Gunship Over Angola

My final encounter with this unusual group of PLAN soldiers was a few days later when they ambushed a convoy of supply vehicles on Fernando’s Road between Oshigambo and Eenhana. The convoy protection detail consisted of some young national servicemen who’d been in the bush only a few days.

Again, our gunship formation just happened to be in the vicinity and we arrived overhead quite quickly, within ten minutes or so of the attack. We were confronted with utter carnage and indescribable terror on the part of the survivors. I recall that it took quite a while to calm a young man who was screaming hysterically into the handset of the ground-to-air radio, which was still attached to his friend, a 17-year-old boy who’d been fatally wounded in the opening salvo of the attack.

Although the panic-stricken infantrymen had attempted to drive out of the ambush when they realised what was happening, this frantic course of action unknowingly compromised their convoy’s defensive integrity, as all the vehicles were so comprehensively shot up by the well-organised attackers that they managed only to get a short distance down the road before breaking down, each quite a way from the next, halting any further escape.

Some months later I was in a pub at the Army Battle School in Lohatla when a young national service officer approached me, having somehow recognised me, and offered to buy me a drink. He told me that he’d been involved in the ambush, and that his abject terror had been born of the very real prospect that the enemy would overrun the almost defenceless disabled vehicles and slaughter all the survivors. The fortuitous arrival of our two gunships, however, scuppered the PLAN objectives, and the attackers had dispersed into the bush. The young officer told me that the ‘whop-whopping’ of the rotors and the noise of the engines as the two Alos arrived overhead was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. It was only then that his fear had started to abate.

He was 19 years old at the time.

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In April 1981, an operation was planned to hit a PLAN base just east of Xangongo (formerly Vila Roçadas), and I was one of the chopper pilots chosen to participate. The operation started unremarkably with two gunships flown by Paul Dore and Paul Downer (nicknamed ‘the two Pauls’) flying to Cuamato, a hamlet around 60 kilometres inside Angola.

When not occupied by invading SADF forces, Cuamato was usually the base for a small contingent of FAPLA troops. Once overhead, the two Pauls fired short bursts from their 20 mm cannons into the middle of the main street. This had become relatively standard practice (never a good thing in war) and had previously always led to the FAPLA soldiers stationed there immediately vacating the village and heading for safety some distance to the north.

When the FAPLA soldiers were clear of the area, Puma helicopters would bring in a large force of SADF men and equipment to set up the ops headquarters and the rest of the Alos would land there too. The force would then invariably be joined by the armoured contingent, who had driven off-road to Cuamato in their Ratels and Elands from inside Ovamboland.

Cuamato was a pretty place, with nice trees, a good supply of potable water and a number of buildings that were still usable. This was why the SADF regularly chose it as the forward staging post for short-duration raids on PLAN camps in southern Angola.

At roughly 14h00 on that first day, and about three kilometres north of Cuamato, a patrol of 20 or so SADF soldiers who had been tasked with reconnoitring the area to the north of the village walked unexpectedly into a well-defended FAPLA camp containing a few hundred soldiers. The FAPLA contingent opened fire on the patrol with anti-aircraft weapons and killed two of our infantrymen.

The two Pauls immediately got airborne to offer air support to the troops trapped on the ground. They were soon joined by two more gunships that had been sent to the scene. The two Pauls were operating below a sizeable cloud of smoke and exploding anti-aircraft projectiles but were seemingly unaware of the intensity of the FAPLA reaction to their presence.

At dusk, when the infantrymen who’d been trapped since the start of the contact were finally able to withdraw, the two Pauls and the other two gunships returned to overnight at Ombalantu, which was situated just inside South West Africa. There, they were joined by another four gunships and a .303-equipped Alo III trooper (able to carry a crew of two and a maximum of three passengers), which would carry the battle commander in the following day’s ops and would be flown by me. That night, in the Ombalantu pub, we heard how, as they neared Cuamato in the fading light of the late afternoon, it had looked like a scene from a war film.