Perhaps the most iconic item of South African mechanized infantry hardware is the six-wheel-drive Ratel IFV, a highly versatile and adaptable infantry fighting vehicle which, in keeping with the customary lineage of many South African innovations, arrived on the drawing board once the fleet of British FV603 Alvis Saracens in service in the SADF ceased to be viable once spare parts became unobtainable. Design work on the Ratel variants began in 1968 with the first prototypes being completed in 1974. Production by Sandock-Austral began in 1976 with the first vehicles being introduced into service the following year. Another cornerstone product was the G5 155mm howitzer which came into being to correct the disadvantages suffered by South African artillerymen outranged on the battlefield by sophisticated Soviet-supplied heavy guns. The G6 self-propelled howitzer was developed around the ordnance of the G5 but with a motorized and mine-protected wheeled chassis. During Operation Savannah the South Africans had been exposed to the highly intimidating 122mm BM-21 rocket launcher, the Stalin Organ of popular battlefield mythology, which, although proving itself to have more bark than bite, nonetheless was copied by the South Africans from a captured model to produce the 127mm Valkiri multiplerocket launcher.
The list of South African-innovated, -pirated and -produced battlefield hardware is long but is perhaps best defined by an anecdote related to the development of a South African-produced flight helmet. The first hostile encounters over the skies of Angola with enemy MiGs gave added impetus to the development of the South African V3 series of air-to-air missiles which were designed to be integrated with a helmet-mounted sight, also of South African design. Development of the helmets began in 1975 with the SAAF being the first air force to fly operationally with this type of system. However, one of these helmets was stolen by Soviet spy and ex-South Africa Navy commodore Dieter Gerhardt who duly passed it over to his handlers. In later years, once South African isolation had been lifted and diplomatic relations normalized, it was found that the helmet sight in operational use by the Russian Air Force was basically that stolen from the South Africans.
All this was in preparation for a rapidly evolving battlefield dynamic. By the dawn of 1976, the MPLA was in effective control of the government and the lion’s share of the territorial expanse of Angola. The FNLA was no longer a force of any particular consequence while UNITA, under the charismatic leadership of Jonas Savimbi, remained in existence but savagely depleted in the aftermath of the South African withdrawal.
UNITA clung to a limited swath of territory in the remote south/central provinces of Angola, overlapping the ethnic heartland of the Ovimbundu group, in effect establishing a separate government with its capital in Huambo, Nova Lisboa of yore, and a key centre on the strategically important Benguela railway line that linked the Atlantic port of Lobito to the interior.
In the meanwhile, South African military activity along the border remained for all intents and purposes a classic, low-level counter-insurgency containment. Routine foot and vehicle patrols augmented by deep-penetration reconnaissance were the tool of choice. Here the skills of the individual hunter/killer operative often led to direct contact or intelligence build-ups that allowed for more orchestrated infantry or airborne actions to take place. Alongside this, covert military support continued to be given to UNITA in respect of the fact that the organization, if not advancing South African interests by its own agenda, was at least hostile to SWAPO and a force multiplier in a situation where politics often proscribed the limits of South African military action. In this type of action the SAAF returned to its support role, with the transport pilots of 28 Squadron doing the usual heavy lifting, the Kudus and Bosboks plying the cut-line on Telstar (airborne radio relay) duty and the Pumas and Alouettes backing up the troops in the field with vital supply, deployment and casevac. The Bosboks and Kudus also undertook air reconnaissance, target-marking, casevac, liaison duties and countless other mundane tasks essential in maintaining an effective air operation.
The Mirages only arrived on the scene during 1978 once the difficult political decision had been made to permit what the military men had been urging for some time: to take the war to the enemy by mounting aggressive cross-border raids in the same way that the Rhodesians were doing in Mozambique and Zambia, cutting the enemy to pieces where he was concentrated and dealing with him before he had a chance to infiltrate the country.
The difficulty in making this decision lay in the fact that, notwithstanding many grotesque battlefield and politicization practices, the revolutionary–guerrilla organizations held the moral high ground by dint of their particular place in history, and could be relied upon to make optimum use of any propaganda coup that the South Africans might offer them by focusing their (the South African) operational superiority on the business of killing ‘gooks’ in large numbers. Such was the case during the Battle of Cassinga where the SADF in combination with the SAAF delivered SWAPO, and by extension FAPLA, a mauling of such intensity that it is arguable if the organization ever fully recovered. The political fallout was indeed shrill and highly embellished, and the South African reputation was certainly further damaged, but the fact remained that patrolling the border could ultimately achieve nothing like the sort of kill rates that a combined operation could achieve against an unsuspecting guerrilla rear base.
The action at Cassinga was part of a larger operation codenamed Reindeer that sought to eliminate a widely dispersed selection of SWAPO bases as well as a much larger concentration focused around the old iron mining town of Cassinga, codenamed Moscow by SWAPO, and pioneered as a joint venture between the Portuguese authorities and the German Krupp family. The town is situated some 250 kilometres within Angola and had been identified as a key SWAPO forward operational headquarters with the capacity to hold upward of 1,200 combatants. The plan to capture it involved a combined airstrike and Parabat assault against a well-fortified and well-defended position, with the 250 earmarked troops being airlifted out after the operation by an armada of helicopters.
