Cocky displayed his talents, courage and aggressiveness for the umpteenth time in a lone action in the Op Repulse area. This occurred just after Tol Janeke was posted there. On 2 August 1976, Cocky was sent to provide top cover to c/s 143 of H Coy 1RR, a Territorial Army tracker unit, that was following blood-spoor from a contact with CTs earlier in the day.
Having established the position of the trackers and the direction in which the CTs were heading, Cocky commenced a recce forward of the troops over flat, featureless terrain. He soon found a group of people sitting under shade at the edge of a bushy patch that was set well away from local villages. It is unlikely that any other pilot would have seen them.
He was asking the trackers what colour clothing the CTs had been wearing when he came under fire and saw two CTs break from the group. Cocky attacked immediately and took them both out with rockets. Fire continued so he turned and attacked the main group that was breaking up. Having expended all rockets, Cocky still had one CT in sight.
Part of Cocky’s ASR reads,
Owing to having no troops or aircraft to assist me, and my rockets were finished, I was not prepared to put my aircraft in a dangerous situation by attacking a lone ter who fired 4 standard magazines and one of tracer at me.
Cocky was wise not to attack with Frantans as his aircraft was not fitted with machine-guns to give him covering fire, and there was no way of knowing if more CTs were still around. The fact that he could see, from height, precisely how many magazines of ammunition had been expended was yet another example of this man’s intriguing talent.
I am convinced he was wounded and would not get too far. Had I had front guns to protect me, I would have been prepared to attack with Frantans.
Apart from four CTs killed, five females, hidden in the bush too close to the CTs, also died when Cocky made his second rocket attack. The loss of civilian lives in these circumstances, though deeply regretted, was inevitable when CTs failed to send women away before initiating offensive action. Happily, there were many other occasions where women saved themselves by moving into the open so that soldiers and airmen could identify them by dress. But even in these situations care had to be taken to ensure that they were not being used by CTs as human shields.
Continuing with Cocky for the moment. He was in the Hurricane area with me during my short stay at FAF 4. Whilst I was instructing Dag Jones, Cocky was also teaching recce to Bill Stevens. Day after day he had been leading successful Fireforce actions, one of which occurred so close to FAF 4 that it caused me, as acting OC FAF 4, to comment:
a. Excellent work by Benecke who was still wide-awake to the need to cover ground, even with wheels down on approach for landing. He was returning from an instructional sortie in recce for Air Lt. Stevens.
b. Of group strength 28-30 ters reported by Benecke only 3 were seen and contacted resulting in one killed and one captured wounded by K-Car fire. Though this was a disappointing score the close proximity of the action to FAF 4 assisted greatly in occupying the attention of the Prime Minister who was visiting JOC with the OCC.
K-Car pilots recorded most ASRs covering actions in which Cocky was involved. His own ASRs were therefore those in which Fireforce was not involved. His thirtieth ASR reports the situations arising from actions of 17 August 1976 when he was tasked to provide top cover to an Army tracker callsign of 2 Independent Company that was following fresh tracks of a large group of CTs that had broken through the Cordon Sanitaire minefield. Cocky’s own callsign was H4 and Mike Delport, who was flying with him, was G4. His ASR reads:
H4 had been tasked to assist c/s 71G who was on tracks of approximately 50. G4 was in the aircraft with me as I intended to demonstrate aerial tracking to him. As we were approaching the callsign, I thought I had heard shots going past the aircraft. I turned around and G4 said he saw two figures running in a NE direction. Tracer was observed passing very close to the aircraft and c/s 71G confirmed that he could hear heavy firing. We then observed large explosions on the ground. There also appeared to be several flak bursts exploding underneath the aircraft. We were at approximately 1,500 feet AGL and the bursts were about 500 feet below us. I called for Fireforce and passed on a sitrep about the explosions and apparent flak bursts.
I then saw a ter running south down a path away from the explosions. I commenced a rocket attack on this ter. Heavy ground fire was experienced on numerous occasions but more so during this attack.
I then saw about 15 ters moving through some trees and commenced an attack. The rockets were on target and as I commenced a pull out I heard a loud bang and felt a strike on my left thigh. I informed G4 who immediately took control of the aircraft whilst I inspected my thigh for damage.
We discovered that we had no aileron control and were in a severe yaw and rolling. G4 righted the aircraft with the use of rudders and we commenced a slow climb.
I then jettisoned the Frantans and the rocket carriers and carried out a quick inspection of the aircraft for damage.
The ailerons were both observed to be stuck in the upright position.
G4 commenced a slow yawed turn towards Salisbury whilst settling elevator trim and power settings.
We informed Darwin of our predicament and intentions. A strong smell of fuel was experienced and we opened the DV panel and fed both motors from the starboard tank. At this stage we had full left trim and a fair amount of rudder to remain wings level. G4 had control of the aircraft so I left him to continue the flight.
As we approached Salisbury I noticed a large amount of fuel on the floor and discovered the fuel leak to be right next to where I was sitting. I extracted the fire extinguisher and moved into the back seat so as to be able to direct the fire extinguisher onto the fuel in case of fire and rearranged loose articles in the rear of the cabin.
A perfect landing, under the circumstances, was carried out by G4 and the motors were closed down immediately after touch down together with mags and all electrics. We abandoned the aircraft as the fire-fighting crew arrived on the scene.
Cocky was lucky to have only been badly bruised by a chuck of airframe debris from a heavy-calibre bullet strike, and Mike Delport did a great job in getting the aircraft back to Salisbury.
Because of the long distance involved, Fireforce arrived a long time after Cocky and Mike had cleared target. Two trooper helicopters took hits that resulted in the death of Corporal Titlestad and continuous fire from a heavy machine-gun relentlessly followed the K-Car flown by Flight Lieutenant Terence Murphy (ex-British Marines helicopter pilot) but without scoring any hits. Due to fading light and some confusion caused by many widely spread enemy firing positions with troops in between, K-Car was reluctant to bring down any air attacks and the airborne commander, OC Support Commando RLI, had no choice but to issue orders for night ambushes.
Although there were no proven kills, this operation happened to be very successful because the CTs lost everything but their personal weapons. The group of about fifty had come in with a large re-supply of equipment which included an STM heavy machine-gun, a type 56 recoilless rifle, RPG launchers with many rockets, TM46 landmines and piles of 7.62mm ammunition; all of which was added to Rhodesia’s growing supply of captured equipment.
The reason for the ground explosions and apparent flak bursts that Cocky reported was explained by the discovery and capture of ‘air ambush’ (CT term) equipment. The CT group had come into Rhodesia with their new ‘air ambush’ weapon system that they had confidently rigged to protect their re-supply equipment against air attack. It consisted of many TNT charges planted in small holes in the ground with a stick grenade placed above each charge with its firing pin tethered to a ground peg. The TNT and stick grenade combinations were set in clusters, each cluster being linked by Cordtex to be fired simultaneously. Upon firing each cluster of TNT (the ground explosions Cocky reported) the stick grenades were propelled vertically to withdraw firing pins and detonated four seconds later at around 1,000 feet above ground (the suspected flak).
&nbs
p; Having lost all of their ‘air ambush’ equipment during their very first day in the country, the CTs must have lost confidence in the system because I cannot recall another incident of this type inside Rhodesia. Occasionally they were employed in Mozambique. Long before this incident, I had read of an antiaircraft system, which Mao Tse Tung developed and named ‘ground cannon’. Later I will discuss my own tests of this crazy, crude and effective system.
Down in the southeast, on 27 August, a Grey’s Scouts callsign on horseback was following tracks of a large group heading straight for the Mozambican border. Tol Janeke called upon the Chiredzi Fireforce to join up with his Repulse Fireforce and placed the joint force close to the area of anticipated action.
Tol amalgamated forces whenever he judged it necessary, which is why in my opinion he was a particularly successful field commander. Every officer had been taught the ‘Ten Principles of War’; one of which is the all-important need for concentration of forces. Few heeded this in the great spread of activities where too few aircraft were called upon to meet too many needs. Tol not only practised this principle, he ensured that the concentrated force was correctly placed for immediate use.
In this particular case, two K-Cars, six G-Cars and two Lynx moved to c/s 24B, who reported that he was two hours behind the CTs. Flight Lieutenant Ginger Baldwin, flying lead K-Car, was surprised by the speed at which c/s 24B was covering ground on horseback. He knew the Fireforce troops could not possibly keep up with them and, since there was no fuel close at hand, decided to land the helicopters and await developments. The two Lynx loitered over the helicopters and maintained communications with 24B.
The horses were watered at a pan where c/s 24B reported twenty-nine CTs had been at water’s edge about one hour earlier. Noting how far this pan was from a game fence that lay beyond, Ginger decided to deploy two stop groups to the fence on the line of movement. This had only just been done when 24B called contact. The Fireforce was over the CTs shortly afterwards and learned that one of 24B’s men had been killed during the engagement.
Ginger described the ground over which most of the aircraft took on groups of bomb-shelling CTs as “… so flat and vegetation so uniform that it was impossible to pinpoint a specific point.”
Tol’s comments on the ASR were:
(1) The FAF 9 Lynx, K-Car and G-cars were positioned with the FAF 7 Fireforce when the follow-up started. This resulted in a combined effort of 2 Lynx, 2 K-Cars and 6 G-Cars being brought to bear when contact was made.
(2) The final count was 40 killed and 13 wounded captured, 8 with weapons. Intelligence has confirmed that 10 ters were escorting 97 recruits to Mozambique for a week of training before returning to Rhodesia with weapons. This contact will no doubt discourage recruits from willingly joining the ters.
(3) It would have been almost impossible to tell who was a terrorist and who a recruit once contact had been made, particularly as the MIU rifleman was killed in the initial engagement.
From our point of view, any man who would be returning to the country trained and armed within a few days, was a CT already.
Chapter 8
Project Alpha
FOR MANY YEARS I HAD questioned the effectiveness of conventional bombs and rockets. Earliest doubts about the efficiency of cylindrical-shaped bombs and warheads were confirmed when I studied their effects at the conclusion of the big Air Force Weapons Display at Kutanga Range twelve years earlier, back in 1964.
Senior officers had laughed off these concerns because they had used the weapons during WWII and had nothing but praise for their efficiency. In fact one very senior WWII officer asked, “What gives a young puppy like you the right to question proven weapons?”
Whilst agreeing that they were well suited to many of the situations for which they had been designed, I was unable to convince my seniors that these same weapons were totally unsuited to counter-insurgency bush warfare. During my FAC work with jets, I watched many strikes but these only reinforced my lack of faith in both imported and homemade bombs.
For over eighteen months Canberras had been limited to using 250-pound, 500-pound and 1,000-pound bombs, none of which was effective and they all involved unacceptably high expenditure of valuable foreign currency. Everything pointed to a need for a drastic change to provide Canberras a safe and effective anti-personnel strike capability.
Although work had continued in an ongoing effort to sort out the 28-pound fragmentation bomb problem that led to the destruction of a Canberra, this weapon system could only be employed with any degree of accuracy inside the Strela missile and anti-aircraft gun envelopes. This in itself was unacceptable, but the thin line of widely spread, puny detonations running through any target was also unacceptable. What we needed was an anti-personnel weapons system that would give a Canberra clout to match its load carrying potential. For safety reasons alone, such a system had to allow Canberras to fly over the most hostile of targets below 500 feet at speeds exceeding 280 knots. If this attack profile could be achieved, it would render Strela harmless and would also substantially reduce threats from manually operated guns.
I was certain we needed a system based on large numbers of small bomblets that could be induced to spread laterally in a wide carpet over an effective strike length of at least 800 metres. Each bomblet would have to retard very rapidly to be well behind the aircraft at the moment of detonation. And, of paramount importance, each detonation had to occur above ground to ensure that shrapnel reached an enemy hiding in ground recesses and trenches.
Having read about the USAAF’s use of solid steel ball bearings to flatten sizeable sections of jungle in Vietnam, I became interested in the idea of producing spherical bomblets. High-speed, low-level deliveries of enormous quantities of three-inch steel balls released from Phantom jets had been used to clear thick jungle vegetation. What really caught my eye in the USAAF article was the fact that balls spread themselves laterally during their short flight to ground.
One foundry in Salisbury and another in Bulawayo produced thousands of round balls for me. Because I was in a hurry and needed to keep costs down, the lead balls they manufactured were crudely made. The bag and string system I employed to release clusters of two-inch and three-inch lead balls from a Canberra, flying at 300 knots at 500 feet, was just as crude. No wonder the Canberra crews were not at all impressed with ‘PB playing high-speed marbles’ but I needed, and got, answers from the drop tests. Firstly, it was clear that turbulence from leading balls forced those following in their wake to move sideways. Instead of striking ground in a straight thin line, a random scattering of both two-inch and three-inch lead balls occurred along the attack-line; some as far as forty metres either side of centre. Secondly, the balls left long grooves in the Kutanga Range sandveld but every one of them lifted back into flight and thirdly, the balls retained lethal velocity way beyond first contact with ground.
Squadron Leader Ken Gibson.
I was encouraged by these results and was considering where to go from there when providence took a hand. Senior Staff Officer Air Armaments, Squadron Leader Ron Dyer, was my right-hand man in all air weapons projects. Immediately after our crude tests he brought his predecessor, retired Squadron Leader Ken Gibson, to see me in my office Ken was then working for the engineering firm that manufactured our locally designed bombs and Frantans. Because he knew something of what Ron Dyer and I were doing, Ken had come to Air HQ to give us wonderful news.
An engineer who had recently joined the company was studying the 28-pound fragmentation bomb problems with the managing director of the company who had designed the system in the first place. The specific problem they were studying concerned safety of nose fuses which, though designed to activate bombs just above ground level, had been responsible for the premature detonation that killed two officers and destroyed a Canberra.
Ken told us that when the new engineer learned of the importance of airburst, he said it might be easier and safer to produce round bombs that would find ground level for
themselves. The ground impact would initiate a delay fuse as the bomb bounced back into flight to detonation at a chosen height, just as we had been considering. Ken Gibson could not have brought better news and I set off immediately with Ron to visit the company.
For convenience the managing director of the company, whom I had know for some years, will be referred to as Denzil and the man with the new ideas, Bev. We were introduced to Bev whom I took to immediately. We had a long discussion during which he said the bouncing-bomb idea was no more than that—just an idea. I told him why I favoured this approach and why I had been testing spheres to facilitate low, safe and accurate delivery with maximum lateral distribution. Since Bev had no experience with bombs or bombing and did not know any of the inherent dangers involved, he needed to learn about the operational requirements for the Canberra, as I saw them. I told him of my experiences and the reasons I wanted to move away from conventional bombs.
Explanation was given as to why cylindrical bombs suffered too many weaknesses in bush warfare situations. The primary weakness of cylindrical bombs and warheads is that, when they burst, shrapnel is driven out at ninety degrees to their longitudinal axis. To be wholly efficient against enemy personnel, a cylindrical bomb needs to be about six feet above ground and vertically oriented at the moment of detonation, but even when dropping bombs from very high levels the vertical attitude cannot be achieved and accuracy is poor.
If the same detonation occurs when the bomb is horizontal, it is at its least efficient angle because only a narrow band of shrapnel strikes ground at ninety degrees to the bomb’s longitudinal axis. The remaining 95% of the ground around the bomb is unaffected; yet paradoxically this is the situation that occurs when bombs are dropped at low level to ensure high accuracy.
Winds of Destruction Page 66
