Dingo Firestorm (17 page)

Smuts had donated the Dakota, built in 1944, to Rhodesia in 1947. With international sanctions and tight foreign currency, these aircraft were irreplaceable, further eroding this small air force. The loss of the Dakota also reflected the obvious: the war was really getting serious.

The government responded by announcing, in April 1977, that all men aged 38 to 50 were required to do military service, causing another rush of emigrants to take the road south to Beitbridge in what was known as the ‘chicken run’ or the ‘owl run’, depending on one’s point of view.

The OCC was disbanded in early 1977 and a new overall military structure was set up, named Combined Operations (ComOps). The new post of supreme military commander went to someone who was a great supporter of offensive warfare and external operations, Lieutenant General Peter Walls. Air Marshal Mick McLaren, the recently retired head of the RhAF, was appointed deputy commander. Curiously, Walls remained at the rank of lieutenant general, which meant he did not outrank his colleagues. This was probably because the predecessor to ComOps, the OCC, had worked well on the basis of equal ranks among the army, police, air force and CIO.

Five years earlier, in 1972, Peter Walls had been appointed commander of the Rhodesian Army, replacing General Keith Coster. The serving term for chiefs of staff was four years, meaning Walls would retire at the end of 1976. Then tragedy intervened. Walls’s natural successor, John Shaw, was killed in a helicopter accident. Prime Minister Ian Smith immediately asked Walls to stay on.

‘I already had a job lined up in South Africa as a director with the Rennies Group,’ said Walls. ‘The CEO decided to keep the post open for me, filling the role himself for a year.’

But Walls and Rennies were in for a surprise. Four months into Walls’s extended year, Ian Smith told him: ‘No, you haven’t been extended for one year; you’re extended for as long as the war lasts and I want you to be commander of combined ops.’

Walls was taken aback. The prime minister had shown no inclination for a supreme commander, despite a well-argued case for one by Major General Andy Rawlins a year earlier. Nevertheless, Walls suddenly found himself in a position of strength: ‘I told him that I didn’t want to accept the job unless I got the authority to call the shots when necessary.’

He added another condition, arising from his distrust of the CIO and the police: ‘I want intelligence to come to me, I don’t want it to come second-hand from a whole group of people.’

Smith agreed, although it would take a while to actually happen – there were still deep rifts within the services.

As a young man, Peter’s father, Reginald Walls, had given him a book,
Defense Will Not Win the War
, written by Lieutenant Colonel W.F. Kernan of the US Army and published in 1942. This book had a huge influence on Walls: ‘I really believed in this philosophy of taking the war to the enemy.’

As commander of ComOps, Walls changed the philosophy to search and destroy, whether that was inside the country or beyond its borders. This ethos was outlined in a paper produced in April 1977, in which the call for external operations as a strategy was explicitly made to ‘counter the terrorist’s ability to escalate the war on all fronts’. Importantly, the paper was underpinned by an urgent recommendation to secure an early political settlement. The four signatories were Peter Walls, his deputy, Mick McLaren, Peter Sherren (police commissioner) and the CIO head, Ken Flower (who reproduced parts of the paper in his memoirs).

Peter Walls knew that Rhodesia’s south-east posed the greatest strategic threat, despite frequent attacks on ZANLA bases and the infrastructure between the border town of Malvernia and Mapai. Josiah Tongogara kept pushing more insurgents into the area. These guerrillas frequently attacked Rhodesia’s vital artery to South Africa, the Rutenga–Beitbridge railway line. The adjacent road link to South Africa was also attacked, forcing the deployment of armed convoys and sometimes aircraft top cover to protect motorists and commercial traffic.

In May 1977, reports were reaching Walls that ZANLA guerrillas were not simply passing through the Mapai area, but were also establishing a large presence in and around the town. The general was itching to deal ZANLA a decisive blow in the south-east. Ian Smith also understood just how serious was the threat, yet he had been warned not to antagonise Vorster any further. But this was in the wake of the Geneva debacle, and Smith was pretty angry, saying it was ‘better to go down standing and fighting, than crawling on our knees’.

He backed his new ComOps leader and authorised the first largescale, overt and sustained attack on Mozambican soil. The RLI, Selous Scouts and elements of the Territorial Army entered Mozambique.

The ‘mini-invasion’ was reported by the
Rhodesia Herald
on 1 June 1977, with the headline:

Security Forces have seized Mapai, the first major main town inside Mozambique in the Gaza Province, and will stay in that country until terrorists have been eliminated from that area, the Commander of Combined Operations, Lieut.-General Peter Walls, said yesterday.

‘Troops will be withdrawn from Mozambique as soon as they complete their task of eliminating ZANLA (the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army loyal to Mr Robert Mugabe) terrorists from the area in question and destroying or removing ammunition, arms or equipment dumps or caches,’ said General Walls.

The usual condemnation followed swiftly from the UN chief, Kurt Waldheim, and from America, Britain, the OAU and others. In some cases, it didn’t just involve condemnation; pressure was also applied in no uncertain terms. Ken Flower revealed in his memoirs that cabinet secretary Jack Gaylard had warned a meeting of senior ministers and ComOps after the Mapai attack that ‘[t]he South Africans had told us that the United States would apply sanctions – and worse – to them if they did not immediately cut off oil and other supplies to Rhodesia if we were extending our war into neighbouring territories’.

Have you seen

The Msasa trees burn

Red to green?

A cooling flame

Between the sun’s blaze

And our tired eyes.

– ‘S
PRING’ BY
R. K
NOTTENBELT

August is the beginning of the warm season on the high plateau of Rhodesia known as the Highveld. Technically it is spring, but it looks more like autumn as the msasa trees come into leaf after the brief, cool, dry winter. In a reversal of the typical autumn process, the msasa leaves first burst out in a wonderful deep claret colour, then change to bright reds, brilliant oranges and then yellows before turning green. It is a wonderful sight.

Salisbury’s spring colours in August 1977 seemed to go unnoticed by the politicians, however. Ian Smith faced a right-wing revolt when 12 of his Rhodesian Front MPs resigned in protest about him giving too much ground to the nationalists. The rebels, who became known as the Dirty Dozen, formed a new organisation, the Rhodesian Action Party. Smith called their bluff with a snap election on 31 August, winning all the contested seats. This election result was a huge boost for Smith, who now had the unequivocal backing of the white electorate to pursue a settlement while vigorously prosecuting the war.

On the very same day, an event just across the border in Mozambique would have a profound and long-lasting effect on Rhodesia. Robert Mugabe was elected supreme leader of both ZANU and ZANLA at a specially convened meeting at New Farm, the ZANLA HQ near Chimoio.

It was also that month that terror came to the streets of Salisbury when ZANLA terrorists bombed a Woolworths department store in the city, killing 11 and injuring 76 shoppers. Ironically, ZANLA had chosen a department store frequented mostly by black people. The bombers had recently been through training at ZANLA’s massive HQ complex at Chimoio – a fact that was not lost on the military hierarchy.

On the international front, the British and American governments wasted no time. Another settlement plan was concocted, which brought two new personalities onto the stage, both rising stars in their administrations. Andrew Young was the new US ambassador to the UN and David Owen the new British foreign secretary. Owen, in particular, wanted Smith to hand over power to the guerrilla forces swiftly.

Inevitably, the South Africans called Smith to Pretoria for a meeting. On 12 September 1977, Vorster told Smith that he had received a letter from the Carter administration warning of ‘dire consequences if the South Africans did not bring peace to the region’. Smith was shocked when Vorster told him that the South African government now expected Rhodesia to go beyond the Kissinger agreement by accepting a majority of black people in both Parliament and the cabinet. He dropped another bombshell, explaining to Smith that the growing pressure on South Africa was making it more and more difficult for his government to continue supporting Rhodesia. This was the final blow – South Africa was pulling the plug.

‘Poor Rhodesia,’ Smith wrote in his memoirs. ‘We had enough problems with our enemies, without this kind of treatment from our few friends.’

The situation was indeed problematic. Special ammunition trains, codenamed ‘barrage trains’, would regularly pass through Beitbridge from South Africa and were then escorted with air cover to their destination, such was their importance. But the frequency of the barrage trains dropped, which seemed odd in an escalating war. The reason was simple: Rhodesia was running out of money. Peter Walls recalled the difficulties:

I remember sitting in Milton Building listening to the sitreps being read. The Repulse area sitrep reported a skirmish at Malvernia where our guys, in retaliation, had lobbed a number of 80-mm mortars into Mozambique. I knew that we were down to our last 30 mortar shells in the main armoury in Salisbury. I said, ‘How the hell do we tell these troops not to fire mortars because we only have 30 left?’ Morale would have plummeted. So all I could do was to tell them to be restrained.

The situation was dire. We couldn’t get the ammunition through. The South Africans would say, ‘Sorry, we can’t get that train through.’ They were also threatening to cut our petrol; it was pretty tough going.

Ian Smith sent for Walls, telling him: ‘You are now the only contact we have with the South African government. We need a $600 million loan. The Treasury can’t talk to the South Africans, the minister can’t talk to them and Vorster won’t talk to me. You are the only person who can put over why we need this loan.’

Walls had a close relationship with his opposite number, the chief of the South African Defence Force, General Magnus Malan. The South African strongman acquiesced to Walls, Rhodesia got the desperately needed advance and the barrage trains started running again.

Later in September, a bolt came from the blue when Zambia’s president, Kenneth Kaunda, invited Smith to Lusaka for secret talks. Tiny Rowland, chief executive of the Lonrho mining company, had facilitated the meeting and laid on his executive jet to fly Smith to Zambia. It was a pleasant gathering, but nothing really came of it because although Kaunda had influence over Nkomo, he had none over Mugabe.

When news broke of Ian Smith’s visit to enemy territory, hardly anyone believed the story. Most shocked of all was Vorster, but he could hardly condemn Smith for talking to his old ‘friend’ Kaunda.

Smith knew that negotiating with Mugabe was futile because the guerrilla leader believed he was winning the war, as did quite a few prominent people in the international community. One way to remould this opinion was to eliminate Mugabe or land a very heavy blow on ZANLA in Mozambique … or both. He asked Walls to come up with a plan.

The answer lay in an operation codenamed Dingo, the brainchild of Norman Walsh and Brian Robinson. General Walls asked for the plan to be presented again. He commented afterwards that ‘Dingo was very risky, but well worth doing’.

Intelligence reports suggested that Robert Mugabe and his ZANLA war council, the Dare reChimurenga, would be meeting at their Chimoio HQ during the week starting 21 November 1977. The prospect of knocking out ZANLA’s HQ and its top commanders was an opportunity too good to miss, even though it meant delaying the operation for a few days and risking adverse weather as the summer rains approached.

Another important factor was the moon phase. It is dangerous to fly an Alouette 3 helicopter on a dark, moonless night because the pilot needs a distinct horizon as his visual reference point, especially when flying slowly or hovering. With an operation of this scale, it was wise to assume that the Alouettes may well have to fly in the dark. The next full moon was due on 25 November 1977, falling between the Chimoio and Tembue attacks, which was ideal.

All Peter Walls now needed was the prime minister’s approval to attack both Chimoio and Tembue. ‘Although I had my difficulties sometimes with Mr Smith,’ recalled Walls, ‘I knew what he would agree to, or probably agree to. I had the greatest admiration for his probity; if I asked him or told him anything, it never went any further. I’m afraid the same can’t be said about other people in the establishment. So I went to him direct.

‘The PM referred to South African pressure. I responded by saying that far be it from me to say what he could and couldn’t get away with, but my gut feel was that he would agree with this one. He pondered, then said: “Yes, all right, you can go ahead.”’

Smith knew the timing was good. Vorster was facing a general election at the end of November, which made it unlikely that he would condemn the raid publicly because the white South African electorate was largely sympathetic towards Rhodesia. Also, the world press was now focused on the Middle East, where President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had just arrived in Israel on a state visit – the first Arab leader to visit Israel and address the Knesset.

Walls commented:

We agreed I would keep Smith updated on the strategic aspects of the operation. I chose to fly in a command Dakota near the battle, with a telex link direct to the PM’s office, because, as ComOps commander, I felt that the place to be was where you got the feel of it – the battle – and you could make instant decisions, which I think helps at times because if you refer things back to committees or ComOps, you are not going to get an answer quickly. But I must emphasise that I was merely the strategic commander. The chaps from the air force and army did the job – they were the kingpins.