are to be congratulated, for the enemy whom it is their mission to destroy is a worthy adversary. Its commanders are well versed in guerrilla warfare, and they use to best advantage a difficult terrain [which] they know like the back of their hands’
Diario de Noticias (Lisbon)
On my flight in 1968 from the Angolan capital of Luanda to the Dembos – a vast expanse of jungle stretching all the way north to the Congolese frontier – we were taken in by a Portuguese Air Force Noratlas freighter. The plane swung inland from the sea minutes after take-off from the city’s Presidente Craveiro Lopes Airport and we levelled off at about 600 feet. The road was apparently too precarious for such a long ride, we were told.1
Although we were later to traverse great distances in road convoys and exposed to our share of snipers and mines, I never ceased to marvel at the way in which the pilots took these lumbering transports into tiny bush air-strips which sometimes hardly looked capable of accommodating a Piper Cub. This was a war of improvisation, we soon discovered, and even though Portugal was one of the poorest of Western countries with a population of only nine million, the nation seemed to manage very well.
We found it interesting that the Nord Aviation 2501 supply planes – similar in construction to the Fairchild C-82 and C-119, came from France, a nation ostensibly opposed to Portugal’s military role in Africa. They were originally part of a NATO arms deal that included several dozen Alouette helicopters which, converted into gunships, ultimately ended up dispatching almost as many black revolutionaries as Portuguese soldiers dealt with on the ground. This was a significant development, contrary to all that France was supposed to stand for, since Paris had recently divested itself of a score of its African colonies.
The popular call from the Elysées at the time was emotive: ‘France and Francophone Africa are one,’ de Gaulle had said. But such sentiment didn’t appear to extend to killing machines like helicopter gunships or Mirage fighter-bombers that France supplied to the apartheid government in South Africa.
As with the Alouettes (of which Pretoria had scores, later supplemented by dozens of Puma helicopters) all were operationally deployed against dissident black people.2
Angola at the end of the war in 1974. Many of the place names were changed by Luanda’s new revolutionary MPLA government.
In the early morning haze, the Angolan capital disappeared fast behind us. Coastal swamplands and civilization gave way rapidly to uneven, triple-canopied jungle below. We continued at almost tree-top level for five minutes before the plane lifted slowly for a row of mountains to the north.
Occasionally, a tall palm broke through the green, felt-like foliage. For some minutes our plane flew perilously close to these forest giants. There were moments when it almost felt that we might be able to put out our hands and touch them.
We were barely ten minutes out of Luanda when the four paratroopers on board started preparations for a supply drop.
‘Enemy so close to Luanda?’ I asked through the intercom.
Captain Moutinho, our pilot, shrugged. ‘We have come a long way since the war started seven years ago. But we still have our problems’. Our target was Quicabo, a Portuguese military post in the mountains north of Luanda, I’d been told in the pre-flight briefing back in the capital.
Below us the terrain had suddenly become rocky. The jungle was broken by blue-gray fingers of granite which reached out hundreds of feet into the air. Silent and erect, they were mute sentinels to the insurgency being fought around them. For the guerrillas, I was to learn later, these rocks offered excellent vantage points. What a pity, were my thoughts, that it was ravaged by war.
‘The area below is thick with terroristas’, Captain Moutinho said, turning away from his controls. ‘This is the notorious sector you have heard so much about, the Dembos. It starts here, 50 miles north of the capital … like Vietnam, heh?’
Lights flashed on the instrument panel indicating that the paras in the rear were ready. Each of the four men wore a harness with a chute, a safety precaution, one of them explained. It had happened before, he said, and though the crew had seen the man’s parachute open, he was never to be seen again. With the rear doors open, the roar of twin engines made speech difficult.
The captain explained that seven crates would be dropped onto Quicabo; two during the first couple of passes and three the final time round. The last drop would be difficult because by then the insurgents might have the drop on them and it was not unusual to return to base with holes in the fuselage. But they had their orders, the captain said, because the consignment contained the camp’s fresh provisions for two or three days, additional medical supplies as well as the mail.
‘The mail, that’s the real priority and it’s the first thing that goes out that cargo door in the rear. We cannot afford to make a mistake with that lot. It’s more important than everything else in this plane—including ourselves’, Moutinho added. He sported a wicked little half-smile as he spoke, but the man was deadly serious.
‘Our approach height will be around 500 feet, but this varies because the camp is small and, as you can see … the mountains. That gives us almost no opportunity to manoeuvre.
We had been told back in Luanda that in this sector, most fresh supplies were dropped by air. The roads were notoriously bad and the guerrillas active. It sometimes took a convoy as much as a day to cover a 30-mile stretch and in the rainy season, it could take twice that. Convoys were often attacked four or five times in a single outward journey and there were always casualties, which made work for the helicopters.
The return trip was even worse. The enemy had observed trucks heading north and were ready for them on their return.
‘It’s a bad war’, the pilot commented. ‘All this business to drop a few packages on a camp … we stick our neck out every time … you will see for yourself.’
The captain was a veteran of the early days of Portugal’s war in Angola. He had also flown American-built F-86 jets for two years in Guinea further up in West Africa where his country was involved in a second war. I was to learn some years later that he eventually ended up at the controls of a DC-6 in Mozambique, but for now, he’d only recently been transferred to transport command and hated it. ‘Now I drive a taxi in the air’, he scoffed.
The Noratlas dipped to port to avoid a row of granite peaks ahead as Quicabo stood out sharply on the verdant slopes. The base looked as if it was perched on an ochre-coloured mine-dump.
‘You can’t miss that kind of target’, the pilot shouted into his mike.
‘What if something goes wrong?’
‘Don’t even think about it … perhaps one of the Alouettes will reach us before they do …’
Both the pilot and the co-pilot were armed with service revolvers and bush-knives—one strapped under each armpit in specially-adapted camouflage service vests that Portuguese airmen donned while on operational duties in Africa. The handguns were American: Smith and Wesson .38 calibre snubbies and were generally regarded as little more than a token protective measure.
Meantime, the military post loomed up ahead and we were going in fast as well as losing altitude. For a moment or two the jungle seemed ominously close. Captain Moutinho sounded a buzzer and the drop began.
Three times the Noratlas circled the camp. It seemed as if all 200 beleaguered men below had turned out to watch. A group near the perimeter waved.
During the twists, turns and directional changes that followed, mountainside slopes sometimes slipped by only yards from our bulky wingtips. At times, granite peaks towered above us as we swung up and around to prepare for another approach. Two of the men on board became sick from the gyrations.
‘We had it easy on that run’, the pilot said to us after the drop and we’d settled back. He had turned the plane around and we were heading north again. ‘It’s much worse when the slopes around the camp are covered in low cloud. He called the Angolan mountain mist cassimbo, a native Bakongo name that had been adopted by the Portuguese.
He intimated that they sometimes had guerrillas firing at them from some of the high points around the base during their approach runs. According to the co-pilot, the conditions that day were the best they’d seen for weeks.
Fifteen minutes later the transport plane landed on the long uneven gravel airstrip at Santa Eulalia. We had arrived at Comsec D—centre-point of the Portuguese counterguerrilla campaign in northern Angola.
Santa Eulalia, our destination and effectively, the operations center of Sector D, lay about half an hour’s flying time from Luanda.
Once on the ground we found ourselves in a fairly substantial military base that had been a hilltop settlement before the war. Apart from a fairly large African compound around the base, the ‘town’ was complete with its local government functionary or Chef do Poste and a trading store. The entire panoply was dominated by the Catholic church.
The plane was met by a delegation of uniformed types and we were led to a row of prefabricated bungalows in the middle of the camp. This was military headquarters to Brigadier Martins Soares and his six staff officers, almost all still in their early twenties.
There was garbage lying about everywhere outside and the Brigadier apologized for the filth. The place had just recently been recaptured from the rebels, he told us, and the rebels had used the church as a barracks for their soldiers. There had been other changes since the Portuguese Army had retaken the town.
Santa Eulalia was surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence more than eight feet high. Arc-lamps with protective wire covers punctuated the perimeter every dozen yards or so. Machine-gun turrets at six or seven vantage points stood out sharply against the jungle. With squat brown buildings in the middle, the place looked like one of those army camps built round Kuala Lumpur during Britain’s Malayan Emergency in the 1960s.
The headquarters and its garrison of 300 on the edge of the village was the stock pattern of most Portuguese Army camps in Angola. Built in 1961, soon after the first wave of attacks swept in from the two neighbouring Congos, the Portuguese had managed to stand their ground for a while, but sheer numbers eventually forced them to pull back to Luanda. All that had taken place barely a year after the two countries had been granted independence, the one from Belgium and Congo-Brazzaville from France.
There were other similarities to the earlier conflict in South Asia. An elaborate system of bunkers and tunnels wound past the command post, all the way to a variety of outer defenses. If the camp was attacked, my escort explained, it was easy to send reinforcements to any position if defenses needed to be bolstered. The youngster was an Alfares, in the Portuguese Army, a rank roughly equivalent to that of a subaltern in the British Army, or a Lieutenant JG in the United States.
Because of enemy snipers – there were sometimes quite a few of them, the young officer explained – he and his colleagues were able to move in comparative safety between the central control position and any other building in the camp, including the hospital. Casualties could be brought back from the most forward positions through sets of interleading tunnels.
‘We find the tunnel system effective. As in Vietnam, the enemy often creeps up in the darkness and will fire a salvo of RPGs or mortars before they disappear again. Half an hour later they’ll try again from the other side. The bush was so thick in the surrounding terrain that even with arc-lamps it was difficult to see more than 50 yards beyond the fences,’ he explained.
The original caption to this photo, taken by Brigadier-General W.S. “Kaas” van der Waals - who served in the South African diplomatic legation in Luanda - was ‘Terrorism starts where the road ends’. In fact, this was a road-building effort in Angola’s Mayombe Forest in Cabinda.
While Santa Eulalia had experienced that kind of attack perhaps four or five times in the past weeks, other, more remote Portuguese positions in Sector D had similar problems and by all accounts the tunnel system worked well. The only problem, one of the officers told me afterwards, was that the interiors were damp and badly lit and had to be cleared of poisonous snakes each morning.
Going through the tunnels towards evening, we found the tunnels stifling, especially in this tropical environment where humidity registered 100 percent on most days during the rainy season.
As the largest military component in the region, Santa Eulalia was actually two camps in one. A second section had been set aside near the landing strip where air force personnel were billeted. Though fenced off and patrolled by the army, it didn’t make sense since it was obviously a duplication of essential duties. I was to discover during subsequent visits in Angola and Mozambique, that such inter-service anomalies became more pronounced as hostilities in the three overseas provinces dragged on.
Once could hardly avoid noticing that the three services appeared to have as little do with each other as possible. Elitist Blues would sometimes hardly acknowledge the presence of the Browns, even if there were officers present. The Portuguese Navy regarded itself as several cuts above the rest.
The place had originally been a coffee estate and even with the war around it, production went on, which was just as well since the Dembos produced some of the best coffee beans in Africa. As we observed when flying in, there were thousands of neat rows of stubby coffee bushes that spread out in all directions in a succession of patchwork patterns. If a piece of land could nurture a couple of trees, somebody used it to plant coffee there.
It wasn’t easy, the Brigadier explained. The economy couldn’t be left to rot because of the war and one of his jobs was to provide escorts for those who kept the jungle at bay. The owners and workers, black and white, were armed and when not under escort, were responsible for their own safety.
Each farm in the area – almost like the Rhodesian anti-insurgent Agri-Alert system that was to follow further towards south-east Africa not very long afterwards – was linked with military headquarters. When an alarm was sounded, the troops came running.
That was the idea in theory. In practice just about everything depended on the strength of the attacking force and if landmines had been laid. Another feature in common with the subsequent Rhodesian war was that it was not uncommon for the guerrillas to fake an attack on a farmhouse and then turn their attention to ambushing the troops as they approached.
Farm-owners often dealt with small attacks on their own, and though the situation was fraught, those involved soon managed to establish a basic system of priorities. Though geographically very different from other African conflicts, the pattern of hostilities in Angola was akin to what had taken place in Kenya at the height of the five-year Mau Mau emergency in that East African state less than a generation before.
Brigadier Martins Soares, a tall, slim, unassuming soldier, might easily have been mistaken for a bank official back in the Metropolis where he and his family maintained a home. He’d been fighting insurgents in Africa for as long as there had been a war in Angola.
When the first cross-border invasions took place, he’d been Governor of the Province of Luanda. The situation became desperate fairly soon in those critical early months, it was his job to organize effective counter-measures in a bid to save the country from being overrun. He’d clearly been successful, at a time when the national army was makeshift and there was almost no air support. It was obvious that this quiet, affable tactician was highly regarded by his men, as he was in Luanda when I was told that I’d be embedded with his unit.
‘That there were attacks in 1961 at all is partly our fault,’ he told me at lunch the day we arrived. ‘We’d been warned six or eight months before by the Portuguese Embassy in Leopoldville that there was trouble brewing. That was long before the first bands of these irregulars pushed across the frontier which, as you will see, is nothing but jungle and still more jungle.’
In Lisbon too, the military, ignoring the politicians, was very much aware that something was afoot. Which was why, about 18 months before the first attacks took place, the Portuguese Army General Staff initiated a project named O Exército na Guerra Subversiva or ‘The Army in a Subversive War’. As he explained, a large part of the problem initially faced by the army was that like the British in Malaya and Kenya – and the French in Algeria – almost nobody in any responsible position at the start had any hands-on experience of guerrilla warfare.
As with American forces in Vietnam, Angolan guerrillas often forced government troops to use the most basic means in order to achieve an advantage. This was tough going on young soldiers who had grown up in Europe and who had little understanding or interest in what was going on in Africa. (Author’s collection)
Another aspect, Brigadier Soares disclosed, was that the country had 3,000 miles of land boundaries with its neighbours, and almost all of them – except to the south – were hostile to the Portuguese presence in Africa. Compounding issues still further was the fact that almost all national boundaries throughout much of Africa were little more than a series of lines drawn on maps at a convention of Imperial Powers in Berlin in the 1890s.
He explained that early intelligence reports indicated that certain dissident elements had been formed into what was termed a ‘Freedom Army’. They were well armed and while training was regarded as cursory, the early insurrectionists were certainly not the disorganized rag-tag band of brigands that some media portrayed them to be.
‘But we ignored most of these reports. Though the intelligence coming in was constant, almost all of it was dismissed as alarmist and here the civil authorities were especially culpable. They dismissed it all as hogwash. Even Lisbon suggested that the malcontents involved were little more that a jumble of black people intent on making trouble …
‘The officials back home even argued that the invasion scenario was preposterous. There were those who maintained that African people had neither the initiative nor the ability to undermine the security of the state. But if it were to happen, they declared, as it had often enough in the past five centuries, then obviously the army would deal with them. That was the kind of sentiment being voiced from on high and which countered my every move to prepare for trouble.
‘But by then there were some of us who began to take things more seriously, especially when the first reconnaissance groups started to cross the frontier and some of their people were caught. That usually happened after they’d got drunk at a local store and spoke too much, or perhaps they’d threatened a local store owner after being short changed in buying beer or perhaps cigarettes … these things happen, and all too often too …’ the Brigadier said.
Among early reports – together with information gleaned from early captures, he explained, were suggestions that the rebels were not acting on their own. There were consistent reports that they had support from abroad. In fact, I knew six months ahead that many of their men had been trained in foreign armies and when these groups began to appear with sophisticated weapons, it was clear to us all in Luanda that this was no minor Saturday afternoon uprising.
Holden Roberto’s army entered Angola in their thousands. They covered hundreds of miles between the border and the capital within weeks.
‘Suddenly we were in the thick of it … the entire civil and military establishment was caught completely off guard,’ the Brigadier said.
‘The few police and troops that we could muster could do nothing. Remember, when this was first happening, we had only 8,000 men in the security forces, and that to cover all of Angola, a country twice the size of Texas. Of them, only about 3,000 were Portuguese nationals.
‘The rest were all black and suddenly, through no fault of their own, their loyalty was regarded as suspect, largely because this was essentially a racial issue. The rebels were making a play of the fact that they were all members of an ethnic African political organization and were only demanding their rightful dues from Portugal, a European country with colonial aspirations. Never mind that they were murdering black and white civilians wherever they encountered them in their sweep towards the south. People were being slaughtered in their thousands …’
In their purge of the established order, Roberto’s FNLA – the National Front for the Liberation of Angola – laid waste to farms, buildings, administration centers, towns and settlements that were inadequately protected and a good deal more with it. They swept aside all opposition before them and anybody encountered along the way that wasn’t ‘for the cause’ was slaughtered.
Even infants weren’t spared: there were dozens of instances of babies having been sliced open and stuck on stakes. These barbaric gestures were supposed to serve as warnings to others.
The Portuguese Air Force made wide use of the Nord Nortatlas freighter to move men and equipment around in the overseas territories. (Author’s photo)
At one logging village in the north, eight Portuguese men, women and children were fed lengthwise through circular saws.
One of the Angolan revolutionaries, describing the event afterwards in Kinshasa to Pierre de Vos of the Paris newspaper Le Monde, said, avec un large sourire (with a broad smile) that once the Portuguese had been bound, ‘we sawed them lengthwise’.
‘Those were the scenes that greeted us in the early days. It was enough to make a man throw up his hands in horror and ask what had become of humanity,’ the officer said.
Brigadier Martins Soares was candid about his country’s shortcomings and the effect these ultimately had in fostering revolt:
‘We’d become accustomed to years of unopposed rule. We also presupposed that when the troubles came, those indigenes in our sphere of influence would rally with us and we’d counter the menace together. After all, we’d ruled effectively for God knows how many generations, though we didn’t take into account how the world had changed after World War II.
That shortcoming, he declared, pounding the table with his fist, ‘was a critical mistake that will ultimately affect this entire continent.’ Though the Brigadier didn’t yet know it, it also signalled the end of white rule in all of Africa. It was only a question of time, he reckoned and in retrospect, he was astonishingly perspicacious in making that prediction.
As he said, it was actually asking too much that Portugal should have been excluded from what Jean Paul Sartre liked to refer to as the ‘Liberation Equation’.
What happened then was that government forces were simply no match for those huge mobs on the march that were sometimes thousands strong. Trouble was, they’d had a whiff of blood and were eager for more.
‘They stormed through hastily erected barricades as if they weren’t there’…
The brigadier maintained that the reason for early rebel successes was basic. Many of the so-called Freedom Army soldiers believed they were inspired by the gods of their forefathers. Also, they were under the spell of their witch-doctors and were told that the bullets of the enemy would be turned to water. ‘They really believed that they were invincible and that nothing could stop them … I learnt very quickly that it is difficult to stop a man who thinks like that …
‘They would rush headlong into battle, screaming and firing their weapons. Others followed behind wielding spears and machetes, fearless and utterly ruthless.’
The cry as the insurgents attacked was always ‘Mata! Upa!Mata! Upa!’which, loosely translated, meant Kill! Upa! Kill! Upa!
UPA, he explained, referred to the Patriotic Union of Angola or Uniào dos Populacèes de Angola, Holden Roberto’s liberation group that organized the invasion in and around Leopoldville.
It was more than a month before the Portuguese found their feet again. The brigadier held on with what few resources he had at his disposal and everyone gave a hand. He had butchers and plumbers and nurses in Luanda manning the barricades and in between, his NCOs were instructing these people how to handle firearms. In fact, he added, there was a group of students at one of the higher educational establishments, black and white, that became quite good at it. They would sometimes venture short distances into the bush after the rebels.
Believing they were in the clear, the attackers were often caught unawares, usually high on liquor or drugs – or both – and in the process of sharing the booty they’d appropriated from the civilians they’d just murdered.
One of the significant problems facing Lisbon in those early stages of the insurrection was the lack of modern weapons by government forces serving in the overseas provinces. When hostilities started in 1961, the Portuguese forces were barely equipped to cope with the demands of a major counter-insurgency conflict. It was standard procedure, up to that point, to send old and obsolete military hardware to the colonies. All the good stuff was retained for NATO use.3
Thus, the first military operations in Angola were conducted using Mauser rifles, some of which dated back to the turn of the previous century. Communications were another issue: almost all the sets available were World War II vintage.
Obviously, Lisbon needed to act quickly. The Wiki website tells us that within months Lisbon had clinched a deal with West Germany and started domestic production of the Heckler & Koch G3 as the standard infantry rifle for the Portuguese Army, though Fabrique Nationale FALs – also in 7.62mm NATO caliber – were issued in limited numbers.
For their part, Portuguese Special Forces – mainly the Parachute Regiment – was set on the AR-10, until a collapsible stock version of the G3 rifle became available. The MG42 machine-gun was issued until 1968, when another Heckler and Koch variation, the HK21 came into production and was made available to the forces fighting in the metrópole-províncias ultramarinas.
Support weapons included outdated American Bazookas, as well as 60mm and 81mm mortars. These were later supplemented by 120mm mortars and howitzers. Some of the heavy equipment went onto Panhard AML and EBR armoured cars, the Fox and, in the final stages of the conflict, the Portuguese-built Bravia Chaimite, an 11-man armoured personnel carrier or APC, customarily with a .50 Browning mounted on the turret.
Though deployed mostly in urban security duties, Daimler Dingos, small, two-man armoured scout cars, were always in the background during official parades. The majority of these vehicles were deployed in convoy support roles.
One of the immediate consequences of the insurrection was that it forever changed Angola’s social structure. If there had been racial differences among some members of the community, blacks fighting alongside whites to preserve the national hegemony quickly dispelled prejudice.
Soon, Angolan civilians of all races generated the kind of pioneer spirit that hadn’t been seen in the colonies for generations. Civilians were doing patrols and their women helped out where they could. Many society ladies who hadn’t done a hard day’s work in their lives found themselves working 72-hour shifts in the city’s clinics and hospitals. Upper crust or not, they scrubbed floors and swabbed blood in improvised operating theatres.
‘These are the tough people who built this country—and but for them, Angola would be lost today, said Brigadier Soares. By then he had been in Angola for more than a decade and he knew his people.
Once it became apparent to Lisbon that the country was faced with a good deal more than a short-term uprising by small groups of dissidents, a form of universal conscription was enforced by the Portuguese government, both in Europe and in the colonies. All fit young men in their early twenties were called up and required to spend time in Africa fighting an enemy that the authorities said, was a direct threat to Portugal. Thereafter, military service was enforced straight out of school, unless a student opted for university; he would do his time in uniform after his studies were done.
Initially, because no one knew how long the emergency would last, there was little or no opposition to military service. Officials in Lisbon were talking about months—perhaps a year. That was March 1961. Nobody was to know that Lisbon was faced with than a decade of hard fighting. Portugal was to wage three separate wars in Africa – in Angola, Mozambique as well as Portuguese Guinea – twice as long as the Americans fought in Vietnam.4
‘There was no question that the rebels had the upper hand from the start. They held on to it until our people were able to send reinforcements. But these all had to come from Lisbon, where endless decisions had to be made within a bureaucratic morass that sometimes defies description. That meant still more delays. And remember, Europe is thousands of miles from Luanda and the men and equipment still had to arrive by sea … in the end it took a lot of time.’
At times, he disclosed, it was touch-and-go whether the revolutionaries would actually be able to take Luanda. At one point they reached the outskirts of the city and it was only the presence of loyal African troops who pushed them back.
‘Many of those same black soldiers who saved Luanda are now in command of their own units in this very same jungle that you see around you.
They were brave men and Portugal does not easily forget,’ he declared, gesturing with a sweep of the arm towards the mess bar for more vinho tinto.
Much had changed by the time we arrived in Sector D. A good deal of the country to the immediate north of the camp – stretching away towards the west and the coast – was either impenetrable jungle or swamp. It was known to the Portuguese military authorities – and to the insurgents, who soon enough became familiar with the more common day-to-day military terminology – as Sector A.
Added to that improbable scenario were tropical diseases like malaria, cholera and sleeping sickness, all of which were rife.
Even more pervasive was hepatitis which would sweep through some camps like the plague. It was only discovered later by the Israeli Army that the disease became endemic if the camp kitchens were not kept spotless. Animal fat residue, it became apparent to IDF specialists, was the principal cause of the disease, especially if allowed to accrue on cooking utensils.
The nature of hostilities too had altered from the early days and it didn’t take the Portuguese Army long to establish its own parameters for combating insurgents.
‘These days, said Brigadier Martins Soares, ‘we patrol where we can. But it is impossible to create a no-man’s-land in this vast jungle region as the Americans might have done in Vietnam. If you clear the bush one week, it grows a foot high the next,’ he said. He reckoned that the terrain in which his units operated was possibly the nearest thing to a Ho Chi Minh kind of trail in Africa – all two or three hundred miles of it.
Of the roughly 6,000 rebels in Sector D at the time of our visit, the staffofficer reckoned that almost all had originally come down this ragged barely discernible bush path from the Congo. Because of the almost uniform heavy overgrowth, the route used by the insurgents was almost always obscured from the air.
‘It takes them roughly six weeks to cover the distance, but that is not the only threat. More of these dissidents had come in from the south-east, originally from their bases in Zambia and that’s more than six or eight hundred miles away. Or they may have been coerced into joining the insurgent army in the sector itself: it is simply a matter of putting a gun to a man’s head …’
Another officer explained: ‘They go on down the trail with everything they need on their backs – their weapons, ammunition, explosives, food, medical supplies, propaganda handouts for the locals – few of whom can read anyway – together with anything else that they may think might be needed to wage war. They’re extremely efficient at moving stuff in bulk – one group even managed to haul a 500-pound aerial bomb into the sector, carried all the way on a litter between them.’
He admitted that such tasks obviously demanded enormous effort, though he was puzzled by the bombs, which he maintained were used by the insurgents as mines. It beat him why they’d try to move such large cargoes when 20 smaller ones would have done just as well, especially since the country – as we’d observed from the air – was extremely difficult to traverse.
Also, there were few roads in the early days and almost no bridges across most of the rivers, almost all of them fast-flowing.
‘A large bomb will blow up a large vehicle; so they bring these monsters down in the hope that they would blow up our Panhards. They’ve never succeeded yet … far too big and bulky … we spot them every time. Who knows what it all cost in suffering to get these things that far down the line.’
Most of the men garrisoned at Santa Eulalia were employed mainly in tactical and support roles by other Portuguese units in the vicinity.
These French-supplied Panhard armoured cars were the mainstay of many Portuguese Army installations in all three overseas provinces during the war. (Author’s photo)
With about two dozen trucks and a couple of helicopters on hand for emergencies, the garrison was mobile. Like several other Portuguese Army units in the region, their main task – apart from running convoys – was protecting the local African population.
The camp at Santa Eulalia had its own clinic, surgical theatre and dental unit. Soldiers further afield who needed more advanced treatment than the unit medic might be able to provide, such as root canal treatment or an appendectomy, were flown into the camp by light aircraft or helicopter. More serious casualties were airlifted to the military hospital in Luanda, usually on special litters fitted to a single-engine aircraft. Or they’d also be taken out by helicopter, which landed on a concrete slab behind the clinic which was used afterhours as a tennis court by the officers.
The camp doctor was an unusual character, the kind that one sometimes encounters in remote corners of Africa. He was noted for being a repository of remarkable stories which invariably involved the kinds of things that can go wrong with humans who work in a totally unforgiving tropical environment.
One of his patients, a former waiter from Coimbra, had been brought in on a stretcher a short while before we got there. He’d contracted a form of elephantiasis, his body, arms and legs grossly swollen. It had apparently been caused by a mosquito-borne virus, leaving the soldier with a grotesquely swollen face. To somebody who wasn’t familiar with the symptoms, it looked like he’d been severely beaten round the eyes.
‘It took an insect the size of a flea to do that to him,’ the doctor explained, showing me the photos. ‘All we could do was dose him up with the usual drugs and hope for the best.’ Antibiotics had so far had no effect, he added.
It was aspirin, strangely enough, that eventually cured the man, and it happened quite by chance. On the second day, the patient complained of a headache.
‘It was really severe and had us worried for a while because he’d already been dosed with just about every drug we had on the base. So as a desperate measure, we gave him aspirin because there was nothing else.
‘Within hours the swelling had subsided. A week later he was back with his unit.’
This kind of thing goes on all the time in the jungle, one of the reasons why the British had such a high casualty rate when they originally fought communist terrorists in Malaya.
On one return trip from one of the remoter military camps in the jungle, we brought back with us in our aircraft a young soldier who’d been bitten in the face by an insect. It should have been nothing – troops get bitten all the time – but then it turned bad and the infection affected both the soldier’s sight and hearing.
By the time the Santa Eulalia medical team started to work on him, the soldier was only half-conscious. The senior doc was even considering getting him out of the bush to Luanda, which he would have done had his condition deteriorated any further. After he’d almost died in the night, they knew that they would have to ship him out, which they did. But by the time he got to the capital the man was fine … he walked off the plane with no support whatever, and we’d put him in there on a stretcher … .
‘We don’t get that kind of case very often’, said a young smiling intern from the Algarve, but it certainly keeps us busy … there are always extraordinary things happening to people in this remote region’. Nor was it all snakes and scorpions, though there were enough of those around.
The doctor wished all his problems were that simple. Quite a few tropical afflictions he’d encountered were killers. Bugs, viruses and bacteria seemed to get hold of the men and rip them apart — physically and psychologically.
‘You can imagine the problems the other side has with these issues since they have few of our facilities. When we hit their camps, we rarely find anything but the most rudimentary when it comes to medicine or equipment. But then again, they’re much more accustomed to this primitive environment than our boys.’
Still, he added, the other side suffered, sometimes badly. Their medical techniques were archaic and logistics simply didn’t allow for the same kind of treatment, though guerrilla barefoot doctors were fond of dosing with penicillin – whatever the ailment.
The insurgents suffered from a serious lack of trained medical staff. By some accounts, the few African doctors that might have been available for the cause scoffed at the idea of traipsing around the African bush in search of casualties. They would argue that should they do that, there was a fair chance of them being used for target practice by the Portuguese Army. Nobody could argue with that kind of logic.
One or two Algerian doctors were attached to enemy units, but even they were wary of crossing south from the Congo.
‘Sometimes we’ll get a medical man with the enemy that will come through to Sector D. The army shot up a group a few months ago and among the dead they found a doctor from Nigeria, a London-trained trauma specialist, we heard later. He was apparently a good man, very focused.
‘… as if Nigeria hasn’t enough of its own problems without still getting the few trained medical specialists that they can boast of slaughtered in a war that is of absolutely no interest or consequence to their country’, the physician mused.