Norman Walsh later commented: ‘The possible overseas reaction delayed the green light. Also, there was considerable opposition to external operations, particularly from one senior Internal Affairs officer.’
Operation Dingo was on the skids, but at least the OCC had not rejected it out of hand. The dynamic duo were not about to give up. Tenacity and Walsh’s influence would make a difference: ‘We had to convince them,’ said Walsh, ‘and there were several attempts.’
Brian Robinson had this to say: ‘Had it not been for Norman Walsh, the operation would never have got any further than the model stage. Setting up an admin base in the middle of enemy territory was unheard of. Only Walsh could have sold the concept to a gaggle of brass who had never heard a door slam.’
Robinson was right about Walsh, but perhaps a bit disingenuous about the ‘gaggle of brass’. The Combined Operations (ComOps) leader, Peter Walls, had heard more than a door slam when he was commanding C Squadron, SAS, against Chinese insurgents in Malaya, and he was very supportive of external operations. He also believed in Walsh’s operational planning abilities. ‘I trusted Norman Walsh completely,’ recalled Walls. ‘To me, he is a great, great guy and a great mate of mine.’
But Walls was not in a position to authorise Operation Dingo, although Walsh and Robinson presented the plan several more times. Political attitudes started changing, however, in 1977.
The second moon after the winter solstice in 1977 heralded the Chinese Year of the Fire Snake, a year of many ups and downs, according to Chinese astrologers. Each lunar New Year brings a new animal; there are 12 animals in the cycle. There are also five cosmic elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water, which, in turn, run in a cycle with the animals, meaning that the same animal and element pair up only once every 60 years.
The previous Year of the Fire Snake, 1917, saw the birth of John F. Kennedy. Also born in the Year of the Snake – but the Water Snake, 24 years earlier, in 1893 – was Chinese leader Mao Zedong, whose revolutionary tactics Josiah Tongogara and ZANLA had adopted in the Rhodesian conflict. Astrology aside, the New Year promised a showdown between the Rhodesian forces and ZANLA.
It was also a year that ushered in change. In 1977, the world’s first personal computer, the Commodore, was launched, followed shortly by a rival machine, the Apple. Optical fibre was first used to transmit a telephone call. The bacteria causing legionnaires’ disease were isolated, and the movie blockbuster
Star Wars
hit the cinema screens. British Airways launched the first scheduled supersonic flight between London and New York using an elegant new airliner called Concorde. The same year, the music world mourned the death of a man who had grown up in the poor area of Tupelo, Mississippi, and became one of the most popular Americans of all time – the undisputed king of rock ’n’ roll, Elvis Presley.
On the political front, Republican Gerald Ford handed over the White House to Democrat Jimmy Carter, who was sworn in as the 39th president of the United States. Henry Kissinger handed his keys over to Cyrus Vance. The new administration had little sympathy for white people in southern Africa and wanted to see majority rule not just in Rhodesia, but in South Africa too.
Schoolchildren rioted in South Africa over being forced to use the Afrikaans language at school. The riots had started in Soweto the previous year and spread across the country, bringing John Vorster under the international media spotlight. His vigorous efforts at détente had come to nil, other than pushing Rhodesia to the brink.
During the first days of 1977, the chairman of the stalled Geneva conference on Rhodesia, Ivor Richard, desperately ploughed on trying to resuscitate the negotiations. In a frantic attempt to bring Mugabe and Nkomo back to the negotiating table, Richard offered to scrap the key concessions Smith had managed to squeeze from Kissinger in return for accepting majority rule.
‘We were now confronted, in early 1977, with the dreadful situation that our worst fears had been realised,’ observed Ian Smith. ‘With Kissinger gone, only Vorster remained as part of the agreement. It left me with a desperately uneasy feeling, because of the clear change in Vorster’s character over the last few years, associated with his escapade into détente.’
Smith saw Richard’s move as blatant betrayal. Vorster and Kissinger had assured Smith that by accepting majority rule, he would have to bend no further. Now he was being asked to concede much more. Vorster had again misread how much clout, or lack of it, the front-line presidents had over ZANU and ZAPU.
Smith rejected Richard’s new proposals outright. He went to the television studios at Pockets Hill and announced to the nation: ‘After all our efforts and the sacrifices which have been made, there can be no question of surrender.’
Geneva was dead and Kissinger’s proposals were history. Nevertheless, Vorster did not see it that way. He still naively believed he could resuscitate Kissinger’s Pretoria Agreement and make friends with the Carter administration. But he was in for a rude shock.
The South African prime minister travelled to Vienna in mid-1977 to meet the US vice-president, Walter Mondale, and was given a taste of his own medicine. Mondale tried to bully him about Rhodesia and South West Africa (Namibia), and demanded political change in South Africa too. He told the press that he wanted to see one man, one vote in South Africa. Vorster was incensed.
But the damage to Rhodesia had been done. When Vorster had forced Smith to declare a ceasefire in late 1974 and told him to attend the Victoria Falls conference, Smith was still ‘allowed’ to negotiate his own position. But the Kissinger agreement was very different. Vorster and Kissinger forced Smith to accept majority rule, or else. Now, with Smith having been reluctantly forced to accept majority rule, there was no reciprocation, no settlement. It was no surprise that morale in Rhodesia’s white community plummeted. Many people were thinking they had made all these concessions – and for what?
‘Regrettably, there were signs that our white community, for the first time, was beginning to have doubts about our future,’ observed Ian Smith. He was correct – the Kissinger proposals signalled the beginning of the end of Rhodesia. But giving up was not Smith’s style.
For the moment at least, Smith had Vorster off his back and he could start picking up the pieces. He would try to negotiate a settlement internally, without everyone interfering. This impasse also allowed him to continue prosecuting the war, particularly in the south-east.
Even though the Rhodesian government could not authorise an operation on the scale of Dingo in early 1977, especially in the wake of Vorster’s anger over Nyadzonia, the military commanders were prepared to continue hammering ZANLA in the south-east in a series of short, covert external raids.
After his release from jail a year earlier, Tongogara had started forging a strategic advantage, opening up a front along the whole Mozambican–Rhodesian border. He had supplemented his infiltration from Manica Province by sending his forces into the south-east of Rhodesia, from Gaza Province into the Gonarezhou Game Reserve, in the heart of a new military operational area known as Repulse. This was a serious strategic threat.
Ron Reid-Daly, the Selous Scouts officer commanding, explained the problem:
The south-east of Rhodesia is flat and with no population to speak of. What the Scouts liked was hilly country because there are lots of vantage points. We also liked lots of population so we could swan in amongst them with our black troops as pseudos, get information and bring the Fireforce onto them.
At that time, ZANLA had access to a railway line running right up to Malvernia, so they could run their troops straight up to the border, fit, fat and flourishing, hop off and cross the border. Our strategy was to entice ZANLA to use the tar road running along the eastern border and to deploy their troops in the Eastern Highlands, rather than into the flat south-east. That is why we started knocking out Mapai and blowing up the railway lines to slow that avenue of incursions down, which we did.
But Tongogara was not to be put off. He knew that his forces were faring better in the south-east, and they were able to attack the crucial rail and road supply lines to South Africa, which was of great symbolic value to ZANLA. Tongogara soon had 1 700 guerrillas operating in the south-east, more than in any other operational area.
Navigating in the south-east wasn’t easy. Often the only landmarks ground forces had were ancient beacons planted by Arab and Persian traders between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. The traders planted Palmyra palm trees in the flatlands of the south-east as navigation aids to guide them from the Mozambican port of Sofala to Mapungubwe, the region’s major trading centre, situated between present-day Beitbridge and the Shashi River. These tall non-indigenous palms, usually planted at river crossings, had reproduced over the centuries and provided very useful landmarks.
This new theatre of the war brought some setbacks in early 1977. It started badly when a Dakota flew into power lines straddling the Lundi River in the south-east, killing both pilots and destroying the aircraft. Then came the death of Reid-Daly’s daring leader of the Selous Scouts’ raid on the ZANLA base at Nyadzonia, Captain Rob Warraker. He died when FRELIMO downed his aircraft just inside Mozambican airspace.
Warraker was flying in a Canberra jet bomber piloted by Flight Lieutenant Ian ‘Don’ Donaldson; Air Sub Lieutenant Dave Hawkes was navigator. They were part of a complicated operation in the southeast involving a night attack on a large ZANLA camp at Madulo Pan, 75 kilometres inside Mozambique on the flood plains of the Limpopo River, just north of Mapai.
The No. 5 Squadron leader, Randy du Rand, led a formation of three Canberras in the inky pre-dawn blackness at only 300 feet above the ground to bomb the Madulo target. The Canberras were carrying Peter Petter-Bowyer’s newly developed Alpha ‘bouncing bomblets’ – the first time these weapons had been used operationally in Mozambique and at night.
In a daring and brilliant effort, Schulie Schulenburg, who had left the SAS to join the Selous Scouts, sneaked right up to the ZANLA camp to lay a radio-activated flare on the camp perimeter and another further away to give the Canberras a line and target.
Ron Reid-Daly remembered that when Schulie, assisted by Steven Mpofu, had reconnoitred the camp in daylight, they had ‘seen a tree at the edge of the camp. In pitch darkness they found the same tree where they laid the target flare.’
Ian Donaldson, flying the fourth Canberra at 30 000 feet to ensure good communications with Schulie, fired the flares by radio signal at precisely the right time. This gave Du Rand the visual markers and line he needed to find the camp target in the pitch dark. The bomb run was bang on target.
When helicopters arrived at first light with troops, they were met by a fierce wall of anti-aircraft fire, which should have been neutralised by the Alpha bombs. To make things worse, FRELIMO had arrived to help ZANLA. Donaldson’s Canberra, having conserved fuel at high altitude, was called in to neutralise the FRELIMO threat at Madulo.
Donaldson shed height in a wide descending turn above the thin layer of low cloud until he spotted a gap through which he could safely descend to his bomb-run height of 300 feet. However, he had the terrible misfortune of breaking cloud right over Malvernia, on the Mozambican–Rhodesian border.
Alerted by the Madulo attack, FRELIMO opened up on the giant bat-like Canberra with everything they had. Donaldson, Warraker and Hawkes had no chance to eject and the Canberra went straight in, killing all three.
Sergeant Kevin Milligan of the Air Force Parachute Training School recalls: ‘I knew Rob Warraker pretty well. He was in the SAS before the Selous Scouts and came through PTS quite regularly for continuation training. He was the sort of guy you took to, a good officer and a good leader. His passing was a great shock to all of us.’
Operations in the south-east continued, to clear the area around Mapai, a town on the banks of the Limpopo River, 90 kilometres inside Mozambique, and São Jorge de Limpopo, a small settlement on the Maputo–Malvernia railway line. Infrastructure was also destroyed.
There were further airborne assaults by the RLI on the ZANLA camp at Madulo Pan and another base called Rio on the Nuanetsi River. The Selous Scouts moved down the main railway line, flushed out the ZANLA guerrillas and destroyed the line. The operation went well, and there were large caches of war materials unearthed in villages around Mapai.
A Dakota from Buffalo Range flew in shuttles, bringing in supplies and carrying captured weaponry back to Rhodesia. As the vintage machine was about to leave with its third load just after dark, disaster struck.
Just as Flight Lieutenant Jerry Lynch hauled the Dakota’s main wheels off the runway, the well-lit aircraft came under withering fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. An RPG hit the starboard engine and small-arms fire came crashing through the cockpit, narrowly missing Lynch but hitting Bruce Collocott, the aircraft commander.
Fighting the severe yaw caused by the failed engine, Lynch had a split second to react. He quickly cut the power on the good engine to reduce the now violent yaw and put the stricken machine back down on the runway, struggling to keep the swerving aircraft straight with differential braking. The laden and now burning Dakota slewed around and lurched to a halt just before the trees at the end of the runway.
Lynch unstrapped and tried to help Collocott out of his seat, but quickly realised his co-pilot was beyond help. Lynch and his technician, Flight Sergeant Russell Wantenaar, just managed to escape the inferno before the fuel tanks blew up.
The loss of Bruce Collocott was felt deeply by his colleagues in No. 3 Squadron and by the jump instructors at the Parachute Training School. Kevin Milligan again summed up the sad feeling:
Bruce Collocott had such a quick wit and he was good fun, we really took to him. The pilots would come to PTS for a briefing and tea before a lift of paratroopers. The repartee between Bruce and the parachute jump instructors was always a humorous event to look forward to. Bruce could not understand why sane men would jump out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft. He would always ask witty questions, like ‘How many meatbombs will we be dropping on the enemy today?’ It was hard to believe that Bruce was gone. His death in Dakota 3702 just added to the feeling of loss. This was one of our favourite aircraft, which, in earlier times, had been Air Force One, the personal aircraft of former South African prime minister Jan Smuts.