Missing in Action (16 page)

Back at Prince Leopold Farm, concern was rapidly turning to alarm within Irish Battalion HQ. It had been confirmed that the Irish detachment at Jadotville was now under heavy and sustained assault. Without immediate reinforcements and resupply it was not clear how long they could hold out. In Elisabethville itself, there was no trace of Lt Ryan and his detachment at the Radio College. Worse still, the heavily armed patrol sent to check on Lt Ryan’s status had also failed to return and was no longer responding to radio checks on their location.

The sniping attacks on the Irish base had suddenly increased in intensity – and virtually every man available to the battalion was now thrown into front-line duties. John O’Mahony prised open his cast in a desperate bid to be allowed to operate a machine gun while on guard duty. The Irish HQ at Prince Leopold Farm now echoed to the sounds of explosions and small arms fire from all over the Katangan capital. Then, just before darkness fell, came the sound all UN soldiers dreaded – the distinctive whine of the turbojet engines of a Katangan Magister jet. If the UN helicopters took to the air, they now ran the very real risk of being destroyed.

Elizabethville airport circa jul/aug 61 (photo J. O’Mahony)

Tpr P McCarton, Cpl T O’Connor, Tpr J. Byrne Elitabethville circa Jul 61 (photo B. Maher)

Cpl Ml Nolan circa aug 61 Elizabethville (photo J. O’Mahony)

Armoured Car close up smeared with mud to make car less visable (photo J O’Mahony)

The charred remains of a UN bus after the ambush launched against Pat Mullins and the Irish patrol by mercenary-led Katangan forces. (Photo: Art Magennis)

Pat Mullins desperately
wiped the sweat from his eyes and muttered a swift prayer before he hit the ‘start’ button on the armoured car’s metal dash panel. ‘Please start, please Lord let it start,’ he said. The V8 engine noisily turned over but agonisingly failed to catch. The Irish mechanics had exchanged the traditional ignition key for a simple push-button starter when the Ford was shipped to the Congo – but troopers were leery of the new-fangled start button. The interior of the armoured car still stank of sweat and smoke but Pat was oblivious to it all. He held his breath, struggled to clear the ringing sound in his ears and waited for the expected anti-tank missile to strike. But none came.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph – please let it start,’ he said as he desperately pushed the button a second time, this time with greater urgency. The Ford engine again noisily turned over, coughed and, a split second later, roared into life. Its distinctive rumble was like music to the young soldier’s battered ears. ‘You beauty,’ Pat sighed as he looked out the driver’s armoured slit and prepared to ease the lumbering car forward. He had secured the armoured slit open with its winged bolting nut because visibility was now more important than protection. The Ford AFV may have been battered and splintered but it was still resilient enough to move.

Pat knew he had to move fast. One more hit from an anti-tank round would rip the Ford apart so he had to clear the area around the Radio College fast. ‘Don’t give them an easy target’, he recalled from the Fitzgerald Camp course he had started, but not completed, with John O’Mahony. He was fully qualified to ride the BSA and Triumph motorbikes used by dispatch riders but, despite being able to handle the Ford AFV, he still wasn’t officially ranked as ‘a driver’ and instead – like John O’Mahony – was referred to as ‘a gunner-driver’. But Pat reckoned he could still drive the Ford as well as anyone in uniform.

He tried to concentrate on the road ahead. The Vickers gun behind him was now angled towards the stars. If trouble erupted, he couldn’t drive the Ford and man the Vickers at the same time. Before swinging himself into the driver’s seat, Pat had tried to swivel the turret wielding the machine gun. But despite straining with all his strength on the two manual turning handles, the turret stubbornly refused to budge. Pat did not know it, but the sheer force of the anti-tank warhead explosion had literally fused the turret to its turning ring and wrecked the three turning ball bearings. With the ball turret weighing almost one tonne, it was impossible for it now to be moved by hand. The brake handle for the turret – essential for bracing it when the gunner was firing the Vickers – was now rendered equally redundant.

His friend, Mick Nolan, lay silent on the floor behind him and Pat knew he had to reach a hospital fast. He knew Mick was badly hurt and that every minute mattered. The Italian hospital in Elisabethville was reportedly the best in Katanga and it treated all the UN wounded. Best of all, there were Irish troops stationed near it, so if he could only make it there, he and Mick would have a chance. 

Pat had made it barely 100 metres from the ambush site when, to his horror, he realised the darkness was all consuming. He could barely see three metres in front of the Ford. There was no street lighting and every roadside house, building and factory was shrouded in blackness. He would have to find his way by memory and dead reckoning.

Pat eased back on the throttle to give himself extra time to judge the road direction in the pitch-black void. He had no option but to hit the button for the headlights. It would advertise his position but he had to see where he was going – and if he kept the Ford moving he would present a very difficult target.

There was a spotlight fitted to the Ford, primarily used to benefit the Vickers gunner, but Pat was loath to switch it on because, difficult target or not, he didn’t want to advertise his presence that blatantly to every Katangan soldier within a square mile. Despite the dim light offered by the small headlights on the Ford, he still did not recognise any landmarks to guide him onto a route he knew.

‘How do I get back to battalion?’ Pat wondered. He wasn’t familiar with this road. He could retrace his steps back to battalion along the patrol route they had already used this night – but that would mean lumbering past the ambush site where the Katangan soldiers had their anti-tank position. Retracing his steps back along Avenue Wangermee was only asking for trouble. He had no idea how many Katangans were there and if he turned around and stumbled upon a Katangan roadblock, he’d be finished.

‘Keep going, keep going,’ Pat desperately thought. He strained his eyes through the armoured slit and willed himself to see a road, a building, a bridge, anything, that he could recognise. But the darkness beyond the flickering beam of the headlights was like a shroud. An icy knot formed in the pit of his stomach as he realised that, whatever happened, he simply could not afford to crash.

Suddenly, a road junction loomed out of the gloom in front of the Ford. There were two major routes to the left and the right but no signposts that Pat could see. Avenue Wangermee continued straight on – but he knew this would only take him further away from the Irish base and out of the city. Which way to go? He was terrified of bringing the Ford to a halt in case the engine stalled. If the trusty V8 stopped he might not be able to restart it. After a moment’s hesitation, Pat carefully swung the Ford to the left. He judged that this might bring him back towards the city centre where he could find a road he recognised leading to either the Italian hospital or Battalion HQ.

The armoured car rumbled on and Pat was careful not to gain too much momentum. The Ford, which utilised a non-synchromesh gearbox, had four forward speeds. Changing gears was an art form that took drivers repeated practice to fully master. You had to double de-clutch when going either up or down a gear, and if you didn’t do it right, the Ford would threaten to shear its gears, not to mention jerking giddily in protest. Any sudden movement and the cabin rattled with the violent shaking of Vickers ammunition belts stored in the metal brackets welded onto the floor and hull sides.

Pat leaned forward and searched desperately to the left and right. There had to be something here that he could recognise. The armoured car rumbled past several smaller road junctions. After the fourth junction Pat began to panic. ‘Where the hell am I?’ he wondered. There were buildings to the left and the right but the darkness made it difficult to discern precisely what they were. The road surface was good, smooth tarmac, so this road must lead somewhere significant. The seconds passed like hours as the car rumbled away from the junction.

Without warning, the Ford arrived at another T-junction. The road to the left and right was much bigger than the route he had just travelled over. Maybe this was the road to the airport? Pat paused for a second, wondering whether to swing left or right. Finally, he eased the steering column to the left. He guessed that this would result in the armoured car doubling back on itself, which would bring him back towards either the Hotel de Ville or the Cathedral. Once there, he could find his way back to base.

Pat had travelled almost 100 metres when he got the first clue to his location. The road swung to the left before straightening out. As he looked right, he realised that he was driving past the Parc Zoologique with the River Lubumbashi flowing directly behind it. Pat was confused. If the Zoo was on his right, then wasn’t he now driving away from the city centre instead of towards it?

Out of the darkness, a building loomed. It was a major structure, maybe three storeys tall with lots of glass and concrete. Out of the haze of his memory, Pat struggled to identify the building. ‘What the hell is it?’ he thought. Barely two seconds passed before Pat felt the icy ball in the pit of his stomach expand and spread its cold tentacles up to his heart. ‘Oh Jesus, this must be the road into the African city,’ Pat realised. In an instant he understood that by twice turning left at the crossroads, he was now heading into the African section of Elisabethville – where the staunchest bedrock of support for the Katangan secession was based. Virtually all the Katangan gendarmes either lived or had families in the African city, which was established alongside the vast Union Minière complex. The native city surrounded the vast mine complex and also the western side of the river. UN patrols were under strict instructions never to cross the river and to stay on the Elisabethville or eastern side of the Lubumbashi. The last place a damaged UN vehicle needed to be tonight was heading into the African city.

Pat slowed the Ford to a crawl as he slid the transmission into the lowest gear he dared without running the risk of stalling. In desperation he realised that he had no alternative but to turn around and head back to the junction. ‘I should have turned right,’ he thought bitterly to himself, ‘I should have turned right.’ He could have tried to turn left now but he reckoned he was too far south of the city centre for a simple turn to bring him back to his destination. It was safer to retrace his steps.

Staring grimly out the driver’s slit, Pat tried to gauge a wide section of roadway where he could turn the armoured car. The Ford – despite its 4.5-tonne weight – was a relatively nimble vehicle. Its thirty-two horsepower V8 engine was its single greatest asset: rugged, reliable and capable of sustaining significant damage and still operating. The engine design dated back to the 1930s and variants of the V8 had powered everything from the Sherman tank to the Chevrolet C60 truck in the Second World War. If the engine had one problem it was that it was petrol rather than diesel fuelled.

Irish troops were fond of the Ford AFV but had learned that it needed to be treated with caution and respect. Ultimately, the chassis was still that of a three-tonne Ford truck. In fact, the chassis had been sourced by the Defence Forces from Ford’s Cork plant and stripped down was identical to the Ford trucks that now plied the Irish roads carrying everything from coal to flour and milk to newspapers. The reality was that the chassis wasn’t specifically designed for this kind of body weight, nor was it designed to offer anything like cross-country mobility. If you ignored the ‘soft’ armour, the Ford AFV’s greatest weaknesses were its brakes and its turning circle.

The Ford lacked any form of power-assisted steering, so the driver guided the armoured car through sheer brawn and the force of his arms. That meant that its turning circle was nothing less than woeful. The wheels had tyres with a 7.5-inch width on a 20-inch diameter rim, which further worsened handling. But, without power steering, wider and heavier tyres simply couldn’t be countenanced. Making matters even trickier was the fact the Ford had drum brakes that could barely cope with the 4.5-tonne body weight. Drivers who had to brake suddenly when the Ford was close to its top speed found they almost had to stand on the brake pedal, using their entire body weight to maximise the available braking power. Put bluntly, the Ford wasn’t designed for doing three-point turns on narrow roads. But Pat had no other choice. And he had to move fast before the Katangans realised what was on their doorstep.

Choosing his moment, Pat settled on what appeared to be the widest stretch of the road in sight. If he swung hard into the turn, he would gain precious inches for the difficult reversing manoeuvre. Steering the Ford while reversing was an exercise in luck as much as judgement as the rearward vision was virtually non-existent. Worse still, Pat didn’t have a gunner to shout reversing directions and distances to him at the steering wheel. He knew there were steep drainage ditches on either side of the roadway, so he had to judge the turn to perfection. Pat mouthed a silent prayer as he swung the wheel to the right.

The Ford turned precisely as Pat had planned. The sharp angle of the turn meant that he achieved the sweep he had intended so as to make the reversing manoeuvre easier. The nose of the Ford was exactly where Pat intended and he hit the brakes. But then disaster struck.

The front wheels inched over the tarmac road surface and suddenly came onto compacted earth. The brakes bit hard but the heavy Ford just kept edging forward. The wheels fought for grip but, instead of biting hard tarmac, they slid on the compacted earth. The weight of the armoured body inexorably pushed the Ford into the turn – and, with maximum brakes now applied, the 7.5-inch wheels struggled to halt the car’s forward momentum. With a crunching sound, the Ford’s front wheels skidded off the elevated road into the steep drainage ditch beyond. The underside of the chassis scraped and scratched along the road surface – finally grinding to a halt and achieving what the brakes had failed to. The Ford was now lying on its belly on the edge of the roadway, its front wheels sunk deep in the drainage ditch. Its rear wheels were still on the road surface but the Ford was now pitched forward at a thirty-degree angle into the ditch. The Vickers machine gun was pointed down into the drain – a danger now only to Congolese frogs and rats. The force of the sudden stop had jolted some of the Vickers ammunition belts free from their storage brackets and they now rolled noisily across the metal floor.

The sudden drop of the Ford’s nose had propelled Pat out of the driver’s seat. The jolt as the Ford then settled onto its belly slammed him hard back down into the seat and, for a few seconds, he sat dazed. Then, with growing horror, he realised that the Ford had skidded too far forward and the vehicle was now stuck. The engine had stalled and the silence left Pat with nothing but a ringing in his ears and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

His hand reached for the ignition start. The venerable Ford engine, still hot, caught at the first turn as Pat kept the transmission in neutral. But, as he slid the car into gear and gingerly eased out the clutch in an attempt to reverse, his worst fears were realised. The rear wheels spun and tyres squealed as the rubber desperately tried to get a grip. The car stayed stubbornly still. Too much of the car’s heavy nose was now wedged into the ditch – there just wasn’t enough grip for the double rear wheels to drag the car back up onto the road.