Missing in Action

by Ralph Riegel

  The charade finally concluded about two hours later and the Irish officer, somewhat to his surprise, was later privately congratulated by one of the French mercenaries for his doggedness and his courage despite the intimidating surroundings. ‘I congratulate you, captain, on your performance,’ the Frenchman smiled as Cahalane was led back to his quarters. Captain Magennis’ intervention had, in the meantime, ensured that no harm would come to the Irish prisoners and, a few days later, the Irish contingent were moved to another farmhouse closer to Elisabethville.

  However, the Armoured Car Group commander remained a special prisoner and, unlike the other Irish prisoners, had his own security detail including a mercenary and six gendarmes. Eventually, the entire group were moved north to where Cmdt Quinlan and the soldiers captured at Jadotville were being held pending ceasefire talks to secure a release of prisoners on all sides.

  10 – The Search for the Bodies

  A ceasefire was finally announced on 21 September, a week after the Radio College ambush and the assault on Jadotville. It suited both sides: the UN desperately needed to defuse the situation and negotiate the return of its captured peacekeepers, while Tshombe needed his regime to appear reasonable and killing more UN peacekeepers was not going to help him gain international recognition for his regime.

  Captain Art Magennis breathed a sigh of relief when the ceasefire was announced and he was finally given permission to return to the 35th Battalion from his assignment with the Indian Dogra Battalion. He had already heard about the missing Irish patrol and knew that swift action was now vital if the missing personnel were to be tracked down. He immediately reported to the operations room at the Irish Battalion HQ for a debriefing.

  It proved to be a crucial meeting because of Captain Magennis’ experiences over the last couple of days. Most informative had been his meeting with the mercenary – a man he later discovered was Bob Denard. Over the next thirty years, ‘Colonel’ Denard carved out a reputation for himself as one of Africa’s top mercenaries and was involved in military operations from Angola to Zimbabwe and from Gabon to the Comoros Islands. In 1961, Congo was Denard’s third major conflict after his involvement in Algeria and Indo-China.

  The Frenchman had been unfailingly polite and courteous to the Irish captain – and indicated he derived no pleasure from fighting UN soldiers, let alone Irish troopers. But Captain Magennis realised that this was not a man to be underestimated – the Frenchman was an experienced soldier and was clearly only in Katanga for the money. Denard had been in charge of the Katangese gendarme units at the Radio College and had apparently mounted the ambush there. The fact that the ambush had been so expertly set and so carefully concealed from the arriving Irish patrol indicated the involvement of an experienced soldier who knew the techniques of mounting an ambush. Details of what Denard had to say would prove crucial in later helping piece together precisely what happened on Avenue Wangermee.

  Yet, in a baffling turn of events, a second Irish patrol, sent out to check on the status of the patrol led by Cmdt Cahalane after Captain Whyte and Sgt Dignam had raised the alarm, had reported back to base that there was absolutely nothing to been seen on the original patrol’s route. They had found no trace whatsoever of the two armoured cars, no sign of any major fighting and no trace of Cmdt Cahalane and his men. It was nothing short of astonishing. The only explanation Captain Magennis could offer was that the second patrol had not been able to retrace the correct route and had simply not found Avenue Wangermee. Somehow, they had taken the wrong route. The captain was determined that the 35th needed to act now to try to find out exactly what had happened at the ambush scene and to confirm the fate of the two Irish soldiers Denard had mentioned. He obtained permission to lead a patrol out the next morning.

  ‘I went back to the tent that was doubling up as an office and I called in Squadron Sgt Dan Carroll. I told Dan I wanted to go down and look at this ambush site immediately. I told him to get a few jeeps and we would take a team down there. I distinctly remember telling him that we would all go well armed. Quick as a flash, Dan was back and everything was ready. He was a great guy, Dan, and the kind of NCO you always wanted on your team. An absolutely magnificent soldier who knew his job and what the circumstances required,’ Art said.

  ‘After breakfast we set out in two cars. I led with Squadron Sgt Carroll, followed by Technical Officer Frank Lawless and two of his fitters in the second vehicle. We carefully followed the route of the Cahalane patrol, through ‘C’ Company’s position in the Tunnel, we turned right at Saio heading north and on towards the Radio College on Avenue du Wangermee [sic].’

  ‘As we approached the college and were still about 100 yards south of it, we saw the first of the missing patrol’s vehicles. It was the turretless armoured car with its machine gun aligned towards us at maximum elevation. It was by the side of the road and what immediately struck me as very strange was that the Browning gun was aligned to the rear. An attempt had been made to burn it, but it had managed to survive with its wheels and tyres intact. It was driveable and all that had happened was that some of the paint had been scorched off the side of it. We collected the Browning machine gun and moved on. I asked Frank to check the barrel of the gun and he turned to me and said: “This gun wasn’t fired.” It was yet another baffling detail in a confusing situation,’ he added.

  As the team took up position outside the Radio College, they quickly realised that Cmdt Cahalane had been ambushed and that the patrol had found itself involved in a firefight. ‘A little further ahead was a burned out Landrover and, still further ahead, was the chassis of a bus. It had been completely burned out and all that was left was the skeleton of the chassis. But there was no sign at all of the lead armoured car, which had apparently been the one hit by the anti-tank shell and immobilised. There were some spent cartridge cases from both 7.62mm and 9mm weapons, which had clearly been fired. But where could the lead car be? And what had become of the bodies of the two soldiers reported dead?’ Art asked himself.

  The Irish team – warily keeping their weapons close to hand – began a minute inspection of the scene in a bid to piece together precisely what had happened on 14/15 September. By the side of one of the buildings, Sgt Carroll spotted what he believed to be blood. All around the building was broken glass, fragments of masonry and obvious evidence of gunfire. ‘There were ammunition shells all around us but not as many as you might have thought. Not so many to indicate a prolonged firefight.’

  Captain Magennis – in his previous conversation with Denard – knew that an anti-tank round had been used and that two Irish soldiers had allegedly been killed, though at what point in time in the ambush was unclear. The scene spread in front of the Irish team made no sense.

  ‘Why would the Frenchman go to all the trouble of taking away a disabled armoured car and two dead bodies and yet leave a perfectly intact armoured car behind? Frank and I were chewing this over when Dan Carroll said, almost to himself: “Maybe the two boys weren’t dead – maybe one or both of them was just knocked unconscious?” It was the first time anyone had considered that possibility but, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made,’ Art said.

  Studying the scene, Captain Magennis could only surmise that maybe his sergeant was right. ‘But if so, where are they? And where is the armoured car? I knew we had best get back to camp and report everything that we had seen. So having taken photographs of the scene and checking to ensure we had all the recoverable weapons, we returned to base leaving the recovery of the vehicles to the afternoon. The operations section was as puzzled as we were about the failure of the second patrol to see the destroyed vehicles and we left it with them to make further inquiries … I remember thinking, after having come back from the ambush scene, how in the name of God could a patrol have followed the route of Cmdt Cahalane’s patrol and come back to report that nothing had been seen? I still cannot understand that to this day. The only explanation I can offer is that they took the wrong route and mistook their
directions,’ he said.

  Later in the afternoon, the damaged armoured car and incine-rated jeep and bus were brought back to the base. But there was still no trace of the missing second armoured car. The Irish battalion now had to rely on local intelligence-gathering sources because, if the armoured car had been taken out into the bush, they simply didn’t have the manpower or resources to mount such a search operation. With no air cover, they also could not fly reconnaissance missions in the hope of tracking the missing Ford AFV.

  As luck would have it the 35th Battalion’s intelligence section received an anonymous tip-off – believed to be from an Elisabeth-ville-based European worker – that a UN armoured car had been spotted abandoned along Avenue Drogmans/Boulevard Elisabeth, a route which led directly into the African section of Elisabethville. The road ran alongside the Parc Zoologique and effectively parallel to the Lubumbashi River. A patrol was immediately ordered and Captain Magennis, with Technical Officer Lawless, again set off to take personal charge.

  ‘In the end, we had no difficulty in locating the car. It was at an angle across the road and its entire front end was lodged in a roadside trench. These drainage trenches were about three feet deep and were on both sides of Boulevard Elisabeth to carry off surface water during the rainy season. An examination of the scene indicated that an attempt had been made to do a U-turn with the armoured car and the driver had apparently misjudged the distance to the trench.

  ‘The trench on one side of the front wheels was absolutely littered with spent 9mm cases which suggested to me that there had been a prolonged period of combat. The angle of the car ruled out any possibility of using the turret machine gun. When we checked the inside of the car, all the equipment had been taken. It was totally stripped down to its bare component parts. It was the same on the outside – everything that could be taken had been taken. There was nothing that could be associated with either of the missing soldiers except possibly a set of keys found close to the car.’

  The discovery of so many 9mm shell casings in the drainage ditch was a crucial clue to what might have happened. The Carl Gustav sub-machine gun, which armed the cavalry troopers – including Tpr Mullins the night he went on the fateful patrol – used a 9mm Parabellum shell. The Swedish weapon was capable of emptying its entire thirty-six round magazine in a matter of seconds. But while lethal at close range, it had limited use for aimed fire over distances. The Carl Gustav was not a weapon to challenge an FN, Kalashnikov or even the French MAS-49 assault rifle in a shooting fight over distance.

  Captain Magennis did not realise it at the time, but the recovered keys belonged to Tpr Mullins. John O’Mahony felt his heart sink when he was shown the keys later that evening and was asked to identify them. Pat Mullins always carried his keys in the pocket of his uniform tunic. John was certain his friend had the keys on him when he went on patrol to the Radio College that fateful night.

  ‘We photographed the car in situ; we finally managed to get it out onto the road and then combed the area thoroughly. But nothing else was found. On the level ground we found that the turret had jammed and the [Vickers] gun looked as if it had not been fired. The gun’s water jacket had been perforated with small arms fire. It was clear that, even if the gun had been fired, it would have over-heated and seized up within minutes. But the big question remained – how did the car get there? The more we discussed it the more likely it seemed to me that Dan Carroll’s solution seemed the likely one. One or both of the missing men may not have died when the car was hit.

  ‘I think the evidence clearly suggests that while one of those boys may have been injured or even dead [at the Radio College], the other one was alive and had driven the armoured car. He had then protected his comrade [at the drainage ditch] and he kept firing until he was killed. Everything we discovered pointed to a second battle away from the Radio College,’ Art explained.

  But that still didn’t answer the question as to where the bodies of the two missing Irish troopers were. ‘If they had survived the ambush and had driven the car to this location and had subsequently been killed in a firefight – as evidenced by all the spent 9mm cases – where were the bodies now?’ Reluctantly, Captain Magennis and his team realised there was nothing more they could do at the scene. They carefully hitched a tow onto the recovered armoured car and slowly escorted it back to the Irish base for more detailed analysis and repairs.

  The captain and Lawless were immediately ushered into the operations section for a briefing on their findings. Such was the concern over the incident that the Battalion Commander, Lt Col McNamee, joined the briefing. Having sifted through all the evidence, the group reached a single unavoidable conclusion – one of the troopers must have survived the missile hit on the armoured car and desperately tried to save his injured comrade.

  ‘There was general agreement that the Katangan gendarmerie were most unlikely to have been responsible for moving the Ford AFV away from the Radio College. It just made no sense. Why would a gendarme – or even a mercenary for that matter – drive away in an Irish armoured car only to have a change of heart near their base and attempt to do a U-turn at speed? And if a gendarme or mercenary was driving the car, then what is the explanation for all the 9mm casings found beside the armoured car and the multiple small arms fire hits on the car and its Vickers machine gun? The gendarmes were hardly likely to be shooting at each other.’

  The battalion’s intelligence section promised to make immediate inquiries amongst local sources about the fate of the bodies. The officers now hoped that the individual who had passed on the information about the armoured car’s location would know something about the whereabouts of the two bodies. Inquiries were discreetly made and members of the 35th Battalion hoped and prayed for a response. Within a week, those prayers had been answered.

  ‘A few days later I was summoned to Battalion Headquarters and was told that information had been received from a city convent that a burial had taken place in a local cemetery of one or possibly two white UN soldiers. It was immediately agreed that our engineering section would carry out an exhumation. Captain Seán Donlon and the legal commandant, Tadhg O’Shea, would attend and, if I wished, I could also be present. I opted to go because I had been so involved in investigating the matter up to this point.

  ‘We were told nothing about the source of the information, simply that if the bodies were buried in wooden coffins they were definitely Caucasians. We drove to an ethnic cemetery in the African section of the city. I had seen a few African funerals at close hand over the previous months and realised that the dead were always buried in a type of shroud, never a wooden coffin. We reached the cemetery, which was a desolate, lonely kind of place. There was one fairly wide unpaved track running down the centre of the cemetery and there were footpaths running left and right of it. The rainy season had begun and the red clay underfoot was sticky and greasy.’

  The task facing the Irish engineering detachment was not an easy one. Unlike in Irish or European cemeteries, there were no headstones here – the grave markers usually took the form of personal mementos or items of household goods left as offerings. That lent a shabby aura to the whole place. It was as depressing a place as the Irish soldiers could have imagined. The only guidance the Irish team had was that the burial was recent and so they focused on an area just off the centre track where recent burials had taken place.

  ‘The engineers started digging straight away and it was very difficult work because the clay was already totally saturated. It was heavy and sticky, and every shovel seemed to be sucked into the red clay. Just when they would get the grave open, it would begin to fill with rainwater. Then came the sound the team had been hoping for and dreading in equal measure – the scrape of metal against wood,’ Captain Magennis explained.

  Without speaking, Irish soldiers and officers alike gazed at each other. No training manual dealt with the nightmare scenario they were now forced to deal with. This was the body of a comrade – a friend – and none of the soldi
ers knew precisely what they were likely to find in the grave. Finally, with a silent nod, they began the awful task at hand. The earth was carefully cleared away from the lid of the rough-hewn coffin. Seconds after the lid was prized off, the team staggered back under the smell of putrefaction.

  ‘I had to withdraw from the scene and escape back to the cars. I am glad I did because it was about as terrible a job as you could ask any soldier to do. I felt violently ill and sick at heart for the two soldiers. These young lads deserved far better than this. When the team eventually came up to the trucks, I was told the body in the coffin was identified by the identity discs around the neck as being that of Cpl Nolan. The grave was searched deeper but there was nothing else there. There was no trace of Tpr Mullins and the team seemed satisfied that there hadn’t been another burial nearby. Back in camp, the legal officer made the necessary reports. I went to my billet and stretched out on the bed and listened to the rain that was now cascading down. I just couldn’t sleep and even the mere thought of food repulsed me.’

  With Cpl Nolan’s body now recovered, Captain Magennis was determined that everything possible be done to locate the remains of Tpr Mullins. He met up with Frank Lawless and Dan Carroll and talked over the best course of action now open to them. But what the three officers did not realise was that the battalion had already made a catastrophic omission, which would have far-reaching implications for the search.

  The 35th Battalion – in line with standard UN procedure – had notified the Congo command of what had happened on Avenue Wangermee and Avenue Drogmans/Boulevard Elisabeth and that two Irish soldiers were missing, presumed dead. The UN command was then informed that the body of Cpl Nolan had been successfully located and recovered. They were also informed that the search for Tpr Mullins remained ongoing. However, no formal request for specialist assistance was ever issued – a critical omission given that the Swedish UN battalion already had a special dog-search team in place in Elisabethville.