Missing in Action (11 page)

However, the Ford was a design inspired as much by the materials available to the poorly funded Defence Forces as by Ireland’s need for an armoured fighting vehicle. ‘They had some Landsverks up in the Curragh. I think Ireland had bought about eight of them from the Swedes. The Landsverk was a big, heavy car with a Scania truck engine and was armed with a 20mm Madsen cannon. Few people knew that it was actually designed by the Germans, who were prevented from making such vehicles because of the Versailles Treaty. What was remarkable about it was that it had two steering columns – one in the front and one in the rear. If the car had to be reversed in a hurry, the radio operator was sitting facing backwards and he could take over the driving,’ Des Keegan explained. In the turret of the Landsverk, alongside the 20mm Madsen cannon, there was a .303 Madsen machine gun. There was another .303 machine gun in the front of the hull that could be fired by the relief driver.

Irish military chiefs had ordered the Landsverk to be copied using a Leyland truck engine. But the resultant cars were so big and awkward they were deemed totally unsuitable for operations in the Congo. Ireland had little else to offer in terms of armoured support. The Defence Forces did have a number of Second World War vintage Churchill tanks obtained from Britain, but while a fine tank and equipped with a 75mm gun, the Churchills were painfully slow and heavy on fuel. Ireland’s most modern tank – the Comet – had a 77mm gun and had been purchased from Britain following the Suez debacle. But, like the Churchill, it was totally unsuited to conditions in the Congo and so the Ford was designed as a more suitable replacement.

The Irish troops feared that their home-built Ford was hopelessly outclassed by the Katangan armour they were likely to face. The American-built Staghound – the Katangans’ main armoured weapon – had a 37mm gun and 8mm of frontal armour. That armour comprised specially hardened steel shaped to try and deflect bullets and shells. Supplementing its main armament were three 7.62mm machine guns – all of which made the Staghound an effective reconnaissance vehicle and a formidable opponent. The Ford, in contrast, shared more in common with an industrial van or tractor than a true weapon of war. It was notoriously top-heavy, with its steel shell built on top of an old truck chassis. The result was that the Ford had a high centre of gravity and its cross-country performance suffered as a direct result. To make matters worse the vehicle only had rear-wheel drive and was susceptible to getting stuck in the African mud once it left the surfaced roads.

Of even greater concern was the fact the Irish vehicle had been manufactured from plate steel salvaged from old industrial boilers. At one point it was even proposed that plate steel from a ship which had run aground on rocks off Donegal, might be used. But the designers – the Defence Forces and Thompson’s of Carlow – finally settled on heavy boilerplate from the Liffey Dockyard as they felt it would offer sufficient protection from small arms fire. Thompson’s undertook construction at their Carlow works to army specifications. The armoured structure was placed on top of a three-tonne Ford truck chassis. It was built with plates that were not hardened steel and therefore offered no anti-penetrative resistance to heavy rounds.

The problem was graphically underlined when Irish troops discovered that if you fired a Lee-Enfield .303 round directly at the Ford AFV from a distance of fifty to sixty yards, rather than being properly deflected, the bullet gouged a lump from the steel plate. Bullet impacts could also result in lumps of metal flaking off from inside the armoured car – with obvious risks for the crew. The question then arose, what would happen if the Ford was hit with something bigger than a standard infantry rifle round? Worst of all, what damage would a direct hit from the Staghound’s 37mm gun inflict?

Most of the armoured cars were equipped with turrets armed with the venerable Vickers machine gun, the design of which was already half a century old. The turrets themselves were circular and based on the design of the Lancia armoured car turrets left in Ireland by the British on their withdrawal in the 1920s. The turret could turn through 360 degrees – but it had to be moved with two large handles mounted to the left and right of the gunner. It was impossible to move the turret and maintain fire with the Vickers. Worse still, the turret was designed in such a way that anyone under six foot tall had to stand on a box just to be able to properly aim the machine gun.

A few armoured cars were left open-topped and were instead fitted with Browning machine guns. Part of the reason for this was to allow extra room so that infantry troops could be carried if required. The turreted Ford was cramped for five cavalry troops and it would have been absolutely impossible to carry infantry as well. The ejection of used rounds from the Browning was a relatively clean procedure and the Browning also boasted a higher rate of fire than the ageing Vickers. In the case of the Vickers in the turreted cars, there was no basket to catch the used shells on ejection. This resulted in the hot metal casings falling down onto the heads of the crewmen below. The Ford driver learned to wear a scarf or high collar to protect the back of his head and neck from the hot bullet casings cascading down on top of him. The casings also rattled around the floor of the armoured car, posing a further threat to the footing of anyone moving around the vehicle.

The Vickers had forged a formidable reputation for reliability and lethality in the First World War and was still as rugged, reliable and potent as ever. Properly maintained, the Vickers machine gun could maintain a devastating rate of fire for literally hours on end. But the Vickers was heavy, required cooling in the Congo heat and, because of its design, could not be turned upwards in the armoured car turret to engage aircraft. Its cooling system was a water-filled jacket – if that was punctured by shrapnel or incoming shells, the gun was rendered useless within a matter of minutes. In contrast, the Browning had no such cooling problems. Worse still, the Vickers was equipped with a condenser – meaning that, after long bursts of fire, the heated water in the cooling jacket would boil off into a special cup. Once cooled, it could be used to top up the cooling reservoir. But it was physically impossible to adapt such a system to an armoured car turret. So the Ford gunner had to try to fire in short, spaced bursts, otherwise he risked overheating and disabling the gun.

‘The Vickers was one of the finest machine guns ever built. Properly used, it was one of the best squad weapons you could have. But it was getting old and the water-cooled version wasn’t really suited for use in the armoured cars. The biggest advantage the gun had was that virtually every Irish soldier knew it inside-out. For instance, the lock on the Vickers comprised fifteen separate pieces making up a unit about the size of your hand and about a half-inch thick. We could assemble the lock blindfolded in a matter of seconds. That’s how well trained we were on the Vickers,’ Des Keegan explained.

The realisation that the Katangans had Staghound armoured cars and Magister jets came as a nasty surprise to the UN military commanders. The Irish troops knew that if their Ford armoured cars came into battle against the Katangans with their Staghounds, they would be entirely dependent on hand-held infantry weapons like the Carl Gustav 84mm recoilless rifle for primary defence. On its own, the Ford simply could not hope to face a Staghound with any success if the Katangan crew properly used their 37mm gun.

As reveille sounded at 2 a.m. on 13 September, Irish troops raced to their positions and launched Operation Morthor. The soldiers who prayed that Morthor would be a repeat of Operation Rampunch were about to be sorely disappointed. This time the Katangans were ready for the UN battalions, and, in some areas, were already spoiling for a fight.

Less than three weeks before, UN troops had secured key Katangan positions without having to fire a shot. Now all hell broke loose, particularly around the Radio Katanga building, where gendarmes, led by mercenaries, refused to surrender without a fight. Luckily for the Irish, that target had been assigned to the Indian battalion. The Irish units had secured their positions in other parts of Elisabethville by 4.30 a.m. and held their posts while listening warily to the sounds of heavy fighting around the Post Office and Radio Katanga buildings which echoed around the city.

One of these Irish-occupied positions was the Radio College (not to be confused with the Radio Katanga building). The Radio College was seized by a detachment of ‘C’ Company led by Lt Thomas ‘Tommy’ Ryan. The building had a powerful short-wave radio transmitter and the UN was determined that once Radio Katanga was off the air, the Radio College should not be available to Tshombe’s forces as an alternative rallying point. The building was located on Avenue Wangermee and was adjacent to a mission run by the White Fathers. Avenue Wangermee had numerous road intersections – one of which was Avenue Drogmans. A right-hand turn led back towards the new Irish base at Prince Leopold Farm on Rue Savonnier. But a left turn led to a T-junction on Boulevard Elisabeth – dangerously close to one of the Katangan gendarmes main barracks.

At Radio Katanga, the Indians moved steadily into position for an all-out assault. The mercenaries – realising they were outnumbered – ordered their black troops to hold their positions and then vanished into the warren of nearby houses. The Katangan gendarmes fought desperately until the Indians managed to fight their way into the building. In the fighting, an Indian sergeant was apparently killed by sniper fire. What happened next is still a matter of controversy. The Katangans claimed that every gendarme and security person left in the building was killed. A total of twenty-five gendarme bodies were eventually removed from the shell-pocked and bloodied Radio Katanga building and buried in a mass grave to the rear of the building. Katangans claimed the soldiers had been butchered and immediately accused the UN of a war crime. Initial reports indicated that the Katangan prisoners were herded into a small room and then hand-grenades were thrown in. The prisoners who survived the hand-grenades were then shot in the head by an Indian soldier delegated to the task. The Irish and Swedish soldiers attached as armoured support to the Indian battalion looked on horrified, but were utterly powerless to intervene. One Irish soldier formally complained to an Indian officer, but was quietly taken aside by one of the Swedes and reminded that the Europeans were outnumbered and, if they threatened to make a big deal about the executions at the scene, who knew how the Indian troops would react?

Following the horrific incident, one Irish soldier returned to base and became physically sick. Irish officers eventually heard rumours about what had happened at Radio Katanga and ordered statements to be taken. Yet, interestingly, there is no mention whatsoever of the incident in the official history of the 35th Battalion. In September 2005, one of the Irish eyewitnesses – who had been haunted for decades by the atrocity he had witnessed and been powerless to prevent – made a statement about precisely what he had seen.

‘I kept my mouth shut. We all did. But we could hardly talk at the time because of what we had seen. It was murder – pure murder. I couldn’t believe it. We were a peacekeeping force. But [after what happened] you would think we were a nation at war,
’
he said. The man suffered for years afterwards from nightmares about Radio Katanga. The nightmare was always the same – visibly terrified black soldiers, some of whom had their knees knocking in fear, being herded into a room before hand-grenades were thrown in after them.

More than anything else, the Radio Katanga incident transformed the entire mood in Elisabethville. Irish and Swedish UN troops became deeply wary of operating alongside their Indian colleagues. As word spread about the events in the Radio Katanga building throughout the city, the secessionists suddenly had a potent rallying cry. UN personnel found they were openly shunned by most of the European population in Elisabethville, while the African population in the city regarded the UN as occupiers rather than peacekeepers.

The Dogras didn’t do much to dispel the rumours of a massacre. One horrified Irish officer later watched as a Dogra soldier shot and killed an elderly black man as he crossed the street some 100 metres away from a building occupied by the UN. The man was unarmed and clearly a non-combatant, but was shot because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. News correspondents later described stomach-churning scenes of Katangan soldiers being repeatedly bayoneted.

In Leopoldville, there was a swift celebration of the strong-arm UN tactics. The Congolese government praised the UN military intervention and claimed: ‘The secession of Katanga is now over.’ Conor Cruise O’Brien himself went on radio in Katanga and confirmed that the secession was now finished. But it was merely the calm before the storm. The Katangan mercenaries had simply withdrawn to regroup – unwilling to tackle battalion-strength UN units head-on, they now decided on an alternative strategy to hit isolated UN posts and patrols. They would also use their superior equipment to deny the UN access to specific areas including the Lufira Bridge, which was a vital nexus on the UN supply line. Worse still, the UN had failed to detain Tshombe due to some confusion in orders over what troops were supposed to do at the presidential palace.

The first signs of trouble came with repeated sniper attacks on UN positions. The Irish had decided – with admirable foresight – to abandon their tactical base near Albert Park in Elisabethville because of its exposure to both mortar and rifle fire. The Irish commanders chose Prince Leopold Farm as their main operations base and even this came under sniper fire. But, unlike Albert Park, their new base offered clear zones for defensive fire should the Katangans decide to make a direct assault.