Dingo Firestorm (9 page)

This was the first documented evidence of a ZANLA presence in the north-east border area. That single note galvanised the intelligencegathering process, which became more intensive. It soon became apparent that ZANLA had already politicised vast numbers of local peasants, yet no hard evidence emerged of a ZANLA presence within Rhodesia. The cat-and-mouse game continued until three black members of the uniformed BSAP arrested three trained ZANLA insurgents in the Kotwa area, 20 kilometres west of Nyamapanda, a town on the border with Mozambique.

Stanton, described by fellow SB officer Keith Samler as a ‘walking memory with an incredible knack for remembering names, places and circumstances’, interrogated the three and they were soon singing like canaries.

They told him about a large arms cache north-east of Mtoko. Stanton took one of the captives with him and after much tramping about in the bush, they came to some small koppies on the edge of the Nyangwa mountain range on the border. ‘We found plaited bark and vine straps that had been made to carry weapons of war,’ recalls Stanton.

The ZANLA captive also spoke about a ZANLA ‘letter box’ in a prominent tree. Stanton found the tree, and copied and replaced the letters before setting up an ambush. In the night, an unknown number of ZANLA walked into the trap and one perished. The next day, a wide search of the area revealed a massive cache of weapons, landmines and ammunition, which Stanton describes as ‘one of the largest arms caches of the war’. As Flight Lieutenant Dick Paxton recalled: ‘I flew heavy loads of war material in my helicopter to Mtoko.’

Stanton’s efforts led to Operation Tempest, the precursor to Operation Hurricane. News of the setbacks to the ZANLA effort in the far north-east as a result of Tempest reached Nhongo at his secret base near St Albert’s Mission, and he decided he could wait no longer. He quickly chose targets, the first being Altena Farm in the Centenary area, owned by a 37-year-old tobacco farmer, Marc de Borchgrave. Nhongo’s primary objective of the first attacks was to study the reaction of the Rhodesian security forces. He delegated the initial attack to his deputy, who used the
nom de guerre
Jairos.

The group of eight left Chiweshe under cover of darkness, marching in the night for 16 kilometres from the sparse TTL to the heavily cropped commercial farmlands of Centenary. Nhongo split from the group to observe the reaction of the Rhodesian forces. The main group arrived at Altena farmstead at midnight, cut the phone wires and laid a Soviet TM-46 landmine in the entrance road. In the early hours of 21 December 1972, Jairos fired the opening rounds of what white Rhodesians would mark as the beginning of the Bush War.

The attack with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47 automatic weapons was brief. But De Borchgrave, fearing another attack, stole out into the night on foot to get help. For those in the house, the long wait for De Borchgrave’s return became unbearable. Eventually, a house guest spirited the kids into the car and, without turning on the headlights, they fled the farm in the dark, narrowly missing the landmine outside the farm gate. The De Borchgrave family were given refuge on a neighbouring farm, Whistlefield, owned by Archie Dalgleish.

It was a bad choice: Whistlefield was attacked 48 hours later. This time, the hapless Marc de Borchgrave and his young daughter, Anne, were injured by shrapnel from an RPG that slammed into a window near where they were sleeping. Once again, the insurgents laid a landmine on the road to the farm.

A massive explosion rocked the early-morning air when a truck carrying the RLI reaction force detonated the TM-46 mine. Corporal Norman Moore, riding on the tailgate, was flung high into the air and fatally wounded.

The RLI immediately started looking for spoor so that they could mount a follow-up. However, unlike in previous encounters with ZANLA, the spoor was very difficult to follow, a sure sign that ZANLA had learnt from their earlier setbacks.

The attacks on Altena and Whistlefield shocked Rhodesians, just as the attacks on the Norton family had shocked the pioneers nearly 80 years earlier at the start of the First Chimurenga. Prime Minister Ian Smith had warned in a radio interview two weeks earlier that ‘if the man in the street could have access to the same information which I and my colleagues have, then I think he would be a lot more worried than he is today’. Despite the warning, the attacks still came as a shock.

The intelligence services now understood why weapons were being brought into the country via Mukumbura, Mzarabani and as far as the Nyapakwe Mountains further east. And they had also learnt that many young people were leaving north-east Rhodesia to join ZANLA in Mozambique. The threat had indeed been underestimated.

Stanton’s ultimate boss, Chief Superintendent Mike Edden, would later tell journalist David Martin in an interview: ‘We didn’t expect the ZANLA guerrillas to come through Tete and we didn’t know about ZANU’s new policy. If we had we might have taken FRELIMO and the threat from Tete more seriously.’

Yet there were other powerful clues of this threat; they were provided by the RhAF. Peter Petter-Bowyer, who by now was commanding No. 4 Squadron, was not one to sit back and enjoy the trappings of the new rank. The new squadron leader got stuck in to developing visual reconnaissance, or recce.

PB had become adept at studying human and animal pathways from the air, differentiating between what is normal activity and what is not. Flying at 1 500 feet between 10:00 and 15:00, when the sun cast the least shadow and the ground reflected light well, he was able to quickly spot unusual pathway patterns that indicated a temporary guerrilla campsite. These camps would usually be in bush cover and not far from a village, where the guerrillas would obtain food and female company.

Together with his trainee recce pilots, PB was busy meticulously plotting pathways over a large area between Centenary and the Zambezi River in Mozambique. It was long, tedious work and tough on the bladder, but once the pathways were plotted, any changes to established patterns were relatively easy to see. Besides spotting numerous temporary camps, PB identified a single well-trodden route from Mozambique south along the Musengezi River and up the escarpment near St Albert’s Mission.

‘I was convinced ZANLA terrorists were active right there,’ he recalls. ‘I went to Air HQ to make a presentation of 4 Squadron’s findings. I stressed that terrorists were active in the St Albert’s Mission area of the Kandeya TTL and this posed an immediate and serious threat to Centenary farmers bordering on the area.’

Nevertheless, just as Rhodes’s officials had preferred to listen to the Native Commissioners, who failed to see the Chimurenga threat 76 years earlier, the Rhodesian government seemed to do the same again. When PB’s disturbing findings were presented to Prime Minister Ian Smith, he asked why the Department of Internal Affairs had not reported this before.

The Department of Internal Affairs took umbrage at PB’s assertions, assuring the prime minister that there were definitely no terrorists in the Kandeya area. PB was horrified. Not only was his intelligence ignored, but a superior officer ticked him off for ‘causing unnecessary alarm and despondency’. PB was joylessly vindicated four months later when Altena Farm was attacked. ‘It was maddening,’ he recalled.

But the damage was done. ZANLA was by now well established in the north-east. Ken Flower wrote in his diary that the failure to spot ZANLA was ‘a dismal failure of our much vaunted “ground coverage” and our previously successful techniques of counter-insurgency’.

Things had indeed changed dramatically. The previously successful techniques Flower referred to had relied on the peasants compromising the insurgents. But ZANLA was now, as Chairman Mao put it, like fish in water: they were living among the peasants.

The army commander, Lieutenant General Peter Walls, would later recall: ‘Had the police commissioner and CIO been good enough to tell us the intelligence they had at the time, we would have been even more prepared. I can’t help feeling a bit bitter about the lack of cooperation there.’

Attacks came thick and fast in the wake of ZANLA’s opening attack on Altena Farm. Ida Kleynhans became the first farmer to die in the north-east when ZANLA attacked Ellan Vannin Farm near Centenary. The attacks spread further east to Mount Darwin. Then came a report that some land inspectors were missing in the far north-east. Flight Lieutenant Dick Paxton, an RhAF helicopter pilot based in Rushinga, was tasked with searching for their missing Land Rover. He soon spotted a vehicle parked by the side of the road. Not expecting foul play, Paxton landed his Alouette on the road behind the vehicle and shut down the engine. Paxton recalls:

As I approached the vehicle on foot, I saw a tarpaulin draped over the back of the Land Rover. As I got closer the hairs on my back started standing on end. I had an eerie feeling something was awfully wrong. I peered in through the driver’s window and saw an AK rifle magazine and a bush hat lying on the front seat. I went cold, cursing myself about how daft I had been to land the heli, and worse still shut it down. I was sure the terrs were watching me as I gingerly retraced my steps back to the helicopter. It was the longest Alouette start-up I have ever experienced.

A much-relieved Paxton was soon airborne, and he raised the alarm. Later, the bullet-riddled bodies of two land inspectors, Robert Bland and Edward Sanderson, were found under the tarpaulin. A third man, Gerald Hawkesworth, had been taken prisoner by the ZANLA attackers.

The scale and spread of the attacks in the north-east brought home to Rhodesians the realisation that ZANLA had managed to infiltrate a vast area. The conflict had now become serious.

Although a year behind the curve, the Rhodesian response was swift. The Joint Operations Command was set up in Centenary in late 1972 to bring together the army, air force, police and SB; these corps worked together to plan operations. The military response to ZANLA in the north-east would be known as Operation Hurricane. The kill rate increased dramatically as many of the original ZANLA attackers were apprehended by the army and the SAS.

Unlike the Altena Farm attackers, the gang that attacked Whistlefield Farm left spoor, which the SAS picked up and followed relentlessly. With a brilliant mix of soldier’s intuition and a good understanding of counter-insurgency techniques used in Borneo, Major Brian Robinson, the new SAS officer commanding, decided to place ambush positions on the Musengezi River, along a route he was sure the ZANLA gang would follow. His intuition paid off – the ZANLA group walked right into the trap; three were killed and two captured.

Robinson, the man who, five years later, would command the ground forces during Operation Dingo, was delighted with the result. However, he also knew that regular infantry operations were not the domain of the SAS. He was keen to get the SAS back to what they should be doing – disrupting the enemy behind the lines in Mozambique.

The target he had been pursuing in Mozambique had shifted from FRELIMO and the odd ZANLA guerrilla to ZANLA itself. He was anxious to take the war straight to ZANLA, disrupting its supply lines and transit routes from Zambia and Tete into the Nehanda, Chaminuka and Takawira sectors. Intelligence indicated that the kidnapped land inspector, Gerald Hawkesworth, had already been marched into Mozambique. This gave Robinson the opportunity and excuse to enter Mozambique to try to free him.

Robinson organised the first ever Rhodesian night-time free-fall deployment into enemy territory, some 40 kilometres inside Mozambique. He had been working with Flight Lieutenant Frank Hales of the Parachute Training School (PTS) to train his men in free-fall parachuting, and in particular high altitude low opening (HALO) techniques. The advantage of HALO was the silent deployment it afforded. The aircraft would fly high, ideally at 18 000 feet, to reduce the likelihood of alerting the enemy. The paratroopers would then free-fall to 2 500 feet, open their chutes and drift silently to earth. On a very still night, anyone near the drop zone might hear the rumbling of a parachute opening in the violent terminal-velocity wind, but at night it would be difficult to know what the sound meant.

Two teams of four pathfinders, the first led by Lieutenant Chris ‘Schulie’ Schulenburg and the second by Captain Garth Barratt, weighed down by their heavy kit, clambered aboard a World War II–vintage Dakota aircraft at New Sarum Airbase near Salisbury for the hour-long flight to their drop zone in Mozambique. It was late afternoon when the Dakota’s wheels left Runway 06. The men near the Dakota’s open door saw the bright-orange late-afternoon sun reflecting magnificently off Lake McIlwaine in the distance. The Dakota climbed slowly to 11 000 feet, the height extending the daylight. The cold intensified. Although it was high summer and the temperature was 24 ºC on the ground, the laws of nature meant the temperature dropped by about 2 ºC for every 1 000 feet the aircraft climbed. By the time the doorless Dakota had levelled off, the blast of air whipping around the cabin was close to freezing, with a wind-chill factor well below that.

The SAS men sat in silence, lost in their own apprehensive thoughts, some rubbing their hands, some pretending to sleep and others incessantly tapping their altimeters to make sure the devices were working. In daylight it is difficult to judge accurately one’s height above ground in free fall; at night it is impossible, hence the ‘alti’ is the free-faller’s best friend.

As the Dakota crossed the border, the pathfinders stood up to check their equipment. It was cold. The twilight was still quite bright at this altitude, but the SAS men knew that as they fell through the air things would get darker quickly. The red light blinked on and Schulie moved into the doorway, ready to fling himself out into the slipstream.

The green light signalled ‘go’, and Schulie leapt from the door sill into the powerful slipstream of the Dakota’s prop wash, which snatched at him and tossed him about. Just as suddenly, it was quiet and he was falling in undisturbed air, keeping stable by arching his back and controlling his direction with outstretched arms, legs and hands. It took 12 seconds for Schulie to reach terminal velocity, the equilibrium free-fall speed of about 200 km/h, when the wind resistance on your body equals the force of gravity pulling you to the ground.