The French Foreign Legion

by Douglas Boyd

  Coevoet was beginning to think he was in a nightmare. Some Mirage mechanics appeared with an oxygen cylinder and some rubber hoses they cobbled together to get what looked like enough pressure into the flat tyre. Coevoet now had to fit eighty laden paras into each flyable aircraft designed for sixty-four men. Achieving the impossible, with the first wave crammed into four C 130s and the single C 160, the dispatchers had no idea how men bent double and crammed on top of each other could hook themselves up to the static lines over the DZ, let alone jump out of the doors in anything like normal time. The only good point was that Capt Ferret and his medical team had meantime arrived and were also crammed in like sardines, so that casualties would receive immediate attention.

  It was 1040hrs when the first overloaded aircraft lifted off and clawed its way to cruising height. Inside, officers and men were laughing with relief. After all that happened, nothing else could go wrong. Could it?

  Chapter 36: Kill or be killed at Kolwezi

  19 May – 6 June 1978

  The first surprise after take-off was for the shivering human sardines in two aircraft to see an inverted forest of icy stalactites rapidly forming on the ceiling above their heads. The Zairian crews had forgotten to switch off the air conditioning. Politely requested to do so, they obliged, laughing. Cabin temperature jumped 25o Centigrade, melting the icicles and soaking the men below. Crammed together, unable to move even to reach the toilets, the more stoical and the more exhausted managed to doze.

  Approaching the drop zone, they manipulated themselves into something like a standing position with difficulty, easing their cramped limbs. Unable to pass among them as normal, the dispatchers yelled for each man to check that those fore and aft of him were clipped on to the static line. So jammed together were the men and their equipment now that the pull-down seats were stuck, reducing usable floor-space even more. Many men could not even stand straight, but were bent beneath others or forced to crouch on the floor with several other men above them. They knew the DZ was 800 metres long. At the speed the planes were doing, the pass would last twelve seconds. How the hell would a stick of eight men extricate itself from the jumbled mass and jump in that time?

  At 1512hrs the red lights came on. The doors were removed, the dispatchers hanging out of the doorways checking the land slipping past below. To their amazement, beneath them was the town of Kolwezi, with the huge open-cast mines making enormous scars in a landscape pitted with round yellow lakes of slurry. The light stayed red as they passed over the DZ close to 90o off-course. The men waiting to drop groaned in unison. There could not have been a better way of announcing their arrival to the rebels waiting for them below.

  The second pass was little better. The jump light stayed red as the pilots corrected course again. And again for another pass. At 1540hrs – after half an hour of fly-overs – the light was green and the dispatchers yelled the word everyone had been waiting for: ‘Go!’[394]

  With the pilots refusing to reduce speed below 400kph, the legionnaires were buffeted horizontal, spun round and round, expecting to have their necks broken by the shock when their chutes opened. Men who had jumped with American chutes before had warned them of this possibility. The first stroke of luck that day was to find that the shock was, if anything, less than they were used to, but although the canopy above them was far bigger than expected, rate of descent was fast in the thin air at 1500 metres above sea-level.

  Automatic weapons were firing beneath them, but orders were not to return fire before landing, for fear of hitting their own comrades. A louder explosion made them look up – and understand why the Zairian pilots in the lead planes had not reduced speed or altitude. An anti-aircraft shell had just missed the last plane in the formation, flying lower than the others. The French pilot at the controls was less worried by the near-miss than the fact that the preceding aircraft had not respected the drop height of 250 metres above the ground. To distance themselves from the artillery below, they had dropped high, which meant that the large propellers of his turbo-prop craft were about to carve a tunnel through a cloud of men and chutes.[395] A wrench on the controls re-aligned his aircraft, avoiding them by the narrowest margin.

  ‘Go!’ Dispatcher Zingraff counted the men of 3rd Company out on the second pass and counted them again below. One canopy was missing. Leaning out, he found the missing para still attached to the plane hurtling along at 400 kph and desperately hacking away at the static line with his combat knife. By gestures, Zingraff made him stop, to avoid falling far from the DZ. The C 130 not being fitted with a winch to get the unlucky man back inboard, Italian legionnaire Strata, a veteran of seven military drops and many in civilian life, hung obediently in the slipstream until the next pass, when Zingraff cut him free and watched him make a successful landing, using his ventral chute.

  For the other men the jump lasted twenty seconds at most, but no one had allowed for a strong north wind blowing them away from the flying club and into the buildings of the New Town. From below streams of tracer arced up at them, slotting neat holes in the canopies – and some bodies. Houses, trees, walls rushed towards them – interspersed with three metre-high termite mounds, as hard as concrete. All they could do, was face the wind, pull on the shrouds to empty the canopies as much as possible, close their legs, hunch their shoulders, jam elbows into the ventral chutes and relax their knees to land roulé-boulé like a rubber doll.

  [SEE MAP L: ‘Kolwezi, Operation Leopard May – June 1978’ below.]

  Those who landed in trees knew the drill, releasing their ventral chutes and rappelling down the shrouds. Erulin landed on a termitary, winded and with a gashed cheek but otherwise unharmed. Many men found themselves in elephant grass over their heads, lost for bearings until a whistle blast gave them a direction to head for. Others found themselves facing a Tiger through the dense grass stalks, at which point it was kill or be killed – the quicker finger deciding which way it went.

  A mystery for Erulin was, what had happened to the eight men of his anti-tank section, dropped way off the DZ? Seven made it back spread over the next twenty-four hours; the other was already dead before he hit the ground, 2 REP’s first casualty of the operation. Wrapped in his parachute by Chaplain Lallemand, his body was flown back to Corsica for burial.

  The job of a radio man is to stick like a leech to his commander, come what may. Emerging from the elephant grass, Capt Gausserès wiped the dust out of his eyes, unable to find his operator, who had dropped immediately after him and weighed about the same. Where the hell was he? Unwilling to call out and attract the fire of rebels he could see not far away, Legionnaire Lacan was nearby but suspended by his canopy, caught in the topmost branches of a giant tree. He rappelled down the shrouds of his ventral, but still ended up twelve or so metres above the ground until, swinging from side to side, he managed to catch a branch and climb and slip the rest of the way to the ground. Gausserès’ orderly Vittone was perhaps the luckiest man in Kolwezi, having landed in the catenaries above the railway tracks. Had the rebels not blown up the power station, he would have been barbecued crisp.

  Lt Bertrand Bourgain and his section had been assigned the mission of taking the rebel HQ in the Hotel Impala. Having landed right in the gardens of the hotel, thanks to the wind, he assembled his men and headed inside. The stink was unbelievable. Every item of furniture and all the fittings were smashed, as though wild beasts had rampaged through. Everywhere, there was dried blood and what seemed to be parts of human bodies. Holding their breath and trying not to vomit, the legionnaires picked their way through the scene of violence to the cellar, where the stink of putrefaction was strongest, from swollen bodies locked together in one fly-covered festering mass.

  Bourgain called Gausserès, and heard the reply: ‘Black to Black One, Over.’

  ‘Have discovered twenty or so bodies, but the hotel is empty. Over’

  The terse radio message, devoid of emotion, was relayed to Erulin, who asked, ‘Black bodies, or white?’ He was hoping to
have news to pass on to Larzul via Gras regarding the six French military advisers rumoured to have been held in the hotel.[396]

  Bourgain replied, ‘Only black, so far. Continuing search.’

  Confronted with the blood everywhere, even on the ceilings, and on the window sills as though desperate wounded people had tried to throw themselves out, men vomited among the destruction. The unflushable toilets were full of blood, but nowhere was there any sign of the six advisers until a legionnaire stumbled over a notebook in which one of them had noted the progression of events, hour by hour. The last note was timed at 0800hrs. Which day, no one ever knew. It read, ‘Heavy machine gun firing at the hotel.’

  But where were the bodies?[397]

  Gausserès was at the railway station, checking out a train of munitions intended for the Zairian army. It had never been unloaded. Sealed cars contained 81mm mortar shells, hand grenades, small arms ammunition. The intermittent sound of firing as other units came up against rebel strong-points grew louder and more sustained. At least two heavy machine guns were firing and there was the occasional crump! of a field artillery piece.

  By a lucky chance the anti-tank corporal of the section sheltering behind debris by the bridge into the New Town had just caught up with them. Calmly, Cpl Morin allowed the first rebel armoured car to approach from Mobutu Boulevard. 150 metres, 100 metres, 50 metres . . . At thirty metres, Morin squeezed the trigger. The driver of the burning vehicle was killed outright but two other rebels managed to extricate themselves and flee under cover of the smoke. A second armoured car advanced, its machine gunner hosing down the debris behind which the legionnaires crouched.

  Legionnaire Solatorenzo replied with disciplined short bursts from his light machine gun to keep the heads of the men inside well down and reduce their visibility. In the middle of the road, Cpl Laroche stood with his grenade-launcher at the shoulder, sighting along it as though on a practice range and waiting with nerves of steel until he could not miss. Paf!

  With the second armoured car immobilised and on fire, two more rebels jumped out and escaped into side streets. A rebel truck approaching through the smoke became the next target for Solatorenzo and skidded off into another side street as his bullets tore through the sides of its soft top.

  All over town, Legion units were in contact, but Erulin’s professional assessment was that the main force of rebels had pulled out, leaving stay-behind detachments to slow up the recapture of the town and thus delay pursuit. But perhaps they were also assassination squads. And anyway his men could just as easily be killed in a chance skirmish as in a battle. As though to make the point, as he came in sight of a group of rebels on higher ground a burst of firing forced him and the men of his mobile command post to roll fast into a ditch for shelter.

  Bourgain’s section pushed on from the massacre in the hotel until it ran into a heavily defended crossroads. French caporal-chef Lombard and Yugoslavian Legionnaire Golic were both qualified snipers. This was what they had been training for. Within minutes they had killed three Katangans. The others fled, leaving behind four weapons: M 16s and Kalashnikovs. Bourgain’s men next launched a volley of rifle grenades at the strongpoint in the technical school, the rebels inside fleeing rather than be outflanked by the legionnaires, and thus giving them an easy passage across the bridge into the native town of Manika. The gendarmerie building next on their list was a harder target, with Danish Legionnaire Jansen taking out several rebels at point-blank range with his machine-pistol. A Katangan appeared from nowhere behind Sgt Touami, about to fire. Before he could squeeze the trigger, Legionnaire Tavari – fifteen metres away and armed only with a pistol – had shot him dead with his first round.

  Inside the Gendarmerie, Bourgain was the next to just miss requiring Chaplain Lallemand’s professional services. Seeing a Katangan pull the pin out of a grenade, preparatory to hurling it into a room full of hostages, he downed the rebel with a single burst. The primed grenade rolled across the floor towards him. ‘Everybody outside!’ yelled Bourgain, hurling himself through a doorway onto the ground in the courtyard, where the grenade exploded, miraculously injuring no one.

  In the prison, cells were so tightly packed with hostages, both black and European, there was no room to sit or lie down. From time to time during the previous days, men had been hauled outside and shot, relieving the physical pressure and increasing the mental stress of those still inside. Hearing the noise of combat growing nearer, and with their guards apparently gone, a number of prisoners emerged into the street – to find themselves the target for a mob of the militia raised by the Katangans’ Cuban advisers and ordered to ‘liberate themselves’ by killing all the Whites. Documents captured later, bore this out.[398] Armed with sticks, machetes and knives, they raced towards the bewildered hostages.

  A Zairian officer who for some reason had not been shot translated their confused battle-cries for the Europeans just in time. Desperately, they ran back into the prison, seeking shelter in the stinking cells they had just vacated, but – as in every prison – it was impossible to bolt the doors on the inside. Men tore off their filthy, blood-stained shirts and knotted them together to make a rope of sorts, lashing the door bars to the window bars. As it started to stretch, desperate men clung to the bars of the doors to stop them being wrenched open, blows from the mob’s weapons raining on their hands and forearms.

  Without warning, as suddenly as they had arrived, the would-be killers left. From outside, the exhausted and confused prisoners heard a voice call, ‘Armée française! Sortez, les mains en l’air!’

  Come out with your hands up! They were the most beautiful words the prisoners had ever heard. Unshaven men, women and children covered in blood and excrement stumbled out into the courtyard, crying with relief and joy at the sight of their liberators, arrived not a minute too soon. Weeping, hardly able to stand, they wanted to touch these men who had saved them. Some, unable to stand, clutched a legionnaire’s leg or touched the toe-cap of his boot in gratitude for their lives.

  Among them were Belgian and French citizens, Australians, Americans – and ex-Sgt Catena, a former Legion para. Some of the children were wounded. A little girl of five in a dress stained by her mother’s blood, kept repeating, ‘They killed my Mummy. They killed my Mummy.’ Others had seen both parents killed before being ‘adopted’ by caring adults after roaming in distress through the slaughter.

  Bourgain’s immediate concern was to get medics for the injured and persuade the others not to leave the prison and risk walking into the fire-fights raging on all sides. ‘Where are the other prisoners?’ he asked. ‘All dead,’ someone calmer than the others replied.

  Elsewhere people hiding in their barricaded homes heard legionnaires race past talking French and had to be told to stay where they were for the moment. Some of the hostages were incoherent from grief and fear; others were completely in control, offering to guide their saviours to nearby enemy strong-points.

  The task of re-taking the hospital had been allotted to 2nd Company, so that Capt Ferret and his team of medics had facilities for more than first aid. What they found there ruled this out for the time being. All medical supplies had been stolen or simply destroyed. Even the medicine cabinets had been smashed to pieces with rifles butts. Mattresses had been torn to pieces and beds, some with the occupants still on them, pushed down the lift wells.

  By dusk, the men on the ground were wondering where the second wave had got to. So were the men in the second wave. Col Gras had made provision to transport and drop 200 men. In the event, he had to transport fifty more to Kamina, including the six NCOs and twenty legionnaires under Capt Halbert who were the super-paras of 2 REP, expert in HALO insertions. Although Operation Leopard had no call for their particular expertise, they had no intention of being left behind in Kinshasa, even if it did mean travelling seated in the gangway. The most unlikely passenger in the DC 10 bringing them to Kamina was Col Larzul, wearing an old set of unmatched combat fatigues found in the bottom of hi
s wardrobe. He was to be Col Gras’ liaison officer with 2 REP on the ground, and was still hoping against hope for news of his six men who had been in Kolwezi.

  The DC 10 touched down at Kamina just before 1600hrs. Eager to get aboard the drop aircraft, the men of the second wave found their first obstacle was the lack of any means to reach the ground, six metres below the open exit doors. In typical Legion fashion, they found a simple solution: launch the emergency toboggan slides. The crew, however, ruled that out, arguing that their boots and equipment would puncture the slides. As Col Larzul peered down at the ground staff, bewildered at the arrival of so high an aircraft at this military airfield, some humorist yelled at him, ‘Go!’

  But it was no joking matter. If the second wave did not take off very soon, it would be too late for a drop that day, never mind that their comrades in the other companies were in combat and the hostages they had come all this way to save at increasing risk with every passing hour. An enterprising Belgian transport contractor brought in his fork-lift truck to lift ground staff up into the holds and commence unloading the paras’ equipment, but no one had any idea how to get the men out of the main cabin until a set of landing steps was ‘extended’ by balancing on it a house-painter’s ladder, down which all 250 men descended at last to the ground.

  Having learned from the first wave’s experience, the paras had prepared lengths of twine and wire to lash their equipment onto the American harnesses. As they were doing this, the drop planes were landing after the return leg from Kolwezi. Perhaps afraid the engines would stop altogether, the pilots did not reduce engine speed to idling. In the infernal din of sixteen turbo-prop engines that left some men deaf for two days, the second wave clambered aboard. Just over an hour after they had touched down at Kamina, they were rolling along the runway, destination Kolwezi – as they thought.