Dingo Firestorm (35 page)

Keith Samler, flying with the helicopters of Pink Section, filmed the brown camouflaged Dakotas passing them in a valley. He could clearly see the dispatchers standing in the open doors.

Squadron Leader Rich Brand chose a route for the Hunters that would skirt the Serra Macuacua granite range, which was sufficiently west of the target for them to avoid detection. Brand smiled as he saw the small settlement of Vila Vasco da Gama pass by on his left. Someone in the squadron had given the great navigator’s name to Brand as a nickname, a tribute to the squadron leader’s navigational skills. A few minutes later, the Hunters headed east, crossing the Rio Capoche as they approached the initial point, a small feature 38 kilometres, or three minutes, north of the target.

At 07:57, Brand broke radio silence as he turned tightly onto a southerly heading: ‘Red 1 at IP.’ The new track took him straight towards the well-known Tembue Tit landmark, the prominent conical feature that stood 53 seconds north of the target.

As White Section passed the IP, three seconds behind Red Section, Vic Wightman made a terse call: ‘White, seven-eight rpm’ – a signal to his wingman, Spook Geraty, that he was about to push the throttle forward to 7 800 rpm, almost full power, to accelerate to a higher speed so that they could drop the flechettes at 450 knots, the ideal speed for dart dispersal. Wightman adjusted his course five degrees to the right, checking one final time that the gun sight was set to ‘bombs’. By the time they passed the ‘Tit’, White Section had almost caught up with the Hunters of Red Section, which was now 200 metres to their left. Wightman heard Brand call ‘Red 1 target visual’ 24 seconds later. Operation Dingo Zulu 2, the attack on ZANLA’s Tete headquarters, was about to commence.

White Section’s target was Camp C, housing the fully trained guerrillas, which lay three kilometres south of Red Section’s target. The expectation was that the insurgents would be lined up on the parade square, an ideal target for the flechettes, provided they were dropped accurately. Wightman scanned his stopwatch. Eleven more seconds, ten, nine, eight … pull.

‘My two great fears,’ said Wightman, ‘just before pulling up to the perch were, what sort of reception awaits us here and will I see anything I recognise from the photos, the intelligence or the maps? We felt quite invincible in our chariots, so I do admit the latter was the greatest fear – the shame of getting to the target area and then not finding the target, and cocking it all up for the others, was too terrible.’

The fear of ‘cocking it up’ added adrenalin, sharpening Vic Wightman’s focus. As the Hunter rose into the sky, he recognised the target immediately, adjacent to a distinct kink in the Luia River. ‘The secret to a good attack is to have the height, speed, power setting and distance from the target all correct at the perch,’ says Wightman.

The parameters were all good as he rolled his Hunter left, with Geraty mirroring his leader’s move. Soon both Hunters were in an attacking 30-degree dive, heading straight towards the neatly swept parade square set out among the clusters of buildings.

Taking note of the size of the fixed cross in the sights relative to the target, and drawing on his experience, Wightman judged the right moment to stab the bomb-release button on the stick, releasing both canisters of flechettes. He immediately pulled up, back to the perch, quickly switching the sight to ‘guns’ and checking that two of the four guns were selected. Geraty followed suit, dropping his flechettes on the southern half of the parade square.

The four flechettes were bang on target, sending 18 000 lethal darts, covering an area of 900 metres by 70 metres, across the parade ground – equivalent to the firepower of over 700 Browning machine guns firing simultaneously.

As Wightman rolled his Hunter over to arrest the climb at the perch, he glanced quickly at the target: ‘I could see anti-aircraft tracer directed at someone, but the parade ground looked quite deserted.’ It was.

Squadron Leader Chris Dixon and his Green Section Canberras already had their bomb doors open, and were closing in fast on Camp C, attacking west to east across the Luia River. Alpha bombs soon bounced over a wide area, and many went beyond the target, which was unavoidable owing to its narrow profile. The after-battle debriefing would conclude that it would have been more effective had the Canberras run south to north. The Hunters dived back and attacked the anti-aircraft positions with cannon or rockets as the Canberras passed through.

John Blythe-Wood and Martin Lowrie pounded the daylights out of Camp A, the recruits’ section, which was not a Canberra target. They attacked first with cannon and then switched to rockets, attacked, rose and attacked again, until Justin Varkevisser’s Vampires arrived to take over. Herds of trainees were seen running into the thick cover of the Rio Chamacheto, a tributary of the Luia.

Four minutes into the battle, Harold Griffiths called, ‘Red Section from K 1, break off, K-cars approaching overhead.’ This was the signal for the next phase of the battle; the K-cars would engage their targets as the Paradaks positioned for the drop.

Kevin Milligan recalls: ‘The Daks split into three pairs, each pair covering one of three sides. The bombers and strike aircraft were in there doing their deadly work. The green light came on and we began the dispatch. The camp was already in flames from the vicious strikes that had gone in on target. Directly across from us, I could see another Dak with parachutes blossoming below it parallel to our drop.’

The target was long and thin, so the paratroops would have to envelop both Camps B and C. Therefore, 48 men were dropped to form each of the three sides of the box. The base of the box ran north to south along the banks of the Luia River, now just a series of streams waiting for the imminent summer rains. The other two sides of the box would bracket Camps B and C.

One hapless paratrooper, SAS Sergeant Dale O’Mulligan, had a shock when he came to the ‘check canopy’ drill after jumping from the Dakota. His parachute was badly malformed, and looked like it had deployed through some lines, known as a lineover. O’Mulligan knew the ground was close, and he reacted instinctively and fast. He looked down, found the reserve parachute ripcord handle on his chest and pulled it with all his strength, using up his second – and last – chance. The reserve chute is a small auxiliary chute designed to open quickly and save your life – not much more than that. A hard landing under the small chute can be expected. O’Mulligan, now barely 200 feet from the ground, was horrified to see that the reserve chute, instead of billowing out above his head, was lazily flopping out of his chest pack.

He was in an awful position, falling too fast, yet too slowly. He was descending way too fast for a safe landing with the malfunctioned main chute, but too slowly to deploy the reserve. A total malfunction of the main chute would have been preferable in the circumstances, but he had no options left. The ground was rising up frighteningly fast and O’Mulligan braced himself for impact.

It was Dale O’Mulligan’s lucky day. The malfunctioned chute crashed into one of the very few big trees in the area, arresting his fall and leaving him dangling a few feet off the ground completely unharmed. Derek de Kock’s preference for landing zones with trees had again proved its worth.

Second Lieutenant Neill Jackson, jumping in the middle of his 24-man stick to have better control of his men, vividly recalled the parachute ride down:

The first thing I recall once my parachute (and my eyes) had opened was the awesome sights and sounds of the Hunters attacking the camp about two kilometres away to our west, diving in steeply from their perch height and firing three- to four-second bursts from their 30-mm front guns into an already burning and smoking camp area.

I saw the large thatched barrack blocks simply disintegrating under the weight of these long single bursts of cannon fire. I could hear the ripple of the explosions and observe the twinkling flashes as the cannon shells found their targets, followed half a second later by the matching sound of the discharge from the guns. Then the unmistakable warbling scream of that famous blue note as the attacking Hunter pulled up and away from the target at full power and incredible speed. They caused an immense cacophony, and it gave me a huge confidence boost to know that these deadly aircraft were on our side.

The Tembue admin base was a lot closer to the target than was the case at Chimoio. It was barely eight kilometres from the southern edge of Camp C, the main target, across the Luia River, and only 16 kilometres from Bene.

‘My helicopter broke away from the others as they passed the admin base area. This site had short grass and some small trees, but there were plenty of openings for individual helicopters,’ recalled Petter-Bowyer.

As his helicopter approached the admin base, there were clouds of white smoke rising from across the Luia River. Everything looked like it was going to plan. Even the DC-7 was not misbehaving with premature drops, although after the frank debriefing following what had happened at Chimoio, PB expected no further problems. As soon as the rotors stopped, PB clambered onto the roof of the helicopter to spot the DC-7 over the trees early enough to give the crew directions. He talked the DC-7 in: ‘Red light on … five degrees right … steady … green light.’

‘George [Alexander, the co-pilot] was listening this time. Troops and then pallets descended right where I wanted them. But there was a tense moment when one pallet appeared to be dropping directly onto me. Happily, it drifted away and crashed through a tree next to the helicopter.’

One of the parachutes ‘candled’, meaning it streamed, but failed to billow open, resembling a Roman candle, and the drums burst on landing. Otherwise the operation went like clockwork and it wasn’t long before PB was able to transmit ‘Square Ring complete’ to Norman Walsh in the command heli, which signified that the base was ready for business.

The only dramatic event at the admin base that day was when a K-car took a bullet in the engine. The machine flew back safely, but would not start. The technicians of No. 7 Squadron again showed their incredible skill. By standing on empty fuel drums, they managed to remove the damaged engine by sheer physical effort and replace it with a new one flown in from Chiswiti via the Train.

The Tembue raid was a lot quieter than the Chimoio operation. Far less fire was directed at the aircraft and paratroops. Within just 15 minutes of H-hour, Brian Robinson asked the stop groups to throw smoke in preparation for the sweep. Codenamed ‘Last Leg’, the sweep started at 08:25. As the stop groups began tightening the noose, Robinson warned, ‘Watch out for trenches, plenty of CTs in trenches.’

There was indeed an enormous labyrinth of trenches, particularly in Camps A and B, many of which had not been picked up on the aerial photographs, probably because there was heavy tree cover in the camps.

Despite the vast network of trenches, however, many of the ZANLA guerrillas chose to run to find cover in thick bush along the banks of the Luia River. In her book
The Elite
, Barbara Cole tells a story of three soldiers, A-Troop Commander Bob McKenna, Sergeant Les Clark and Trooper Gerry McGahan. They were confronted by a large group of ZANLA guerrillas fleeing into a gully: ‘Standing back-to-back, the three soldiers blazed away while the enemy fled into the bush and dived for cover. Fortunately for the Rhodesians, Bob and Les carried automatic rifles, and Gerry an RPD light machine gun. In the whole of the war, the three men had never fired so rapidly or changed magazines so quickly.’ Within three minutes, scores of ZANLA lay dead in the gully.

Only 48 minutes after the attack had begun, General Peter Walls, sitting at his desk in the command Dak, could no longer contain his curiosity: ‘Niner, this is Zero. Can you estimate CT casualties yet?’ Brian Robinson replied rather curtly to the supreme commander, ‘Not yet.’ He and Norman Walsh were extremely busy controlling the battle. Walsh was relieved that, so far, only one aircraft had taken a superficial hit – a Vampire, now with a neat hole through its fuel drop tank, which it incurred while attacking Camp A.

Brian Robinson ordered Neill Jackson’s Stop 2 to sweep westwards, where they came across a 75-mm recoilless rifle, fortunately abandoned, which Robinson told them to destroy. Jackson explained: ‘Under instructions from the airborne commander, we continued with our advance, and soon began making contact with the camp defenders. We fought our way westwards through the outskirts of the camp, killing about 40 to 50 terrs as we went, most of them in trenches or hidden under bushes.’

It didn’t take long for the Rhodesians to suppress the initial ZANLA fire. Then the battle moved into its most dangerous phase, codenamed ‘Tight Rope’, which entailed searching and clearing the camps. Barely two hours after the attack had started, Norman Walsh radioed PB at the admin base, asking for a helicopter to bring in the Special Branch men to interrogate prisoners and search for documents. Pink 4, one of the G-cars at the admin base, carried the SB men into Camp C.

Shortly after landing, Keith Samler and Ken Milne entered a hut complex, looking for intelligence. Samler tells the story:

It was a typical African pole-and-dagga hut, with a low door, and a thatch roof almost to the ground. While I was inside, I heard this noise of people scrabbling around outside the back of the hut, which gave me a fright – I thought some gooks were there. I went out of the hut quickly, weapon cocked, and advanced around the curved building – and, lo and behold, doing the same thing was Frank Hales. Behind Frank were Bob MacKenzie and Jock Hutton. Frank said to me, ‘What the fuck are
you
doing here?’ I replied by asking what the fuck
he
was doing there, as he should be in an old-age home. Anyway, I had found a crate of Cerveja Manica in the hut, so we cracked open a few bottles of the warm beer and then went our separate ways.

Samler continued searching the huts. As he entered a particular one, he saw movement in the corner of his eye. It was an armed guerrilla hiding under the bed. Fortunately for Samler, his reaction was quick, and he killed the man with a burst from his Uzi sub-machine gun, adding his contribution to the bigger picture, as Samler put it.