In this particular case, two K-Cars, six G-Cars and two Lynx moved to c/s 24B, who reported that he was two hours behind the CTs. Flight Lieutenant Ginger Baldwin, flying lead K-Car, was surprised by the speed at which c/s 24B was covering ground on horseback. He knew the Fireforce troops could not possibly keep up with them and, since there was no fuel close at hand, decided to land the helicopters and await developments. The two Lynx loitered over the helicopters and maintained communications with 24B.
The horses were watered at a pan where c/s 24B reported twenty-nine CTs had been at water’s edge about one hour earlier. Noting how far this pan was from a game fence that lay beyond, Ginger decided to deploy two stop groups to the fence on the line of movement. This had only just been done when 24B called contact. The Fireforce was over the CTs shortly afterwards and learned that one of 24B’s men had been killed during the engagement.
Ginger described the ground over which most of the aircraft took on groups of bomb-shelling CTs as “… so flat and vegetation so uniform that it was impossible to pinpoint a specific point.”
Tol’s comments on the ASR were:
(1) The FAF 9 Lynx, K-Car and G-cars were positioned with the FAF 7 Fireforce when the follow-up started. This resulted in a combined effort of 2 Lynx, 2 K-Cars and 6 G-Cars being brought to bear when contact was made.
(2) The final count was 40 killed and 13 wounded captured, 8 with weapons. Intelligence has confirmed that 10 ters were escorting 97 recruits to Mozambique for a week of training before returning to Rhodesia with weapons. This contact will no doubt discourage recruits from willingly joining the ters.
(3) It would have been almost impossible to tell who was a terrorist and who a recruit once contact had been made, particularly as the MIU rifleman was killed in the initial engagement.
From our point of view, any man who would be returning to the country trained and armed within a few days, was a CT already.
Chapter 8
Project Alpha
FOR MANY YEARS I HAD questioned the effectiveness of conventional bombs and rockets. Earliest doubts about the efficiency of cylindrical-shaped bombs and warheads were confirmed when I studied their effects at the conclusion of the big Air Force Weapons Display at Kutanga Range twelve years earlier, back in 1964.
Senior officers had laughed off these concerns because they had used the weapons during WWII and had nothing but praise for their efficiency. In fact one very senior WWII officer asked, “What gives a young puppy like you the right to question proven weapons?”
Whilst agreeing that they were well suited to many of the situations for which they had been designed, I was unable to convince my seniors that these same weapons were totally unsuited to counter-insurgency bush warfare. During my FAC work with jets, I watched many strikes but these only reinforced my lack of faith in both imported and homemade bombs.
For over eighteen months Canberras had been limited to using 250-pound, 500-pound and 1,000-pound bombs, none of which was effective and they all involved unacceptably high expenditure of valuable foreign currency. Everything pointed to a need for a drastic change to provide Canberras a safe and effective anti-personnel strike capability.
Although work had continued in an ongoing effort to sort out the 28-pound fragmentation bomb problem that led to the destruction of a Canberra, this weapon system could only be employed with any degree of accuracy inside the Strela missile and anti-aircraft gun envelopes. This in itself was unacceptable, but the thin line of widely spread, puny detonations running through any target was also unacceptable. What we needed was an anti-personnel weapons system that would give a Canberra clout to match its load carrying potential. For safety reasons alone, such a system had to allow Canberras to fly over the most hostile of targets below 500 feet at speeds exceeding 280 knots. If this attack profile could be achieved, it would render Strela harmless and would also substantially reduce threats from manually operated guns.
I was certain we needed a system based on large numbers of small bomblets that could be induced to spread laterally in a wide carpet over an effective strike length of at least 800 metres. Each bomblet would have to retard very rapidly to be well behind the aircraft at the moment of detonation. And, of paramount importance, each detonation had to occur above ground to ensure that shrapnel reached an enemy hiding in ground recesses and trenches.
Having read about the USAAF’s use of solid steel ball bearings to flatten sizeable sections of jungle in Vietnam, I became interested in the idea of producing spherical bomblets. High-speed, low-level deliveries of enormous quantities of three-inch steel balls released from Phantom jets had been used to clear thick jungle vegetation. What really caught my eye in the USAAF article was the fact that balls spread themselves laterally during their short flight to ground.
One foundry in Salisbury and another in Bulawayo produced thousands of round balls for me. Because I was in a hurry and needed to keep costs down, the lead balls they manufactured were crudely made. The bag and string system I employed to release clusters of two-inch and three-inch lead balls from a Canberra, flying at 300 knots at 500 feet, was just as crude. No wonder the Canberra crews were not at all impressed with ‘PB playing high-speed marbles’ but I needed, and got, answers from the drop tests. Firstly, it was clear that turbulence from leading balls forced those following in their wake to move sideways. Instead of striking ground in a straight thin line, a random scattering of both two-inch and three-inch lead balls occurred along the attack-line; some as far as forty metres either side of centre. Secondly, the balls left long grooves in the Kutanga Range sandveld but every one of them lifted back into flight and thirdly, the balls retained lethal velocity way beyond first contact with ground.
I was encouraged by these results and was considering where to go from there when providence took a hand. Senior Staff Officer Air Armaments, Squadron Leader Ron Dyer, was my right-hand man in all air weapons projects. Immediately after our crude tests he brought his predecessor, retired Squadron Leader Ken Gibson, to see me in my office Ken was then working for the engineering firm that manufactured our locally designed bombs and Frantans. Because he knew something of what Ron Dyer and I were doing, Ken had come to Air HQ to give us wonderful news.
An engineer who had recently joined the company was studying the 28-pound fragmentation bomb problems with the managing director of the company who had designed the system in the first place. The specific problem they were studying concerned safety of nose fuses which, though designed to activate bombs just above ground level, had been responsible for the premature detonation that killed two officers and destroyed a Canberra.
Ken told us that when the new engineer learned of the importance of airburst, he said it might be easier and safer to produce round bombs that would find ground level for themselves. The ground impact would initiate a delay fuse as the bomb bounced back into flight to detonation at a chosen height, just as we had been considering. Ken Gibson could not have brought better news and I set off immediately with Ron to visit the company.
For convenience the managing director of the company, whom I had know for some years, will be referred to as Denzil and the man with the new ideas, Bev. We were introduced to Bev whom I took to immediately. We had a long discussion during which he said the bouncing-bomb idea was no more than that—just an idea. I told him why I favoured this approach and why I had been testing spheres to facilitate low, safe and accurate delivery with maximum lateral distribution. Since Bev had no experience with bombs or bombing and did not know any of the inherent dangers involved, he needed to learn about the operational requirements for the Canberra, as I saw them. I told him of my experiences and the reasons I wanted to move away from conventional bombs.