A CT had his leg blown off just below the knee by an anti-personnel mine during an attempted crossing from Mozambique into Rhodesia. His companions, ignoring his pleas for help, high-tailed back into Mozambique leaving the stricken man to his fate. The fellow lay in the minefield all night and was only found by a routine patrol at about 10 o’clock next morning. A helicopter was called for, but it was impossible in the meanwhile for the Territorial soldiers to enter the minefield to administer first aid.
In spite of enormous blood loss, severe shock and a long cold lonely night, the CT was still conscious and able to communicate with the soldiers whilst awaiting rescue. There was then considerable danger for the Air Force technician who was lowered to the injured man by hoist, but he was placed in the small crater made by the mine that had blown the CT’s leg away. Without moving his feet the technician secured the CT, then both were lifted into the safety of the helicopter cabin and flown straight to the Selous Scouts ‘fort’ at Mtoko.
In the small hospital within the fort, the attending doctor put the CT on blood and saline drips then attended to the stump of his shattered leg. He expressed amazement that the CT had survived so long but had no doubt he would regain strength quickly. I was at Mtoko at the time and was taken into the fort to see this CT during his first evening in hospital. He was propped up in bed with blood and saline lines to both arms. His colour was a pasty grey, his face was drawn and his eyes half-closed.
I saw him again the following evening and could not believe this was the same man. Although still on drips he was sitting up in bed shirtless because the weather was hot. The man’s shiny black skin enhanced his muscular upper body. The grey was gone and his face was full of smiles. Few, if any, white men could have survived such an ordeal, let alone recovered so rapidly.
The CT had already been ‘turned’ in this short time but, because of ZANLA’s propaganda, he had some doubts for his safety in Selous Scouts hands. So he offered to take the Scouts to the base in Mozambique from which he and his group had come. When asked how he would do this he said he was fit enough to hop all the way.
Odds and sods
IN SOME AVIATION MAGAZINE I read of someone using a fixed-wing aircraft to rescue a man from the ground whilst airborne. I was intrigued by the technique described and attempted to do it myself. The idea was to let out a long length of rope from the rear cabin (about 500 feet of rope), with a suitable dead weight at its end, then turn steeply towards the rope’s end in the manner of a dog chasing its own tail. By holding the turn, the majority of the rope was supposed to descend with its end section hanging vertically downwards. With correct handling of turn and height it was reported that the weighted end of the rope could be positioned over any selected spot. This allowed a man on the ground to take hold of a slip harness, fit it under his shoulders, remove the weight and await uplift.
Once the man was secure in the harness, the pilot simply had to increase power, still in the turn, to lift him clear of the ground before rolling out into straight and level flight. Thereafter the man at the end of the rope could be placed back on the ground in another location in similar manner to his uplift. Alternatively, he could be hauled up into the aircraft.
My trial might have succeeded had the Trojan been able to sustain a very tight turn but this proved impossible because of that aircraft’s power limitation, so the experiment was dropped.
In one of the Hunters hangars at Thornhill a tractor used for towing aircraft to and from the flight lines refused to start one very cold morning. One of the technicians decided he had the solution. He placed a ‘little bit’ of Avpin in the carburettor to get the engine running. When subjected to pressure, Avpin combusted spontaneously giving off the high volumes of gas that powered the Hunter’s Avpin starter-motor turbines. But Avpin was certainly not suited to containment because its gas generating potential was awesome. It took just one turn of the tractor’s starter motor for the ‘little bit’ of Avpin to blow the tractor engine’s head clean off the engine block and through the high roof of the hangar.
In the self-same hangar another hole was made in the roof, but in this incident the circumstances where far from amusing. Armourer Mike Ongers was standing on the Hunter ejector seat he was servicing when the ejector cartridge fired. The seat itself went through the roof but Mike impacted the roof and was thrown back through overhead lights before dropping onto the concrete floor of the hangar. His injuries committed him to a wheelchair for life.
On 4 Squadron the technicians were getting very upset with my Squadron Warrant Officer, Spike Owens. They complained that their WO was nicking their costly tools thereby forcing them to take special precaution whenever Spike was around.
Spike Owens had come to Rhodesia from the RAF many years before and was well known for his huge collection of vehicle parts and home appliances which he claimed he had bought at bargain prices with the intention of re-selling them for profit. His collection included every tool imaginable. Where he got all these things from I cannot say but Spike was always able to produce spare parts and items that were hard to find.
I was very fond of Spike. He was always bright and helpful and I was especially thankful for his resourcefulness when it came to keeping our aircraft flying. Any suggestion that he might have ‘inadvertently’ picked up so and so’s tools was met with vehement denial. I could not pin him down but remained pretty sceptical. Nevertheless the unfortunate nickname given him by Henry Jarvie stuck. ‘WOBOTOC’ stood for Warrant Officer Bill Owens Thieving Old C.…
FAC errors and successes
CHRIS WEINMANN COMMENCED VISUAL RECCE in Mozambique on his own on 16 February 1974. Two days later he called for jet action on a large camp he had found just north of the River Daque fairly close to the Rhodesian border. This base had definitely not existed ten days earlier when Chris, Brian and I had been together on recce training. He chose to fly to Salisbury to brief Canberra and Hunter crews for a strike that for some reason or other did not involve FAC marking. Bill Buckle provided photographs taken for mapping purposes during the dry conditions of winter and, on these, Chris marked the extremities of the area to be struck from the target picture he had in his mind. The target of approximately 700 metres in length and 600 metres wide appeared to be a combined FRELIMO and ZANLA base.
An attack plan was formulated in which four Canberras, flown by Squadron Leader Randy Du Rand, Ian Donaldson, Mike Delport and Prop Geldenhuys would employ ‘lead-bomb technique’ to deliver two loads of nine 500-pound bombs and two loads of ninety-six 28-pound fragmentation bombs. The Canberras would be followed by four Hunters, flown by Don Northcroft, Ginger Baldwin, Rick Culpan and Jim Stagman firing 30mm cannon on the periphery of the target with re-strikes to fill in any obvious gaps that appeared within the Canberra bomb patterns.
Lead-bomb technique involved the lead bomber passing to his No 2 an aiming correction if his first bomb was not spot-on its intended strike point. I strongly opposed this method of bombing live terrorist camps because the delay between each stick of bombs gave terrorists way too much time to run clear of target. Lead-bomb technique was only suited to fixed targets such as ammunition dumps, fuel storage farms and buildings.