Ultimately the South African advance was halted by a combination of bridges destroyed by retreating enemy and a rapid escalation of Cuban military support for the MPLA and its military wing FAPLA. It is also fair to say that a severe bout of political jitters affecting previously committed regimes, not least among them the United States, contributed much to a change of heart in Pretoria. The question now had to be asked: what would South Africa have done with Luanda should it have succeeded in taking the city? She could hardly have hoped to occupy Angola and certainly she would not have been able to hold onto the capital city for long. Moreover, the unpublished US guarantees and promises that had inspired Pretoria to undertake such an ambitious military expedition were now clearly no longer relevant, and with much lowing in the OAU pen regarding the legitimacy of the MPLA, and with a general acceptance internationally that this was so, there seemed little point in South Africa leaning further out on a limb to make a bad job good. Castro, it seemed, had dramatically raised the stakes on behalf of the Soviet bloc, called the bluff of the West and had won. Angola now lay within the Soviet–Cuban sphere of influence and there was nothing for it but for South Africa to effect an orderly withdrawal, conceding each district back to the MPLA as it did.
The best that could be said about it all was that South Africa now had a new regional ally in UNITA which, in fairness, was scant compensation for the loss of an old regional ally in Portugal and the arrival of SWAPO in liberated Angola with all the material and moral support that the MPLA and the Cubans and Soviets could offer. The FNLA had effectively dissipated in the aftermath of the disastrous defeat at Battle of Quifangondo which, incidentally, saw the South African support contingent evacuated from the coastal town of Ambrizete, some 150 kilometres north of Luanda, using inflatables and a SAAF Westland Wasp helicopter to shuttle men on board the SAS President Steyn in a combined South African naval and air force operation.
CHAPTER FOUR:
THE COLLAPSE OF PORTUGUESE RULE IN AFRICA: A NEW ERA AND A NEW ENEMY
Perhaps the most important lesson to be absorbed by South Africa in the aftermath of Savannah was how disadvantaged in the matter of equipment, armour and technology the defence establishment was after some 30 years of military malaise. The campaign had illustrated very clearly the limitations of guts and glory in the face of the sophisticated Soviet weaponry that was pouring into Angola and into the hands of FAPLA front-line units. South African artillerymen, as only one example, had on more than one occasion during Operation Savannah found themselves comprehensively outranged by their opponents and had only managed to keep one step ahead thanks to excellent training and very nimble tactics. The same was true in terms of air support, armoured vehicles and tanks, all of which prompted military planners at home to begin to give serious thought to plugging the gaps.
The difficulty, of course, was that South Africa was finding herself increasing constricted by the United Nations arms embargo and a general unwillingness on the part of key global arms suppliers to deal with the country. Britain, with its titanic post-colonial conscience, was among the first to restrict arms supplies to South Africa – ironic, many were apt to grumble, bearing in mind that South Africa had managed to overcome a natural aversion to the British in order to defend her empire in two world wars. South Africa, however, owned a fledgling arms industry which, ironically again, owed its existence to British encouragement and capital and which had produced a considerable amount of support matériel for the general Second World War Allied effort.
South Africa had begun, as we have heard, to fall from grace in the aftermath of the 1948 general election that introduced the National Party into power and which began the process of institutionalized apartheid that the global community would in due course begin to find so unpalatable. This increasingly negative sentiment on the part of various global forums peaked as a consequence of the March 1960 Sharpeville Massacre that saw some 69 blacks gunned down by police during an anti-pass law demonstration. The United Nations was finally nudged awake from an unquiet slumber over the matter of creeping South African race dichotomy and began issuing ever-more shrill edicts condemning the regime and encouraging voluntary international sanctions, in particular an arms embargo.
That Britain was among the first to respond perhaps goes some way to explain the South African choice of the French aircraft manufacturer Dassault Aviation for the acquisition of the substantial fleet of Mirage IIIs and F1s. The former were acquired in the early 1960s and included CZ interceptors, EZ ground-attack, BZ and DZ dual-seat trainers as well as photo-reconnaissance RZ versions of the aircraft. The decision to acquire an additional fleet of F1s was taken in 1969 but these did not begin to arrive in South Africa until 1975 and were unavailable at the time of Operation Savannah. The jet fighter force in fact only deployed permanently during the latter phases of the Border War, namely between 1978 and 1988.
In the meanwhile, an armaments production board had been established in 1964 for the purpose of controlling and monitoring general arms procurement, supply and manufacture for the SADF, South Africa at that point having shed the Union and established itself as a republic. Four years later the Industrial Development Corporation helped to establish a parastatal entity, the Armaments Development and Production Corporation, or Armscor, tasked with bringing together the many disparate elements of production, to establish new branches where needed and to oversee all arms imports and exports.
As the 1970s progressed international resolve against South Africa intensified. The mandatory arms embargo imposed by the United Nations in 1976, as had been the case with Rhodesia a decade earlier, simply had the effect of spurring local innovation and production and the quest for unorthodox markets and irregular partnerships. One of these was a strategic defence cooperation agreement with Israel that saw South African troops appearing in the field armed with Israeli Galil assault rifles, later replaced by the South African R4 assault rifle, a licensed variant of the Galil which came into service in 1982. Prior to this, South African troops had been armed with the R1 assault rifle, itself a licensed variant of the Fabrique Nationale FN FAL which was also supplied in large numbers to sanctions-constrained Rhodesia to the north.
It was during the 1980s that the South African Border War escalated and internationalized to the extent that it essentially became a conventional war. This, in combination with the international mood of the anti-apartheid movement, further constrained South Africa’s ability to source military matériel abroad. The 1980s was also a period of intense militarization within South Africa as the breadth and scope of the Border War spread and as the domestic arms industry began to produce a wider range of ever-more sophisticated weaponry and support equipment.
There were many examples of this. One such example is the development of the Olifant tank which was the result of a series of upgrades of the British Centurion tank, undertaken in part in cooperation with Israel that similarly used modified Centurions in its Sho’t programme. In the same way the Atlas Cheetah, produced by the Atlas Aircraft Corporation, was merely a homegrown upgrade of a Mirage III, evolving through several variants and resembling very closely the Israel Aircraft Industries Kfir, which was itself based on a Mirage V. Other aircraft produced locally by Atlas Aircraft Corporation, a key component industry of Armscor, were the Atlas Oryx, a medium-sized utility helicopter which began its development process as an Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma conversion, the Impala Mk I, an Italian Aermacchi MB-326 variant built in South Africa under licence, and the Bosbok and Kudu, Italian-designed light utility aircraft that saw consistent service throughout the Border War.