The RRAF’s final major acquisition was the Alouette III helicopter in 1962.
The French had built a new, highly versatile light-utility helicopter, the Alouette (lark). Conventional helicopters at the time used heavy piston engines, and they struggled to fly at high altitudes. The French designers chose a different type of engine, one that was not just lighter and smaller, but could also perform at high altitude. They used a jet engine.
The shaft gas turbine engine enabled the Alouette to achieve impressive altitude records with a heavy cargo. In 1961 the third marque, the Alouette III, capable of carrying seven people, entered production. This helicopter was exactly what the Rhodesian Air Force needed, and the first Alouettes were acquired in 1962. These deft little machines would form the backbone of Rhodesia’s counter-insurgency operations for years to come.
The Alouettes, Hunters, Canberras, Vampires and Dakotas were the main attacking force in the Rhodesian Bush War.
UDI dealt a blow to the jailed nationalist leaders and any hope of their early release. They knew that they would have to direct events from behind bars – which was not difficult, as there was always a friendly warden or sympathiser willing to act as a messenger. Astonishingly, the jailers were unaware of this. Sithole’s jailed executives were able to smuggle documents and letters out of the detention centres almost at will.
One of the most important documents to be smuggled out was the Sikombela Declaration, which authorised Herbert Chitepo, a lawyer who had fled to Lusaka in neighbouring Zambia, to organise the external wing of ZANU. Chitepo would head up what was to be known as the Dare reChimurenga (war council). Chitepo was given full accountability for conducting the war and running the affairs of ZANU from Zambia, at least while the executive remained in prison.
Chitepo and his fellow ZANU exiles organised the war; their new army was known as the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Although Chitepo had only a handful of trained guerrillas at his disposal in 1966, he was keen to start hostilities, particularly in response to UDI, but also to steal a march on ZANU’s other enemy, Joshua Nkomo, and his ZAPU army, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA).
Chitepo’s strategy was simple – to mount attacks inside Rhodesia to scare the white people and ignite a popular rebellion. In April 1966, Chitepo dispatched the first group of 21 ZANLA insurgents from Zambia to Rhodesia. Their objective was to sabotage major electric power lines, blow up the Beira–Salisbury oil pipeline and murder a few white farmers along the way.
The fully armed insurgents boarded a truck in Lusaka for the 90-minute drive to the outskirts of Chirundu, the border town linking Zambia and Rhodesia via a road bridge. After dark, the truck continued down a bumpy sand road to a point near the banks of the Zambezi. From here they were ferried across the crocodile- and hippopotamus-infested river to the Rhodesian side. They then split into three groups of seven men. These were the first insurgents to enter Rhodesia; they were about to start the Second Chimurenga (uprising), 70 years after the Mashona Uprising, or First Chimurenga, against Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company pioneers in 1896–97.
While Chitepo had been readying his insurgents to cross the Zambezi in early 1966, Flight Lieutenant Peter Petter-Bowyer was about to become the first locally trained RhAF helicopter pilot. Those before him had learnt to fly the French-made Alouette helicopter in France or South Africa. As No. 7 (Alouette) Squadron expanded, however, training pilots externally was proving costly with scarce foreign currency. PB, as he is known, an experienced and qualified fixed-wing flying instructor, joined No. 7 Squadron to establish whether local training were possible and, if so, to become a qualified helicopter instructor.
He soon graduated, which brought the dubious honour of serving an immediate seven-day stint as the squadron’s standby pilot at the New Sarum Airbase on the outskirts of Salisbury. Being duty pilot usually meant hanging around the crew room all day reading books and hoping for a flying task. It was peacetime, so a typical call-out duty might be to airlift a seriously injured road-accident victim to hospital or help round up escaped convicts. It didn’t get more exciting than that, but then, being stationed in the delightful city of Salisbury made up for the boredom.
It was a pleasant Wednesday afternoon in late April 1966. PB had no idea that his inaugural duty as standby pilot would be fateful; he was about to make history.
In times of peace, Wednesday was a half-day for most air force personnel. Around noon, the bulk of normal activity at the base ground to a halt as people dashed off to change into sports gear. Wednesday afternoon was time for sport – cricket in summer, rugby in winter, with tennis, golf, bowls, squash and other activities played all year round. This enjoyable sporting ritual naturally excluded those on essential duty. All PB could do was watch with envy.
But then things started looking up. The phone in the crew room jangled. ‘Petter-Bowyer, there has been a sabotage attempt on the power lines near Sinoia. Fly to the police station in the town immediately,’ said the duty officer.
A farming town 100 kilometres north-west of Salisbury, Sinoia is an anglicised version of Chinhoyi, the town’s name derived from the local chief who used to take refuge in the famous and beautiful Sinoia Caves whenever the fierce Ndebele from the south raided the area for cattle and women.
PB guessed that a gang of saboteurs had attempted to cut the main electricity lines supplying Salisbury from the hydroelectric generators deep in the bowels of the Kariba Dam wall, where the waters of the mighty Zambezi River are harnessed to produce clean power. PB and his flight technician, Ewett Sorrell, strode briskly to the Alouette helicopter standing on the apron, its three rotor blades drooping forlornly.
After checking the Alouette, PB strapped himself into the right-hand seat while Sorrell checked the start process from the outside. PB flicked the fuel booster switch to ‘on’ and lifted the red safety cover housing the engine selector switch – the starter button. As he flicked the starter, the characteristic high-pitched whine of the Turbomeca gas turbine engine broke the silence. The sound grew louder and more intense as the kerosene fuel ignited with a deep whoosh. The scream became shriller until the little turbine settled at its idling speed of 17 000 rpm.
PB advanced the fuel-control lever steadily, increasing the turbine speed until the centrifugal clutch started taking, transmitting power from the engine to the gearbox and driving the main rotors, which, in turn, drove the tail rotor. The three drooping rotor blades lazily started rotating clockwise, but quickly became a flat, blurred disc as the engine and rotors reached their operating speed. The wind-up was complete; the Alouette was ready to fly.
‘Cyclone 7, you are clear to lift off, cross runway zero six and route direct destination low level, call leaving the control zone.’ PB replied to Salisbury air-traffic control with a crisp ‘Roger, Cyclone 7 clear lift and cross’.
PB lifted the collective pitch lever, increasing the rotor pitch, and soon the Alouette eased effortlessly off the ground into a hover. After a few more checks, he edged the cyclic stick forward to achieve forward flight, pulling gently on the collective lever to establish a climb into the prevailing north-easterly breeze. Once at a safe height and speed, PB banked the helicopter left onto a westerly heading, passing near the civilian airport complex.
Soon they were flying over the southern suburbs and industrial areas of Salisbury, which gave way to the fairly flat but productive commercial farmland of the Mount Hampden area. To the right of track stood Mount Hampden – a koppie that had been the intended location of Fort Salisbury when pioneers first arrived in 1890. They found a better supply of water near another koppie, however, 20 kilometres south-east of Mount Hampden.
The Alouette continued across farmland rimmed to the west by the Great Dyke, a band of narrow ridges and hills running north–south for about 500 kilometres through Rhodesia. Visible from space, this feature was formed 2.5 billion years ago when molten rock forced its way through the original surface strata, later eroding and leaving behind this unique, dyke-like structure rich in minerals, including chromate, nickel, cobalt, gold, silver and platinum. PB started a gentle climb to crest the top of the Dyke, and descended on the other side.
‘That’s Trelawney on the nose; we are spot on track with 13 minutes to run,’ PB said to Sorrell over the intercom. At their two o’clock position, the imposing grain silos of Banket stood out – 20 massive concrete storage bins in a long row. It was late April, and harvesting was in full swing. The bins were being filled, a process that would continue until June.
Banket is a town at the centre of the Lomagundi area, one of the most fertile farming regions in the world. Enormous quantities of maize, cotton, tobacco and beef were produced there. Much of the produce from Lomagundi, and Rhodesia’s other farming areas, was for export, earning the bulk of the nation’s foreign currency.
Although he didn’t know it at the time, PB was flying to Sinoia to engage ZANLA insurgents bent on destroying the commercial farming sector in this land of plenty. They would eventually succeed, but it would take them about 40 years to smash the breadbasket and precipitate one of the fastest economic declines in world history.
Sinoia loomed large as the Alouette crossed the Hunyani River to the south of the town to set up an approach into the Lomagundi Police HQ. After landing in the police station car park, PB began reversing the helicopter starting process, winding the machine down. After the urgent scramble from Salisbury, the apparent lack of urgency in Sinoia seemed a bit odd.
The officer in charge of Lomagundi District, Police Superintendent John Cannon, met the crew and invited them to join him and his wife for a leisurely lunch. After a pleasant meal, Cannon, a former Lancaster Bomber pilot during World War II and holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross, got down to business and briefed the helicopter crew about the situation.
An armed group of ZANLA insurgents had botched an attempt to blow up a main-line electricity pylon near Sinoia. Cannon explained that field intelligence revealed that 21 ZANLA insurgents had crossed the Zambezi from Zambia near the border town of Chirundu and split into three groups of seven. Cannon was most anxious to apprehend the group that had tried to blow up the power pylons. He called this group the Armageddon Gang. Cannon was candid with the helicopter crew. ‘I have no idea where to start looking,’ he said. ‘But it seems a good place to start would be at the site of the sabotage attempt.’
They flew there in the Alouette. The inspection revealed the saboteurs had a poor understanding of explosives and demolition techniques; the damage was only superficial. Other than the evidence at the base of the pylon, there were no obvious signs pointing to where the saboteurs had gone. Cannon assumed they would not be far, so he asked PB to deploy sticks of his regular and reserve police force by helicopter so that they could sweep the area and flush out the gang.
With Sorrell left on the ground to make room for the rather large police reservists, mostly farmers, PB’s first human deployment nearly ended ignominiously. Although he had been well trained to fly the Alouette safely and accurately, little of PB’s training time had been devoted to landing at maximum weight in a tight landing zone (LZ).
Landing a lightly laden helicopter is a fairly straightforward process. The pilot slows the machine down, aiming for an upwind landing spot. As the machine gets closer to the spot and the ground, the pilot slows both the forward and downward speeds until both are effectively zero, ideally entering a stable hover a few feet above the spot on the ground. When the machine is heavily loaded, however, a lot more power is required to arrest the descent and hold the hover. If a heavy machine is allowed to descend too fast, the power available is insufficient to stop the descent, and it will bang to the ground – a bad outcome euphemistically known as ‘settling with power’. Once committed to a landing, or, in other words, past the point of no return, all the pilot can do to cushion the impact is pull the last trace of power from the rotors. But there’s one problem: the gearbox can only take so much strain, or torque, after which it will start shearing itself to bits.
PB was committed to the landing. All he could do was pull collective power past the torque limit of 1.0 and brace himself for the inevitable hard landing. The Alouette landed heavily, its tough undercarriage flexing to absorb much of the shock. The machine seemed to have survived intact, though. That ‘arrival’ – in air force speak, anything other than a gentle touchdown is denied the dignity of the word ‘landing’ – taught PB a poignant lesson. From that day forward, all new helicopter pilots would, as a matter of routine, learn to operate at the extremes of the helicopter’s performance envelope.
The police swept through the bush but found nothing, not even a trace of the insurgents. With ideas running out, PB and Sorrell flew off to try to spot the gang from the air. They flew low and slow, searching various likely hiding places – a very dangerous way to look for the enemy, as it presented the unarmed helicopter as a big, fat sitting duck. But the air force men knew no better; there was no precedent. Luckily for them, but frustratingly, there seemed to be no trace of the Armageddon Gang. The mood back at the police complex was sombre. The question on everyone’s mind was, how are we going to find these bastards? Then the phone rang.
The call was from the Police Special Branch (SB), a unit of dedicated detectives, who would be integral to the Bush War. The SB had an undercover agent working within ZANU, and this man happened to be the Armageddon Gang’s main contact in Rhodesia. Even better news was that he was due to meet with the gang the next morning just outside Sinoia. This intelligence simplified things for Cannon. Once the undercover agent had ended his meeting with the insurgents, Cannon’s force of regular and reserve policemen would pounce and engage the enemy in a classic police cordon-and-search operation.