The men of the SAS, RLI and RhAF had indeed inflicted a most painful broken nose on Robert Mugabe’s ZANU forces in one of the biggest battles in Rhodesian history.
Rhodesia Herald
SALISBURY, TUESDAY NOVEMBER
29 1977
Rhodesians’ big raids deep into Mozambique
1 200 TERRORISTS KILLED
Forces smash two camps
Security forces have killed more than 1 200 terrorists in what are acknowledged as their biggest and most successful raids to date against terrorist bases inside Mozambique.
The Rhodesian forces have struck at two camps well inside Mozambique in separate operations which started last Wednesday. The first attack was against the main ZANLA operational headquarters and terrorist holding camp – 90 kilometres inside Mozambique and 17 kilometres north of Chimoio, which used to be called Vila Pery.
The second attack started on Saturday and was directed at the Tembue terrorist base 220 kilometres from the Rhodesian border and north-east of the Cabora Bassa Dam.
Operation Dingo did not end the war. It was not expected to, and many more battles lay ahead. Yet it was pivotal. The raid caused considerable damage to ZANU and its leadership, wiping out 20 per cent of its guerrilla forces and seriously injuring another 10 per cent. The very same spot where Robert Mugabe proudly stood, just three months before Dingo, to acknowledge his election as supreme leader was a pile of rubble. The Rhodesian attack also very nearly cost Mugabe his muchcherished leadership. He was castigated for being complacent about the defences at Chimoio. His detractors once again criticised his total lack of military expertise, the reason why they believed he should never have been elected in the first place.
Operation Dingo came at a time when there was a growing assumption that Rhodesia was fast losing the capability to sustain war, and that almost any settlement could be imposed on the Rhodesian government – not really surprising after Kissinger’s meat-cleaver intervention a year earlier. Operation Dingo put the record straight by delivering a strong message to the world: the Rhodesian forces were not down and out; there was plenty of fight left in them. The British foreign secretary, Dr David Owen, said as much – to the intense irritation of Robert Mugabe. The fact that Rhodesia could mount an attack on this scale surprised many; some even claimed that South Africa must have been directly involved in the raid.
The UN secretary general, Kurt Waldheim, said the raid had ‘greatly impaired peace efforts’. These were tacit admissions that any plans to bypass Ian Smith’s government in the settlement process were doomed. The American ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, summed up the position succinctly: ‘If you want to stop the fighting you have to talk to the people with the guns.’ And that is exactly what happened two years later at the Lancaster House negotiations.
Mugabe, the most reluctant signatory to the Lancaster House Agreement, achieved victory with a resounding majority in the elections of 1980, thanks in no small way to the strategic foresight of his general-in-chief, Josiah Tongogara. And yet Tongogara, known to some as the Che Guevara of Africa, would not live to see the election results. He died in a road accident on a dark Christmas night in 1979, en route from Maputo to Chimoio to sell the Lancaster House Agreement to his guerrilla forces. With Tongogara’s death, any hope disappeared of unifying the two rival guerrilla political parties, ZANU and ZAPU.
In the aftermath of the Dingo attacks, Robert Mugabe and his spin doctors went into high gear to save face, declaring that New Farm was simply a refugee camp. This is the line much of the international media took.
It is true that there were support staff, hangers-on, family members and their children in the complex. Edgar Tekere’s wife, Ruvimbo, was the best-known example (she hid in a pit latrine for two days and survived). But there is no doubt that the camp’s primary purpose was military. Mugabe, Tongogara, Tekere and others had their own quarters within the complex; it was naive to the extreme to believe that New Farm would never be attacked.
The Harare government’s museums department avoided the spin and properly honoured the fallen; many of them had put up a brave and spirited fight. It built a fitting war memorial, designed by architect Peter Jackson, at the battle site adjacent to the preserved Antonio family farmhouse, now a museum that still bears the huge holes in the floor where Rich Brand’s opening shots tore into the building on that Wednesday morning. The large perimeter sign, written in Portuguese and English, reads:
Chimoio – Zimbabwe Liberation War Shrine
Here lie the remains of freedom fighters who fell during Zimbabwe’s liberation war. These brave men and women were killed in a Rhodesian air and ground attack on Thursday [
sic
] 23 November 1977.
National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe
Resembling a small version of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, the sign has nearly 1 100 names inscribed on rows of polished stone panels. Had the Dare reChimurenga not switched its meeting to Maputo on that fateful day in November 1977, there would certainly have been some well-known names on those panels.
The outcome of the Lancaster House Agreement in late 1979 was significantly better for the Rhodesians as a result of Operation Dingo and subsequent external operations. Mugabe’s original standpoint was that there would be no settlement unless his army replaced the Rhodesian forces in their entirety. He also made it clear that the white farmers would have no protection of land tenure, and key industries would be nationalised.
As it turned out, the guerrilla forces were contained in assembly points for a very long time, tenure of white land was secured for at least a decade and no major nationalisation took place. Good examples of just how far Mugabe compromised were the appointment of Lieutenant General Peter Walls as his top military commander and the reservation of 20 per cent of the parliamentary seats for white people, which allowed Ian Smith and some of his key lieutenants to remain in Parliament.
In many ways, the Lancaster House Agreement was a defeat for Mugabe, and probably explained why, despite his massive election victory, he was never comfortable with its outcome. It denied him the total control he craved from a military victory, whereby he could have dismantled the Rhodesian state on his terms and replaced it with a ZANU-Marxist model. Mugabe’s frustration would become more and more apparent as time passed. The dark cloud of unfinished business would hang over Zimbabwe for decades, with serious consequences.
At the time of the 1980 elections, the Rhodesian forces did in fact have a highly secret contingency plan to attack the guerrilla assembly points and wipe out the ZANU leadership, in effect a
coup d’état
. General Walls had approved the plan; it would be triggered if the Lancaster House Agreement broke down and Mugabe carried out his threat of ‘going back to the bush’.
Intimidation of voters was a big issue, and the British governor, Lord Soames, had the power to annul the elections if he deemed that intimidation was materially affecting the outcome. The Lancaster House Agreement came close to falling apart a few times. Then, at the 11th hour, after reports of serious intimidation in Mashonaland and Manicaland, Peter Walls asked British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to annul the election results because of intimidation. But the electoral process had gone too far, and the British government ignored his appeal. Walls was furious: ‘I totally lost it, effing and blinding and cursing the British government and their prime minister.’
Angry as he was, the general still held the fate of the new Zimbabwe firmly in his hands; he had the power to authorise a coup. He recalled:
I had to weigh up whether we would make a Dingo-style strike with a few men against many thousands and with the countryside swarming with these people, who, by the accounts of the provincial commissioners, were fully on Mugabe’s side. Also, I was tipped off that our plan had been leaked to Mugabe’s men. Before seeing my commanders to give them my decision, I went off to see Boris Thomas, my Presbyterian minister. I didn’t tell him any details, just that I had to make a hell of a decision. He said I would be guided and I walked back to my office. I don’t always believe in proverbs, but there is this tiny proverb: ‘Don’t ever light a fire that you can’t put out.’
When Walls was back in Milton Building in Salisbury, the anxious commanding officers of the RLI, SAS and Selous Scouts – Charlie Aust, Garth Barratt and Pat Armstrong, respectively – arrived to hear their commander’s decision.
‘I have decided,’ Walls told them, ‘that this will be lighting a fire which we can’t put out.
‘Charlie Aust, the RLI commanding officer, was shocked. He just wanted to get in there and kill the bastards, as did the others. Pat Armstrong was, I think, non-committal, and Garth Barratt looked as if he was expecting it, but I may be completely wrong. Anyway, Garth said, “So we do nothing?” I confirmed that we would do nothing.’
Having made this historic decision, Walls drove to the Pockets Hill television studios to make an announcement to the Rhodesian forces that their job was to preserve the peace. ‘It came as a hammer blow to all the guys waiting to go and attack the assembly points. So I can understand why I was seen as the mongrel of the century, the traitor of the century,’ said Walls.
Peter Walls made a brave decision, one that history has probably judged as the right one. Had the coup gone ahead, Rhodesia would probably have lost the very few friends it still had – and the fire would probably have eventually been unquenchable.
By appointing Walls as his supreme military commander, Mugabe shocked his own commanders and surprised the world. It didn’t last long, however. Four months later, in August 1980, Walls gave an interview to the BBC and told the truth – that he had indeed asked Margaret Thatcher to annul the elections, although he didn’t reveal the contingent coup plan. Walls was either naive or deliberately precipitating a problem. In any event, he resigned his commission, which gave ZANU-PF all the ammunition it needed. Mugabe had a special piece of legislation drafted, enabling the state to strip Peter Walls of his birthright, the citizenship of the country in which he was born. The stateless general and his wife, Eunice, took exile in South Africa. He never returned. Peter Walls died in 2010.
After Peter Walls’ resignation and deportation, Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru) became commander of the Zimbabwe National Army, a position he held until going into private business in 1995. He died in 2011 in a fire on Alamein Farm, a 5 000-hectare spread near Beatrice, 70 kilometres south of Harare. Nhongo had forcibly seized the farm and its moveable assets from a white commercial farmer, Guy Watson-Smith, 10 years earlier, at the height of the land invasions in Zimbabwe.
Norman Walsh stayed on in the Zimbabwe Air Force, rising to air marshal and commander in 1981; he played a vital role in developing the new air force. There was an unpleasant time when saboteurs, almost certainly operating from South Africa, blew up four brand-new British Hawk jets, five Hawker Hunters and a Lynx. Walsh’s chief of staff and colleague, Hugh Slatter, and five Zimbabwe Air Force officers were arrested and charged with sabotage, an offence carrying the death penalty. Walsh was deeply concerned and went to extraordinary lengths to support his officers.
Slatter recalled: ‘Norman`s position was precarious to say the least, because although he realised that the charges against us were false and he felt the need to support his officers as commander of the air force, he also recognised that the CIO, Ushewokunze, the Home Affairs minister, and others were watching for one move that would allow them to brand him as part of the sabotage plan and an enemy of the state.’
Walsh was not allowed access to the lawyers of his accused officers; he was under constant observation, with his phone tapped. He got round this by lying in the back of a car under a blanket. It was a huge risk, as he could have ended up in prison on the same serious charges. Slatter later said: ‘How many people do you know who would literally put their life on the line like that? I only know of one.’
The High Court found the men innocent of all charges, yet they were promptly arrested again, reflecting the paranoia gripping the Mugabe government. Under intense international pressure, the men were eventually released and deported. But the fact that they, and many other air force officers, were prime suspects just because they were white soured things permanently.
Norman Walsh resigned from the Zimbabwe Air Force that year and emigrated to Australia, where he lived until his death in 2010.
Brian Robinson left the SAS shortly after Dingo, achieving the distinction of being the squadron’s longest-serving commander. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and took over as coordinator of special operations at ComOps involving the SAS and Selous Scouts, a role Robinson carried out until the end of the war in 1980, when he became commander of 1 Zimbabwe Parachute Regiment.
Robinson left Rhodesia later in 1980 to become an international arms-sales broker. He returned to his roots in Durban in 1984 as managing director and shareholder of an automotive company. In 2004 he became a military adviser to the United Arab Emirates until he retired a year later and returned to Durban, where he lives.
Despite the pleas of Rex Nhongo and others for him to stay on, Peter Petter-Bowyer left the air force in May 1980, a month after Zimbabwe was born. He became managing director of three Shell BP subsidiary companies. The Iraqi Air Force heard of his skills and asked him to develop a cluster bomb for high-speed delivery from a fighter jet. PB accepted the challenge, resigned from Shell BP and moved to South Africa, where he successfully developed the CB-470 cluster bomb for the Iraqis. He also developed weapons for the South African Air Force before setting up a trading business and ultimately a manufacturing business of his own. He left Africa for England in 2002 and settled in Norfolk, where he lives with his wife, Beryl.