the Biafra Story (1969) (18 page)

At this time Biafra was already sheltering some four million refugees from other occupied areas, about one and a half million Ibos and two and a half million minorities. Port Harcourt and its food-rich surrounding countryside was a favourite shelter, and the pre-war population of half a million had swollen to close to a million.

After a swift build-up on the western bank of the Imo, beating off counter-attacks aimed at dislodging the beach-heads, the Third Division launched itself at Port Harcourt in the last days of April. The Biafran forces took the onslaught of the usual spearhead of armoured cars, a drenching in shells and mortars, and then the Nigerian infantry. In a lone last stand with an empty magazine, the Italian fighting for the Biafrans, Major Georgio Norbiatto, was lost, missing presumed killed.

By the middle of May Afam, Bori and Okrika had fallen. The Biafran defence was hindered by thousands of refugees, while the Nigerian advance was assisted by small groups of local levies, volunteers and guides. Some of these had been imported from Lagos, including the former insurgent student, Isaac Boro, who appeared this time as a Major in the Federal Army. He was killed outside Bori.

With a fast right hook the Nigerians cut the road northward out of Port Harcourt towards Aba, and on 18 May advance units occupied the eastern outskirts of the city. A fierce shelling bombardment had been going on for days, and the road northwestwards from the town towards Owerri was choked with nearly a million refugees pouring out for safety. This human tide immobilized Colonel Achuzie, the newly appointed commander to the sector, and by the time it was cleared the Nigerian's had ensconced themselves in the town and occupied one side of the airport, with the Biafrans at the other. Here both sides paused for a month to take breath.

Early in April Major Steiner, the German ex-Foreign Legion sergeant, who ranked senior among the four mercenaries (the fourth was an Englishman who like Williams had operated along the Cross River, but had left) was ordered by Colonel Ojukwu to train and bring into being a brigade of shock troops along the lines of the small, tough bands the four Europeans had been separately leading up to that time. Steiner, who had had his own band of guerrillas operating around Enugu airport to the great discomfiture of the Nigerians, set up camp and ordered Williams to join him. The two began to put together the Biafran Fourth Commandp Brigade, a co4troversial unit which was nevertheless to play a widely publicized part in Biafran operations against the Federal Army.

Williams wanted to remain on the Cross River, but was overruled. A fortnight after he left the Gwodo-Gwodo crossed over, which Williams thought they could not have done if he had stayed. With his contract expiring, and desolated by the overrunning of his beloved Ibos, Williams returned to London in early May, but a week later he was asking to come back. He returned for his second contract on 7 July. By this time Steiner had trained up 3,000 men divided into six small battalions or strike-forces, and was ready for action. When offered a sector he chose the Enugu to Onitsha road, and went back to the North, where Williams joined him on his return.

Throughout July the Commandos raided the positions of the Second Division along that road with some success. Later, when asked why he had not joined with the First and Third Divisions in the 'final assault on lboland', Colonel Haruna, commanding the Second, admitted that all his preparations had been stultified by these Commando raids which forced him to keep switching large units from place to place wherever the raiders struck. The activities of the Commandos at Amansee, Uku, and Amieni proved the validity of Steiner's nonconformist theories of small fast-moving bands of men being more effective in African terrain than solid phalanxes of infantry, but although Colonel Ojukwu agreed with the principle, circumstances later forced him to bring the Commandos back to an infantry role.

During June Adekunle in the south launched out of Port Harcourt with orders to capture the remains of Gowon's Rivers State lying west of the Bonny. At this point Colonel Ojukwu asked the tribal chiefs of the two southern Provinces, Yenagoa and Degema, to come and see him. He told them the nature of the terrain they lived in was so unsuitable for defence that he could not offer great hopes of the Biafran Army being able to prevent the Nigerians from overrunning them. Therefore he offered the chiefs the chance that if they wished to opt for Nigeria and save themselves from eventual reprisals, he would draw up his defensive tine north of the two provinces and cede the remainder of the Rivers area to Nigeria.

The chiefs wished to reply at once, but Ojukwu told them to go back home and talk it over in council. The next day a messenger arrived with the Rivers people's answer. They wanted to stay with Biafra; they hoped for every defence pos sible, and would help all they could; they realized this woul bring reprisals, and were ready for them.

Adekunle later made the Rivers pay a stiff price for their loyalty to Biafra. As Ojukwu had predicted, the territory was impossible to defend against a force equipped with scores of boats and ships. Defending units had to be split into pennypackets to watch every spit of land and island. The Nigerians could pick their spot and move in off the sea. By the middle of July landings had been made at Degema, Yenagoa, Brass and a score of other places. On the mainland Nigerian infantry forces moved through Igritta, Elele and Ahoada, to capture the rest of the'Rivers State'. So far Colonel Adekunle had never operated outside the minorities areas. He had never set foot in lbo-land, while the other two Nigerian Divisions had never operated outside lboland except for the First Division's campaign to capture Ogoja Province. In some ways therefore, despite his enormous weapons advantage, Adekunle had had it easy.

This is not to say that fighting was any less severe in the minorities' areas than in Ibo-land, nor that most of the chiefs of the minority groups did not remain loyal to Biafra. But in the minorities' areas it was easier to find dissidents prepared to collaborate either through genuine conviction or desire for advantage, and these Nigerian agents had done enormous work guiding the Nigerian forces and revealing to them hidden byways which only the local people could know.

It had also been easier to introduce into the minorities' areas some weeks before an attack scores of agents imported from the Eastern minority communities in Lagos. Some of these agents nevertheless defected once they got among their own people again, and told of large sums of money being seeded around the minority areas to buy over the local chiefs, of agents provocateurs preaching hatred of the Ibos, and of threats of violent reprisal in the event of the local people remaining loyal to Biafra when the forthcoming attack took place.

The techniques were not unsuccessful in some parts, though few of the original promises made were ever fulfilled and the behaviour of the Nigerian soldiery usually brought swift disillusionment. Violence habitually came in two waves. The Federal combat troops moved through first, shooting everything on sight regardless of tribe, destroying and looting property regardless of ownership. The violence of the soldiery was usually in proportion to the casualties they had had to take in order to capture a position. Thus where a town fell easily without a shot being fired, and the population swung rapidly into a pro-Nigerian attitude commensurate with the brisk change in the power balance, there sometimes occurred periods of amity between the infantry and the local population. This never happened in lbo-land, but no one in Ibo-land had very many doubts that their fate was in any case sealed.

After the infantry moved on, the second-rate garrison troops moved in. Within weeks the local indigenes had learned that 'One Nigeria' was a fine slogan but an unattractive reality when it involved a seemingly limitless occupation by soldiers who had not been discouraged from thinking anything in occupied Biafra was theirs for the taking. That was why by the end of 1968 some of the most fertile breeding grounds in the whole country for the budding Biafran guerrilla movement were those minority areas that had been longest under Nigerian occupation.

In July Adekunle prepared to make his first move into 1boland and began to push towards Owerri. He had developed his 'O. A. U. plan', the capture of Owerri, Aba and Umuahia in quick succession. Somewhat intoxicated by the sense of his own importance and under serious illusions about his competence, Adekunle had vaunted his intentions for a quick kill of the remainder of Biafra far and wide. His increasingly erratic behaviour caused a tide of complaints and General Gowon was repeatedly forced to apologize on his behalf. But he could obviously twist Gowon round his finger when he wanted anything, and h.- remained at the head of the Third Division to build up his one-man kingdom.

Towards the end of July his forces had pushed up the Port Harcourt to Owerri road as far as Umuakpu, twenty-three miles south of Owerr i. Colonel Ojukwu, wishing to go to Addis Ababa but not liking to see Owerri fall while he was away, ordered Steiner and his Commandos to leave Awka and come down to Owerri.

By this time it had become clear that Steiner was content to command the Brigade and do the operational planning, at which he was good, while leaving the actual combat to Williams. This lean Welsh-born South African, cheerfully admitting he was half mad, had a habit of proving he was bullet-proof by standing amid a hail of fire while men were shot down around him, waving a walking stick and shouting obscenities at the Nigerian machine gunners, which drove them frantic with rage. But the Biafran Commandos responded to this bravado by imitation, and 'Taffy's boys' got a reputation as hard fighters. At any rate Nigerian prisoners admitted their infantry did not like to find itself up against the Commandos, which pleased Steiner and Williams enormously. By this time they had been joined by three newcomers, a burly Scot, a lean, soft-spoken but highly dangerous Corsican, and a handsome young Rhodesian called Johnny Erasmus, no intellectual but a wizard with explosives.

South of Owerri, in the face of Umuakpu, Steiner put Erasmus to work to build a ring of obstacles in the path of the Nigerians. After three days, and having felled two hundred trees, dug pits, planted mines, linked booby traps, arranged arcs of fire, dug bunkers and wedged everything wedgeable with grenades with the pins taken out, Erasmus announced that the Nigerians could either stay at Umuakpu or use paratroopers. In fact they never did breach those obstacles; they were eventually outflanked and dismantled from the rear.

Leaving the Biafran infantry ensconced behind this Maginot Line, Steiner sent Williams and five hundred Commandos round the side. They struck on 4 August not at Umuakpu, but at Nigerian battalion H. Q. at the next village down the road, Amu Nelu. Within an hour Williams had destroyed the H. Q., recuperated a large quantity of equipment, arms and ammunition, left over 100 Nigerian dead on the road, and departed in time for breakfast. The effect of Amu Nelu was not long in coming. The Nigerians sent an emissary through the lines to the Biafran infantry asking for a local truce.

Within a week the Commandos had to be transferred again, this time to Okpuala, half way along the road from Owerri to Aba. The Nigerians were moving from the south against this road junction as well, and the Scot and the Corsican were detailed to stop the advance. A series of fierce battles ensued during which both were wounded. But a mixed force of Commandos and infantry held the Nigerians short of Okpuala until after Aba had fallen.

Aba, shielded from the south and west by the curve of the Imo River, was presumed to be safe from attack. It was the biggest city left, now overflowing not only with its original refugees but many of those from Port Harcourt. It was also the administrative centre of Biafra. Across the Imo there had been two bridges, one at Imo River Town on the main road from Aba to Port Harcourt, the other at Awaza further west. The first bridge had been blown up, the second was intact but mined. It was the Awaza bridge the Nigerians chose. When they appeared on the far bank, the Biafrans blew the charges, but they had been badly placed. It was one of the most serious errors of the war. The bridge went down, but a gas pipeline a few yards to one side escaped the blast. Along the top of this pipe ran a catwalk, and the Biafrans, out of ammunition, watched helplessly as the Nigerians started to cross on foot in single file. This was on 17 August. Williams was sent for with 700 men, but he could not get there until the morning of the 19th. By this time the Nigerians had put across three battalions.

The Commandos fought for two days to try to get the bridgehead back, but while two Federal battalions held them a mile from the water, the third marched south and captured the northern bank of the other, bigger bridge. Seeing that it was useless, Williams pulled back to the main Aba-Port Harcourt road. For six days the Biafran Twelfth Division assisted by Williams' men, now made up to 1,000, fought back as a tide of Nigerians crossed the Imo on foot. Feverish work was in progress, reportedly with Russian engineers, to re-build the Imo River Bridge to bring over the heavy equipment.

Williams, holding the main axis, did not rate the Nigerians very dangerous so long as they lacked their armour and artillery, although they still outnumbered the Biafrans many times in guns, bullets and mortars. On 24 August the bridge was completed and the attack column rolled across. The en. suing battle was the bloodiest of the war. Williams threw in his 1,000 Commandos in attack rather than wait in defence. The impertinence caught the Nigerians off guard. They had a reported three brigades in the main column up the main road, and the intention was to march easily to Aba, brush as4e the resistance, and move on to Umuahia.

For three days Williams and Erasmus led less than 1,000 young Biafrans clutching bolt-action rifles against the pride of the Nigerian Army. They had no bazookas, no artillery, precious few mortars. The Nigerians threw in a rain of shells and mortars, five armoured cars and a monsoon of bazooka rockets. Their machine-guns and repeater rifles did not stop for seventy-two hours. The backbone of the detence was the 'ogbunigwe', a weird mine invented by the Biafrans. It looked like a square cone with dynamite packed into the narrow end and the rest stuffed with ball bearings, nails, stones, scrap iron and metal chips, The base is placed against a tree to absorb the shock, the trumpet-shaped opening, covered over with plywood,' faces down the road towards the oncoming forces. It is detonated by a wire, and experts advise the firer to stand well back. On exploding, the ogbunigwe sweeps clear a ninety-degree arc in front of it, with a maximum killing range of over 200 yards. Such a device let off at short range will normally destroy a company and stop an attack in its tracks.