The first of these was Operation Cucumber which took place between 6 and 9 July and involved four SAAF Canberras accompanying RhAF Canberras on a low-level attack on a ZANLA base southeast of Cabora Bassa dam in the Tete Province of Mozambique.[13] Between 21 and 24 August 12 Squadron was again alongside RhAF Canberras, this time in an operation codenamed Placid, attacking ZIPRA targets in Zambia: four in Mulungusi, one in Rufunsa and two in Solwezi. The most iconic and memorable SAAF/RhAF combined operation, however, was Operation Uric, or Bootlace as it was codenamed in South Africa, which took place between 2 and 8 September 1979 and involved a comprehensive series of ground and air attacks on various targets along the Limpopo corridor running between the Mozambican capital of Maputo and the Rhodesian border at Malvernia/Vila Salazar.
Operation Uric was one of a series of hard-hitting, lastminute operations staged by the exhausted but unbroken Rhodesian security forces as a curtain-call to 90 years of proud military tradition, much of it undertaken in the company of the Springboks; certainly the involvement of the SAAF in this operation was a fitting valediction to a fading partner in arms. The operation required virtually every air asset the RhAF could put in the air and more besides. The Rhodesian commitment included eight aging Hawker Hunter strike jets, six Canberras, 12 C-47 Dakotas, six Cessna Lynx and 28 helicopters, mainly Alouette IIIs but also including a small flight of Bell 205s. The South African contribution amounted to 15 Pumas and two Super Frelons drawn from 19 and 15 squadrons respectively.
The operation involved a series of precision airstrikes targeting primarily the rail and road bridges up the length of the Limpopo corridor, with engineers and members of the SAS attempting to demolish the substantial road and rail bridge over the Limpopo at Aldeia da Barragem adjacent to the town of Chirunduo. An RhAF Bell 205 was lost during this action with a Rhodesian flight engineer killed and, although the bridge was seriously damaged, it was not destroyed. The operation also witnessed the loss of a South African Puma that was brought down by an RPG-7 rocket fired from the ground. The missile impacted the helicopter immediately behind the pilot, causing a violent roll to the right before the ship crashed into the ground in a ball of flame. Killed were Captain Paul Denzel Velleman, co-pilot Lieutenant Nigel David Osborne and flight engineer Sergeant Dirk Wilhelmus Marthinus (Dick) Retief. None of the 14 Rhodesian soldiers on board survived. The moment marked the single-worst loss of life sustained in combat by the Rhodesian security forces since the onset of the war. Two South African Puma pilots were decorated for valour after the battle: Commandant Breytenbach was awarded the Honoris Crux (Sliver) and Major Stannard the Honoris Crux.
Bootlace was followed soon afterward by Operation Miracle, another Rhodesian external raid, this time targeting a widely dispersed ZANLA base close to the Mozambican town of Chimoio. To this operation the SAAF contributed two Canberras. In late October, the last collaboration with the RhAF was Operation Tepid, a major airstrike on a ZIPRA camp situated midway between Kariba and Lusaka. Again, it was the SAAF Canberras that took part.
By the end of 1979, the war in Rhodesia was effectively over and within a few months the curtain was drawn on the brief but dramatic history of this, the last problem child of the British Empire. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe became a new member of the OAU and the Front Line States, while South Africa inherited yet another hostile black African country committed to her destruction. Political focus now shifted to South West Africa, and the independence agenda for a territory that the United Nations now officially referred to as Namibia.
South West Africa had initially been legally governed by South Africa as a League of Nations mandate which continued to be the case beyond the Second World War, notwithstanding gentle pressure from the League for South Africa to not grow too attached to the territory. Pretoria had indeed begun to regard South West Africa as a fifth province of the Union, making no secret of the fact that this was precisely how she would like to see the matter of future sovereignty resolved.
However, in 1966, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2145 that both terminated South Africa’s mandate over South West Africa and assumed responsibility for the territory itself. A year later the Council for Namibia was formed with a view to mapping out a route toward independence in keeping with the general handover of power to indigenous responsibility that was underway continent-wide. South Africa ignored all this, continuing instead to integrate South West Africa into the South African political system, complete with a blueprint for the establishment of South African-style bantustans (black ‘homelands’).
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the UN worked hard to pry South West Africa loose from South African control. World opinion, certainly where it mattered most, tended to be ambivalent at best. South Africa remained open for business, and business was good. South Africa, it must be remembered, occupied an economic stratum that bore almost no resemblance to any other on the continent. The SAAF, just as one example, was flying Mirage FIs, not one of which had been paid for by donor funds and nor were any current military assets gifts from a friendly government. South Africa was solvent and it had influence.
The 1980s, on the other hand, was very different. The international organization of the anti-apartheid movement had developed considerably, with placements in every major world capital, with ambassadors at large such as Winnie Mandela and Desmond Tutu and with such icons of the struggle as Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela to call on, an era of powerful and popular grassroot global support for change in South Africa was introduced. Most importantly though, South Africa found herself strategically alone and backed into a corner. In September 1978, United Nations Security Council Resolution 435 was adopted that proposed a ceasefire and UN-supervised elections in South African-controlled South West Africa, which ultimately was to lead to the independence of Namibia, nullifying any efforts South Africa was attempting to make to develop an internal settlement with moderate black interests that did not include SWAPO.
Throughout the remainder of the life of the Cold War, South Africa resisted ongoing and intensifying United Nations pressure for an inclusive settlement, stating consistently, and not altogether unreasonably, that an unopposed SWAPO walk-in and the unashamedly Marxist-oriented administration of Namibia that would undoubtedly occur was unacceptable to South Africa. This would remain the position until the collapse of the Soviet Union, at the end of the 1980s, removed the basis of this argument.
13
ZANLA, or the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, was the armed wing of ZANU, one of two nationalist factions fighting to overthrow white rule in Rhodesia.