Missing in Action (5 page)

Tprs K Rockett, J. Clifford, P Mullins taking a break (photo J O’Mahony).

Nothing echoes around
the cavernous interior of a United States Air Force (USAF) Douglas C-124 Globemaster II transport quite like the sound of young soldiers engaged in an energetic bout of vomiting. The veteran USAF loadmaster smiled to himself at the obvious distress of the young Irish troopers, who grimly sat in the paratrooper-style webbing seats, the green hue of their faces almost perfectly matching their green wool uniforms. The plane carried almost 100 soldiers – virtually all of whom sat with their backs to the fuselage sides, grimly staring across the floor at each other.

A few stared out the window at the landscape beneath them, but that only added to the nausea when the turbulence suddenly hit and the plane plummeted up to 100 feet before regaining altitude. It was a hard lesson, the American sergeant thought to himself, but one that had to be learned by every infantryman who thought that a life in the air force was easy.

The seats, which resembled canvas buckets, were quickly dub-bed ‘hard arses’ by the soldiers, who found that, after eight or ten hours strapped into one, they lost all feeling below their waists. One soldier – distressed by constant vomiting and the turbulence – ignored the directions from the USAF loadmaster, unstrapped himself and insisted on walking up and down the central aisle of the plane. One sergeant acidly queried whether the young man ‘was going to fucking walk all the way to Africa?’ For others, the experience was clouded by a fog of ignorance and innocence. One trooper was shocked to realise that the Belgian Congo was actually in Africa and not in Europe.

The Globemaster rumbled on southwards over the African continent, the brown sprawl of the Sahara Desert spread out below it like a vast mosaic. The giant Douglas military transport was a good aircraft with an enviable safety record. Her four giant Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major piston engines could drive the aircraft, and up to 200 troops, at almost 250 miles per hour over a range of 4,000 miles. Since immediately after the Second World War, the Globemaster had been the US military’s transport aircraft of choice.

The California-built plane could carry light tanks, armoured cars, artillery and even disassembled aircraft. But, unlike her newer jet-powered rivals, she had a substantially lower maximum altitude. This meant that she had to cruise through turbulence rather than climb over it like the newer jet counterparts from Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed. But, in terms of reliability and rugged build, the Globemaster still dominated the skies.

The aircraft occasionally shuddered and dropped like a stone as it hit a pocket of turbulence caused by the hot air currents sweeping up from the desert below. This added to the discomfort of the soldiers, several of whom were now gripping Rosary beads as sweat poured from their foreheads. Their wool uniforms didn’t help matters either. A few soldiers would pause between bouts of vomiting to mouth silent prayers for deliverance. No one had said it would be like this back in Dublin or Cork – and they weren’t even in the Congo yet. Flying had seemed such a great adventure back at Baldonnel Air Base that no one had anticipated this kind of agony.

The USAF sergeant would have smiled even more broadly had he realised that, but for a handful of soldiers, this was the first time the Irish troops in front of him had ever been on an aeroplane. Almost none of them had left Ireland before – and the few who could claim to be global travellers had merely taken the ferry across the Irish Sea to visit relatives in the UK. What was a routine delivery mission to the Congo for the veteran USAF personnel was akin to a journey on the
Starship Enterprise
for the inexperienced Irish troops.

A few hardy souls who managed to ignore the sound of sickness and pervading smell of vomit around them suddenly realised that they were hungry. They tentatively began to inspect the standard US army ration packs that had been handed to them back at the giant USAF base in Tripoli before the final leg of their journey to the Congo.

‘It was the closest thing to
Babes in the Wood
that I have ever seen,’ John O’Mahony recalled. ‘One soldier turned to Cmdt Pat Quinlan and pointed out that there was meat in the sandwiches and, as this was a Friday, should they be allowed to eat them given the Catholic Church regulations? Cmdt Quinlan turned to him and smiled: “You’re in the field now, lad, and you eat whatever you like.” For most of us, it was our first experience of such staples of US military life as Hershey chocolate, rye bread and doughnuts.

‘I struck out because my sandwich had this kind of sticky purple jam in it. I’d never seen anything like it before let alone tasted it and thought it was a strange kind of blackcurrant. I asked the American sergeant what it was and he grinned at me and said it was beetroot jelly. I was so hungry I ate it up without question but, in the next bout of turbulence, I threw it all back up again. That was June 1961 and I’ve never eaten beetroot jam since then,’ John smiled.

The journey for
the soldiers began back in February when those who volunteered for the Congo had been selected and confirmed following medical assessments. All soldiers then underwent a special four-month training rota – largely based on the lessons that were slowly being digested from the Niemba tragedy. Niemba taught the tragic lesson that indigenous populations who might initially appear friendly could turn hostile in a matter of seconds. In future, all Irish patrols would exercise extreme caution when dealing with roadblocks. Central to the new training was how to deal with roadblocks – and, crucially, how to defend a convoy while a roadblock was being removed.

Soldiers were shown how to properly approach a roadside obstacle – with half the patrol adopting defensive positions and half working to clear the roadblock. Soldiers were also drilled in policing techniques, crowd control skills and protecting and reassuring refugees. One of the ironies of the Irish training regime was the recognition that Irish troops would most likely have to protect Baluba refugees – despite the fact it was Balubas who were responsible for the fatal Niemba ambush.

In early June, a deployment date was confirmed. For Pat, John and the other soldiers of the Southern Command, it meant going to Collins Barracks for a special march-past parade and blessing. They were then transported to the Curragh – with a brief stop back in Fermoy for some final farewells. Having spent a night in Connolly Barracks at the Curragh, the troops were ordered into full dress uniform and transported to McKee Barracks for a second formal march-past parade and blessing on 19 June. It was a major occasion for the young troopers as the dress parade was formally reviewed by Taoiseach Seán Lemass, Foreign Affairs/External Affairs Minister Frank Aiken and Defence Minister Kevin Boland.

Pat, who knew he would spend his nineteenth birthday in Africa, had told his family and friends to find their way to any house in Kilbehenny village that had a radio, as the McKee Barracks parade was recorded by RTÉ to be broadcast as a key part of that night’s main Radio Éireann news bulletin. The soldiers were thrilled to see cine-cameras at McKee Barracks – and realised that newsreel footage of their parade might even make it into the interval slots at local cinemas like the Ormonde.

Advance parties of the 35th Irish Battalion – which was now bound for a six-month tour of duty in the Congo – had already flown out to Africa on 10 May. The bulk of the battalion would fly out (via Malta/Tripoli and Kano, Nigeria) between 20 June and 2 July in various ‘chalks’ – a term coined by paratroopers for a planeload of troops. Some of the Globemaster flights would involve the shipment of the battalion’s armoured cars, Landrover jeeps and logistical equipment.

The troops in the first transports that stopped in Kano to refuel were shocked by the formality of their welcome. Nigeria – which was still a British colony at that point – had its Kano Air Base run by Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel, supplemented by British army support units. The British commander – realising that the Irish troops were undertaking their first ever UN deployment overseas – insisted on providing an honour guard for the bemused Irish soldiers as they got off the plane.

Pat, John and the others from Fitzgerald Camp now formed part of the new Armoured Car Group, which was the 35th Battalion’s primary support unit. They had excitedly posed for a photograph at Fitzgerald Camp before their journey to the Curragh – and the proud smiles of the twenty-five men led by Captain Seán Hennessy reflect the fact that they regarded themselves as elite soldiers and ready for anything that Africa might throw at them.

An ordinary infantryman might be a private, but Pat and John were intensely proud of the fact they were ‘Troopers’ as in the old cavalry parlance. While they didn’t exactly broadcast the fact, Pat and John believed they were following in the same tradition as the US cavalry troopers that had fought and won the battles for the Wild West, as well as the Irish dragoons that had played such a key role in helping Wellington defeat Napoleon. They would move fast, strike hard and protect those in their care.

The boyish romance of the mission quickly began to fade under the sheer logistics of getting to the Congo and the discomfort of the arduous flight. ‘A lot of the lads swore that they would never, ever fly again after that trip. It would have been bad enough for experienced fliers but it was a horror-show for us. I think there were only a handful of people on board who didn’t end up throwing up their dinners,’ John recalled. ‘We had to fly from Baldonnel in the USAF Globemaster II because our own Air Corps had nothing remotely capable of flying us out to Africa. We were in regulation wool uniforms and the only weapons we carried on board were the Carl Gustav sub-machine guns that we were normally issued with. The regular infantry lads used the FN assault rifle, which was a Belgian gun and had only recently been introduced into Irish service. But while it was a fine gun it was too long and awkward for us to use in the confined space inside an armoured car. That’s why we had the Swedish Carl Gustav which was short, stocky and used the 9mm cartridge,’ John said.

If the Congo represented a coming of age for the Irish army, the adoption of the FN assault rifle was the first effective admission that soldiers could no longer be expected to be equipped with the weapons from a previous generation. The Lee-Enfield had equipped the Irish army for forty years. First produced in its Mark II form in 1907, the Lee-Enfield was superbly accurate, legendary for its reliability and weighed a portable 3.9 kg. But the rifle was a bolt-action design where the rate of fire depended on the skill of the individual soldier.

In contrast, the FN was an assault rifle design that, like the Kalashnikov, was in the process of revolutionising infantry combat. Manufactured by Fabrique Nationale (FN) in Belgium from 1953, the weapon was properly known as the FN-FAL. It weighed half a kilo more than the Lee-Enfield but introduced a whole new era of lethality. The FN boasted a firing rate of 650 rounds per minute and had a twenty-round magazine – ten greater than that of the Lee-Enfield. It was rugged, reliable and extremely accurate – traits that ultimately resulted in it being adopted by ninety countries worldwide as their army’s primary infantry weapon. The FN could also be produced in selective fire or semi-automatic forms, and it was so powerful that a heavy-barrelled model was manufactured which could take the place of a squad machine gun. The adoption of the FN meant that, for once, the Irish army was at the cutting-edge of military technology.

All of this combined to make the younger soldiers in the nascent 35th Battalion almost sick with excitement – although they maintained their calm exteriors lest they be mocked by their sergeants. Repeated delays merely added to the tension and excitement. ‘The flight was delayed for a while due to weather before the pilot was finally able to take off at 11 a.m. I don’t think I was ever so excited in my life and the only downside was that Pat and myself were assigned to travel out on different flights. We eventually arrived into Tripoli at 7.30 p.m. and I still cannot believe the size of the base that we landed at,’ John said.

In the era of King Idris I, before the advent of Muammar al-Gaddafi, Libya was a key US ally. The major benefit of this relationship for the US was the use of a huge air base outside Tripoli that was strategically located to effectively dominate the southern Mediterranean. At the time, Wheelus Field Air Base was one of the largest air force bases anywhere in the world. Just seventeen years before, US armoured units had helped defeat Rommel’s fabled Afrika Korps over these same north African sands. Since then, the US had maintained a very strong strategic presence in the region, which, given the growing military strength of the Soviet Union and their accelerated warship building programme, was now deemed vital to US national interests. Since the era of the Romans, north Africa was a location that could, in the wrong hands, threaten control of the Mediterranean.

Wheelus, originally called Mellaha Air Base, was built by the Italians in the 1930s. Having seized the facility from the Germans in 1943, the US renamed the base Wheelus Field and supplied it with massive concrete runways to handle the giant long-range nuclear bombers and strike-fighters that the USAF wielded. To further complement Wheelus’ facilities, a vast gunnery range was developed at El Watia to help air crews hone their bombing and strafing skills.

At its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a staggering 4,700 US personnel were stationed at Wheelus and El Watia – and, in line with US military doctrine, the base was developed to offer troopers a ‘home from home’ complete with ice-cream parlours, hamburger restaurants, a cinema and sports facilities. An impressed US Ambassador to Libya, John Wesley Jones, having toured Wheelus in 1959, referred to it as ‘a Little America – on the sparkling shores of the Med’. In common with other major US overseas bases, from Ramstein in Germany to Diego Garcia in the Pacific, Wheelus was designed to offer homesick soldiers and airmen all the comforts and attractions of Main Street USA. But the major drawback of Wheelus was the harsh north-African summer where noontime temperatures could soar to a sizzling fifty degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit).