We were told that Air Rhodesia’s engineers and upper management were fully aware of what had been done to protect Dakotas and they agreed that a similar style of engineering could be employed to shroud Viscount exhaust pipes. The matter of repainting the Viscounts presented no special problem. However, despite a very cordial meeting, both Archie and I sensed that there was no real interest because Air Rhodesia’s managers seemed unable to accept that Strela would ever be a threat to civilian airliners.
Army Sub-JOC commanders
ON 4 JUNE 1974, LIEUTENANT-COLONEL Dave Parker, the Army Commander at JOC Darwin, asked me to take him along on a recce flight. He had been impressed with air recce successes and wanted to gain first-hand knowledge of how we searched for CT camps and what ground patterns attracted a pilot’s attention. His open-mindedness and desire to learn from direct experience was very refreshing. Throughout our flight his questions and observations made it plain that he was very switched-on. Having shown Dave a few bases I had found previously we were fortunate to find a new one that appeared to be in use. Surprisingly he saw the base more easily than many of the pilots I had trained and his excitement was infectious.
Three helicopters brought in twelve RLI troops. Dave could see immediately that they were going to be too thin on the ground to have any chance of boxing in the area around a camp site that offered the CTs a number of escape routes in good cover.
I directed the lead helicopter to position 150 metres to one side of the CT base by calling “Camp centre 150 to your right… NOW.” Troops were put down simultaneously on three sides of the camp before the lead helicopter climbed to 1,000 feet to direct the troops towards the camp. The other two put in dummy drops in gaps between the troops in an attempt to make CTs uncertain of which way to break. They then returned to Mount Darwin for more troops.
Contact was made before Dave and I saw two groups of four CTs breaking at high speed through a huge gap between the soldiers. Being unarmed I could do nothing about this, and the orbiting helicopter was already engaging CTs inside the camp. We had to be content with two CTs killed and one captured wounded with no less than eight CTs seen to escape. This experience certainly highlighted for Dave Parker the reason why Air Force had been asking to concentrate helicopters with permanent reaction troops, not simply to reduce the size of gaps, but to improve soldiers’ efficiency under the direction of their own airborne commanders. Greater levels of immediate intelligence flowing from Selous Scouts made the availability of this type of reaction group all the more important.
There had been a few successes when helicopters and troops were brought together with an Army commander directing his troops from a helicopter. For the most part, however, helicopters had been penny-packeted to meet far too many unprofitable calls. This had been at high cost considering the unacceptably low returns for effort expended.
It so happened that two Alouette gunships were used for the first time on this very day, though neither one was available for our small action. Earlier in the day, Flight Lieutenant Rob McGregor and Sergeant Henry Jarvie had flown top cover to trooping helicopters. When the trooper helicopters had left the scene, a well-known wounded CT leader, who was hiding in a hut with other wounded CTs, pinned down the ground forces. This gave Rob and Henry opportunity to employ their 20mm side-firing cannon, which resulted in the death of all the CTs. During the late afternoon Flight Lieutenant John Annan and Sergeant Morris fired their cannon in another action but with no confirmed results.
The arrival of gunships, improving Selous Scouts effectiveness and Dave Parker’s influence in the field made it possible, at last, to introduce the permanent reaction force the Air Force had been advocating for some time. The Air Force had not been alone in seeking this concentration of forces because a number of RLI commando commanders had been pressing for the same thing. To my own knowledge these included RLI Captains Jerry Strong, Pat Armstrong and Dumpy Pearce.
As with the Portuguese assault force at Estima, this involved grouping troops, trooper helicopters, helicopter gunships and armed fixed-wing aircraft. We could not possibly match the lift capacity of the Portuguese but we had the advantage of having very aggressive RLI soldiers and could provide their commanders a seat in a gunship from which to observe and direct them. The continuous presence of a gunship overhead each action also facilitated immediate supporting fire to ground troops or to engage targets moving beyond their reach.
Within a few days this reaction force, soon to be called Fireforce, was put into effect and the results achieved over the following six months were astounding. Dave Parker had much to do with bringing the first permanent combined force into being at Mount Darwin.
Dave was a truly superb individual who was held in high regard by all who knew him. He was blessed with many talents that included flexibility of mind and a desire to actively seek and receive the opinions of others without regard to their rank. He absorbed everything he heard before reaching decisions that were reduced to clear-cut plans and instructions. He also had the rare ability to admit to occasional error, never offering excuses for his own mistakes. It was no wonder that the RLI troops nicknamed Dave Parker ‘The King’.
Five weeks after my flight with Dave Parker I flew with Lieutenant-Colonel Bert Barnard, an RAR officer. Bert was the Army commander at JOC Centenary, the post he had held from the outset of Op Hurricane. Along with most Army and Air Force officers I found Bert Barnard to be the exact opposite of Dave Parker. He was pompous, highly self-opinionated and intolerant of opinions emanating from any rank below his own.
My Flying Logbook shows that he accompanied me on a visual recce sortie that lasted for only one hour and twenty-fve minutes. Bert became bored and asked to return to Centenary on the pretext of matters requiring his urgent attention; a marked contrast to Dave Parker’s flight of over six hours, following which he had expressed disbelief at having been airborne so long.
Fireforce might have come into effect much sooner, admittedly without gunships, had Bert Barnard listened to Air Force and RLI opinion. However, none of us had yet realised that we should have pressed for penny-packeting of helicopters to bring him, inevitably, to the opposite view of needing to concentrate forces.
Fireforce and Scouts
ON COMPLETION OF TRIALS AND training for the new 20mm helicopter cannons, helicopters and RLI commandos teamed up to form two assault forces, initially comprising one 20mm gunship and four trooper helicopters, each carrying four soldiers. Mount Darwin and Centenary had one force each.
To distinguish between gunships, Rhodesian troopers and SAAF troopers, abbreviations were introduced. Influenced by a popular British Police TV series then showing in Salisbury and entitled ‘Zed Cars’, the helicopters became:
K-Car (Kay)—gunship (killer)-cum-command post