By late afternoon the demolition teams were running low on explosives and the defending troops needed more mortar bombs to hold off troublesome ZANLA and FRELIMO forces that were firing at them from beyond the town’s outskirts. The Dakota landed for the third time that day, but this was shortly before sunset. Instead of offloading and taking off immediately, the aircraft was held up when the skipper agreed to a Scouts request to wait a while to load more captured equipment. In this case aircrew willingness to assist the Army turned out to be a very bad mistake because two hours elapsed between landing and the Dakota commencing its take-off run.
Enemy forces using the cover of darkness had been given plenty of time to establish themselves close to the centre of the runway. The hail of bullets and RPG rockets that followed the Dakota, just as it lifted off, gave it no hope of survival. Flight Lieutenant Bruce Collocott in the co-pilot’s seat died instantly, the starboard engine was knocked out and leaking fuel ignited.
Skipper Jerry Lynch had no option but to close down the port engine and land straight ahead. He did an amazing job to bring the crippled aircraft to a controlled halt, allowing survivors to escape from the aircraft. His attempts to get Bruce out of his seat nearly cost Jerry his life before being forced to abandon the attempt due to the blazing inferno around him. Bruce Collocott, with his ever-ready wit was a great loss to the Air Force. So too was the loss of the very first Dakota ever owned by the Southern Rhodesian Air Force. By instruction of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, South Africa had sold it to Rhodesia in 1947 at a ridiculously low price.
Flechettes
THE FRENCH PRODUCED AN ANTI-PERSONNEL warhead for 68mm Sneb rockets that incorporated thousands of tiny darts known as ‘flechettes’. When the rockets were fired they flew for just under one second before explosive charges burst warhead casings to release the flechettes into very high-speed free flight. A salvo of flechette-carrying Snebs resulted in a dense cloud of lethal darts covering a large area of ground.
For reasons I never understood, flechette rockets were forbidden by international law because the darts, upon impact with a human body, had the habit of tumbling and making nasty exit wounds. Yet ordinary rifle bullets, which caused more damage and were just as lethal, were considered acceptable. This has never made sense to me.
From as early as 1964 I had been interested in the possibility of using clusters of free-flying darts as a lethal weapon system. This had nothing to do with very lightweight rocket-borne flechettes that relied on very high velocity to make them lethal. I was thinking of large quantities of heavy darts flying in dense formation to produce an instant effect on the ground that could only be achieved by hundreds of machine-guns firing simultaneously.
At the time I was preparing Kutanga Range for the weapons demonstration in 1964, I loaded two teargas carriers with as many six-inch nails as they would accommodate. Flying a Provost, I delivered these from low level at 240 knots. The test was unofficial and was only known to the Kutanga Range staff. The standard flat head of the nails did not give all the nails stability, but those that struck nose-first embedded quite deeply into the trunks of hardwood trees. The test was sufficient to show that the use of six-inch nail shafts incorporating flight stabilisers would be lethal if delivered fast enough. In 1976 I was in a position to extend my explorations officially.
I arranged for an unserviceable Vampire long-range fuel tank to be modified to incorporate a downward opening trapdoor that was activated by the bomb-release button on the control column. Station Workshop at Thornhill produced 2,000 darts from six-inch nails whose flat heads had been removed and substituted by three small in-line fins.
A single-drop trial at 350 knots proved the accuracy, density and lethality of the darts. So, as soon as the Golf bomb project allowed, I turned attention to the matter and a file marked Project Hotel was opened. The project’s aim was to produce many thousands of ‘six-inch flechettes’ for carriage by faster-flying Hunters in large releasable under-wing dispensers.
My visit to the Bulawayo factory that manufactured six-inch nails resulted in an emphatic “technically impossible” response when I asked for nails with no heads, but then an equally emphatic “Yes we can produce them”, when I explained their purpose. My next visit was to a plastic-moulding company in Salisbury that produced the moulds for the plastic fin design that I had sketched in the MD’s personal diary. The fins were pressure-moulded from recycled plastic and force-fitted over the blunt ends of the six-inch shafts to turn them into flechettes.
Bev designed and produced a purpose-made flechette dispenser that looked just like a streamlined bomb. It incorporated four radiused panels that, together, formed the main cylindrical body enclosing and bearing the heavy charge of 4,500 flechettes. Each of the four panels was secured at its front end to an explosive nose cone and was hinged at its rear into the forward ring of the flight stabiliser cone.
Upon release from its carrier a loaded dispenser dropped free for half a second before the nose cone’s explosive charge fired. This released the front anchors of the four panels that rotated outwards and rearward in the air-stream to release 4,500 flechettes into free flight. 50% of the load was packed facing backwards to ensure maximum content but this enhanced lateral distribution at the expense of inconsequential retardation.
Tests conducted from Hunters, off a standard front-gun attack proved that the new weapon was accurate and highly effective. Released in pairs at speeds in excess of 450 knots resulted in an immensely dense cloud of 9,000 flechettes flying a shallow trajectory, which made survival of exposed people impossible within in the 900-metre-long by seventy-metre-wide strike area.
To give some idea of a flechette strike from a single Hunter—it would require no less than four hundred and fifty .303 Browning machine-guns firing in unison to match the projectile density in the single second it took for all flechettes, first to last, to reach ground.
The flechette-dispensing system was cheap; it did not involve foreign currency expenditure and, unlike exploding weapons, was totally safe to the delivering aircraft. The system was demonstrated to Air Staff and immediately cleared for operational use, though the question of how our very large stable flechettes might be affected by the international ruling against small flechettes was never resolved. Because there was some doubt, we restricted their employment to strikes inside the country.
Having proved the flechette system for Hunters, I wondered if they could be useful for Canberra night-strikes. Being a silent weapon, I imagined what psychological effects they might have on CT morale if the silent death darts swarmed into ZANLA’s external bases when the CTs were up and about during the night when they felt safest. Using a long delay to cater for the free flight time, we tested one flechette dispenser dropped by a Canberra flying 20,000 feet above target. We needed to know the distribution pattern created by such a drop and a water target was best suited for the purpose.