Battle For Angola: The End of the Cold War in Africa c 1975-89

Introduction:

Portugal’s Wars in Africa

To understand the nature (and complexities) of this book, which deals not only with a historical background to Lisbon’s five century-long occupation of Angola, but also some of the military struggles linked to maintain that presence – including the 13-year Guerra do Ultramar or what the guerrillas liked to call the War of Liberation or Guerra de Libertação – I need to start by dispelling a few myths and make clear my role as a military or foreign correspondent. In a search for answers, I visited all three of Lisbon’s metrópole provincias ultramarinas many times during the course of more than a decade …

I

Following the publication in Britain of my book Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa and subsequently translated in Lisbon, which was when Portugal e as Guerrilhas de Africa – to the surprise of many – became an immediate best-seller, I decided it was appropriate that I tackle Angola’s historical and contemporary travails as a subject on its own.

For roughly 40 years after the last member of Portugal’s armed forces flew out of Luanda, the nation tended to ignore the fact that for more than a decade a series of bitter wars were fought in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea (today Guiné-Bissau). In the process, a lot of lives were lost.

These colonial insurrections exhausted the nation and nobody needed to be reminded that hostilities ended ignominiously. In the minds of most, Portugal was driven out of Africa; there was simply no other way of viewing the outcome other than as a defeat.

But then, quite suddenly in the second decade of the New Millennium, a lot of people started to ask questions about those conflicts in faraway Africa. A new generation of young (and not so young) Portuguese were eager to learn what their fathers, uncles, husbands, lovers, granddads and others had done while hostilities went on. Did those older folk actually get involved in jungle skirmishes, set ambushes, get blown up by landmines and possibly even killed people who were regarded as enemy? In turn, did they see some of their friends suffer similar fates?

Suddenly a variety of books started to appear in Portugal and they were snapped up. Mine was followed by other titles; unquestionably, there will be more.

A similar trend had already been set in motion in Southern Africa with regard to Pretoria’s 23-year insurgency war along the southern fringes of Angola and, to a lesser extent along the frontiers of Zambia and Mozambique. In the past decade there must have been about a dozen books a year published on those conflicts and as a scribbler, I have been involved there too.

After Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars appeared in print, I received a lot of requests from Portuguese media about Lisbon’s troubles in Africa. I was asked numerous questions and answered as best I could, even though I sensed an underlying hostility among some of the hacks involved, in part because it is impossible to please everybody.

Also, there were radical elements who believed that everything about these wars was either tainted or evil and needed to be condemned. I didn’t argue: my role was to tell it like it was and that was that.

But some of the interviews provided a certain measure of depth that none of us had plumbed before. Questions and answers not only made good sense but were intrusive and interesting, especially from an historical perspective. Like the individual who asked whether Portugal had actually lost her African wars, or whether she was driven out by radical political sentiment? That query suggested that the demon might have been communism, which, of course we now know is partly true. Or, on another tack, this time from an ‘Old Africa Hand’ who questioned whether there were ever any massacres of innocents like the Americans experienced at My Lai in Vietnam?

Somebody else persisted in asking whether the average Portuguese combatant was any good at this kind of conflict...and so on…

Most of the people I dealt with were seasoned, well-experienced Portuguese journalists and writers, with a book or two under some of their belts. Their number included Manuel Carlos Freire of the Diario de Noticias, a newspaperman who had spent 20 years on the Africa beat and who had seen and done just about everything. His review covered two full pages of copy and photographs, together with a map detailing where the wars were fought. It appeared in the issue published on 22nd November 2015.

That was preceded on the 27th October by a double-page spread that also included quite a few pictures, this time in Lisbon’s O Diabo. Written by its editor Duarte Branquinho, a seasoned military correspondent, his piece was arguably the most intrusive because he has a strong following of military veterans and rarely pulls punches. Before that, the Portuguese national news agency ran several stories on the book, all of which, cumulatively, suggests an enormous resurgence of historical interest in that country’s African military campaigns.

That said, a lot of people have since questioned me about these wars and the eventual outcome. The most persistent query that came up in the process was whether Portugal actually lost her wars in Africa.

The truth is that with the army mutiny of April 1974, hostilities were effectively brought to an end. And while it was certainly not a cataclysmic disaster like Nazi Germany suffered in 1945, conflict was abruptly halted and the men in uniform came home.

You could almost compare it with the French exit from Indo-China in 1958 or the inglorious departure of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989. All these ‘superior’ powers suddenly abandoned their stated military aims and the guerrillas/Freedom Fighters/adversaries on home ground went on to declare victory. They could hardly be faulted because there was no other way of looking at it.

The guerrillas in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea were no less elated. They celebrated until those in Angola and Guinea started squabbling among themselves and that led to more wars and many more senseless killings.

In my personal view exactly the same sort of thing is going to happen to Putin’s Russia in Syria in a few years’ time...

The bottom line here is that anybody with a modicum understanding of history could, by the early 1970s, see the writing very clearly on the wall. The war had been going on for half a generation and frankly, things in Lisbon’s African dominions could not go on like that forever. The country was being bled dry by a war that pitted one of Western Europe’s smallest and poorest nations against the might of the Soviet Union.

One also has to take into account that just about everything that happened to Portugal at the time took place at the height of the Cold War, no small issue in the 1960s and 1970s.

Thus, with the Carnation Revolution, everything changed and literally, it was an overnight thing. As I said in my earlier book, when that happened, almost the entire Portuguese nation breathed a collective sigh of relief. In truth, it was a complicated process, largely because the single biggest problem for Portugal was strategic vision, or lack of it. With one notable exception: General Antonio de Spinola...

Certainly, as United States Naval aviator Captain Jack Cann pointed out, you go to war to achieve this vision when no other acceptable way is open; however, while there had to be a response to the March 1961 attacks, the big question was about where Salazar was going with it all?

As Cann declared, ‘...the military component did its job quite well, and it is a well-chronicled, fascinating, and laudable story. The problem lay in the politics. There was no flexibility in Salazar’s position. His opponents were sidelined, and only his single-dimensional vision prevailed.1

After Salazar’s stroke, the future Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano was welcomed as a vehicle for change but he soon became an extension of the same unimaginative policy. His reaction to Spinola trying to negotiate with the PAIGC guerrilla leader Amilcar Cabral in 1972 and establish what was termed a ‘Commonwealth’ made infinite sense, but that proposal was soon quashed by Caetano.

As my American friend declared, there was literally no useful strategic vision at the top. With no ability to vote the government out of office, revolution was the only alternative. Of course, the revolutionaries had strategic myopia too, but then that is another topic worth discussion, but not between these covers.

Looking back, it was just as well that the wars ended when they did. I went to Lisbon often enough in the 1960s and 1970s and knew quite a few of the major players: people like the venerable Generals Spinola and Bettencourt Rodrigues (I have immense respect for them both). Also, there was no question that the nation was tired of conflict.

The Americans coined a phrase for it towards the end of the Second World War and they called it ‘war weary’. The Portuguese nation – after 13 hard years of hostilities – was utterly exhausted.

You have to recognise that the difficulties faced by Lisbon were almost insuperable, finances being a major part of it: Portugal had very little cash to spare and it stayed that way for decades. Compared to today – with instant communications and jet travel – Angola might have been on the other side of the globe.

Troops didn’t fly there like the Americans were doing in Vietnam: they went by ship and that took time and money.

Another question asked often enough was what kind of differences did I manage to discern between those three African wars?

Portugal’s colonial conflicts adapted to circumstances in all three theatres of military activity. In miniscule Portuguese Guinea, where the insurgents were rarely more than a day’s march away from any of that enclave’s frontiers, things were tough for government forces because the guerrillas could bring so many more weapons to bear.

Angola, in contrast, became an expansive (and expensive) war with huge distances needed to be covered by both sides. But there, the mindless killings of 1961 remained constantly in the minds of the defenders and everybody accepted that if they did not take care, such brutal excesses could happen again.

Mozambique was even more diverse, with hostilities restricted mainly to the jungle north and central regions. In Lourenco Marques (Maputo today) you might be forgiven for thinking that there was no war because the enemy never got far that far south. In fact, you never travelled in convoy on the roads south of Beira.

There were other differences. One needs to take into account that the Portuguese had almost no experience or training for an insurgency-backed war in one of their overseas provinces, never mind all three. Prior to those colonial struggles, the last time Portuguese troops had heard shots fired in anger was in the First World War, something that then had also happened in Africa (against the German Army in both Angola and Mozambique). I deal with that as well between these covers.

That the Portuguese Army was able to haul itself out of what was clearly a soporific haze and rally to a cause that had suddenly become an urgent ‘do or die’ affair is enormously commendable. In the eyes of most European observers, it was totally unexpected.

More salient, the country had no real armaments industry, but it didn’t take long to get things going; first by acquiring from West Germany the rights for the local manufacture of the G3 rifle (and several other weapons), buying and then building the kind of heavy vehicles needed in a modern war (Unimog and Berliet) and, of course, the air components that went with it all. A lot of that stuff was in place, but much of it was part of Lisbon’s commitment to NATO and the Americans, though helpful at first, soon began to restrict some of those assets from deployment to Africa.

US Navy Captain John Cann2 (who we all know as Jack and who has written several books on these hostilities) phrased it well when he declared in his introduction to my earlier book that Portuguese troops were incredibly brave. As he phrased it ‘...those young men had the ability to fight under conditions that would have been intolerable to other European troops.’

He went on: ‘They could go for days on a bag of dried beans, some chickpeas and possibly a piece of dried codfish – all to be soaked in any water that could be found...’

Captain Cann added that they were able to cover on foot and through elephant grass and thick jungle distances sometimes hundreds of kilometres over a three day patrol period. They quickly learned how to fight well, and did so successfully for more than a decade across three fronts in regions that were almost half the size of Western Europe and stretched much of the distance across the African continent. Remember, Angola fringes the Atlantic while Mozambique stretches for 2,600 kilometres all the way down the western littoral of the Indian Ocean...

More to the point, the Portuguese fought in Africa for twice as long as the American Army did in Vietnam...

On reflection, while it was an extremely difficult ongoing process that took lives, there are few countries that fared as well in any lengthy guerrilla conflict in the past two centuries. But in the end, it just became too much for the nation and the self-elected leaders decided to move on, not without good reason.

Another question which raised its ugly head several times was whether I witnessed any slaughters like those experienced at Wyriamu and My Lai while the Americans fought in Vietnam?

This is something often raised. And yes, at the start of hostilities in Angola in 1961 there was an incredible level of mindless violence on both sides.

That all followed the invasion of North Angola by UPA insurgents, a force composed of large bands of armed insurgents determined to overrun Luanda in as short a time as possible. They actually came close to doing just that, penetrating southwards to within a couple of days’ march of the capital.

So while some sources make out the invading force was largely composed of ‘bandits’ or ‘rabble’, that cannot be altogether true because they had their share of successes. They took control of the regional command centre at Nambuangongo from government forces with little resistance.

The rebel agenda was as clear as day: shock and intimidate the Portuguese nation into a state of terror and force them to leave Africa. And let’s be blunt: thousands of people, both black and white Angolans died in the process because the attacks were so bloodily ferocious. Some kind of insurrection had been anticipated by Lisbon’s intelligence agencies, but certainly not on that enormous scale.

UPA cadres killed everybody: men, women and children. Peoples’ eyes were gouged out and pregnant woman had their bellies slashed open. In Leopoldville, capital of the Congo, UPA leaders boasted openly about their deeds: One of them told a French journalist ‘avec un large sourire’about Portuguese logging families in the north that he and his men had slaughtered.

His exact words were: ‘we fed them lengthwise into the circular saws’ (and this is on record with Agence France Presse).

That initial bunch of Portuguese soldiers thrust towards the frontline to face oncoming rebels in those first jungle forays was untrained and undisciplined and consequently created almost as much damage among the civilian population as the UPA. Afterwards, as the war came under control, a better relationship developed with the locals.

In retrospect, it was perhaps to be expected that Portuguese security forces retaliated with brutal vigour, as has happened in just about every violent revolution on every continent. They spared no effort, and in retaliation, many thousands of local people were killed, whether they were attached to invading groups or not. It is all there, documented in the archives in Lisbon. A hallmark of this period was the number of heads cut off and put onto stakes to rot in the sun (something both sides were guilty of).

Lisbon’s forces having stabilized the situation in the Dembos north of Luanda, a measure of sanity did return. The army imposed severe strictures on any kind of brutality.

Obviously, there were still excesses when units came under fire or when troops were found mutilated, but the rule of law eventually did prevail. In fact, while covering the war I discovered several units where the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was pinned up in the mess hall. I never saw that either in Lebanon or in the Rhodesian war, not once.

Were there any massacres like My Lai in Portugal’s overseas wars? I would say yes, but only in the very early days of Angola’s mayhem. That was a lunatic period of excessively violent exchanges on both sides and lasted less than a year.3

In Mozambique’s war zones, in contrast, General Kaulza de Arriaga presided over some unfortunate events in various areas including Tete, Wiriyamu and Inhambane. But you will find very little of this in the archives because the Portuguese are extremely sensitive about those blots on their record.

Nothing like that happened in Guinea, though the massacre of 50 workers at Pijiguiti Docks in Bissau in August 1959 (during a non-violent demand for rights) might be categorised as such. It was certainly a senseless slaughter on the part of the authorities and led directly to Amilcar Cabral preparing the PAIGC for war.

The revolt by rural blacks in Angola early 1961 caused an enormous rush of emotions in the Metropolis. Salazar wasted little time in despatching all available military reserves to Luanda to quell the uprising which everybody thought would last months. Instead, it quickly developed into a major series of wars that ended 13 years later.

Portugal and its colonies became the focus of a new propaganda war.

Portuguese troops marching along Luanda’s oceanfront Marginal. (Author’s collection)

It did not take long for Lisbon to learn from other colonial insurrections: they implemented the aldeomentos system of containing the civilian groupings in protected villages, similar to that employed by the British during the Malayan Emergency. (Author’s collection)

As conflict progressed to involve the Great Powers, Washington sided with UNITA and supplied Jonas Savimbi’s people with Stinger missiles which were used to shoot down Soviet helicopters. (Author’s collection)

Tanzanian President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere is regarded as the architect of many of the anticolonial/anti-white insurrections that beset vast swathes of Southern Africa from the early 1960s on. (Author’s photo)

A captured insurgent wounded in a contact with government forces in a Luanda prison during the author’s visit. (Photo: Cloete Breytenbach)

Che Guevara was an early visitor to the region where the war was being fought.

Early photo of counter-insurgency hostilities in bush country east of Luanda. (Revista Militar)

Portuguese Fuzileiros (Marines) on ops. (Photo: Revista Militar, courtesy of US Navy Captain Jack Cann)

As hostilities progressed and South Africa became more involved in the war, the South African Air Force started to play a significant role, including deploying its C-130 transporters in operational roles in South Angola. (Photo: Dean Wingrin)

Portuguese Air Force crews attached to American-built F-84 fighter jets at Luanda Airport. (Photo: Forca Aerea Portuguesa)

MPLA Adolfo-Maria base at Kalunga, 1973.

Portuguese Air Force Alouette gunship with 20mm cannon mounted and operational in Angola. (Photo: Forca Aerea Portuguese!)

Map showing the extent of the insurgent onslaught throughout southern Africa, taken from the author’s book The Zambezi Salient.

The bush war was to take on a radically new dimension once Pretoria started to involve some of its more modern weapons, including Ratels, such as the one shown here during Operation Askari.

UNITA’S leader, Dr Jonas Savimbi caused the civil war to go on for another decade, until he was eventually tracked down by Luanda’s security forces and killed. (Author’s collection)

The author on a Rhino mine-protected vehicle at Ondangua in 1985. (Photo: Alwyn Kumst)

In the final stages of the bush war, South African refurbished Olifant tanks played a predominant role in some of the battles that preceded a cease-fire. (Author’s collection)

Many advanced Soviet weapons were captured by South African forces during the course of hostilities, including these hand-held ground-to-air MANPADS. (Author’s collection)

Overall though, Lisbon fought the rest of its colonial conflicts ‘by the book’. This, obviously, did not please everybody and did not restrain PIDE and other government security agencies from regularly and often brutally overstepping the mark.

II

Another query pertained to my impartiality as a writer and journalist, and whether I followed the wars only with the Portuguese Armed Forces or also with some of the guerrilla groups.

Fundamentally, I – and many Western journalists – could not risk going into combat with the guerrillas. That would have been like spending time with the Israeli Army and then asking to be attached to a radical Arab Jihadi unit that had sworn destruction on the Jewish State: it just does not happen. Unlike Basil Davidson, or that radical nonconformist Portuguese Admiral Rosa Coutinho, my ties with Moscow were, if anything, guarded.

Also, were my articles censored by the Portuguese authorities?

There I can be specific: The authorities in Lisbon (or any of the overseas colonies) never once asked to vet my material. In those days it was not done.

I suppose they could have censored my writings because I could be critical – and sometimes was – especially with regard to the way the war was being fought in Mozambique. The truth is, they did not. Nor did they ask to view the photos I took, though obviously there were some classified issues (like the deployment of helicopter gunships and F-84 bombing missions) from which I was discreetly steered clear of.

Once in the field, I was usually on my own (without an escort officer). Obviously, there would be liaison officers appointed to coordinate my trip, but they almost never ventured into the field with me. We called them ‘Jam Stealers’ because so few of them ever saw any real action.

Notably, my contact in Bissau was Captain Otello Saraiva de Carvalho, then serving on General de Spinola’s staff. There is actually a photo of him in Portugal’s Guerrilla War, taken in Portuguese Guinea.

An important issue raised by Manuel Freire of Diario de Noticias revolved around Portugal being the first European Nation to arrive in Africa and the last to leave. He queried whether the Portuguese presence in Africa was any different from that of other European nations?

In point of fact, it was. During the many decades that I covered Africa for newspapers and magazines, as well as news and photo agencies, I was able to visit all the African states. I also made dozens of TV documentaries. This ‘total immersion’ process gave me a very good insight as to how things were in the various African states and how their respective governments worked and there is no question, there were enormous differences.

Liberia for instance, though totally free, was actually more of an American colony than neighbouring British-run Sierra Leone or Francophonic Cote d’Ivoire. For almost a century Liberia’s currency was the American dollar and it was only after President Tubman died (in his sleep, in contrast to those who followed) and ethnic violence emerged, that Monrovia had to establish its own currency.

Also, ties with Washington were so strong that Liberians could come and go to and from the United States as they pleased. Freed slaves had originally been the basis of it all, but then Firestone got a grip with the rubber industry which became of strategic importance during the Second World War. In the end, Firestone almost ran the country.

Elsewhere on the continent, the two colonial powers that stood out rather starkly were Britain and France, both quite benevolent in their approach to imperial rule. Paris’s mission was always to draw its colonies closer to what it termed the ‘motherland’. In turn, Africa provided France with much of the raw materials it needed as a commercial and industrial power (and still does). For all that, very few important matters were not referred to Paris.

It did not take long after the end of the Second World War for the Elysees Palace to accept that all her African colonies would not remain subservient forever. The rebellion in Indo-China had already started and the knock-on effect extended half way across the globe. It resulted in a form of self-rule being implemented in places like Dakar, Yaoundé, Abidjan, Libreville, Bangui and elsewhere. The naysayers in Paris were aghast of course, but the new system worked quite well because the French rule of law prevailed and with a good sense of fair play, ordinary people were protected.

The British went a step further. Though they had their ‘all powerful’ governors in capitals like Nairobi, Lagos, Freetown, Dar es Salaam and the rest, Whitehall did not meddle in matters linked to tribal affairs. Lord Lugard had originally established what was referred to in Nigeria as ‘Indirect Rule’ for the Moslem people in the north: that meant that day-to-day government and administration was left in the hands of traditional rulers (coupled to a relatively moderate form of Sharia Law that did not include the cutting off of hands for minor transgressions).

It is worth mentioning that when I met General de Spinola at his Bissau headquarters, I had already observed his approach to local tribal leaders in Portuguese Guinea (some of my photos in Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars cover this aspect) and the ‘Lugard’ issue was raised. I got the impression that Spinola had already considered that this might be the way forward, though I also sensed that I might be stirring muddy waters and he soon changed the subject.

My opinion is that if General Spinola had time and the resources – he had neither – he could have made it work: the village ‘self defence’ concept was quite widespread in Portuguese Guinea and once in place, it worked reasonably well.

With regard to black Africa generally, one must accept that Britain and France – as well as Spain, Italy and Belgium (and Germany, before it lost all its African possessions after the First World War) – were relatively newcomers to actually colonising Africa.

Though the French and the English had traded with the continent for a couple of hundred years, the British only annexed Lagos in August 1861 under the threat of force by Commander Beddingfield of HMS Prometheus. Ceremoniously, he was accompanied by the Acting British Consul, William McCoskry.

Nairobi, in East Africa, was only established in 1899. Portugal, in contrast, put roots down on the African continent more than four centuries before that.

Which raises another issue: Does that explain how Portugal could maintain a war in three African fronts for more than a decade?

The answer is no. In trying to explain why Portugal fought so hard for 13 years to prevent its provinces in the ultramar from being lost, one has to consider the fact that Lisbon knew and understood Africa a lot better than any other European power. Also, she tolerated nobody – black or white – from interfering with those interests.

Further, the rebellion in Angola’s north in 1961 was nothing new. There had been many uprisings, rebellions and revolutions in the past, some minor and quite a few that needed a good deal of effort, time and manpower to quash.

When explaining reasons why Lisbon had reacted so strongly to the Angolan attacks in the early 1960s, Prime Minister Salazar said on numerous occasions that the provinces were, as he phrased it, ‘an extension of Portugal itself.’

‘All three territories are part of the greater Portugal’ he stated on many occasions, adding that he was not going to allow centuries of historic civilizing tradition give way to radicals with guns. The consensus in Lisbon at the time was that this sort of thing had happened before and everything would eventually settle down.

Those who were ‘in the know’ would remind the populace that some of the early rebellions in both Angola and Mozambique had been extensive and more often than not, quite bloody. All had been put down, some quite brutally, particularly in regions adjacent to German South West Africa (before Kaiser Wilhelm’s war). It is interesting that there are many recorded instances of South African Boers having been hired to fight in some of the earlier conflicts; according to French historian René Pélissier, several dozen times during the course of the century before.

What is astonishing is that Portugal was able to rally the way it did when, for a time, all seemed to be lost in Northern Angola in 1961. Portugal then, was a nation of nine million people and, after Albania, the second poorest country in Europe.

One needs to accept too that while the Portuguese were not battling the most sophisticated enemy on the planet, the rebels quickly evolved into a fairly effective fighting force and were kept well supplied by the Soviets with the same weapons then being deployed against the Americans in Vietnam. Also, guerrilla cadres from all three territories were being trained in their thousands in military establishments behind the Iron Curtain, China and Cuba, as well as in a dozen African states that enjoyed Moscow’s support.

It is also true that the guerrillas trained by Eastern Bloc states were streets ahead of those funded by the West, with the single exception of UNITA which at one stage, went on to control roughly 90 percent of Angola’s rural regions. The initials, in Portuguese, stand for União Nacional para a Independència Total de Angola: National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

The Washington-supported FNLA (Front for the Liberation of Angola) in contrast, was little more than a token force, its morale and fighting capability destroyed in a single major defeat immediately after independence at the Battle of Quifangondo (which became known among those who survived it as the ‘Road of death’). I deal with this at some length in Chapter 12.

It is axiomatic too, that from the many guerrillas sent abroad for training, a significant number of brilliant, totally committed and determined fighters would emerge.

Guinea’s João Bernardo Vieira (His nom de guerre was Nino) was one of them. Very much a ‘hands-on’ fighter, ‘Nino’ demonstrated an utterly ruthless skill and daring while active militarily against Lisbon’s forces, to the extent that his forces ended up controlling several ‘no-go’ areas off the coast from which he was never properly excluded by the Portuguese Army.

I met the man – by then President of his beloved Guiné-Bissau – during a visit to Bissau long after the war had ended while making a television documentary there, and I found him a remarkably reticent, quiet-spoken individual. That, I subsequently heard, belied his ruthlessness and when it came to settling scores, his enemies murdered him, cut his body into small pieces and spread them about the city.

Jonas Savimbi was an altogether different kind of individual who went on to become a favourite with the Washington Central Intelligence Agency: they eventually supplied him with Stinger ground-to-air missiles (together with a group of American specialists who took up permanent residence at his bush camp at Jamba in the extreme south-east of the country, an event that was to cause serious damage to the Angolan Air Force.

It should be noted too, that in the post-independent phase, many of Savimbi’s frontline troops were trained by South African military Special Forces operators, and with it all, UNITA became a fearsome insurgent force.

It is ironic that those same South Africans were eventually recruited as mercenaries and hired by Luanda – their former arch-enemy – to destroy UNITA, which they did in a series of short, sharp campaigns, something I deal with in detail in the first three chapters of this book.

In truth, Savimbi was every bit as ruthless as Guiné’s Nino, probably even more so. In a subsequent exchange of messages with British journalist Fred Bridgland, who wrote one of the best books to emerge from the war, Savimbi murdered just about everybody whom he even thought might oppose him.4

As with so many African leaders, his measure of power became absolute and, in turn, absolutely bloody. Bridgland is currently updating his earlier work on the UNITA leader.

Diario de Noticias also questioned whether Lisbon’s African wars could be compared to the US intervention in Vietnam?

My answer was this: The Vietnam syndrome in relation to what was going on militarily in Africa at the time had been a subject of much debate, and here one has to recall that the first of the ‘Liberation Wars’ in East Africa was launched against the Mau Mau in Kenya and effectively put down by the British military using largely conventional means. All that took time and it gave London the necessary breathing space to formulate fresh and more innovative sets of tactics.

It soon became clear to insurgent groups that Mau Mau tactics – and the way they were implemented, usually piece-meal against the British – did not work. So a more conventional approach was adapted by the guerrillas once the Angolan war got into its stride, followed quickly by similar struggles in Rhodesia and Mozambique.

What subsequently did emerge was that many of the instructors who put Angolan, Guinean and Mozambique insurgents through their paces, had good experience of insurgent warfare in Vietnam, as did Luanda’s Cuban allies. Also, identical weapons were deployed, both in Asia and in Africa: the AK, RPG-2s, the RPD light machine-gun and the TM-46 anti-tank mine as well as a range of anti-personnel bombs like the POM-Z. With time, these weapons progressed to more advanced versions (RPG-7 and TM-57 among others).

Obviously, guerrillas being trained in Soviet countries were inducted into many of the systems employed by Vietcong veterans who had seen a considerable amount of action: being ‘Third World’ and both regions largely undeveloped, it made good sense. Trainees were shown news clips and propaganda films and seasoned battlefield commanders would come through and, with the help of interpreters, would explain how they fought.

Also raised were reasons that I believed led Portugal’s military forces to defeat, which has no immediate answers.

In the modern period – post Second World War – there have been few wars that have been ‘won’ outright: that is, one side going in and crushing another, the Malayan ‘Emergency’ being the exception. Most recent wars have ended up at the negotiating table and fairly clear victories have ended up with the ‘winner’ having to yield, often quite substantially: the Korean War (still undecided); Israel after the Six Day War (the Jewish state having to hand back all of the Sinai Peninsula), American efforts in Vietnam, the Iraq-Iran War (one of the bloodiest) and South Africa’s so-called Border War which, to those involved, seemed to go on forever. In most cases both sides claimed victory...

The same could be said to apply to Lisbon and its African ‘provinces’. The Portuguese were not, in the classic sense ‘defeated’ in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, but then she did not win either. Like other conflicts, guerrilla or otherwise, everything eventually centred on politics, in this case driven by a disaffected military establishment. The reality is that the African people who challenged Lisbon’s hegemony for their freedom in these overseas territories eventually got it.

It is interesting that exactly the same sort of thing happened in the Rhodesian War, though obviously on a much smaller scale. I knew former Prime Minister Ian Smith quite well and after the hostilities had ended, he confided that he became aware of his own military shortcomings when it was reported that he was losing a company of men every month, not to any kind of enemy action, but rather, to emigration.5

These were the same people who had been doing the fighting and they moved on, because like many young Portuguese who fled abroad, they felt they had to make new lives for themselves in a more secure environment.

In both countries (as well as with South Africa towards the end of the Border War in the late 1980s) the consensus was that there was essentially nothing to be gained by unnecessarily losing more lives in a succession of African wars.

Critically, of all the wars in the post-Second World War epoch, Portugal was arguably the most ‘unready’ nation to embark on a major conflict, never mind one that lasted more than a decade.

That the Portuguese Army was able to haul itself out of what was clearly a soporific haze and rally to a cause that had suddenly become desperate is commendable. In the eyes of most European observers, it was totally unexpected, especially since the French had recently been driven out of Algeria. If the powerful and seasoned French Army couldn’t do it, ran the argument, how the hell could poor little Lisbon’s cohorts?

But then, to the surprise of all, it wasn’t long before young Portuguese troops were giving as good as they got. In record time they managed to recapture many of the gains made by the revolutionaries in north Angola – including the new-found rebel regional capital Nambuangongo in the heart of the Dembos. It took a while, but with application and an astonishing determination, they got themselves back onto the offensive.

I deal with these events in some detail in Chapter Four of Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa.6

III

It was Portugal’s youthful soldiers – the majority of them conscripts – who finally had the last say, commented one observer who had spent time at the front. He was right, because if you had to suggest today that there is any nation, big or small, that would send its boys into a war for more than a dozen years, you’d be laughed out of the room.

The sentiment then and now is that this is a virtually impossible concept, not only in terms of money but in manpower, logistical limitations and, of course, the ultimate test: attitude.

In reality, the youth of yesterday was very different to today’s youngsters. That applies as much to Portugal as it does to the average American, Israeli or Brit. Four or five decades ago young people accepted challenges as part of life because, simply put, the majority of them had to.

One example puts this into perspective. When the Israeli Army invaded Hezbollah strongholds in 2006, conscripts were ordered to leave all personal electronic gear behind. Many did not, with the result that when they called their families and their girlfriends from their bunkers inside Lebanon, Hezbollah communications specialists were able to triangulate those positions and rain mortars down onto their heads.

Can you imagine your son or your neighbour’s son being sent to Africa for two years’ military service without once being allowed to come home? And without their omnipresent cell phones, iPads and computer games? Forget it…

While war raged in Africa, those who were called up tended to accept their lot. It was only at later stages that many of the young men waiting to be called up slipped across the border and sought succour in other countries. For the majority, that ‘faraway’ continent of Africa was as alien to the average kid who has just left school in Vila Real, Lisbon or Castelo Branco as landing on the moon.

Yet, for those who did not take the gap, almost all accepted their lot because it was considered in the national interest. Just as youthful American, British, Australian and Canadians rose to the occasion when the world was threatened by the Japanese and the Nazis in the Second World War and scores of conflicts before that.

The command factor obviously played a role. While there were innumerable laggards – as there would be in any large-scale gathering of individuals – there were many excellent officers fighting Portugal’s wars in Africa. Some were quite brilliant. I rate General Antonio de Spinola as one of the best. In one of my recent books, I put him way up there with the likes of Orde Wingate of Chindit fame, France’s Roger Trinquier and Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap.

So too, with General Bethencourt Rodrigues, with his classically aggressive and intrusive approach that clearly reflected an excellent historical understanding of guerrilla warfare, and who went on to turn the war in Angola on its head. By then, the people of Angola believed he had won the war and that it was time to move on, but a group of dissident officers in Lisbon thought otherwise.

To return to the older veteran, I found General de Spinola to be an unusual man, friendly and direct, sometimes almost embarrassingly so. He was also tough, a stickler for discipline and often uncompromising. He never tolerated slackers within his upper command, some of whom would be removed from positions of trust and put on the next plane home.

His most significant attribute was that he was modest enough to sit down with people and listen to what they had to say, not only his own officers and men but most noteworthy, the people whom he governed in Portuguese Guinea. Following his arrival in this West African enclave, he’d decided early on that in order to achieve results, he had to get the local people involved and he did so in a positive, pro-active manner.

Seminally, the man had a solid military background. It is not generally known that during the Second World War, he spent time as an observer of Wehrmacht efforts on Hitler’s eastern front during the encirclement of Leningrad. Groups of Portuguese volunteers were then fighting for the Nazis, having been incorporated into what was known as the ‘Blue Division’ and they apparently gave a pretty good account of themselves.

What is also not known is that Spinola met clandestinely at least once with Leopold Senghor, the much-esteemed President of Senegal. The two men shared a common interest in what the Leninist lunatic Sekou Toure would do next.

Nor was General Antonio de Spinola afraid to take chances. When he was offered the opportunity to rescue a bunch of Portuguese soldiers who were being held in a high security prison in Conakry, he sent his commandos into the enemy port to haul them out. It was an extremely risky venture listed in the record books in Lisbon as ‘Operation Green Sea’.

It is worth mentioning that he was occasionally happy to bend the rules. Scribes such as myself were well down the list of priorities in Portugal’s African wars, but when my plane almost came down in the Atlantic because of engine failure and had to limp back to Bissau, I appealed to him (through my liaison officer, Captain Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho) to help me out.

I told him that I had an interview scheduled with the Ghanaian foreign minister in Accra a few days hence and unless he put me on the regular TAP jet flight back to Lisbon the next day, it would be forfeited.

I flew out the following morning.

Another issue raised, was a question about enemy forces: how did they rate in a comparatively modern war? This was something that surfaced quite often when I spoke to some of today’s journalists in Lisbon.

The ability of the guerrilla armies, I suggested, varied between the three overseas provinces at war, as they did in Rhodesia and with the South Africans along the southern frontier of Angola.

In fact, as all these wars progressed, the guerrillas improved markedly. South African troops who fought their own ‘Border War’, often talked disparagingly about the SWAPO enemy, but one must accept that it takes a specially committed type of combatant who is willing to go to war for

23 years (which is how long that war lasted). Make no mistake, SWAPO cadres were good fighters and they ended up teaching Angola’s MPLA a thing or two when it came to fighting a bush war.

From personal observation, I would rate Amilcar Cabral’s PAIGC at the top of the pile, with a few MPLA units a close second. Obviously, a lot depended on training and, as hostilities dragged on, the ability to be able to handle complicated weapons systems efficiently made the difference.

Quite a few insurgents were killed laying heavy anti-vehicle landmines that had been hauled hundreds of kilometres across country because they did not observe the basics. Some ignored the simple task of keeping the detonator clean, so that when it is screwed into place it does not jam. You don’t use your fist to slam a TM-57 detonator home if something is lodged in the thread causing it not to fit properly...

At the same time, the majority of guerrillas were a remarkably resilient force. They could march for weeks across the most inhospitable parts of Africa and survive quite comfortably off the land. Few European troops – apart from Special Forces units, of course – could do the same. Those black fighters came from the land and they managed to live off it.

Also, the guerrillas like to keep almost all their needs on them, close by, which helps when you are mobile. Modern armies need enormous logistic back-up. And when wounded, I have seen black troops (both guerrilla as well as those serving in the Portuguese Army) with horrendous wounds that would have killed most white youngsters.

It was the same in Biafra where there were no drugs and most times, no anaesthetics. I spent time with the French doctors attached to a small group who became the forerunners of Medecines sans frontiers, cutting off limbs without chloroform. It must have been hell, but these victims accepted their pain and very few cried out.7

And then, the ultimate question: what was my interest in these wars? Several times questions were raised about my bona fides: what it was that gave me the right to pass judgement on conflicts in distant lands, almost always involving people I hardly knew? It was a valid criticism that I answered as best I could.

My reply became standard because I had seen a lot of wars and, in the process, was wounded twice, once because of my own stupidity. I had been covering conflicts for most of my professional life, more often than not for Britain’s Jane’s Information Group and for London’s Daily Express, as well as a host of publications on four continents. Also, I was circulating my photos to Gamma Presse Images and Sipa, both originally in Paris.

I made something like 100 TV documentaries over a dozen years, few of them of a military nature but some quite specifically so. That included producing and directing a TV film on the war in El Salvador as well as a one-hour TV documentary on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1985). My film on the civil war in Uganda was screened coast-to-coast in the United States by American Public Television (PBS).

Apart from my work in Africa, I was in and out of the Lebanese civil war for a decade, covering largely from the Christian Arab side. During this period I accompanied units of the Israeli Army into Lebanon when they invaded Beirut in 1982 and thereafter with the Israeli Navy patrolling the Eastern Mediterranean on Dabur gunboats.8

During the Balkan War I was mainly with the United States Air Force operating out of Frankfurt and afterwards, briefly involved with landmine removal in Croatia.

Before that I covered numerous conflicts ranging from Biafra (the subject of Biafra’s War, my most recent book published by Helion), travelled through some of the more accessible parts of the Congo (where I was arrested on an espionage charge), Somalia (many times), the Rhodesian War (about a score of operational visits) and off and on for 20 years with the South African army and air force along the Angolan frontier.

Then came the Sudan (arrested once more and marched through the streets of Khartoum at gunpoint), the civil war in El Salvador as well as going operational with mercenaries in Angola (twice against Savimbi’s forces), and in Sierra Leone with the same South African mercenary group, Executive Outcomes and thereafter, flying combat in a Mi-24 helicopter gunship with Neall Ellis. The former Portuguese overseas territories were consequently very much a part of it

I never covered Vietnam because I was too busy elsewhere, but in the process I was able to write dozens of books which can be viewed under my name on amazon.com.

In preparing this book, I have to mention that it was impossible for me not to look back in some detail at what I’d had published in the past on Portugal’s African campaigns and in so doing, I could easily have skirted everything I’d included in Portugal e as Guerrilhas de Africa. But that would have meant ignoring the single most important factor that affected this nation’s history over the centuries: how Lisbon was ultimately ousted from Africa.

So, if some readers do spot familiar tracts from my earlier works, I ask you to bear with me because cumulatively, that material is a vital component to exactly what went on in the ultramar. Additionally, we have the benefit of it all being suitably updated. I am constantly getting comments from some of those who were there about events I’d dealt with. Invariably some of these arrive with additional data, which adds lustre to it all.

That, I believe, is how history should be handled: a sometimes disjointed hodge-podge of detail, investigative fact and speculation strung logically together to make good common sense but also to add another tiny piece of the national puzzle in its proper context.

This book closely examines what happened to Angola both before and after the so-called ‘Colonial Wars’ had ended. In fact, having dealt with Portugal’s efforts in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, a lot of the material in this work covers Angola in its post-coup d’état phases.

Indeed, there were several, including the hectic (and often bloody) transitional period, since the civil war lasted for a couple of decades, as well as the use of South African mercenaries to force UNITA to the negotiating table and eventually to give up the struggle. For Dr Jonas Savimbi it had become a hopeless struggle for survival and he could never match the kind of money then flowing into Luanda’s coffers from its oil industry.

What does emerge in this work are the exceptionally heavy odds that were ranged against South Africa in its Border War, most of which was contested along the southern borders of Angola.

In countering Moscow and its surrogates, Pretoria was pitted against a far more powerful enemy that it initially realised. Though not a poor nation, the South Africans struggled to match what the

Soviets, Cubans, East Germans and other Comintern nations were committing to a struggle that at one stage almost ended up with both sides using weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

In the closing stages of the war, the Angolans did use chemical weapons against South African troops, but whether by accident or design, these did not work properly. Pretoria had consistently warned that any use of WMD by their adversaries would result in an ‘appropriate reply’.

South Africa had already built six atom bombs and there is no question that pre-emptive planning involved the actual use of them, with Luanda a prime target. It was then that Washington and Moscow decided that enough was enough and that with a chemical or nuclear outcome imminent, nobody needed a further degradation of hostilities. But more of that later...

For now, it is apposite to look at the money involved, specifically in relation to the sophisticated material the Soviets and their allies pumped into the Angola war.

With Portugal out of the way, there is no question that the next step for Moscow was the big push: to remove South African forces from the military equation, aimed specifically at Cape Town as the ultimate target. With a battered South African government acquiescing to superior (and as far as Moscow was concerned) more pliable forces, the sea route around the Cape, strategically, would be theirs.

This is something that has been consistently pooh-poohed by some strategists, but you need to look at the numbers in Chapter Seven, if only because it makes good sense.

A typical Ovambo town in South West Africa’s northern reaches as observed from an Alouette helicopter gunship. Though SWAPO guerrillas moved in and out of these villages and had the support of locals against government forces, they were never able to maintain a strong enough grip to dominate and hold a region. Almost always the insurgents would arrive after dark and conditions allowing, disappear back into the bush before first light. (Author’s collection)

Official emblem of the once-proud SADF

1Personal correspondence with Dr John Cann, 2016.

2John P. Cann: Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961–1974, Hailer Publishing, Florida 2005; Brown Waters of Africa; Portuguese Riverine Warfare 1961–1974, Hailer, 2007; Flight Plan Africa: Portuguese Airpower in Counterinsurgency, 1961–1974; Helion, 2015.

3http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/portugals-hidden-atrocities

4Fred Bridgland, War for Africa: Twelve Months that Transformed a Continent; Ashanti Publishing, 1992.

5Talks with the former Prime Minister at his Harare home prior to his retiring to Cape Town.

6Al J. Venter; Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa, Helion, UK, 2012.

7Al J. Venter: Biafra’s War: 1967–70 – A Tribal War in Nigeria That Left a Million Dead; Helion, 2015.

8Al J. Venter: Barrel of a Gun: A War Correspondent’s Misspent Moments in Combat; Casemate Publishers, USA 2010.

PART I

OVERVIEW

Portuguese warfare in Africa revealed the limitations of the European state and its technological approach to warfare. Unlike Europe, Africa had almost limitless land and few easily identifiable strategic targets for the control of its wealth. Military objectives – as European strategists understood them – were hard to identify. Consequently, the rewards of campaigning for European troops were slight and the logistical problems often insuperable. The Afro-Portuguese therefore, not only learned to fight their wars in the only manner possible in Africa, but these wars came to have objectives which were only understandable and therefore achievable in an African context.

With apologies, source unknown

In contrast, Portugal did pretty damn well dominating its African dominions for five centuries. The last time anything like that was achieved was by Rome. Britain’s expansive fiefdoms across the globe lasted only a couple of centuries…

The author

I began my history at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war …

Thucydides

1

Angola’s War Against the Rebels – The Beginning of the End

Private armies are a far cry from the Sixties dogs of war.

John Keegan, Former Defence Correspondent, Daily Telegraph, London.

Very few military histories start halfway through the campaigns on which they are focussed. This book does exactly that, and for good reason. By capturing Jonas Savimbi’s diamond fields at Cafunfo (near the border with the Congo), a small group of South African mercenaries involved in Angola’s insurgent war effectively severed rebel access to the world outside. Once they had removed diamonds from the battlefield equation almost all UNITA’s external bank balances were effectively ‘frozen’. No sales of precious stones were being generated and that meant no money for weapons…

The great battle of Cafunfo lasted several weeks, though if you include the planning stages and movement of assets needed for such a military adventure, it took months.

The process involved a mechanized strike force that covered hundreds of kilometres in a distant corner of Africa that few of us had heard about, never mind visited. Throughout, the attackers consistently came under fire from an extremely determined adversary, many of whom were not afraid to die for a real or imagined ideal.

These battles – short, sharp and brutal – were fundamental to the kind of conventional onslaughts launched by both sides, the likes of which are rarely taught in such august establishments as West Point, Sandhurst or France’s elite École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr.

At the end of it, the consequences of government forces – sternly backed by a modest group of freelance fighters – taking the diamond fields after the Cafunfo battle were long term. In turn, the rebels had blown it.

Though hostilities would continue for a good while longer, UNITA – a political and guerrilla movement founded, nurtured and commanded by maverick insurgent leader Dr Jonas Savimbi – appeared to lose both the initiative and the momentum linked to the struggle, which had always been a hallmark of this rebel force.

Without the $200 million delivered annually by Cafunfo’s and Catoca’s alluvial diamond diggings, the rebels were deprived of a hefty proportion of the wherewithal they needed to fight their war. In contrast, the Luanda government was coining billions from oil, supplemented by the comparative ‘small change’ it got from diamonds.

In reality, the mechanized assault in Angola’s remote Lunda Norte Province in July 1994 should never have happened. The target lay at the far end of a virtually non-existent road in the middle of nowhere. Throughout, while moving towards its objective, the strike force was exposed in a region that had little cover and almost no prospect for back-up should things go wrong.

Air cover from several Mi-17s operating out of Saurimo – the city lies 300 kilometres to the east of Cafunfo (or roughly three hours flying time there and back) – and almost the entire area in-between was hostile. Should one of the helicopters be forced down, it would have been difficult for help to arrive in time. That did happen, several times in fact, but the saving grace was that South African mercenary aviators always insisted on two-ship operations. If one helicopter went down, the other would land and rescue passengers and crew.