Dingo Firestorm (31 page)

The fierce volume of ZANLA’s ground-to-air fire that day ensured that most K-car crews had similar experiences – every single K-car was holed at least once.

As the noose tightened, the battle became a series of skirmishes as the fight was slowly but surely knocked out of ZANLA. The sweep of the outer perimeter was done, and Robinson transmitted ‘Short Leg’ to General Walls. Another milestone was ticked off. But time was dragging on and there was still much to do, in particular clearing hundreds of buildings, recovering or destroying weapons and equipment, and getting the men of Special Branch in to look at bodies and documents.

Recovering 184 men and their equipment back to Rhodesia was the planners’ biggest headache. They would be evacuated by helicopter, four at a time. The recovery plan stipulated that at 13:30, the G-cars would begin the extraction. First, they were to recover the 144 used parachutes, followed by a phased extraction of the troops. According to the plan, the last troops were to leave the target at 16:10. Clearly, this was not going to happen, as it was already 13:35 and the sweeps were still advancing.

Brian Robinson called General Walls: ‘Request permission to remain in target area to 16:00 then recover back to admin base. Recovery from admin base tomorrow.’

This was a big change to the plan, leaving a large force in hostile foreign territory overnight. Peter Walls knew the battle was going well. He also knew that the risk of a ZANLA counter-attack or of FRELIMO intervening now seemed distinctly unlikely, which significantly lowered the risk of remaining in Mozambique. But he was well aware of the political sensitivity of Operation Dingo being seen by the outside world as an invasion of a sovereign nation. Staying overnight increased this prospect. The telex machine in the command Dak was kept busy updating Prime Minister Ian Smith in his office in Milton Building as the day wore on. Walls sent an evaluation of the risks and rewards of extending the stay in Mozambique for the night. The prime minister agreed.

Robinson was given permission to stay longer. Walls had also taken into account that the weather over Lake Alexander, the next staging and refuelling stop inside Rhodesia, had deteriorated, which meant they might have no option but to stay in Mozambique overnight.

All things being equal, the Hunters attacking at low level could remain airborne for just under two hours. The trip back to Thornhill from Chimoio would take 25 minutes and consume about 1 200 pounds of fuel at high altitude. In his pre-sortie planning, Rich Brand had added a further 600 pounds to this for the approach, landing, taxiing and contingencies for ‘joker’ fuel. This is an RAF term signifying that the fuel level has reached the minimum to get to one’s destination safely. The first pilot to reach this level calls ‘joker’ over the radio, and everyone understands precisely what it means: time to head for home. There is another fuel level after joker has been reached – known as ‘bingo’. This is the critical fuel point, another way of saying ‘oh shit!’ In the case of the Hunter, bingo is reached when there is only enough fuel, when flying at low level, to stay airborne for 17 minutes. This flying time can be extended to nearly 30 minutes by flying at a high altitude where the thinner air provides better efficiency for a jet.

In the thick of battle, with all sorts of distractions, it is easy to pay scant attention to the fuel level, and in some cases miss joker completely. To get the pilot’s attention, the Hawker Hunter has a pair of prominent amber lights, called bingo lights. These are activated when the aircraft reaches the critical level of 650 pounds of fuel. As soon as the bingo lights flicker on, it is imperative the pilot drops everything and heads for home, immediately.

Bingo has no fat built in. It assumes there will be no delays whatsoever, and leaves no room for error. If, for example, one of the Hunters has a problem on landing and blocks the runway – there is a high probability of this when you have just been shot at – it leaves those still needing to land with no option but to land on whatever part of the runway is available. The luxury of diverting to another airfield is no longer an option.

Fuel was not an issue for the White and Blue Hunter sections; ammunition was their limiting factor. Wightman and Geraty ran out of rockets and cannon after only 15 minutes, returning home immediately to rearm. But Red Section remained high over the target, attempting to conserve fuel, providing top cover and a reaction if FRELIMO decided to intervene. At 08:25, Rich Brand spotted the first glimmer of one of his bingo lights. He immediately called: ‘Red Section, pogo pogo go.’

‘Pogo’ was a code word the Hunter pilots recognised instantly; it was an instruction for them to flick to an unused radio frequency to talk, thus avoiding clogging up the battle frequency. On the private frequency, Brand told his section he was on bingo: time to head for home. The other two Hunters followed Brand in trail (loose line astern). As the Hunters left Chimoio, the ‘jammers’, the Vampires of Voodoo Section, moved in to replace them.

Passing through 20 000 feet, Brand radioed air traffic control at Thornhill, requesting a ‘priority approach and landing’, which meant air traffic control would clear the airspace and ensure the runway was clear of other traffic. After descending and nearing the base, Brand slowed the Hunter down to 180 knots after 26 minutes and selected gear down; the action was shortly followed by a gentle thump and three green lights came on as the undercarriage locked down.

Three green lights is a good thing. In a sortie a few months earlier, Brand’s Hunter had been damaged by ground fire. That time, only two green lights, left and right, came on. ‘I tried all the usual tricks to get the nose wheel down, but it was stuck. I landed on the main wheels, holding the nose up as long as possible. The aircraft scraped along gently on its nose, the only thing needing replacing after the incident was the nose-wheel door.’

This time, all was normal. He selected full flap and initiated a continuous left-hand turn onto the final approach. The barn-door flaps and extended undercarriage increased the drag, slowing the aircraft. Brand rolled the aircraft level just as he crossed the threshold, allowing the Hunter to gently kiss the Thornhill runway at 130 knots. Being so light on fuel, Brand did not need to deploy the brake chute – the wheel brakes would suffice. Behind him, Dave Bourhill was already on short final, and John Annan was turning in from a short base leg.

Fortunately, there were no landing-gear problems, burst tyres or other battle-inflicted damage to spoil the landings. As Red Section touched down, Wightman’s Whites were waiting at the runway holding point, rearmed, refuelled and keen to return to Chimoio.

Eagerly waiting to receive Red Section was the ground crew, like the pit crew in Formula One racing, ready to refuel and rearm the aircraft. Brand hopped out of the cockpit, had a quick word with the crew chief and then did three things in strict order of priority: he had a pee, grabbed a Coke and Cornish pasty, and then went off to call Air HQ Ops in Salisbury to give them a sitrep. This routine took Brand just 10 minutes, by which time the armourers had replaced the gun pack and recharged the Matra rocket pods. The slowest task was refuelling, which would take another seven minutes – in total, a remarkably quick turnaround time of 17 minutes.

Some 20 minutes after stepping out of their cockpits after the first sortie, Brand, Bourhill and Annan were strapped in their Hunters again, and Red Section was ready to head back to Chimoio. The aircraft took to the sky just as Norman Walsh and Brian Robinson were lifting off from the admin base in the repaired command helicopter.

The Hunters would return to Chimoio three more times before the day was out. Four of the seven Hunters would take hits and need repairs. Rich Brand’s favourite Hunter 8116 took a hit in the rear fuselage; John Blythe-Wood’s machine suffered a hit in the starboard windscreen; Vic Wightman got a hole in the air intake; and Spook Geraty a hit in the gun pack.

The Centre Wicket phase of the operation signified the start of a thorough search of the camp area. The task was to clear the buildings, recover intelligence material, destroy or recover arms and ammunition, and destroy infrastructure in the Chimoio base. To achieve this, the RLI and SAS men fanned out. Bob MacKenzie’s SAS group was assigned the task of clearing Chitepo College and the ZANLA intelligence centre. He tells the story: ‘Sweeping through another 150 metres of woods, during which 15 to 20 more terrorists were flushed out and killed, my patrol reached ZANLA’s intelligence centre. It comprised 18 grass huts which served as offices, classrooms and storerooms, and although surrounded by more trenches, they had been abandoned.’

A group of MacKenzie’s men called him over to an open-air classroom beneath the forest canopy, which had taken a stick of bombs from a Canberra, killing, it seemed, all 60 student political commissars. This was part of Chitepo College, the central unit for training ZANU’s commissars to operate in Rhodesia. Only the brightest military-trained cadres were selected for the intensive preparation here.

‘Blackboards blown over by the blast carried drawings of AK-47 rifles and terrain sketches, and the students’ notebooks were filled with the wisdom of Chairman Mao.’ The air strikes had clearly caused heavy damage throughout Chimoio. MacKenzie praised the air effort: ‘[T]ogether with those killed by rifle fire, some 600 dead guerrillas were counted in the headquarters area alone.’

Then MacKenzie had a lucky escape. Brian Robinson ordered him to take a patrol to the ZANLA vehicle-maintenance depot, about a kilometre away. There they found several vehicles, including buses, Scania trucks and luxury cars for Mugabe and his commanders. After taking a pickup truck to use as transport, the SAS men blew the garage and its contents to bits. Armed with the nice white ZANLA Peugeot pickup truck, MacKenzie and his patrol toured the anti-aircraft sites to recover the DShK 12.7-mm guns, which would prove useful in Rhodesia.

Acutely aware that they might be mistaken for ZANLA in the white patrol vehicle, MacKenzie called as many pilots as he could to let them know that the white pickup was friendly. The message clearly did not reach everyone:

About halfway along, I was alarmed to hear two Hawker Hunter pilots talking on the net about a group of terrs escaping in a white truck; they were about to turn in and ‘fire them up’ … I was anxiously shouting ‘stop, stop, stop!’ into the handset and getting ready to abandon the truck, when a powerful transmission broke into the net, ordering the Hunters not to attack.

The new voice belonged to General G.P. Walls, ComOps commander, who was monitoring the battle from a specially equipped command C-47 Dakota orbiting inside Rhodesian airspace. I felt a strong surge of relief, then another of warmth and respect for the general, who obviously was paying attention to the details of the battle into which he had sent his men.

As the battle subsided, it was time to bring in the SB men to identify the bodies of senior ZANLA commanders and sift through vast amounts of documents to see what was worth taking back to Rhodesia for deeper analysis. Keith Samler, his boss, Mike Edden, and Ken Milne were taken from the admin base in a G-car escorted by a K-car, obviously in deference to Mike Edden’s senior rank of assistant commissioner.

They were dropped on the road just west of the HQ, from where an RLI callsign escorted them to the main complex. Samler had interrogated a number of guerrillas captured inside Rhodesia, which had given him a good mental picture of the layout of the area. But he did not expect what happened next:

We were approaching a clearing in the bush when somebody said ‘down’, then I heard a sound I will never ever forget. It was horrific. It sounded like a dozen people tearing up a dozen sheets at the same time, an awful ripping sound. I had no idea we were being shot at by a K-car equipped with four Browning machine guns. One of the soldiers reversed his cap to reveal the day-glow patch, while another yelled ‘stop, stop!’ over the radio. Thank goodness it stopped immediately. We recovered ourselves and continued walking to the HQ building area.

The first place Samler searched was a brick hut brimming with sophisticated medical equipment, including scanners, X-ray machines and all sorts of electrical equipment donated by the UN, Oxfam, and the like. Samler recalled:

I found this totally incongruous in the middle of the African bush, where there was no electricity. As I walked out, I saw Jeremy Strong. He recognised me and yelled, ‘Hey, Samler, what the fuck are
you
doing here?’ I shouted back that I was minding my own business and asked him what the fuck
he
was doing there. We knew each other well, and had a convivial discussion and then got on with our work, firstly blowing up the medical hut.

Major Jeremy Strong, a Sword of Honour recipient from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, commanded the RLI’s No. 3 Commando, and had jumped in with Stops 1 and 2. He was second in command of forces on the ground during Op Dingo.

From the medical hut, Samler made his way to the HQ building, to seek out and identify bodies of the ZANLA hierarchy. As he approached the HQ, he took colour footage with his Super 8 movie camera, a brilliant record of New Farm after the initial attack. The main HQ building, the red-roofed former farmhouse, was still standing, but badly damaged internally by Rich Brand’s 30-mm cannon fire at H-hour. In the swept gardens nearby, Samler filmed an unexploded Alpha bomb, a clear indication Chris Dixon had also hit his target accurately from his Canberra.

The puzzling thing was a distinct lack of dead bodies in the immediate HQ area – nothing like the scale of death nearby and south of the road in the triangle area. As Samler entered the building, an RLI trooper shinned up a tree outside the HQ and hoisted the Rhodesian flag on a branch, shouting ‘just to show who is in command here’.

There were signs that gave the SB men hope that some ZANLA commanders were around. Near the HQ, they found a briefcase belonging to Rex Nhongo, Tongogara’s deputy. It was an important item, so much so that Flight Lieutenant Ian Harvey, then the world’s most experienced Alouette pilot, was tasked to retrieve the briefcase and personally ensure it got back to Rhodesia. Astonishingly, a rumour that they had got Rex Nhongo swept through the camp faster than the Hunter strikes. But his body was not there.