Speaker 1Welcome back to South African Border Wars with me, your host, Dez Latham. This is episode 98. When we left off last episode, it was the end of Operation Modula and Cuban leader Fidel Castro had begun to consider a negotiated solution to the Namibian and Angolan war. There was a sideshow planned before the next major op into Angola in 1987. The SADF top brass had finally decided to try and cut off the logistics route west of Cuito Cuanavale through to Menon. This was also a period in the war where the South African generals began to get more and more involved in the tactical decisions. Some of the upcoming battles were going to involve the SADF forces creeping ahead, similar to the fighting in World War I at times. FAPLA had not folded and run. Commanders on the ground said that the enemy had often fought with a degree of determination that drew grudging respect from the South Africans. It's time to consider Jan Hooghaart's Marauders and an approach that perhaps in hindsight was about two months too late, but better late than never. The Commandant had been sent back to Rundu in late October to put together a secret mission to head west of Cuito Cuanavale, where the road runs east-west, but the rivers run north-south. That means there are quite a few points that are strategic. They are bridges and drifts, and at least five places where a motivated and well-structured team of saboteurs or attackers could cause mayhem. Convoys of vehicles were arriving in Cuito virtually daily, some with 300 or more trucks and tankers and support machines bringing supplies and equipment. Each convoy that made the trip safely from Menon, 200 kilometers to the west, was greeted by cheers, and each was a knife in the back of the SADF morale. Experienced men were wandering. They were wondering why the SADF continued to pursue this creeping logic, even those who became aware of the initial outreach of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which began in late 1987. "Gutkup is dierkup" – "Peace meal is no way to eat an army, particularly one that is three times your size and being resupplied daily, and one that has the luxury of air superiority." Militarily, the South African leadership had reverted to a kind of total war lunacy. May the toughest survive. The hardliners, the bitter einders, were in command. That's all very well, and yes, this is hindsight, but for thousands of years men and women have fought, and for thousands of years there have been basic principles underpinning what you do in any situation in a war, whether guerrilla or conventional. Flirt with those rules and you ask me for trouble? For example, launching troops in a direct attack on an enemy in a fixed and firm position is not a justifiable strategy unless you control the means by which that battle is fought. You have air superiority, or you have profoundly vital intelligence. Another principle that goes back almost as far as human memory is that if you're going to upset an enemy's equilibrium by attacking, ensure that their plans are awry before you begin that attack. They must be confused and then terrified, or vice versa. They must be in doubt of their own side. Their morale must be suffering from weeks of barrages, and they definitely need to be starving or close to collapse. Vapila was experiencing none of these symptoms. The SADF handbook on mechanized warfare had apparently been thrown out in the last months of this war. You reduce resistance in your enemy by exploiting movement and surprise. The South Africans east of Quito were plodding along, hardly moving, and repeating old ideas. The officers I mentioned last episode, the Fonseils, the Fries, the Hocharts, the Hartlefs, the Mullahs, were in an invidious position, everything they knew about the history of war, plus the history of fighting in southern Angola, was being flouted, frustration grew. At least Hochart now had an opportunity to sow some mayhem and possibly upend Vapila's equilibrium in early December 1987. It was a fairly audacious plan, no doubt about it. Finally, he had some opportunity to cut the hamstrings of Vapila's powerful delivery leg. A full-blooded attack was required, and Hochart, unfortunately, was not going to get that. It was piecemeal, but it was mobile. His brief was to plan a secret mission aiming at the Manong-Quito-Kwanawali road west of the Quito river to disrupt the enemy's logistics. The main attack on the town was still going to take place from the east. Hochart was also told, "Only minimum casualties will be permitted." Three two-battalion units had been tied down east of the town with Commandant Hartlef's combat group Bravo, but the winding up of Operation Modular meant these could now be redeployed with an unfortunate proviso: they were going to be re-equipped. They had to be equipped and rested first, then allowed to shift only in mid-January, and that was too late for Hochart's marauding plan. Hochart had begun destabilizing Vapila's routes by early December. He turned to 120 men only from 101 Battalion, made up of soldiers from Ovambaland. The mobile rocket launcher battery was shifted from Hotsliff to Hochart. He scouted around Fort Buffalo, 3-2 Battalion's headquarters, and managed to pull together a special support company with 81mm artillery. The company was equipped with 159mm mortars, Jeep-mounted 106mm anti-tank guns, and Milan anti-tank missiles. Special Force reccees from 1 and 5 recce also joined his elite team. "This was a very high-risk operation," said Hochart, "with real determination the enemy could have cut us off there with a battalion they had in Crayondo and Bauschelunge." To improve chances of success, intelligence gathering was vital, particularly about the Vapila units stationed along the Menong-Kuitukwana Valley Road. "It is a very high risk situation," said Hochart, "but you have to be very patient. It is a very high risk situation, so you have to be very careful," said Hochart. "It is a very high risk situation," said Hochart, "but you have to be very patient. It is a very high risk situation, so you have to be very patient." Team 2 of the reccees had kept Kuitukwana Valley's airfield under close scrutiny, led by Sergeant Martin Smit. When the enemy moved, Smit would call down the G-5 and G-6 artillery fire onto the runway. Most of the most valuable equipment had been moved away from there by this time. The MiGs were now stationed at Menong, but helicopters and small aircraft flew in from time to time. On the 27th of November, they hit the jackpot after spotting trucks that seemed to be entering a large underground bunker on a regular basis near the airport. They noted this on a map and then radioed the coordinates to the artillery commanders, who fired a salvo at the bunker. The fifth shot hit the bunker's entrance, and then there was a massive explosion. The bunker was burning, and rockets and other ammunition began to go off. Eventually, a giant hole, a kind of sinkhole, appeared in the ground above the bunker, and a mushroom cloud grew thousands of feet into the air. The South Africans had killed Russian logistics commander Colonel Andrei Gorb, who had spent a year in Angola and avoided death until then. Igor Zhudakin, hunkered down with 2-1 Brigade, said that "everyone respectfully had called him uncle," as the verse of Wisotsky says. "Death selects the best and pulls them out, one by one." "Only the good die young," they said. The SADF reorganized their forces at this time. The three combat groups Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie reverted to their real names: Alpha to 61 Mech, Bravo to 3-2 Battalion, and Charlie to Forsyth. 3-2 returned to Buffalo, and a second Ulifant tank squadron was then sent into Angola, manned by Citizen Force soldiers from the Pretoria Regiment, under command of Major Wim Groble. No Munner, as they were known, were on their way. The first squadron was now made up of fresh conscripts from the School of Armour in Bloemfontein, under Major Tim Reitman. One of the replacements for 61 Mech wrote of his shock at seeing the men on their way home to cloud out who had spent three months in Angola. They were wearing filthy overalls, their hair was long, they had beards. "These guys look like animals. What the hell have they been doing up here?" said one. As for the Reitels, they were battered. There was no sign of the Reitels, so the Reitels had to be taken out. This meant that 61 Mech and Forsyth, along with the artillery and tank squadrons, numbered just over 2,000 men and 24 tanks. Facing them in the coming battles would be at least five brigades east of Quito, three more brigades in the west, around 8,000 troops. The Angolans also had at least 40 tanks, which had survived the battering of Operation Modula. The Angolans had been forced to recruit more troops, though, and rush them south, many of whom had not been properly trained, and apparently the caliber of fighting around on Faplar's side began to drop. Offsetting this was a far cleverer approach to fighting the South Africans. Faplar had already shown some steel in previous confrontations; they had deployed their mechanized units in a more mobile fashion, moving them around the battlefield. The Cubans and the Russians were also more hands-on. The Angolans set up their defenses in three lines stretching north to south, something like the Western Front. On the other, near the Chambinga high ground that had caused the SED of so much trouble, 2-1 Brigade was based in the north, 5-9 Brigade in the middle, and 2-5 Brigade in the south. Behind these were 16 Brigade, 66 Brigade in the middle at the Quito bridge with 25 tanks, and three tank battalions in the south. The third defense line lay west of the river where 14 Brigade waited. Cuban artillery units moved into position and they would become a serious threat as the South Africans advanced from the east. The Chinese army was able to take down the Chinese army in the north, but the Chinese deployed to the south and southwest of Kwito Kwanawale. The Angolans had made one more major change, an initiative that was to complicate matters for the South Africans. They had stopped using their radio communications as the main contact between units and reverted to the old-fashioned telephone. The brigades were close to each other, so laying these lines made sense and the SADF did not cotton onto this old-fashioned system until a little later. FAPLA had come to the conclusion that the SADF was far too well informed every time they radioed their position. The Russians believed it was an inside job, someone was relaying information, but the reality was the SADF comms op was world class, they had broken codes early on. Furthermore, FAPLA appeared to trust the radio encryption so commanders would often converse in Portuguese directly without resorting to codes. Waiting southwest of Kwito was Junita's first regular battalion, who controlled most of the approaches to the strategic road between Manang and Kwito. They were the most able of Jonas Savimbi's battalions and moved quickly and often at night. Soon, Commandant Hochardt's marauders were moving in the bush between Kaundo and Baixa Longa, breaking up into small groups, moving from point to point. Sometimes they laid up for 48 hours and then sent recce teams ahead to establish places that were ideal for stopping and resting. During the day, they lay under camouflage and lit no fires, protected by dense forest as they went. They had no chance of drop-offs by aircraft and were set to spend up to two months in place. This meant they were traveling heavy, moving tons of equipment and ammunition, food and fuel, dropping these in big caches that were guarded by Junita. The move north took many days, and while Hochardt advanced, the SA Air Force made several raids on the convoys. These were never enough to stop the advancing trucks. In one raid observed by the Reckies, four Mirages swept in on the 22nd of December. The SADF was in the middle of the night, and as soon as they were in the middle of the night, hitting a static convoy of 318 vehicles, including 35 tanks at Longa. Only eight of these were hit. FAPLA's defensive tactics against air attack was improving, so too their anti-aircraft batteries. It began to rain in December, buckets full every day, which worked to the South Africans' advantage because it covered their tracks, and meant that the Angolans would have to stick to the roads or get stuck bundubashing, and their air cover was limited. FAPLA then upped their convoy defenses to almost a complete brigade that traveled with the convoys, around 1,000 men. Hochardt had only 120 men facing these, let alone ducking the MiGs and other Angolan aircraft that would sometimes swoop overhead. His marauders sat alongside the Menong Road. Both sides were using a colonial-era navigation aid, the kilometer stones that had been placed there by the Portuguese. Sergeant Piet Furie and his team of three Reckies from 3-2 Battalion spent two months alongside this road. Sometimes they were only a few hundred meters away, watching hundreds of vehicles drive past. The bush was extraordinarily thick. FAPLA soldiers hesitated, leaving the road to search deep into this vegetation. "We would sit there sending statistical information on a convoy by radio, how long it was, where the front car was, the position of the back marker, the types of vehicles. Then our guys would come in with the Mirages," said Furie. Logistics also proved to be a challenge. The landmines, they used, stopped a convoy but only damaged a single vehicle. Hochardt wanted to lay much more deadly automatic ambushes, but these had to come by truck to the logistics center 100 kilometers south, and be carried north. The MiGs scouted constantly. Hochardt had to split his Matera de Al into two dense thickets near the Bambi and Gimbi streams, about 30 kilometers south of the Menong Road. Yunita and the marauders worked closely together. This was regarded as one of the more successful joint ventures. But the South Africans and the Angolan rebel movement. Eventually, Hochardt was in a position to launch direct attacks at the road itself, deploying eight of the mobile rocket launchers, so that they covered 50 kilometers of road between the rivers of Guatir and Longa. He was facing a strategic decision, however. If he allowed these to fire, then the Angolans would know that there were South Africans close by, and perhaps launch an outflanking brigade from the east to trap them. So he used the spotters and passed on the coordinates to Yunita's 120-millimeter mortar sections, which began to hit the convoys, in liaison with the Reiki mining teams and the SAF's bombing raids. Hochardt still hadn't decided when to launch a ground attack, but watched in admiration as the SAF deployed their bomb-tossing techniques from low altitude, which managed to thwart the MiG-23s prowling at higher altitudes. These planes were usually heading from Menong to the east of Kuitu Kwanawali to bomb the South African forces huddled there, preparing for the upcoming assault, or flying back from the bombing raids. Hanging around at very high altitude were the top cover MiG-23s, and their missiles outmatched anything that the South Africans had. So the SAF was sneaking around, hoping to avoid the vast array of AA guns and missile systems across the region. By January, the SAF's raids had inflicted a great deal of damage, striking in the early morning or slipping in under the MiGs flying heavy with bombs. And so the consistent attacks paid off on the 9th of January when four Mirages caught a 170-vehicle convoy protected by FAPLA's 8th Brigade just west of the Guatir River. Forty vehicles were hit and burning. Then a thunderstorm built up at the right time and provided Hochardt with the opportunity to fire his Valkyrie MRL rockets for the first time. FAPLA had lost a great deal of men in that convoy, but the battered group moved slower and approached a base along the road at Longo which is around 100 kilometers out of Menung. As the thunderstorm broke, Junita fired off 120mm mortars and Hochardt brought his MRLs out into the open for the first time. They now had more than the usual five minutes of firing before they had to be scooted back into the bush. By the time the MRLs stopped firing, the Reckies counted 60 vehicles that were on fire. It was now open season, the SAF units firing constantly on these convoys which continued despite the battering they were taking. Junita also began to hit the convoys with ground attacks, slowing down the flow of equipment. However, they never managed to stop the supplies completely. Hochardt then left the marauders on the 10th of January and Commandant Hartsleif and his 3-2 battalion regulars slotted into their position. The secret op was going well, they thought. It hadn't achieved all its objectives, but he hadn't lost any of the important MRLs. There were deaths on the SADF side, however. A team of national servicemen operating a 20mm anti-aircraft gun at a rear logistics base had seen the wreckage of a FAPLA MiG during the days of waiting around and decided to inspect it. But the MiG wreckage was booby-trapped and two died immediately in the explosion, a third lost his arms and his sight. Operation Hooper, which had originally been planned for mid-December, had shifted to February and Hartsleif and Hochardt had their doubts about the new plan. They wanted the G6s to be brought up so that these deadly guns could bombard the road. Three of the G6s had been used at the end of Modula from the northeast of Cuito Conavali, as I mentioned last episode, shocking the defenders, but one of these had already been sent to an international arms exhibition in Chile. Large Soviet planes were flying into Minang and these were ripe targets for the G6s. The big Ilyushin-72 transports were lumbering beasts and UNITA was finding it difficult to hit these with their American Stinger missiles. A UNITA colonel then managed to shoot down an MI-24 high-end gunship near Minang, but he used a bog-standard RPG-7 to do that, not a multi-million dollar American-made top-of-the-range bit of kit. It was politics once more that led to Operation Hooper's delay, along with the reality of having to send many of the National Servicemen home at the end of their two-year stints. Originally earmarked for Saturday 13th of December, on that day the UN Security Council unanimously demanded that the SAGF withdraw from Angola. The PEN's Minister Magnus Malan had admitted that the G6s were not ready for the G6s, but that the G6s were ready for the G6s. In November, the G6s were in fact in the country assisting UNITA. That caused a furore, but it was ironic because it was only the less-informed South African citizens who didn't know this at the time. Britain's MI-6 intelligence unit had apparently told the South Africans that what they called the witless conduct of the public relations campaign was doing Pretoria damage, so they had better come clean. They are notoriously introvert and secretive. It's very damaging. They're not spelling it out to the outside world. Said the operative. Foreign Affairs Minister Pic Buerta said the fact that Cubans and Russians were now fighting meant that South Africa had to get involved. Of course, the Cubans and Russians said they'd got involved because of the opposite. Then Pretoria stumbled again in its PR campaign. They said only four SAGF soldiers had died in the air raid in the early November battles. It was actually seven who died in ground fighting. Some of the families of the men, of course, knew the Pretoria's fibs. Milan spoke about Cuban and Russian offensives and why South Africa needed to get involved, but someone had forgotten to brief Jonas Savimbi, who at the same time was telling international journalists that no South Africans were involved and it was his professional group of soldiers killing Fopla. Talk about a right mess. By now it was 11 South Africans dead since the 9th of November, dozens more wounded. 2,000 South Africans had been inside Angola. Now they were listening to Savimbi's say, there has been no South African intervention. We've had aid from South Africa, but not men fighting at our side. Meanwhile, the plans for Operation Hooper were being fine-tuned, but disease was beginning to cause chaos amongst the SADF. More than a hundred had been casavaked out of southern Angola because of illness, and two men were about to die from a virulent form of cerebral malaria. More about that next episode. Please rate the podcast on iTunes. It helps raise the visibility of the series. If you want to contact me, you can head off to abwarpodcast.com. There's a contact form on the homepage. Or direct message me on Twitter. At Dears Latham. Until next, goodbye.
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