Dingo Firestorm (4 page)

It is now plain to see that the British government are not prepared to be brought to any conclusion on the question of independence except on the most extravagant terms, not because of misgivings about my government’s competence and ability to govern in the interests of the country, or the logic or rightness of my minister’s case, but because they wish to placate at all costs members of the Commonwealth who have declared openly their hostility to my government and country.

Smith’s popularity had grown dramatically among the white electorate. He needed a stronger parliamentary base and called a general election in May 1965, and won a resounding majority. The die had been cast.

The Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) read as follows:

… We the Government of Rhodesia, in humble submission to Almighty God who controls the destinies of nations, conscious that the people of Rhodesia have always shown unswerving loyalty and devotion to Her Majesty the Queen and earnestly praying that we and the people of Rhodesia will not be hindered in our determination to continue exercising our undoubted right to demonstrate the same loyalty and devotion, and seeking to promote the common good so that the dignity and freedom of all men may be assured, Do, By This Proclamation, adopt, enact and give the people of Rhodesia the Constitution annexed hereto.

God Save the Queen

Given under Our Hand at Salisbury this eleventh day of November in the Year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five.

All across Rhodesia, people listened anxiously to their radios as Prime Minister Ian Smith read out the proclamation. He continued: ‘We Rhodesians have rejected the doctrinaire philosophy of appeasement and surrender … We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilization, and Christianity – and in the spirit of this believe we have thus assumed our sovereign independence. God bless you all.’

The
Rhodesia Herald
summed it up with the headline ‘UDI – Rhodesia goes it alone’.

UDI was a very high-risk strategy; some even called it suicidal. Why, they asked, would Smith’s cabinet take such a gamble? The context of the time provides clues. The prelude to UDI was a time of great change and turmoil in Africa. As some saw it, if the scramble for Africa by European powers in the nineteenth century was wrong, the desperate scramble to get out of Africa was immoral.

There was a headlong rush to grant independence to the former colonies. Ghana was the first, in 1957, and then they went quickly – eight French colonies were granted independence in August 1960, starting with Benin on 1 August and ending with Gabon on 17 August. By 1961 no fewer than 28 African countries had been granted independence. Some were nowhere near ready.

Ghana was regarded as the model for African independence. Yet only one year after independence, the Ghanaian leader, Kwame Nkrumah, introduced detention without trial, which he used to crush the opposition. Two years later, he introduced a new Constitution that enabled him to rule by decree, bypassing Parliament and making his rule absolute. He spent money with gay abandon on poorly thought-out, massive industrial projects and set the moral tone by raking off money from these projects into his own private companies. At the same time, Ghana neglected its main source of wealth, namely agriculture.

Investment dried up as corruption set in. Things got worse, and by 1965, the year of UDI, and after only eight years of independence, Nkrumah had taken Ghana from being one the most prosperous developing economies in the world to bankruptcy. The country had achieved the unenviable record of becoming the fastest-declining economy in Africa’s history, a record that would only be beaten some 40 years later by an African country led by an ardent Nkrumah admirer: Robert Mugabe.

Nkrumah blamed Britain and the West for his woes and decided to look east for new friends. While visiting one of his new associates in Hanoi, North Vietnam, he was ousted in a
coup d’état
, a method of grabbing power that became fashionable in parts of Africa.

And it wasn’t just in Ghana. Brutally repressive and corrupt regimes trampled democracy in many states north of the Zambezi. Even just across the mighty river, in Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, President Kenneth Kaunda was paving the way for a one-party state. Kaunda’s rallying cry of ‘One Man, One Vote’ was humorously modified to ‘One Man, One Vote, One Time’. A joke, perhaps, but all too often that was what happened.

With no success stories to build on among the newly independent states, the Rhodesians had no appetite to follow suit by embracing unchecked majority rule. The country had been self-governing for over 40 years, yet the British government insisted that Rhodesia should drop its all-race, but qualified, voting franchise in favour of one man, one vote.

Ironically, neighbouring South Africa had become a republic following a referendum of white voters there in 1961, but with no provision for black people to vote. The Rhodesian government struggled to understand the rules of the game.

The final nail in the coffin was when Britain’s Labour Party under Harold Wilson came to power in October 1964, demanding that there would be no independence without majority rule. A clear line was drawn in the sand, which brought about UDI, international sanctions, hardship and war. It laid the foundations for the largest conflict of that war: Operation Dingo.

It was a clear day in late summer 1920, and a palpable air of expectation hung over Southern Rhodesia’s second city, Bulawayo. The Silver Queen II, a twin-engined Vickers Vimy World War I bomber aircraft converted for commercial use, was expected to land on the city’s main horse racecourse. This would be the first aeroplane ever to land on Rhodesian soil.

Just after 10:00 on 5 March, Bulawayo’s warning guns sounded. The ultra-wide streets of the city, built to accommodate the turning circle of an ox wagon, suddenly thronged with people as shops, offices, factories and homesteads were vacated and everyone joined a disorganised charge of humanity to the racecourse. The huge biplane eventually came into view from the north. Clearly visible were the 12 long wooden struts and a network of cables anchoring the two wings and framing the two square engines either side of the big spruce plywood fuselage.

The cheering was so wild that it drowned out the sound of the band playing the welcoming piece. Officials struggled to keep the crowd off the racetrack to allow the Vimy to land safely. At the controls were Quintin Brand and Pierre van Ryneveld, the first men to attempt to fly from London to Cape Town.

The flight to Bulawayo had not been without incident. A radiator problem ended the flight when the aircraft had to make a forced landing in southern Egypt (present-day Sudan), which damaged the Vimy beyond repair. The aviators were loaned another Vimy, hence the name Silver Queen II, and continued south.

After the pilots’ mayoral lunch in the town hall and a festive night in Bulawayo, the adoring crowds returned to the racecourse at dawn to witness the departure of the Silver Queen II. The Vimy taxied out to enthusiastic cheering, turned and the pilots gunned the engines. But the cheers turned to groans as the aircraft struggled to get airborne in the thin air, clipped some trees at the boundary of the racecourse and crashed with a tearing thump.

Both pilots and both engineers survived, sustaining minor injuries, but the Silver Queen II followed its predecessor to the scrapyard. Brand and Van Ryneveld were determined, however, to be the first men to complete the London–Cape Town route by air. They were lucky: South African premier Jan Smuts loaned them a de Havilland DH9, enabling them to continue to Cape Town, where they landed in Wynberg on 20 March 1920. Both men were knighted for their efforts.

Sir Quintin Brand, who had fought with distinction in World War I as a fighter pilot with No. 1 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps (which became the Royal Air Force), went on to the rank of air vice-marshal with the RAF during World War II, commanding the South-Western Sector during the Battle of Britain. Five years after the war, he left Britain to settle on a farm in Southern Rhodesia. Sir Quintin’s nephew, Richard ‘Rich’ Brand, would later also command No. 1 Squadron, but in a different air force: the Rhodesian Air Force. Rich Brand opened the air attack in a Hawker Hunter at Chimoio to start Operation Dingo.

The arrival of Brand and Van Ryneveld in Bulawayo in the Silver Queen firmly planted the aviation seed in Southern Rhodesia. Civil aviation expanded exponentially after this event. In the 1930s, there were calls to establish an air force in Southern Rhodesia, but in peacetime they fell on deaf ears. It took the rise of German National Socialism and aggressive rearmament to rekindle the air force debate.

Despite strong opposition, an air section was established in November 1935 as part of Southern Rhodesia’s Territorial Army. Soon training for military pilots started at the civil airport at Belvedere, barely three kilometres west of the junction of First Street and Jameson Avenue in the heart of Salisbury. Instructors from the de Havilland Aircraft Company in Britain began training pupils in the Tiger Moth two-seat trainer aircraft.

There was, nevertheless, still considerable opposition to the establishment of an air force. Politicians simply didn’t see the need. Sentiment changed quickly, however, when Germany started suggesting that its former colony Tanganyika should be returned.

‘If that happens,’ said Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins, ‘we might very well have an enemy on our doorstep.’

On 17 July 1936, the embryonic air force, known as the Air Section, Southern Rhodesian Defence Force, was officially gazetted. A dedicated military airbase was established in Cranborne, a suburb four kilometres south of the city. Hawker Hart fighter planes were soon added to the air section as advanced training aircraft. The sight of these powerful, fast, noisy twin-seaters flying over Salisbury’s south-eastern suburbs brought much excitement, but also some resentment from those who used to picnic in the quiet, tranquil Cranborne woodlands. In May 1938, the first six trainee pilots graduated when Governor Sir Herbert Stanley awarded them their wings at Cranborne.

As the drums of war reverberated across Europe, the need to train pilots to defend the empire became increasingly apparent. To speed things up, the air section established a travelling flying school, which flew to selected centres outside of Salisbury to train pilots.

When war was declared on 3 September 1939, it took only three days for the Southern Rhodesian government to decide that a dedicated air force was paramount. The Southern Rhodesia Air Unit was renamed No. 1 Squadron, Southern Rhodesian Air Force, and an extensive recruitment campaign for pilots and ground crew followed. The Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF) was born.

Many Rhodesian airmen – a disproportionate number given the small colonial population – would serve with distinction under the RAF in the North African campaign and Europe. More than 100 Rhodesian airmen were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Inevitably, many would make the supreme sacrifice. The worst-hit squadron was No. 44 (Rhodesia), which suffered one of the highest number of Lancaster Bomber losses of all 59 Lancaster squadrons. The losses in World War II were felt all the more acutely in the tiny colonial community back home in Africa.

Training continued at Cranborne after the war, by which time noisy American Harvard trainer aircraft had replaced the Harts. A combination of the noise generated by these machines and the odd crash in the Salisbury suburbs brought pressure to bear on the air force planners to find a new base. In 1952 the air force moved from Cranborne to Kentucky Farm Airfield, a site 12 kilometres south of Salisbury and away from built-up areas. Purpose-built hangars, a control tower and other facilities were constructed on the south side of the main runway.

The new base was later named New Sarum, after Old Sarum, an aerodrome near the English town of Salisbury. The Old Sarum aerodrome was built during World War I. Old Sarum is an ancient hill fort established during the Iron Age and later used by the Romans. The hill fort serves as an excellent landmark for the airfield, lying just 700 metres from the threshold of the east runway.

In July 1953, the new Kentucky Airport staged the Rhodes Centenary Air Rally, the largest air event to be held in the subcontinent at the time. Aircraft from the RAF, Southern Rhodesian Air Force and South African Air Force, as well as privately owned and commercial-airline aircraft, took part. Pylon racing, aerobatic displays and other forms of competition thrilled the crowds during the morning session, and the air forces performed in the afternoon. The final day of the event was marred when two Harvard trainers of the Southern Rhodesian Air Force collided during a complex formation manoeuvre, crashing in front of the huge crowd and killing all three on board.

Establishing New Sarum well away from suburbia meant that attention was now drawn to Salisbury’s civil airport at Belvedere. Because of Belvedere’s suburban location, a new civil air terminal was built on the north side of the main runway at New Sarum and named Salisbury Airport, once again bringing the military and civil operations together with a shared runway. The 2.5-kilometre main runway was just long enough for the typical aircraft of the day, but at 5 000 feet above sea level, it was inevitable that a longer runway would be needed. With good foresight, the planners had set aside land to extend the runway to the south-west when the time came.

The Southern Rhodesian Air Force became the Royal Rhodesian Air Force in 1954 when the queen granted it royal status. The RRAF continued to adapt. It introduced the Hunting Percival Provost as the basic trainer and the DC-3 Dakota as the transporter. Vampire fighters signalled the arrival of the age of jet power, replacing the Spitfire as the main fighter and ground-attack aircraft. In 1959 English Electric Canberra jet bombers were added to the fleet, followed in 1962 by the impressive Hawker Hunter fighter and ground-attack jets.