Dingo Firestorm (23 page)

Griff tuned his radio to 118.1 MHz, to talk to the civilian control tower on the other side of the runway: ‘Alpha 7, request lift-off’, to which there was a quick reply: ‘Seven, circuit clear, lift-off at your discretion.’

Anyone monitoring the public frequency, as they often did, would assume this was a routine departure of a helicopter from New Sarum at first light. Little would they know this was the largest helicopter armada to fly into battle since the Vietnam War.

Griffiths lifted the collective lever and started taxiing the heavily fuelled Alouette forward; he then lifted it free of the ground into nosedown forward flight. The horizon was quite distinct by now as the steely dawn lit the eastern sky.

Norman Walsh lifted off with the first section of helicopters. ‘As we left Sarum, I felt an immense relief. Relief that after all the planning and briefings, we were now on our way.’

Operation Dingo had started.

As the last helicopters were lifting off from Salisbury, the man to initiate the attack, ace marksman and leader of No. 1 Squadron, Rich Brand, was just waking up in his home at the RhAF Thornhill Airbase in Gwelo, 210 kilometres away.

‘What is your name?’

‘Officer Cadet Brand, sir.’

‘You big dick!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why don’t you play rugby?’

‘Because I don’t particularly like the game, sir.’

‘Do you feel this pace stick on your head?’

Brand squeaked out a painful ‘yes, sir’.

‘If you don’t play rugby, I will stick this pace stick up your arse and give you a double backbone. Understand me?’

The scene was a group of student pilots at Thornhill Airbase in the Rhodesian Midlands undergoing basic drill instruction, the first stage in the process of learning to fly. The victim was Rich Brand, one of the cadets.

‘My first experience was not flying, but drill,’ recalls Brand. ‘Our drill instructor was Sergeant Major Ron Reid-Daly. It was a cold morning. Ron Reid-Daly asked us who played rugby. Most of the guys put up their hands, except me. I had played rugby at school, but it was on dirt, and the game didn’t really appeal to me. Needless to say, after that morning I played rugger enthusiastically.’

Rich Brand wanted to be an astronaut. His ambition was well grounded. His father’s brother, Sir Quintin Brand, had been the first pilot to fly an aircraft from England to Cape Town. Many years after his Silver Queen adventure, Air Vice-Marshal Quintin Brand commanded the South-Western Sector in England during the Battle of Britain in 1940.

Rich was also influenced by his brother Basil, a flying instructor on Harvards at the South African Air Force flying training school at Dunnottar. Rich Brand seemed destined to simply push open the door and enter his chosen career. Instead, the young man would have to deal with deep disappointment and rejection.

Rich Brand descends from Dutch sea captains whose original name was Burgaardt-Brand, who made early contact with South Africa, arriving in the Cape of Good Hope in 1619 as they plied the trade route to the Dutch East Indies. Brand has some famous ancestors. Sir Christoffel Brand, an advocate and passionate democrat, was the first speaker in the Cape Legislative Assembly. Sir Christoffel’s son, Johannes Hendrikus Brand, became the fourth president of the Orange Free State, a position he held for 24 years until his death in 1888. Jan Brand, as he was popularly known, coined the phrase
alles zal recht komen als elkeen zijn plicht doet
(all will be well if everyone does his duty). This became shortened over time to form the popular modern Afrikaans saying
alles sal regkom
.

President Brand was asked to become president of a proposed Boer Union, which would unite the Transvaal and Orange Free State. He declined because he strongly believed in a policy of strict neutrality with Britain, knowing the powerful empire opposed the concept of a Boer Union. The Brands’ history of neutrality with Britain and the fact that Quintin, and Christoffel before him, was a Knight of the Realm and chose to speak English may well have had unintended consequences for young Rich.

After matriculating at a school with the unlikely name of the College of the Little Flower, a Catholic institution run by Belgian monks in Pietersburg, Brand joined the SAAF for a compulsory stint of national service, which was the right place to be to start the application for pilot training. About 200 other aspiring pilots gathered at the SAAF Gymnasium at Voortrekkerhoogte to compete for the few places on offer.

Brand sailed through the medical and aptitude tests, and was confident when he entered the final phase, the interview. A week later, a list of successful candidates was pinned to the Gymnasium noticeboard. Rich Brand anxiously searched for his name, but couldn’t find it. There must have been a mistake, so he searched again. It soon became clear that Brand had been rejected.

Rich’s brother Basil, a serving SAAF pilot, asked a contact in the aptitude section to find out where his brother had come unstuck. To his astonishment, Basil discovered that Rich had achieved the top mark in the pilot aptitude tests. Somebody did not want Rich Brand in the SAAF.

Brand is not an English name, but the fact that Rich was an Englishspeaker was impossible to hide in the interview. This was the late 1950s, when the predominantly Afrikaner National Party was consolidating the power it had won a decade earlier, and moving inexorably towards breaking with the Commonwealth to become a republic.

He was devastated, his dream of becoming an astronaut well and truly shattered. After finishing his national service, he started picking up the pieces. He had to look elsewhere and the obvious place was the Royal Rhodesian Air Force. So he trekked up to Rhodesia and went straight to Quo Vadis, a farm near Umtali in the beautiful Eastern Highlands owned by his famous uncle, Sir Quintin Brand.

Like Norman Walsh before him, Brand had to live in Rhodesia for six months before he could apply to the RRAF. Sir Quintin provided the opportunity, teaching his nephew the fundamentals of farming, driving tractors and rifle shooting, first at targets, then live quail. The young man excelled at shooting, a skill that would serve him well in the air force.

The six months flew by, and soon Brand had to go through the same process of medical and aptitude tests he had undergone a year earlier in South Africa. This time, the door opened and Brand joined 11 lucky young men in the 11th pilot intake of the RRAF in 1958. Some of them would also become legends, such as Ian Harvey, Tol Janeke and Vic Wightman.

Reid-Daly drilled the men relentlessly and no cadet was immune from his attention. Brand recalled an event: ‘On the tarmac early one morning, we were lined up facing the control tower when a squawking bird flew past. Reid-Daly looked at Tol Janeke and said, “Janeke, answer that bird.” Of course, Janeke said absolutely nothing.

‘Reid-Daly glared at the hapless officer cadet: “Janeke, you are going to regret that you did not answer that bird, because one day you will be flying along in your aeroplane and you will have to bail out, and your parachute won’t open. And you would have had the opportunity to stick your little finger up that bird’s arse and drift gently down to the ground.”’

Such was the quaint humour of this larger-than-life personality who would go on to establish and command the Selous Scouts, a man who was known affectionately as Uncle Ron.

Then it was time to learn to fly. On 10 March 1958, Brand met his instructor, the irrepressible Mick McLaren, also a South African. Brand has good memories of McLaren, a man who had a big influence on his flying career:

He taught me very early the value of a properly trimmed aircraft, a prerequisite for accurate flying. One day, I had not trimmed the aircraft properly, and Mick picked up a crowbar he kept in the Percival Provost cockpit, banged me on the helmet with it and said, ‘Brand, trim the fucking aircraft!’ He went on to lecture me about TAFIO, a common mnemonic pilots used to remember this drill – T, trim the aircraft; A, asseblief, trim the aircraft; F, for fuck’s sake, trim the aircraft; I, I must trim the aircraft; O, Oh shit, trim the aircraft.

On April Fool’s Day in 1958, McLaren climbed out of the Provost, telling Brand, who had 15 hours’ total flying time in his logbook, to fly a circuit on his own. Thinking it was an April Fool’s Day joke, Brand did nothing – at least not until he saw McLaren reaching back inside the aircraft for the crowbar.

‘I guess I landed okay because I continued flying.’

After 124 hours of prop flying, Brand joined the jet age, and started flying Vampires, mainly under the instruction of Flight Lieutenant Peter Petter-Bowyer.

‘After Vamps, I was posted to No. 3 Squadron, flying Dakotas, which I hated with a passion.’

Brand did not hide his feelings, and told his superior officers at every opportunity that his heart was in flying jets. To make up for the tedium of flying big, slow machines, Brand applied himself to building and flying model aircraft, at which he excelled – he won the Rhodesian Aeromodelling Championship title 11 times and the South African title seven times, earning his Springbok colours.

After 300 hours on Daks, Brand’s persistence paid off. He was posted back to No. 1 Squadron and Vampires, this time to learn weapon firing and bombing, under the expert instruction of Norman Walsh. He showed a high aptitude for delivering weapons accurately, and averaged only 14 yards in the high dive-bombing profile, a fantastic achievement in anyone’s book. His gunnery results showed a 35 per cent hit rate, also impressive for a student. And, recalls Brand, ‘I always remembered to trim the aircraft well; Mick McLaren’s TAFIO was well and truly ingrained in my flying.’

After another mandatory stint at HQ as operations intelligence officer, Brand returned to No. 1 Squadron as weapons instructor, a job he was good at. Then came some exciting news – the squadron was to take delivery of a dozen Hawker Hunter FGA9 jets. This was a fighter and ground-attack jet capable of supersonic speed, a bigger, faster and much more exciting machine to fly than the Vampire.

Late in 1962, Brand was told he was going to the UK to learn to fly the Hunter and ferry one of the 12 back to Rhodesia. His first experience with the Hunter was in a simulator at RAF Chivenor in Devon, which did not feel good: ‘I thought the Hunter was a most dangerous aircraft, as everything that could go wrong in the simulator did.’

His fears proved unfounded after three dual flights in the Hunter T7 two-seat trainer. Then Brand was told to fly solo in a single-seat F6, essentially the same machine as the FGA9. The single-seat layout was broadly similar to the T7 he had just flown, but there was one big difference – the F6 punched out a lot more thrust than the trainer.

It was late afternoon on a wintry January day in 1963. Brand strapped in, fired up and lined up on the runway as the sun was slowly reddening in the west. As he brought the thrust lever up to 4 500 rpm, Brand could feel the difference.

He applied full power, hearing a howl as the hungry engine sucked in air. The aircraft accelerated, reaching the unstick speed of 145 knots pretty quickly, and Brand was airborne, above the cloud in the cold twilight sky. He was enjoying the experience so much that he hardly noticed it was rapidly getting dark, and he had to snap out of his reverie and land quickly before he lost the airfield in darkness.

Soon it was time to fly the FGA9s to Rhodesia. The route would involve four refuelling stops between Lyneham in England and Thornhill in Rhodesia – Malta, Libya, Khartoum and Nairobi.

‘As we left RAF Lyneham, our boss, Squadron Leader Mike Saunders, lost his radio, so flying as No. 2, I had to take the lead. There was total cloud cover below; I never saw the Channel or much of France. Two hours and 45 minutes later, with our low-fuel “bingo” lights glowing, we landed in Malta. The rest of the ferry flight was uneventful,’ Brand recalled.

His passion for perfection and need for constant improvement when building his world-class model aircraft were key ingredients in Rich Brand’s constitution throughout his air force life, enabling him to add important modifications to Rhodesian warplanes. When he was with No. 5 Squadron, flying the Canberra jet bomber, Brand soon noticed that the bombsights were not harmonised across the fleet, meaning that each Canberra was slightly different for the navigator. Working with a team, Brand devised a system to harmonise the sights, thus enabling a navigator to jump from one Canberra to the next, confident that the sights would be the same. The Hunter also needed harmonising for air-to-air gunnery, something Brand carried out with the help of Rick Culpan.

In February 1976, Brand’s dream came true: he was appointed leader of No. 1 Hunter Squadron at Thornhill.

Shooting accurately became the hallmark of No. 1 Hunter Squadron; its pilots were often referred to as the Steely Eyes. Word got out about this, and a newspaper published an article claiming that RhAF Hunter pilots could hit a dustbin in a jungle clearing with their 30-mm cannons. This article drew the attention and mirth of rival squadron members, who, as a challenge, presented Brand and his squadron with a rusty old dustbin in a ‘formal’ ceremony in the officers’ mess at Thornhill.

Brand took up the gauntlet. The next day, he asked ‘Kutanga Mac’, the range officer at the RhAF firing range near Thornhill, to place the rusty dustbin on the range. Brand took off in a Hawker Hunter, fired a quarter-second burst (five rounds) and drilled the dustbin.

The seriously holed and dented exhibit, now the air force world’s most famous dustbin, was chrome-plated and returned to the officers’ mess, where it stood proudly. The inscription on the dustbin lid, still bearing the old Royal Government Issue OHMS stamp, read: ‘That jungle dustbin – Alpha.1.1280 – five rounds fired, one hit.’ (The squadron boss always took Alpha, followed by the squadron number, hence Alpha 1. The Hunter serial number was 1280.)

‘The Hunter is very stable when firing those guns. The 30-mm cannons are deadly, deadly accurate,’ recalls Brand. ‘In fact, the cannons were too accurate for the type of war we were fighting. If ground forces called in a Hunter strike, say on a group of terrorists under the third tree from the left, and the troops couldn’t see from the ground that it was actually the fourth tree, the third tree would be destroyed, but the terrs would go unscathed.’