The SAS stay-behind forces remained in ambush positions for the night and accounted for more CTs who thought all the Rhodesians had gone home. Early next morning, these men destroyed whatever buildings and equipment remained before helicopters recovered them along with selected equipment, and piles of captured documents.
Chimoio Base lay littered with bodies, burned-out structures and destroyed equipment. Hundreds of wounded ZANLA were pouring into FRELIMO’s provincial town of Chimoio. The two ZANLA commanders we had hoped to take out, Josiah Tongogara and Rex Nhongo, were not in base and escaped as they had done before and would do time and time again.
We knew that, when they gathered courage to do so, ZANLA’s leadership would visit the battle-site to ensure that all evidence of ZANLA’s arms was removed. They must do this before calling international observers to witness the burial of ‘Zimbabwean refugees’ because ZANLA had registered Chimoio Base, along with all other military establishments, as a refugee camp.
We knew that particular attention would be given to showing the UN High Commission for Refugees the bodies of a number of teenagers killed at Chimoio. These were the school children that had been forced, or enticed, to leave schools in Rhodesia to undergo military training in Mozambique. No doubt the chalk boards and timetables the SAS soldiers had seen in two classrooms would have been cleared of their Marxist slogans and instructions on weapons-handling. They were sure to have been adorned with make-believe items ‘to prove their good works in teenager education’.
Phase One of Op Dingo was over. The countdown for Phase Two had already started as emergency repairs to the helicopters were hurried through with little time to spare.
Tembue attack
THE EASTERN SKY HAD ONLY just begun to light up on Friday, 25 November, as twenty-two helicopters lifted out of Mtoko and Mount Darwin on the first leg of the 320-kilometre journey to Tembue. The reserve force of ten helicopters was to follow one hour later with spares.
Squadron Leader Rex Taylor, with a small team of Air Force VR and RLI troops, awaited the arrival of the helicopters at a ‘staging base’. This base was sited at the eastern end of a long, flat, high feature known as ‘the Train’ lying between the Rhodesian border and Lake Cabora Bassa in Tete Province. The mountain was so named because, when viewed from the south, it resembled a steam engine with a long line of carriages travelling in a westerly direction. Our landing point approximated to the position of the guard’s van.
Rex and his men had positioned the previous day to receive a large supply of fuel by para-drop. With plenty of time to spare, the fuel drums had been set out neatly throughout the open ground of the staging base and all parachutes were stacked out of harm’s way. Everything seemed unhurried as the helicopters refuelled in the crisp, early morning air.
The 176-kilometre leg from here to Tembue would normally be the maximum range for an Alouette carrying a full load of laden troops inside Rhodesia. However, being only 2,000 feet above sea level in cold conditions, it was possible for the trooper helicopters to carry an extra ten-minutes’ worth of fuel to cater for unexpected situations. Norman Walsh’s command helicopter and the K-Cars with full fuel-loads could fly to Tembue and remain over target for a little more than one hour.
I enjoyed flying low-level over territory that was so familiar to me from my recce days. The countryside was quite breathtaking and not a soul was to be seen with so much noise from so many helicopters—anyone around had disappeared into hiding. The Cabora Bassa dam was about ten meters below its maximum level and I was astonished to see how much the water had eroded the banks along hillsides with long stretches of vertical walls at water’s edge. Eight minutes from target, we heard the Hunter and Canberra radio transmissions as they made their airstrikes, dead on time. Earlier the six Dakotas had passed the helicopter force as they ran in to drop SAS and RLI paratroopers. My helicopter broke away from the others as they passed the Admin Base area. This site was populated by small trees and short grass but had plenty of openings for individual helicopters.
We landed in the centre of the selected location in the largest open space in the entire area. My immediate problem was to get the protection party down where I was and have fuel evenly distributed in the Admin Base area. George Alexander in the DC7, again flown by Captain Jack Malloch, responded perfectly to all instructions.
I had to climb onto the roof of the helicopter to see the DC7 early enough to give direction. “Red light on… five degrees right… steady… Green light.” George was listening this time. Troops and pallets descended right where I wanted them on runs left, right, short and over my position. There was a tense moment when one pallet appeared to be descending directly onto me but, happily, it drifted enough to crash through a tree next to the helicopter.
The Admin Base was only six kilometres from the nearest edge of the target so we could hear the K-Cars firing quite clearly; otherwise the bush absorbed all sounds of smallarms fire. The Tembue Admin Base task was a cakewalk compared to Chimoio. All the trooper helicopters arrived and landed well clear of the cargo parachutes. The aircrews quickly disconnected them from the pallets, bundled them neatly and moved them centrally for easy recovery. Rolling the drums and standing them up in small clumps at each helicopter landing point was hot, sweaty work for the crews who completed the job before the first K-Cars arrived in the Admin Base.
The protection troops deployed in all-round defence and were not seen again. There was only one drama in the Admin Base. Very few hits were sustained by K-Cars whose pilots reported fewer targets than they had seen in any part of Chimoio and a great deal less anti-aircraft fire. Nevertheless, one K-Car engine had taken a strike that necessitated its replacement. The technicians, using fuel drums as a working platform, made the engine change, and the helicopter that had flown it in completed the round trip from and to ‘the Train’ in less than six hours.
It was late in the day when I went forward to be escorted by an SAS callsign through sections of the airstrike areas. The Alpha and Golf bomb effects were less gory than I had seen at Chimoio. However, my main interest at Tembue was to inspect the area of a flechette strike. During the planning phase of Op Dingo, I had asked Norman Walsh to consider using flechettes if he felt there was a target that suited them. Although he liked the idea, he decided against using flechettes at Chimoio because there would certainly be an international outcry following the inevitable inspection by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. He chose rather to use one Hunter to drop a pair of flechette dispensers on the parade ground at Tembue. This was duly done.
Regrettably the daily parade had been postponed on this particular day; Sod’s law—the base commander was suffering from a hangover so the parade square was vacant at the time of strike. A lone tree just short of the parade ground, on the right side of the attack line, was tightly embedded with flechettes from its uppermost branches all the way down to the base of its trunk. The entire parade site itself was crowded with partially embedded pink tail fins that had separated from steel shafts now buried below surface. Nobody, but nobody, would have survived the daily parade had it been held at the routine time.