Dingo Firestorm (15 page)

He argued passionately for the need to attack ZANLA and its supply lines in Mozambique using a two-pronged strategy. This comprised, firstly, slowing the movement of the enemy and disrupting his supply lines by systematically destroying bridges, railways, roads and other infrastructure in Mozambique and Zambia, and, secondly, reducing the enemy numbers able to infiltrate Rhodesia by taking the war to them, by attacking the large external camps.

Walsh’s plan made perfect strategic sense, yet some senior members of the OCC were dead against external attacks, fearing political backlash and a widening of the war. The choice was stark: attack the enemy in his own backyard or wait for him to come to you. Those opposed to Walsh’s strategy, reinforced by Western and South African political pressure, won the day. His plans were shelved for the time being.

Walsh was not one to give up, though. When Brian Robinson visited him in November 1976 to show him pictures of the Chimoio complex, the two men got straight down to planning Rhodesia’s largest and most daring air and ground attack of the war.

‘Brian Robinson and I had planned several minor operations together in the past,’ recalled Walsh. ‘We worked well together as a planning team.’

The admiration was mutual. Brian Robinson had immense respect for Walsh as an airman and military thinker. He later paid a great tribute to Walsh: ‘I had a fantastic friendship with him, although he outranked me by miles. He would have made an outstanding SAS officer.’

It was Walsh’s ability to see the bigger picture that made him stand out. Peter Petter-Bowyer describes him as ‘a battle-experienced pilot with outstanding qualities in leadership and bags of common sense’.

Wing Commander Hugh Slatter, who would later serve as Walsh’s chief of air staff, takes it further:

He was a true natural leader, and a quiet man of action. He possessed an extraordinary ability to see through the non-essentials and very quickly arrive at the right solution. While serving on the joint planning staff, Norman would have his instinctive solution to the problem almost immediately, whereas the formal process required the preparation of a service paper, which meticulously considered all relevant facts and aspects of the situation, before coming up with a recommended solution, which took anywhere from three to five days of investigation and writing, and never, in my memory, did it come up with a solution different from Norman’s. This almost uncanny ability of his served him well, especially when it came to planning and executing operations.

‘No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.’

– H
ELMUTH VON
M
OLTKE, NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENERAL OF THE
P
RUSSIAN
A
RMY

Scotty McCormack was delighted with the photos of New Farm. He chose the best ones and had them enlarged as big as they would go. Then he called in a mapping expert, Captain Jacques du Bois of the Rhodesian Intelligence Corps, who when not in uniform worked for the government mapping department.

Away from prying eyes in the SAS headquarters, Kabrit, in the Salisbury suburb of Cranborne, Du Bois beavered away with maps, photos, papier mâché, ink and paint to produce a professional, largescale model of the entire ZANLA complex at New Farm, Chimoio.

During their intelligence gathering for Chimoio, SB told McCormack that they had picked up int about another big base deep inside Tete Province, almost on the Malawian border. ZANLA captives in the Op Hurricane area called it Tembue; this was the main ZANLA base in Tete Province.

Tembue operated as a staging point for trained guerrillas before they were deployed into the Hurricane area. It also had a specialist training facility and served as a reception point for new recruits. Tembue was far – 185 kilometres – from the Rhodesian border, nearly three times as far as Chimoio. Nevertheless, McCormack ordered and received aerial photos, then asked Du Bois to make a model of Tembue too.

Now it was time to begin the serious planning. Brian Robinson, the SAS commander, is modest about his role in planning Dingo: ‘I can only take credit for the concept of parachute vertical envelopment. This came about because I realised we would never have sufficient helicopters to go around.’

Robinson called on his pal, the commanding officer of the Parachute Training School, Squadron Leader Derek de Kock, to work out the finer detail for the mass paradrop. ‘We had learnt that the closest we should drop troops to the target was 1 000 metres,’ recalled De Kock, ‘mainly because the gooks seemed to be able to run 1 000 metres in a minute and would escape.’

The next challenge was to ensure that the aircraft and paratroopers remained clear of each other. De Kock explained:

The line-astern formations of the Daks were such that they were staggered slightly vertically and slightly to starboard. The troops were dispatched very slowly, not faster than one man per second, to ensure that each Dak load would cover at least 1 000 metres. Each man out was counted and this was broadcast, so that the pilot of the next Dak in line switched on his green light as the count reached 19.

Robinson went back to his HQ and continued planning. ‘The SAS style of planning,’ says Robinson, ‘was to develop a plan with the officers. That made them part of the planning from the start. They would take immediate exception to be just given a set of orders. This does not mean that the SAS was a Chinese Parliament which put operational matters to the vote. However, freethinkers had to be given the opportunity of contributing to the plan.’

Operation Dingo was no different, he explains: ‘The administrative plan was done by my second in command at the time, Mike Graham. All the troop commanders, including Grahame Wilson, assisted him. This was done in minute detail and could serve as a model for any operation of this size in the world.’

The whole operation depended on the air force: every soldier would go there and back – alive, dead or injured – by air.

Before the troops arrived, the target had to be softened with a heavy aerial assault, and, vitally, the anti-aircraft sites had to be neutralised to protect the big, slow paratrooper Dakotas and the trooper Alouettes, or G-cars. After the paratroopers had been dropped, the jets would need to provide top cover, which meant remaining above the target ready to strike ground targets to support the troops. Walsh also had to ensure he had at least one fighter jet armed for air-to-air combat in case the Mozambican air force decided to intervene with its Russian-built MiG jet fighters.

The challenge was that there were only eight serviceable Hawker Hunters in the entire air force and one needed to be on standby. All seven would have to fly to the target at low level to avoid enemy radar, which guzzles fuel in a jet. They needed to be over the target almost simultaneously to achieve surprise and neutralise the anti-aircraft weapons quickly. With fuel and ammunition being the constraining factors, there would be times when there was no Hunter top cover, a dangerous situation.

Walsh had to devise a plan to ensure there was uninterrupted top cover. He quickly came to the conclusion that the ancient Vampires of No. 2 Squadron would have to be used to fill the gap while the Hunters returned to base to refuel and rearm.

The de Havilland Vampire, a stubby little jet with a twin tail boom, came into service with the RAF just at the conclusion of World War II. Armed with four 20-mm cannons and rockets, the Vampire packed a punch. But it became dated when better machines, notably the Hawker Hunter, had come into service in the mid-50s, rendering the little jet obsolete. The RAF withdrew it from front-line service in 1955. At the time of Operation Dingo, 22 years later, the Rhodesian Vampires were the only ones still flying combat missions. And they would fill the void perfectly.

Planning a massive airborne assault requires great detail and accuracy. The only given for the planners was the location of the target. As the crow flies, New Farm was 279 kilometres from New Sarum, Salisbury, from where most of the aircraft would depart. The distance for the Hunters leaving from Thornhill, Gwelo, was 388 kilometres.

Norman Walsh had to factor in the range of speeds from the slowest to the fastest aircraft. The difference was 340 knots, from the Alouette helicopter averaging 80 knots to the Hawker Hunter barrelling along at 420 knots.

Using his experience of standard procedures with the squadrons, Walsh worked out the precise strike times, down to the second, and the attack direction. The rest was up to the pilots. ‘All individual squadrons were left to plan their own routes, strike plans and recovery,’ said Walsh.

This put an enormous burden of responsibility on the squadron leaders. For example, if the Hunters arrived 30 seconds late, they risked shooting down the Canberras and putting the Dakotas at serious risk from anti-aircraft fire. The knock-on effects of getting the timing wrong were huge.

The same issues of precise timing applied to the helicopters. Their task was to deliver 40 men to the target, which required 10 Alouette helicopters. Another 10 would be in the gunship, or K-car, configuration to complete the target envelopment. And Walsh himself needed a command helicopter, necessitating 21 helicopters in all.

The biggest challenge would be recovering a total of 184 paratroopers and returning them to Rhodesia, together with their chutes, prisoners, captured weapons, documents and, of course, any injured personnel. The 10 G-cars would have to fly 46 sorties to the target just to retrieve the men, four at a time. Another 13 sorties were needed to get the parachutes out – with sanctions, nothing was wasted – and probably another 20 sorties for prisoners, documents and weapons. All in all, each G-car would have to do 10 trips to and from the target, assuming no losses. In itself, this was not insurmountable, but the problem was that the extraction phase could only begin once the battle was over, which may well be in the late afternoon, thereby compressing the available time. It was a big task, especially as the RhAF only had 24 serviceable Alouette helicopters at the time.

Another problem was that the Alouette had a very limited range with a full load, which meant that refuelling staging points would be needed – inside enemy territory. Walsh worked out the details down to each helicopter and plotted the staging points on a map. It would be tight.

Armed with the impressive models of the target and a well-thought-through ground and air plan, Robinson and Walsh invited the OCC to a briefing at the SAS HQ. The philosophy behind Dingo was a no-brainer: big camps, like this one, full of ZANLA guerrillas ready to pounce on Rhodesia presented a very clear and present danger. Something had to be done.

Robinson and Walsh outlined their idea. They would surprise the target with a massive air strike and then quickly surround it with paratroopers and helitroopers, a tactic known as vertical envelopment.

Attacking camps in Mozambique wasn’t a new concept. The SAS had been wreaking havoc in Tete Province for years; the Selous Scouts had destroyed ZANLA’s Nyadzonia camp in Manica Province; and in the south-east, the Scouts, backed up by the RLI and the regular army, had taken on ZANLA in Gaza Province. But an attack on the scale being planned for Chimoio (codenamed Zulu 1) and Tembue (Zulu 2) in some ways resembled an invasion of Mozambique, rather than a series of pre-emptive skirmishes. Nevertheless, Robinson and Walsh hoped the leadership would see beyond the diplomatic hurdles and approve the plan, especially as large numbers of enemy were poised to enter Rhodesia with the imminent summer rains.

They duly briefed the members of the OCC. Norman Walsh’s request was quite straightforward, but the scale of what he was presenting could not be hidden. The highlights of the final briefing probably went something like this: ‘Sir, may I please requisition the entire Rhodesian Air Force? Yes, all serviceable aircraft. And yes, all our aircraft will need to fly over a foreign country.’

Where will the helicopters land to refuel?
‘Inside hostile territory and, yes, the trooper helicopters will all need to refuel near the target at about the same time.’

What losses can we expect?
‘We’ve studied some American operations reports on aircraft losses; we found them surprisingly high by our standards. So we will use our standard procedures based on past experience with the squadrons to keep losses to a minimum.’

Brian Robinson’s request was equally straightforward, and would have probably gone along the following lines: ‘I need 88 men from the RLI, plus 96 of my own SAS paratroopers. This force will box off three sides of the target.’

How big is the target?
‘Eighteen square kilometres; anything outside of that will be attacked by air only.’

How much territory must each man defend?
‘On landing, the gap between our paratroopers will be about 47 metres.’

What is the enemy strength?
‘We estimate about 2 500, but it could be as high as 8 000.’

So you are saying that the best-case scenario is odds of 14 to 1 in ZANLA’s favour – or at the other extreme 44 to 1?
‘Yes, but we have air support and the element of surprise.’

How are you going to extract 184 troops and their equipment?
‘By using all the available helicopters we have, sir.’

The plan was not just bold, it effectively threw all the air force dice at once. If it went horribly wrong, Rhodesia might no longer have an air force to speak of, and lose its key weapon in the counterinsurgency war.

The OCC was uncomfortable with the plan and refused to sanction it. As Walsh had learnt before, timing was the big issue: it was the right plan at the wrong time. This was late 1976, right at the time Henry Kissinger’s Rhodesia peace proposals were about to be debated in Geneva. It also came only a few months after the Selous Scouts had wiped out the ZANLA camp at Nyadzonia, an attack that had seriously irritated South African Prime Minister John Vorster and brought a wave of international condemnation on Rhodesia.

Under the prevailing circumstances and the risk of bringing Mozambique into the war, the Rhodesian government simply could not authorise an attack on this scale.