Missing in Action

by Ralph Riegel

  ‘The priest assured me that what he had said was true and that I was outnumbered. The captain then asked that the two of us meet on Avenue Wangermee without arms to talk. I agreed to this and stated that I was leaving Lt Paul in the college as a hostage. I met the captain and the priest on the avenue and he repeated the fact that I was completely surrounded. He then told me how many men I had and what weapons I had. He also said that I had no communication with my unit,’ Lt Ryan explained.

  ‘This information I strongly suspected had been given to him by the priest who had visited the college the previous night with M. Tomberlaine to make a [radio] broadcast. He then told me he had men in every house around the college and that the priest’s residence across the road was also occupied. He said he had an armoured car at one [corner] and an anti-tank weapon on a jeep on another. At a signal from him, a jeep appeared with a weapon mounted on it – an armoured car appeared at Avenue Ruwe and at every door and window of every villa black and white soldiers, not in uniform, appeared. I also noticed from ten to fifteen whites in civilian clothing on Avenue Wangermee, who at first I thought were civilians but who were now taking a more than curious interest in the proceedings,’ he wrote.

  ‘The captain then gave me five minutes to decide between surrender and being blasted out of it. I left him and then returned to the college and I released Lt Paul and the other civilian. I went around to my men and explained the situation. They all said they would be guided by my decision. In view of the lack of communication and the fact that I only had one Bren gun I decided we could not hold the position against the odds without my men being slaughtered and I decided to surrender. On notifying the captain of this, he asked us to leave all our weapons in the building and to come out on the road. We were then surrounded by forty to fifty paratroopers and gendarmes who threatened us and pushed us around and manhandled us. The intervention of a priest, the two white officers [Captain Denard and Lt Paul] and a journalist saved us,’ Lt Ryan reported.

  The Irish officer and his men were immediately placed under armed guard and transported away from the Radio College. Back on Avenue Wangermee, the French mercenary now laid his plans to deal with the expected UN relief force and its armour. Cmdt Cahalane and his men then stumbled right into the trap.

  Inside the Radio College building, the soldiers who had taken shelter there and were manning the defensive perimeter wondered what the hell was going to happen next? If the Katangans brought up their Staghounds and started to shell the building around them, the patrol would be finished. The Radio College was too big, too open and had too many windows to properly defend against an all-out assault by a superior enemy force. If the Katangans used the Staghounds and their 37mm guns to shell the building, it would most likely collapse around their heads.

  For several hours, Cmdt Cahalane and his men held their defensive positions in the various buildings they had taken shelter in and simply waited. It was now a race between UN reinforcements reaching them and the Katangans deciding to mount an all-out assault along their entire perimeter.

  Then, without warning, came the distinctive sound of a Ford engine firing up. Cpl Sullivan – who was trapped in the building with the patrol – later recalled that nothing could be confused with the smooth, throaty roar of the Ford engine firing into life. ‘I knew it was the Ford all right – you couldn’t mistake it for anything else. At the time we thought it was probably the Katangans taking away one of our armoured cars. But it was so dark we could hardly see our hands in front of our faces. We couldn’t see the armoured cars even though they were parked out on the road in front of us,’ he said. The soldier later estimated the time at around 2 a.m. After a few minutes, the sound of the rumbling Ford engine faded into the distance.

  Inside the building, the patrol was now getting desperate. They had no radio contact with Battalion HQ, their commander was badly concussed, their senior sergeant was barely conscious from severe loss of blood from his leg wound and they had little or no water. The Irish soldiers had no idea what was happening in the rest of Elisabethville and no inkling of whether Captain Whyte and Sgt Dignam had made it through Katangan lines to reach battalion and request reinforcements.

  ‘In the morning we were completely surrounded and [the Katangans] called on us to surrender. We were approached by two white men, a priest and a nurse, and they told us that if we did not surrender they [the gendarmes] were going to blow up Soerte’s house with Cmdt Cahalane inside. The nurse attended me and I was taken in the back of a car, covered over, to the Gendarme Hospital,’ Sgt Carey explained.

  The White Father missionary, Fr Paul Verfaille, and the medical sister initially thought the badly wounded Irish sergeant would die – but they bravely decided to try and help him. The missionary didn’t tell the Irish platoon of his fears that if the wounded man was found inside the building after the surrender, he might he shot by the gendarmes because of the difficulty in moving and treating him. The courageous cleric decided it was his Christian duty to get the sergeant out of the building before that could happen.

  As they helped Sgt Carey away, the remaining Irish troops debated what to do next. Dawn was likely to bring a full assault by the Katangan gendarmes and their heavy weaponry meant there was a distinct possibility they would blow up the building where the Irish were sheltering. The Irish troops’ only heavy weapon was the Carl Gustav 84mm and there were only a few rounds for it. The patrol had a few hand grenades but was otherwise totally dependent on Carl Gustav 9mm sub-machine guns and FN assault rifles. The patrol had very little water and only emergency rations, so a lengthy siege was out of the question. Surrender – however unpalatable – suddenly seemed the only option available.

  Cmdt Cahalane was still badly dazed from the concussion of the Energa warhead. He was also almost totally deaf from the explosion. But with Captain Whyte and Sgt Dignam gone to get help, and Sgt Carey en route to hospital with a jagged hole in his thigh, should Cmdt Cahalane be unable to continue in command, his deputy would now be a mere corporal.

  The patrol re-checked their defensive perimeter and carefully weighed up their options. The Landrover and bus had been repeatedly hit by Katangan fire and were now hors de combat. The bus had caught fire and was burning with increasing ferocity. The flames from the blazing bus cast dancing shadows along the roadway and the Irish soldiers peered into the darkness in the hope that the fire might illuminate the Katangan positions. A short time after the bus caught fire, there was a sudden ‘whoosh’ as the fuel tank exploded and a jet of flame soared ten metres into the sky.

  The lead armoured car had taken the anti-tank hit and, everyone presumed, had been wrecked. But someone – somehow – had got it started and it had rumbled away from the ambush site. The rear armoured car was still there by the roadside, but to reach it the Irish troops would have to cross an area of open lawn in full view of the Katangan machine gun positions. And even if they reached it, there was no guarantee it would start.

  For Sgt Carey, the intervention of the priest and nurse initially seemed to cast him from the frying pan and into the fire. The journey with the priest from the Radio College to the hospital had been conducted in a haze of pain. By now, the entire leg of Sgt Carey’s uniform pants was soaked red with blood. The little group eventually made it to the Gendarme Hospital and Carey was carried in and immediately treated by a female Belgian doctor. The doctor gently treated the Irish sergeant but was visibly furious at the consequences of the fighting going on around Elisabethville. However, Katangan soldiers, when they realised a wounded UN trooper had arrived in the building, reacted with outrage sparked by memories of what the Indian troops had done to their comrades in the Radio Katanga building.

  ‘While I was in the operating theatre there, I was assaulted and punched by some [Katangans]. One guy came into the room as I was lying on a bed and came towards me with a knife. I looked up, saw him coming towards me and I thought my end had come. The doctor shouted “no” and the guy was hustled into a corner by a few of the
nurses. I was immediately rushed from there into the back of a jeep lying down and brought to the White Father’s Mission. There I was put into a laundry room – they then provided me with a blue suit, a shirt, socks but no shoes. A few hours later a little man came in to give me some coffee, an apple and a slice of apple cake. He never spoke a word and then left. They took any possessions I had and the following day they took me by ambulance to Sabina Villas on the Elisabethville Airport Road, which was occupied by Indian troops. They put me on the road, roughly 500 yards [away] and I had to make my way, as good as possible, to the barrier. The ambulance crew told me they could not drive me any closer as the Indians used to fire on civilian ambulances. I had to crawl and drag myself on one leg the last 500 yards to the UN checkpoint and no one came out to help me. Thank God when I got there, there was an Irish UN officer attached to the Indians from a signal company,’ Sgt Carey said.

  ‘After this I was attended by an Irish doctor, Cmdt O’Shea, and I had a letter in my pocket from the Congolese hospital to give to him. I think it was in connection with morphine. From Sabina Villas I was taken to Elisabethville Airport. While there, with others on stretchers in the lobby, a Katangese jet strafed the airport. It set fire to three aircraft and all the glass was blown into the lobby. Some more were again injured and I was [later] flown to Leopoldville to the UN Hospital. As I was in civilian clothes they put a guard on me thinking I was a mercenary. It took a further twenty-four hours to get the problem solved.’

  Sgt Carey had survived a wound that might easily have killed him. The bullet had torn a hole in his upper thigh – and had slightly nicked his femoral artery. Had the tear in the artery been just a fraction bigger, the Irish sergeant would have bled to death in a matter of minutes. Even more incredibly, Sgt Carey had defied his wound to heroically help drag his commanding officer to safety – a feat impossible for a lesser man. ‘They eventually flew me out of Elisabethville to Leopoldville on a DC-3 for medical treatment. I discovered that it was a chartered flight and, when the co-pilot came back to check on us during an electrical storm on the way there, I realised he was from Ennis in County Clare. The next thing I knew he brought me back a drop of Canadian Club whiskey to help deaden the pain in my leg,’ Tim Carey recalled.

  Remarkably, a few months after he returned to Ireland, Sgt Carey was astounded when a carefully wrapped parcel arrived at his Fermoy home. The postmark on the parcel indicated it had come from Belgium. When he opened the package, the west Cork soldier was astonished to discover all the personal belongings that had been taken from him in the White Friar’s Mission. Included was a note from Fr Verfaille who explained that he had travelled to Belgium and now wanted to return Sgt Carey’s possessions. He wished the Irish soldier a full recovery. His note sparked a close correspondence between the two men for many years.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it to be honest. I never thought I would ever get my stuff back. They were very good to me in the mission and, if it wasn’t for that White Father and the Belgian doctor, I don’t think I would have made it out alive from Elisabethville. In fact, I kept the blue suit they put me in to smuggle me to the Indian checkpoint for years afterwards,’ Tim Carey recalled.

  Back at the Radio College, the Irish patrol knew they were running out of time. Sentries had reported that the Katangans – again under mercenary supervision – had established several new firing points for their machine guns, which controlled all the main exits from the Soerte’s villa, where the Irish forces were now gathered. The Irish soldiers could stage a break-out and run for it – but it was almost certain such an effort would result in heavy casualties. Even if a few soldiers made it to the second armoured car and reached the Browning machine gun, they would then have to re-cross the same lawn to reach Irish positions. A break-out into the surrounding neighbourhood was equally unattractive. Being on foot and unfamiliar with the terrain, they would likely be hunted down by the Katangans before they could even make it halfway back to Battalion HQ.

  The last surrender demand had been almost surreal. Cmdt Cahalane could barely hear such was the damage to his eardrums from the anti-tank round impact and explosion. The Katangan demand had been levelled by a Belgian-born officer, Major Paul Janssens, who had now taken control of the Radio College scene on behalf of Tshombe’s forces. Wearing thick black sunglasses, Major Janssens realised the injured condition of the Irish officer and was forced to bellow his surrender demands at the top of his voice despite the fact he had been allowed approach to within a few metres of Cmdt Cahalane. The Irish were left in no doubt that they faced an imminent all-out assault because the native Katangan troops were convinced the UN would try to send a rescue column to the Radio College.

  Reluctantly, Cmdt Cahalane and his men realised they had little option but to surrender. An all-out assault by the Katangans on the Radio College could result in a massacre – and Major Janssens had promised that the UN troops would be treated properly and in accordance with the Geneva Convention if they laid down their weapons and surrendered on terms. The patrol, which had been sent out to discover the status of Lt Ryan and his detachment, was now about to share their fate.

  Back at Prince Leopold Farm, concern was rapidly turning to alarm within Irish Battalion HQ. It had been confirmed that the Irish detachment at Jadotville was now under heavy and sustained assault. Without immediate reinforcements and resupply it was not clear how long they could hold out. In Elisabethville itself, there was no trace of Lt Ryan and his detachment at the Radio College. Worse still, the heavily armed patrol sent to check on Lt Ryan’s status had also failed to return and was no longer responding to radio checks on their location.

  The sniping attacks on the Irish base had suddenly increased in intensity – and virtually every man available to the battalion was now thrown into front-line duties. John O’Mahony prised open his cast in a desperate bid to be allowed to operate a machine gun while on guard duty. The Irish HQ at Prince Leopold Farm now echoed to the sounds of explosions and small arms fire from all over the Katangan capital. Then, just before darkness fell, came the sound all UN soldiers dreaded – the distinctive whine of the turbojet engines of a Katangan Magister jet. If the UN helicopters took to the air, they now ran the very real risk of being destroyed.

  Elizabethville airport circa jul/aug 61 (photo J. O’Mahony)

  Tpr P McCarton, Cpl T O’Connor, Tpr J. Byrne Elitabethville circa Jul 61 (photo B. Maher)

  Cpl Ml Nolan circa aug 61 Elizabethville (photo J. O’Mahony)

  Armoured Car close up smeared with mud to make car less visable (photo J O’Mahony)

  The charred remains of a UN bus after the ambush launched against Pat Mullins and the Irish patrol by mercenary-led Katangan forces. (Photo: Art Magennis)

  8 – A Brave Trooper’s Fight to the Finish

  Pat Mullins desperately wiped the sweat from his eyes and muttered a swift prayer before he hit the ‘start’ button on the armoured car’s metal dash panel. ‘Please start, please Lord let it start,’ he said. The V8 engine noisily turned over but agonisingly failed to catch. The Irish mechanics had exchanged the traditional ignition key for a simple push-button starter when the Ford was shipped to the Congo – but troopers were leery of the new-fangled start button. The interior of the armoured car still stank of sweat and smoke but Pat was oblivious to it all. He held his breath, struggled to clear the ringing sound in his ears and waited for the expected anti-tank missile to strike. But none came.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph – please let it start,’ he said as he desperately pushed the button a second time, this time with greater urgency. The Ford engine again noisily turned over, coughed and, a split second later, roared into life. Its distinctive rumble was like music to the young soldier’s battered ears. ‘You beauty,’ Pat sighed as he looked out the driver’s armoured slit and prepared to ease the lumbering car forward. He had secured the armoured slit open with its winged bolting nut because visibility was now more important than protection. The Ford AFV may have been battere
d and splintered but it was still resilient enough to move.

  Pat knew he had to move fast. One more hit from an anti-tank round would rip the Ford apart so he had to clear the area around the Radio College fast. ‘Don’t give them an easy target’, he recalled from the Fitzgerald Camp course he had started, but not completed, with John O’Mahony. He was fully qualified to ride the BSA and Triumph motorbikes used by dispatch riders but, despite being able to handle the Ford AFV, he still wasn’t officially ranked as ‘a driver’ and instead – like John O’Mahony – was referred to as ‘a gunner-driver’. But Pat reckoned he could still drive the Ford as well as anyone in uniform.

  He tried to concentrate on the road ahead. The Vickers gun behind him was now angled towards the stars. If trouble erupted, he couldn’t drive the Ford and man the Vickers at the same time. Before swinging himself into the driver’s seat, Pat had tried to swivel the turret wielding the machine gun. But despite straining with all his strength on the two manual turning handles, the turret stubbornly refused to budge. Pat did not know it, but the sheer force of the anti-tank warhead explosion had literally fused the turret to its turning ring and wrecked the three turning ball bearings. With the ball turret weighing almost one tonne, it was impossible for it now to be moved by hand. The brake handle for the turret – essential for bracing it when the gunner was firing the Vickers – was now rendered equally redundant.

  His friend, Mick Nolan, lay silent on the floor behind him and Pat knew he had to reach a hospital fast. He knew Mick was badly hurt and that every minute mattered. The Italian hospital in Elisabethville was reportedly the best in Katanga and it treated all the UN wounded. Best of all, there were Irish troops stationed near it, so if he could only make it there, he and Mick would have a chance.