Winds of Destruction

by Peter John Hornby Petter-Bowyer

  As I headed back with Bob Whyte, who I had taken on as my technician, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise Ian. We noticed heavy smoke rising from the bush way ahead and realised this was close to where we had last seen Ian. Even before we arrived overhead we saw that the fire was racing outwards spewing heavy black smoke. Already many hawks were heading towards it to feast on insects disturbed by the fire. Again and again I called but there was no response.

  We had started an orbit over the already burnt-out area of the forest before a deep breathing and obviously excited Ian Wardle answered. I told him we had been very worried having heard nothing since his ‘contact’ call. “Hell, no sweat. We have killed most of the bastards but we think a few got away. It is safe here now. Come on down and take a look. I will have a couple of my men watch the chopper.”

  I passed on the good news to Brigade and found a bigenough gap in the trees close to where I saw Ian waving his map. The whole area was burnt out so the helicopter had to be placed on the ground very smartly to limit the swirl of black ash thrown up by rotor-wash. Ian and his men were black from head to toe. The whiteness of eyes and teeth and the pinkness of mouths surrounded by matt-black faces emphasised their huge grins. These were very happy guys who had come through a very noisy though short-lived experience. Ian couldn’t wait to take us, step by step, through every action.

  After their water break, the refreshed troops advanced in an echelon formation either side of trackers moving in heavy shade under high trees. Ian was next to the lead tracker when he detected movement under the trunk of a tree that had been pushed over by elephants. His eyes immediately focused on the unmistakable outline of the barrel and bipod of a Russian RPD machine-gun. He opened fire instinctively. The whole callsign joined in as terrorist movements were picked up over an area of no more than thirty meters square, centred on the point where Ian concentrated his fire. Suddenly, from this spot, a double explosion rocked the area and initiated a bush fire.

  Retaliation from the terrorists was limited in the face of RAR’s overwhelming firepower and most terrorists died immediately. When firing stopped the force swept cautiously forward. Moaning was heard before it turned to screams as one terrorist, his cloths on fire, emerged from behind another fallen tree. Ian dropped him with one shot and the sweep continued right through the area. When certain that there were no live terrorists around, Ian gathered his men for a site debrief. The men who had been on Ian’s right during the firefight had spotted eight terrorists breaking as a group. They knew they had accounted for three, which Ian found lying some distance from the main group of eight dead men, but five had escaped.

  Ian was preparing to continue with the follow-up on the survivors when Brigadier Godwin ordered him to prepare for uplift. A Provost pilot had reported the huge extent of the fire and it had been decided to deploy fresh troops ahead of the survivors who had headed off in a southerly direction, probably running ahead of the fast moving bush fire.

  Ian had pushed his men almost ninety kilometres in less than forty-eight hours so, although Ian himself was disappointed at being pulled off, his men deserved a break after a job well done. In the Brigade Officers’ Mess marquee that evening the brigadier invited Ian to recount events for the assembled RAR and Air Force officers. Like many of our Army officers, Ian Wardle’s speech was somewhat affected but his briefing was graphic and amusing. About the burning terrorist incident, he said, “The man was screaming, burning and making a general nuisance of himself, so I shot him.”

  Wounded Major Hoskins’ E Company of RAR was taken over by Major Ray Howden who, together with A Company under Major Taffy Marchant, established a forward base at Limpandi Dam near the southwestern corner of the game reserve. Murray Hofmeyr was attached to this base to facilitate troop deployments for operations along the Gwabazobuya River and the Botswanan border that formed a funnel through which the main terrorist group was expected to pass. From Shapi Pans two tracker combat units were deployed to locate and neutralise the five terrorists who had survived Ian Wardle’s contact.

  Out of the blue a South African Police (SAP) Alouette III helicopter arrived at Shapi Pans. The first thing I noticed about the SAP helicopter was that it was fitted with a Becker Homer, which we had not yet received. The South African Air Force pilot, Lieutenant ‘Weasel’ Wesley, was seconded to SAP to fly Police-owned helicopters. He told us that he had been sent from Katimo Mulilo in South West Africa and that additional SAP helicopters were to follow. This was because of South African ANC terrorists being involved with ZAPU.

  For two days after Ian Wardle’s contact, things were quiet at Shapi Pans, so I took opportunity to visit Paul Grobelaar’s large mobile processing factory that handled all elephant and buffalo carcasses from a game-culling operation that was in progress in the Wankie Game Reserve. This unpleasant periodic slaughter of animals was necessary to control population growth but it needed Paul’s support to ensure that no destroyed animal was wasted and that everything was put to good use.

  Paul had a small Cessna 140, which he flew to locate small herds of around twenty elephants. Two game-rangers were then directed to the selected herd. They walked in from downwind to get right in amongst the herd before shooting the babies first as this had the effect of stopping the adults from running off. Taking out the adults necessitated fast shooting and rocksteady nerves whilst the great brutes were rushing around screaming in angry panic, often charging the men. Because of their marksmanship and knowledge of vital points from every angle, it was almost unheard of for a ranger to have to use a second shot to finish off a wounded jumbo. They really hated the task but insisted on doing the culling themselves. Because they loved the animals so much, they refused to leave it to other hunters. They dared not fail to eliminate every member of the selected group because any elephant escaping the slaughter would certainly induce panic in neighbouring herds.

  Two baby jumbos that had been orphaned by ivory poachers roamed around the camp at Shapi Pans. They loved people and were a bit of a nuisance. Though small in elephant terms, they were amazingly powerful and would push one around seeking to be fed and scratched. Their interest in helicopters was a bit of a worry, but apart from leaving snotty marks on the vision panels they did no damage. Years later, in 1982, I saw these same two elephants. By then they were almost full grown at Ozzie Bristow’s Lion and Cheetah Park near Harare (new name for Salisbury).

  I had known and feared Willie de Beer from school cadet camp days at Inkomo Barracks where he was Regimental Sergeant-Major. Now retired from the Army and serving as a ranger with National Parks, Willie offered to take me on a buffalo-culling operation that, because of Op Nickel, was being done by day. Buffalo were normally culled at night using powerful searchlights in specially designed vehicles. The one we used had 40mm holes in its metal sides, showing how dangerous a buffalo bull’s horns could be.

  Willie and van Heerden.

  A young ranger aged about thirty by the name of van Heeden drove the vehicle, with Willie and me sharing the front seat. Four black game-ranger-trackers were standing behind us holding a rail that ran around the rear section of the open vehicle. We were a long way southeast of Shapi Pans searching the sandy road for fresh buffalo spoor when one of the trackers pointed to the road and said there were boot tracks of someone moving in the opposite direction to ourselves. We stopped and without hesitation the tracker said that these had been made no more than two minutes earlier.

  I recognised the sole pattern immediately. It was the wellknown figure 8 pattern of boots issued to terrorists. Sand was still trickling at the edge of the spoor. Realising that we had passed close to a terrorist who was obviously trying to make his way back to Zambia, I warned the rangers there was the possibility that other terrorists were with him walking off the line of road. We turned around and had only gone a short distance following the spoor when it moved left off the road into the bush.

  Willie, ignoring my advice to keep moving, climbed out of the vehicle and followed the tracks a sh
ort distance armed only with a dart gun that was intended to anaesthetise buffalo. He shouted out to the unseen terrorist to surrender. Nothing happened so Willie returned to the vehicle. I recommended that I drive the vehicle and drop off the young ranger with one of the trackers in an ambush position once we were down the road and out of sight. This was agreed. When we had gone about 150 metres and had thick bush on our left, I moved the gear lever to neutral whilst maintained engine revs and applied gentle hand-braking. The two men dismounted and we continued on to Shapi to collect troops.

  When we returned after sunset a dead terrorist lay on the road. He had appeared as soon as we left and had run across the road, waited a while, then run diagonally across to the other side. His next crossing would be straight towards the hidden ranger who stood up and called to the terrorist to surrender. The unfortunate terrorist raised his weapon but knew nothing of the .375 magnum bullet that removed one vertebra from his neck. Van Heeden said he had aimed for the neck because he understood it was important for identification purposes not to damage a face.

  The young ranger was deeply concerned that he might be placed on a murder charge and was feeling guilty because the SKS rifle this man was armed with had only one round of ammunition in it. When studies of papers and a notebook in the terrorist’s possession proved that he had been at Inyatue, the ranger accepted the legal situation but he remained shaken and depressed for having killed a human being.

  On this same day, tracks of the five survivors from Ian Wardle’s contact were found and followed into thick bush close to the National Parks southeastern border game fence. A call to the terrorists to surrender was answered with automatic fire. Under covering fire, the RAR officer crawled forward and lobbed in a phosphorus grenade. This single grenade spewed phosphorus over all five terrorists whose smouldering bodies were found close together during a sweep through the site.

  Earlier in the day, an RAR patrol spotted two terrorists collecting water from Leasha Pan. Long-range fire was initiated too early when these two men spotted the troops. One broke north and the other south. The man who ran north was ignored by the troops but was killed later that day by the game ranger. Tracks of the second moved south and led RAR trackers to a resting place from which about sixty terrorists had departed in a hurry.

  Disastrous twenty-four hours

  TRACKERS MOVED FAST ALONG THE trail that showed the terrorists had moved at a run for a considerable distance through open scrubland. When the trackers reached the point where the terrorists had broken through the game fence, Lieutenant Nick Smith arrived to take command of the follow-up along with extra troops flown in by Hoffy.

  Two helicopters from Shapi Pans (I was still out with Willie de Beer) joined Hoffy in deploying other troops under command of Lieutenant Ken Pierson. Ken’s orders were to set up ambushes on the Nata River directly in line with Leasha Pan and the point the terrorists had crossed the game fence. It was dark when helicopters, flown by John Rogers and Ian Harvey, returned to Shapi Pans where Chris Dixon, who had recently arrived, joined them and me in a helicopter forwardlift of fuel for the following day.

  All night long under a brilliant full moon we lifted fuel to a location just beyond the game fence close to a Botswanan border beacon known as Point 222. This was a frustrating job because we could only lift two drums of Avtur in our underslung cargo nets to Point 222 but then had to use one of these to get back to Shapi Pans for the next load. The net result of four helicopters flying throughout the night was that only twelve full drums of Avtur were available at the remote forward logistics base at dawn.

  At the commencement of the fuel lift, Prop Geldenhuys flying a Provost at height provided communication between soldiers on the ground, Tac HQ and Brigade. The first sign of trouble came when Sergeant-Major Timitiya told Prop that Nick Smith had been shot and that he was under heavy fire. Nothing more was heard. Nick Smith failed to come up on the HF radio at the scheduled reporting time of 18.00 and there was no response to any call from Prop, the two companies or Brigade HQs. When Ken Pierson checked in on schedule, he reported having heard heavy firing from Nick Smith’s area and said he could not raise Nick on VHF. Deep concern had already set in as Prop continued trying, unsuccessfully, to raise Nick. I remember how impressed I was by Prop’s cool manner and efficiency in conveying what needed to be said.

  Prop was then a PAI (Pilot Armament Instructor) on 4 Squadron, which amazed me because, as a past student of mine, he seemed too young to be doing such a responsible job. It took some time before it dawned on me that I had been just as young in similar circumstances.

  More anguish was added to the night when Prop relayed the appalling news that Ken Pierson was dead. Ken had been shot by one of his own men when he moved from one ambush position to another. As dawn broke I flew from Point 222 to the Company HQ were Hoffy gave Bob Whyte and me a very welcome cup of coffee whilst we refuelled from his diminishing stock of Avtur. All he had in the way of food was tinned pilchards in tomato sauce. Having eaten nothing since breakfast the previous day, I was able to face the cold fish and hard ration biscuits in preparation for what promised to be a long day.

  Front from left: Prop with 4 Squadron instructors: Pat Meddows-Taylor, Bill Jelley, Ken Edwards (OC), Nobby Nightingale, Rob Tasker and Justin (Varky) Varkivisser. Back: Chris Weinmann, Bill Buckle, Hugh Slatter (sitting on canopy rail), John Bennie, Mark McLean and Harold Griffiths.

  At some time during the night John Rogers had flown Major Mac Willar from Shapi Pans to the Company HQ. Mac was still in discussion with the company commanders Ray Howden and Taffy Marchant when Ian Harvey called the ops room to say he had been attracted to the game fence by smoke rising from a small fire. Here he found some of Nick Smith’s troops in a state of despair. They reported that they had run out of ammunition following contact with many terrorists in ambush but did not know what had happened to Nick Smith or Timitiya.

  John Rogers and Hoffy lifted Mac Willar with troops and spare ammunition forward to link up with these men. By the time he arrived the rest of Nick Smith’s troops, drawn by the earlier noise of Ian’s helicopter, were also there. Mac moved off with the troops to the site of the ambush where he found the bodies of Nick Smith and Sergeant Major Timitiya. In the meanwhile, I had collected the one and only terrorist captured thus far. He was an SAANC man who had panicked during the firefight and had been found and arrested by locals living in a small tribal village about eight kilometres away.

  Hoffy and I landed at the ambush site when trackers confirmed the area safe and terrorists well clear. They had left this position in the direction that should have taken them directly to the ambush positions Ken Pierson had prepared. I joined in on an inspection of the contact site that showed the terrorists had moved across open ground, which they had obviously selected as ideal killing ground for a prepared ambush. They then orbited in a wide left-hand circuit and setup a crescent-shaped ambush along the edge of a line of scrub overlooking the selected killing ground. Here they dug shallow shell-scrapes to await the arrival of troops they knew must be close by, because they had heard Hoffy’s helicopter deploying Nick’s callsign at the fence.

  Site of ambush. The helicopters are parked in the ‘killing ground’ with the ambushline lying just beyond the tree belt. In white shirts are: SB officer, his assistant and the SAANC prisoner.

  The terrorists may have been forced to initiate the ambush early when troops of the left echelon were about to bump the right side of their ambush line. By this time, however, Nick and Timitiya were abreast of the RPD machine-guns clustered at the centre of the ambush line. Nick was totally exposed with no cover at all whereas Timitiya was next to a lone tree. The firefight that ensued was intense and it was clear that Nick and Timitiya had used deliberately aimed conservative fire, whereas the other troops had expended their limited issue of ammunition. In retrospect the standard issue of two full magazines and only twenty rounds of reserve ammunition was way too little for situations such as this. It was a hard-learned lesson!<
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  Clearly the eight dead terrorists, five with RPD machineguns, in the centre of the ambush line had been taken out by deadly accurate fire from Nick and Timitiya. The tree that Timitiya had used to steady himself whilst firing his MAG machine-gun from the hip was riddled with bullet strikes high above his head with just one single graze mark from the round that struck him in the head. Most bullet strikes to his body had occurred after death. Judging from his line of spent cartridges, Nick had run directly towards the ambush line before he went down because, without any cover, outright aggression must have been his only option.

  Of greatest concern was that Nick’s VHF radio had been taken by the terrorists. Also taken was Nick’s FN rifle, Timitiya’s MAG and a number of packs which had been thrown off when the firing started. The capture of SF clothing by the terrorists posed a greater problem than the radio, because all spare batteries were still in the possession of one of the RAR survivors.

  The bodies of two terrorists.

  Only when the loss of the radio became known was Hoffy able to make sense of a VHF call he had received from an African male asking him to come and pick up wounded men. The caller had used the word ‘helicopter’ instead of the usual ‘Cyclone 7’ when a caller did not know a helicopter pilot’s personal callsign. Hoffy had tried to get this caller to give him a locstat (grid reference) of his position. There was no reply so Hoffy got on with what he was doing.

  There was plenty of evidence to show that a number of wounded terrorists had left the ambush site with the main body. Along the trail an RAR tracker detected drag marks leading to a clump of scrub off to one side of tracks that showed the group had been walking in single file. Here the bodies of two more terrorists were found. I popped in to take a photograph of these bodies on my way back to Point 222.