and we wouldn’t have heard them anyway. They dug in about 8 inches and made themselves a little wall in front of them. The guys were armed with AK47s and RPGs in between them. Then when they had set up, they looi-ed [hit] us.
I woke up and I thought I was dreaming. There were green and red tracers flying over my head. I could feel sand actually hitting me from the bullets that were landing around me. The guy sleeping next to me on a groundsheet was hit in the leg and in the stomach . . . He was pretty badly injured, and he was screaming and sitting up. I was trying to keep him down. I was trying to keep my head as low as possible as well, with my chin in the ground.
These guys were looi-ing us big time – RPGs were hitting the tree above us and exploding. I shot off one shot with my R1 and I had a storing [stoppage] because I had got sand in it while trying not to be hit. I managed to get hold of the weapon of the guy next to me, and I shot one shot off and that also had a storing.
By this time, the fire had going down – it only lasted maybe 30 seconds or a minute – I don’t know. Then these terrorists took off and ran.[125]
These shortcomings were caused partly by the SADF’s inefficient personnel system. As Willem Steenkamp explains, large numbers of Citizen Force and Commando members were regularly called up to man bases and escort convoys. Time for travel and refresher training “cut the actual operational service to something over two months . . . and no one stayed long enough in an area to build up a comprehensive knowledge of people and places . . .”[126]
South African tactics also were clumsy and unwieldy. Jan Breytenbach relates, with more than a touch of sarcasm, how Operation Kobra was launched in May 1976 with “masses of infantry”; “[s]upply bases, bursting at the seams, were set up in the operational area to provide everything from hot showers to ample issues of daily ration packs . . . It was the biggest deployment of South African troops since the Second World War. But this huge force did not get a single kill.”[127]
Eugene de Kock observed that the security forces had a disdain for SWAPO at the time because the guerrillas never stood and fought. “The fact that SWAPO soldiers were seldom seen, and resisted getting into set-piece engagements, reinforced the view that they were ineffectual and merely a nuisance. This was not so. SWAPO groups – large ones at that – moved freely around Ovamboland. But, because they could not be found, they did not exist for the security forces.”[128]
Recalling that era, a senior SWAPO commander told Susan Brown years later that “the enemy had no influence among the masses . . . During that time, even the SADF were under-trained. They were not specialised in guerrilla tactics. That is why they found it difficult to track down guerrillas during that time; they were not in a position to move in the areas where we used to operate and they got demoralised. At that time we had the upper hand.”[129]
SWAPO also moved to broaden the geographical scope of the war. PLAN’s chief of staff, David “Ho Chi Minh” Namholo, related: “[Strategy] was changed to cross into farming areas, going to urban areas rather than just being in the north or in Caprivi or in Kavango – to bring the war to the farming areas.”[130]
Moreover, SWAPO’s freedom of movement meant that they could intimidate the local population by assassinating local pro-South African headmen and officials almost at will. One of the first victims was the “chief minister” of Ovamboland, Filemon Elifas.[131] “Operating in teams of two,” Eugene de Kock remembered, “they killed members of the Home Guard and Defence Force and local chiefs”.[132] Selective terrorism can be a strong incentive for the locals to support an insurgent force.
The truth is that, by the end of 1977, as Recce member Jack Greeff experienced, “the SADF was losing the war” in SWA.[133] Although the SADF had in excess of 7 000 troops in Ovamboland, against never more than a few hundred SWAPO fighters at any given time,[134] the SADF’s “kill ratio” was not impressive. In the period 1966 to 1977, 363 SWAPO guerrillas were killed in action, compared with 88 security force members[135] – a “kill ratio” of only 4,1 to 1, and hopelessly inadequate in a guerrilla conflict. With an estimated 2 000 to 3 000 South West African exiles being trained by SWAPO in Angola, things were not going to get better either.[136]
A rather humorous story told by Breytenbach illustrates the quandary the South Africans found themselves in by early 1978. A major was giving a briefing to some politicians and generals about the situation in the operational area:
So the major picked up his six-foot pointer, walked to the almost blank wall map which was meant to depict the “enemy situation”. It covered the whole of Cunene province, in Angola, and all of Ovamboland south of the cutline.
Tentatively he pointed to an insignificant little spot in western Ovambo. “Generals, gentlemen,” he said. “This is Ongulumbashe, a former ‘terr’ base that was discovered in 1966, about twelve years ago. Police and paratroopers attacked the place. They shot the hell out of SWAPO and the survivors scattered all over the place.” He swept his pointer over all of the Cunene province and Ovamboland.
“And now we don’t know where the f*ck they are!” He stood his pointer in the corner against the wall and sat down.[137]
Beyond that, South African capabilities were eroded because of an internecine power struggle between the SADF and the SAP for control of the war and the gathering of intelligence. The matter was only rectified when PW Botha succeeded the police-inclined John Vorster as prime minister and had – as Magnus Malan related – “one of the biggest fights I’ve ever had in my life” with the police generals.[138]
However, all of this was about to change. In July 1977, Major General Jannie Geldenhuys was appointed GOC South West Africa Command. His orders were “to keep the insurgency at least on such a level that the constitutional development could take place in an atmosphere of stability and peace”.[139] This would prove to be a tall order indeed, given the rampant SWAPO insurgency and the way in which the Savannah campaign had laid bare fundamental weaknesses in the SADF’s strategy, doctrine, structure and equipment. Nevertheless, if anyone could do it, this “direct and unpretentious” man – “a soldier’s soldier”, as Chester Crocker called him[140] – would be it.
3
The failure of Operation Savannah, together with its political fallout, gave rise to a fundamental rethink within the SADF. The campaign exposed a number of organisational, doctrinal, equipment and strategic deficiencies, which had to be addressed rapidly. In fact, the development of a new operational and tactical doctrine was already well under way, as we will see, but Savannah meant that everything had to be accelerated.
Traditionally since 1910, successive South African governments had sought their country’s security within the bosom of the British Empire, and later the Commonwealth. Thus, in 1914 Prime Minister General Louis Botha entered the First World War on Britain’s side. In the 1930s, Prime Minister General JBM Hertzog fiercely opposed Italy’s occupation of Somalia and Ethiopia, and his successor, General Jan Smuts, entered the Second World War on the side of Britain.
By the late 1950s, however, the international situation had started to change. The colonial powers, especially Britain and France, were withdrawing from Africa, and in 1957 Ghana became the first European colony on the continent to gain independence. Not only was the Commonwealth changing from a mainly white club to one dominated by Third World member states, but South Africa’s apartheid policy elicited so much international opposition that the country became ever more isolated. Internally, the Sharpeville and Langa shootings of 1960 led to widespread riots. For the first time, whites in South Africa had to face the possibility of a black revolt.
This
