Episode 25 – The Reccies and 32 Battalion continue the war inside Angola and the Soweto Uprising shocks the Nationalist

[Music] Welcome back to South African Border Wars with me, your host, Desi Latham. This is episode 25 and we're focusing on the second half of 1976. Last episode we heard about the Cold War machinations, which had led to Cuba and Russia coming to the assistance of the MPLA in Angola. We also heard about the deployment of blank troops inside the SEDF for the first time and how South Africa was not rearming itself as its defense equipment was out of date. Three two battalion had been deployed to the Cutline at the border and was highly active, as were Swapo's plan in search. Meanwhile, the diplomatic storm that had broken out over South Africa's invasion of Angola continued to rage with the OAU breaking its own membership rules to accept MPLA as the official and yet unelected government of Angola. On the security front, South Africa was in chaos. In June 1976, the Soweto uprising shook the Petroly government with both its ferocity and its unique character. For the first time, Black Youth living in the townships to the south west of Johannesburg decided enough was enough and went on the rampage in which was an historic event as they rose up against the apartheid government. After living as second-class citizens, these youngsters decided to try and overthrow the Nationalist Party government. Petroly's response was equally violent, the police opened fire with alarm ammunition from the first day, killing hundreds over the next few months as different parts of South Africa experienced similar explosions of Angola. Watching all of this was the international community which was to increase sanctions on Petroly or Shulky. While a full arms embargo had still not been enforced that was only to follow in 1977, Petroly had effectively entered Paris status already and most nations were loathed to sell weapons of any sort to security forces who were being photographed shooting teenagers in the streets. After Operation Savannah, the government forbade the SEDF to cross the border into Angola as a try to reset relations with neutral African countries, most of whom had been surprised by the extent of the SEDF's invasion all the way to the edge of the capital of Wanda. The Frighten Zambia for example, which was tinkering with support for the ANC and other liberation movements. South African Air Force aircraft had to stay out of Angola in airspace for two reasons. One was strategic, the other was the fact that the MiG-21s were now patrolling on the other side and the MPLA had also set up SEDF 2 and SEDF 3 missiles in the south. But exceptions were made, as I mentioned, 3/2 battalion was operating along the cutline from their base and Petroly had deemed it acceptable for mainly Black battalion to clandestine the anti-Angola and attack Swapal bases. But they were restricted to a shallow area in the south. That battalion would be so effective in the main operational area of South East Angola that Swapal actually shifted its bases westwards to the Canadian province where the SEDF did not have a big presence. As 3/2's Comrade Un-Bratenbach pointed out, we had to get them off balance, take away the initiative and act as the spoiler in their attempts to overrun a bomb attack. Reconnaissance regiments known as the Rekis were also carrying out secret missions in Sidenger and they arranged further than the 3/2. I'll dedicate an entire Fiji episode to the Rekis as they were a significant organisation which was to cause Swapal and other insurgency movements around South Africa quite a bit of trouble. If you appear at a map of this area, you'll be struck by many things starting with its enormous size. General Young Clean Hunts explained that the area was too big and border was too long. The terrain made a difficult two, flat with no natural look-up points. We did not have the capacity to close the border. It always remained permeable. A more accurate description would be the border leaked like a sieve, both directions. Back in South West Africa, Pretoria was pretending to follow the spirit of the League of Nations mandate of 1919. While that had been revoked by the International Court of Justice in 1971 as we've already heard, the territory was really a fifth province of the RSA. At first, the Nationalists were held bent on instituting full-scale apartheid in South West Africa, but realised eventually that fundamentalist principles of white power and the spotty Ubuntu stunts they planned back home was even more unworkable in the South West Africa. Petia Pate was introduced instead where blacks were forced to carry passbooks and were unable to purchase property or even start businesses in much of the territory. Local black groups and tribes were becoming more and more radicalised as time went on by the very fact that they had no right to vote, and were being oppressed by policemen and soldiers in their own country. Swapu did not have to work very hard to canvas all men and women. Pretoria's actions basically drove the population into the arms of the black nationalists organisations, while there was a constant attempt by Pretoria to control the flow of information. Prime Minister Joan Forstownes Cabinet decided that they would try something different in South West, after it was clear that they could not enforce hardcore apartheid starting in the mid-70s. He announced that the territory would become independent and abandoned the grand scheme of segregating black and white. While I was there in the early 1980s, for example, there were many mixed couples at their hotels or the big cities, which would have shocked all the conservative tonnies of Tablaunchland to their call. Admittedly, these were usually German-speaking men with black girlfriends, but the fact that whites and blacks were kissing and drinking vodka together at Ubuntu Hotel was quite a surprise for anyone who knows the history of South Africa. Back in Pretoria, Forstownes received you in special envoy Alfred Escher and told him that the South African government fully supported the idea of independence for South West Africa. But there was a problem. Swapu regarded any negotiations with Pretoria as a sham, and Pretoria regarded Swapu as a Russian backer as an existential threat, so there wasn't much negotiation there until the late 1980s. The S.A.D.F. doctrine had changed in the early 1970s, some I mentioned last week, such as the G5 development and the Rathla, along with new upgraded fighter aircraft, being planned. A raft of other weapon systems were in the pipeline, as you'll hear over the course of this series. Part of this doctrine was enshrined in the idea that one S.A. infantry battalion, or one S.I., as it's known, was to train and test the new mobile philosophy. Savannah had stymied the S.A.D.F. as the politicians changed tack interfering in some of the planning and frustrating officers like Brechenbach on the ground, and he grumbled constantly about the lack of a proper objective. As Leopold Skolz writes, "So eloquently in his book, the S.A.D.F. in the Board of War, the defence force had learned a few more lessons than its fight with the Fuplar and the Cubans and the Russians." Firstly, there was a fog that descended from the political leadership who weren't completely aligned with what was actually going on. Forster was not a happy camper, as PW Butter and others destroyed the last vestiges of his cunningly crafted African outreach. The aim of future operations in Traghalla would be precisely formulated, rejecting the kind of incremental fiddling that took place during Savannah. If the S.A.D.F was going into a fight in the future, it would be with a powerful force and for a limited duration. Savannah had dragged on and on, and that was no way to fight a proper, shock-un-all wall. Secondly, the equipment issue would be addressed anonymously. Thirdly, a heavy infantry fighting vehicle was crucial, and thus the rattle about which I spoke last episode. Fourthly, the concept of combat groups and teams drawn from different core was sound and should be developed. This was a bit of a revolution, as we'll see in upcoming missions. And fifthly, the brigade level command would become the basic operational combat level, loosening up control and putting that into the hands of officers on the ground. This mobile doctrine began to be developed by Roland De Frist, who you will hear from during this series. There are thousands of men and women who fought, but De Frist is probably one of the most important becoming the army's foremost expert on mobile mixed arms operations. The S.A.D.F also sent several middle-ranking officers on courses with the Israeli Defence Force that had a great deal of experience in mobile mechanized warfare during the wars of 1948-1969, 1967, and then in 1973. The S.A.D.F also took over the Israeli operational planning cycle, which they perfected during the 6th day war of 1967, and then the October war of 1973. This planning cycle takes place in real time, and means directly A-Zong is maintained between different staff from various units simultaneously. Armor, infantry, artillery, logistics, air force, navy, these would all come together for initial planning and then submit to senior commanders. It was a democratic process which sounds rather weird when talking about command and control. Roland De Frist was one of the main proponents of allowing initiative to devolve downwards to the combat group and even team-level. The irony is the MPLA's FUPLA did not have such flexibility as it was now mentored by the Russians who had essential control ethos based in their communist origins. It's illuminating how the capitalist-based S.A.D.F faced the communist-based FUPLA and the command structure of the S.A.D.F clearly espoused far more egalitarian principles of individual power. Without getting ahead of my software, just think about the contradiction of that sentence. FUPLA was supposedly partying for the rights of the majority using a military structure that implies centralized control and definitely was run on non-democratic principles. The S.A.D.F was fighting basically for the rights of a minority but imbued with a decentralized democratic principle, strange but true. Military history is peppered with these oddities as you'll also hear in another recent podcast series of mine called The Battle of Stalingrad. That's where the Soviets eventually realized that they should devolve power to the officers rather than over-direct operations from a thousand miles away. It's opposite to what Adolf Hitler was doing, managing the battles day by day, minute by minute. And yet, that wasn't the case when it came to Swapar and Unita, while the Cubans and Fuplar power of command were centralized, in Swapar and Unita, they were loosened with the evolution of power to lower ranking officers. Savannah had proven the success of the ACDF's new ideology of allowing lower ranking officers to make significant decisions on the ground, even with the frustration of Redemba, Takenhijia Khan. So the SEDF set up the commission of investigation into the future planning of the SEDF with Yani Hilton-Hess in charge. His report off to Savannah impassies the influence of what he called "the space factor," where South Africa faced heavily armed enemies like the MPLA, but these were some distance away from the country itself. South West Africa was the buffer zone. Not fighting became crucial, so two ideas of how to cope with a long coastline. Without decentralization of command, there would be no success in warfare as the units facing immediate action with so far away. Roland DeFris knew this, but he also knew that any future action where conventional warfare was ad-mixed with non-conventional had to be characterized by a force with devastating bar power. So did Yani Hilton-Hess. As he rots in his autobiography called "At the Front," substantial changes were made to battle techniques and procedures. One was the 127-millimeter multiple rocket launcher, a copy of Russia's Stalin-Ogun. Back in Avambaland, the SEDF patrols were bumping into Swapar insurgents, and three tube Italian was conducting Klandistan cross-border action at times. And because this is Africa, sometimes an elephant would trip a mine and others the elephant would go on the offensive. For example, somewhere in the Cabango close to the Zomagli border where patrol came across a herd of elephants late in 1976. Keldon-Hess recounts how the herd reacted badly to being disturbed and charged. In the rush to escape, the radio operator dropped his radio and climbed the treat. The elephant duly approached the device, which was hissing and crackling, and proceeded to flatten it. When the patrol returned to Rundu, the quartermaster demanded the radio be found and returned. The patrol members duly sent the crushed radio back to him, mailed in a large envelope. As Keldon-Hess notes in his book at the front, March 1976 was the period that saw Swapar insurgents he's increased. We went over some of these incidents last podcast, but they were facing some pressure from the MPLA who demanded that Swapar assist Fapala in the fight against Unita in the South east of Angola. Swapar's military wing plan then increased the network of training camps and bases in southern Angola and stepped up incursions through December 1976. I explained previously how the summer rains, which began in October November, created thick bush and wetlands, which are difficult to cope with for a mobile mechanized army. But it was ideal for a foot soldier slugging his own way to the south in order to attack a farm or blow up a power power line, or shoot a traditional leader. It's hard perhaps to understand just how the environment changes in this region. During winter it's dry, the dust hangs in the air, and the vegetation thins out. You can see for miles. In summer, the vegetation becomes so dense you can only see 30 or 14 meters away until you walk into a salt pan or wetland. Then all vehicles have a big problem. The mud is a bit like the step of the Ukraine. It's almost impossible to move through for even vehicles with tracks. As the December attacks increased, intelligence was then received by South Africa, that the front line states of Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Angola were planning a way of insurgency across the region starting in early 1977. By the summer 1976 plan was focusing on energy's untraditional leaders inside northern South Africa, executing many abducting some intimidating others. These men were largely well disposed towards the South African administration. They were paid as administrators after all, so Swapua was sending a message to all in the region, "Do not collaborate with the white oppressor." The SEDF, the Ensenter counter message, "Do not collaborate with the terrorists." And the traditional leaders were caught between the two. So a Larlan fighting was reported between July and December when activities began pick-up again. On the 6th of December, two insurgents crossed into a Vambelan from Angola but ran into a patrol before they could carry out their assigned tasks to assassinate traditional leaders. One was killed in the firefight, a second wound. On the same day, another Swapua group kidnapped Chief Zakarai Kenny Men's daughter from the crawl near the Angolan border. A day later on the 7th, Deputy Chief Haseki Inkali was shot dead by Swapua, and the son of a local chief called Willapard Inkali was abducted and marched into Angola. There were another four days of no action, only to be broken at that point by the U.N. Commissioner for South Africa's Sean McBride. He popped up on various world television channels to warn about a non-existent pending invasion of Angola by the SEDF. Thinking about this later, the splok actually worked as a form of counterintelligence for the South Africans in a way as he spouted complete baloney about the SEDF while simultaneously talking up their capacity. Helicopters all over the show sophisticated weapons artillery hundreds or perhaps thousands of armoured cars all gunning their engines in the Caprivi strip waiting to invade Angola. Naturally the MPLN Cuban need you to caucus with Swapua about what to do next. Of course there were no sophisticated SEDF weapons artillery armoured cars or helicopters circling southern Angola. The real story was planned in surgeons with just north of the border taking a position on the opposite side of the SEDF on Angola in soil, then opening fire on SEDF patrols moving on the southwest African side along the cut line. And of course vast person. While most of these exchanges ended with only bullet holes in the Akash authorities on one such occasion, corporal Benjamin Scuman of Port Hitasris was killed when his temporary base on the border was hit by automatic weapons fire. The border war of 1976 rumbled to an end and 21 South Africans had died in action through the 31 others were killed in various incidents and accidents. As we'll hear next episode 1977 would start with an ominous series of events. Please rate the podcast on your platform of truth. You can direct message me on Twitter @deslaatham or through the website abwarpodcost.com Until we meet again, Pussbait. [Music]