The Board of Inquiry into this incident established that Jack, flying an FB9, had encountered low cloud on his first leg from Thornhill but had left the decision to climb above it a fraction too late. His aircraft impacted a vertical rock face a mere three feet from the summit of Mount Belingwe and disintegrated.
The four 20mm Hispano cannons remained deeply embedded in the rock face but most of the airframe debris, including the engine and undercarriage, passed over the summit. The Army kindly provided fifty territorial trainees from Llewellin Barracks to assist our technicians recover the scattered wreckage.
There were no helicopters available in those days so there was no way around the long climb up the mountain to recover every piece of wreckage which had to be manhandled or dragged down the difficult slope. Fortunately very heavy items, such as engine, main planes and undercarriage, were near the foot of the mountain and were accessible to four-wheel drive vehicles. The four cannons could not be extracted from the rock and were left in situ. They are probably still embedded there to this day!
Sabotage
IN OCTOBER 1960 THERE WAS a great deal of political manoeuvring by black organisations seeking the dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Because this caused much industrial unrest in Southern Rhodesia the Federal Government decided to get a message to all the black folk by air-dropping leaflets, as most of the people in the remote areas did not have radios.
Nos 2, 3 and 4 Squadrons were tasked to fly Provosts, Dakotas and Pembrokes to do the drops. Each aircraft was allocated a specific area to ensure full coverage of the country without overlaps. I had to cover a sector to the north and east of Gwelo before returning to the industrial area of Gwelo at 5 p.m. when workers would be streaming into the streets from the factories.
Flight Lieutenant Charlie Tubbs, the Senior Air Traffic Controller at Thornhill, asked if he could accompany me on this four-and-a-half-hour sortie. With thousands of leaflets in bundles behind our seats and tucked in every accessible, safe location we set off with Charlie, an ex-RAF pilot, making the take-off. Once airborne he asked me if he could try his hand at landing on return to base. I agreed he could.
Charlie did most of the flying to allow me to map-read and record every village with the number of leaflets dropped as we moved from place to place in a pre-planned pattern. Our final drop was over the black townships of Gatooma. We then turned for Gwelo remaining at low level. The Provost was purring along when I turned to Charlie and said, “Isn’t it amazing how reliable engines are nowadays. Here we are flying along, never worrying that the fan might fail on us." Charlie was horrified. “Don’t say that, you might regret your words.”
We arrived at Gwelo’s industrial area on time. The canopy was rolled back and we had just commenced dropping leaflets when the sight and stench of smoke preceded severe vibration from a faltering engine. The canopy was rolled forward then immediately re-opened because of blinding, foul-smelling smoke in the cockpit. When the engine quit I was already aiming for the zigzag roof of the Bata Shoe Factory just ahead of us because there were too many power lines about and the roadways were crowded.
I put out a hurried ‘Mayday’ call to Thornhill Approach just as we were about to touch down on the factory roof. But happily the engine powered up again just long enough to allow us to wallow past the factory to the edge of the disused wartime RAF base, Moffat Airfield. The engine then quit completely and I was able to put down quite smoothly in very high grass. As the aircraft sliced through the grass, I prayed we would not strike any hidden antheaps or antbear holes that were common to this area. Blindly we rolled over rough ground for some distance before emerging smack bang on a grass runway that had recently been trimmed by the Gwelo Gliding Club.
When we climbed down from the aircraft Charlie’s hands were shaking as he groped for his cigarettes. After a couple of hard drags Charlie said in a stern voice, “You promised to let me try my hand at landing”, whereupon we both burst into near-hysterical, relieved laughter.
This was the first of a number of incidents involving sabotage of Royal Rhodesian Air Force aircraft. A 30mm steel ball bearing had been introduced into the engine casing and had settled at the rear of the number six-cylinder piston. There it had banged away with every revolution of the engine until eventually it broke through the piston head. Once the piston was holed, the whole engine casing became highly pressurised, forcing all the engine’s oil to dump to atmosphere through the crankcase breather pipe.
Two days later another Provost suffered engine failure for the self-same reason. I think it was Flight Lieutenant Ken Edwards who put down safely with no damage to the airframe in Seke Reserve near New Sarum. An inspection of all the Leonides engines revealed that another four engines contained loose 30mm ball bearings.
The next incident involved a Canberra. Flight Lieutenant Ozzie Penton, a man of small build, was conducting his pre-flight inspection when he came to the port engine where, with fingers around the shroud, he could pull up as he jumped just high enough to check the lower turbines of the jet engine. He noticed something unusual and called a tall technician over to take a close look. There, between the line of static vanes and the first impeller blades, lay a socking great bolt that had obviously been placed there to damage the engine on start-up.
Initially it was believed that the sabotage was by black hangar Staff acting for the Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union who continued to create unrest throughout the land. But then an incident occurred which made it obvious that ZAPU agents were not involved.
One of the black hanger workers at New Sarum called the Warrant Officer in charge of No 3 Squadron to come and inspect the undercarriage of a Dakota. He told the WO that when he was cleaning the aircraft’s oleos the wheel axle retainer nuts did not feel right, even though they looked normal. The WO soon established that the nuts were indeed visually normal but felt wrong. They had perfect shape, threads and all, but had been fashioned from compressed paper and glue, sanded smooth and painted silver.
Though never proven, it was concluded that one or more of a number of RAF technicians on secondment to our Air Force were acting against our interests, possibly for MI6 in London. The seconded men returned to Britain shortly after these incidents and others that involved two Canadairs of No 3 Squadron. These incidents are covered later.
With ongoing unrest in the Shona areas, there was concern for the safety of the tribal chiefs who had become targets of youths stirred to action by ZAPU. Ground-to-ground communication with soldiers protecting the chiefs and their families were so poor that it became necessary for the Air Force to overfly all chiefs’ kraals twice daily. To assist the pilots, each army protection unit laid out a white sheet on the ground. If nothing was overlaid on the sheet all was well. If, however, the unit had a problem, three orange strips could be laid on the white sheets in any one of a number of patterns set out in a booklet to convey their situation to the pilots who passed these on to local Army commanders. The flights were long and generally enjoyable, though I couldn’t help worrying that my aircraft engine might have been sabotaged again.