I could not get over the fact that Mark Smithdorff always had his map facing north no matter the direction of flight. Like all the other pilots, my map was turned to face in the direction of travel. If Mark tried this he became as confused as I did with the map the right way up when flying on any heading but north. Mark had another peculiarity. When writing on a blackboard, he would stand at its centre writing from left to centre with his left hand before transferring the chalk to his right hand and continuing uninterrupted in identical neat style towards the right-hand edge of the board.
Mountain flying was by far the best part of training. On my first time out, Mark had arranged for us to route via Mare Dam in the Inyanga area to collect young breeder trout that we were to release into pre-selected pools in the Bundi Valley high up in the Chimanimani mountains. Rex Taylor had done this previously with fingerling trout but platanna frogs had devoured all of them. We were trying larger fish. There were about fifteen six-inch trout sealed in plastic bags that were half-filled with water and blown to capacity with oxygen. Each bag was in a cardboard box and about thirty-odd boxes filled the rear cabin. It was necessary to fly the one-hour leg directly to Chimanimani to limit damage that fish could cause each other.
The beauty within the mountain range astounded me because previously I had only seen the side of this range from Melsetter village. Hopping from one pool to the next we emptied the trout into the cold water and saw them all swim off strongly. These fish survived and more trout were flown in for National Parks over time. By early 1970 all the pools within the Chimanimanis, both within Rhodesia and Mozambique, carried good populations of large trout.
On completion of basic training, I flew my Final Handling Test with Ozzie Penton who declared me ready for the Ops Conversion phase. My instructor, Mark Smithdorff, was one of nature’s natural pilots who made everything look so simple. When he hovered, the helicopter remained absolutely static no matter how the wind gusted or how high the hover.
Cargo slinging, hoisting slope landings on mountain ledges, forced landing precisely on any point of my choice – all so smooth and unfussed yet always too good to be repeated with Mark’s precision and ease. I was fortunate to have had such an instructor to prepare me for my final handling test.
The final test was conducted by Ozzie Penton who had been promoted to Wing Commander as OC Flying Wing at New Sarum. By this time Squadron Leader John Rogers had returned from South Africa.
Sinoia operation
FOR BECOMING THE RRAF’S FIRST wholly trained helicopter pilot, I was made squadron standby pilot for the next seven days. Because of this I was the one called out following a report of terrorist activity near Sinoia. My flight technician for this trip was Ewett Sorrell. We set off for Sinoia not knowing more than an attempt had been made to blow down pylons on the main Kariba to Salisbury electrical power-line at a point just north of Sinoia town. Sinoia lay some sixty miles northeast of Salisbury on the main road to Zambia via Chirundu. The town served as the commercial hub and rail centre to large farming and mining communities in the region. It was also home to the Provincial Police HQ, which commanded a number of outlying police stations.
Superintendent John Cannon DFC was very pleased to see us on our arrival in his HQ building and invited us to lunch with his charming wife before getting to the business at hand. I had not met John before although I knew that he had served with distinction as a Lancaster pilot during WWII.
In his quiet, precise manner, which I came to know quite well over the next couple of days, John gave me a detailed briefing before we flew off to inspect the pylons against which sabotage had been attempted. The inspection revealed a very low standard of training by the ZANU men who had tried to knock out the country’s power supply. They obviously knew nothing about pylon design or how to use explosive charges to shear steel structure. Damage at the points of detonation was so minor that no repair work was necessary. At some points scattered chunks of TNT showed that detonators had been thrust into the end of the Russian-made TNT slabs and not into the purple dots which clearly marking the location of primer pockets. All that ZANU had achieved was to show us that they intended to do harm.
John’s information was that seven men known as the ‘Armageddon Group’ were one component of a group of twenty-one ZANU men who had entered the country together some ten days earlier from Zambia. This group was responsible for this job. Where the remaining fourteen men were John had no idea but he said they could not be too far away. All the same the Armageddon Group, having shown its hand, was the one we had to locate and destroy.
During the first afternoon at Sinoia I found that, for all my training, I had not been properly prepared for operations. To fit a helicopter into an opening in the trees with no more that six inches to spare was fine in training, yet here I nearly fell out of the sky when landing full loads of Police Reservists (PR—mostly portly farmers) and their equipment. The enormous reserve of power available from the Alouette’s jet engine, small though it was, was sufficient to destroy the main-rotor gearbox if the calculated maximum collective pitch angle on the rotor blades was applied too long. I exceeded the gearbox limits during a number of landings by yanking on excess collective pitch to check the helicopter’s descent for a soft landing. This necessitated the removal of a magnetic plug on the gearbox casing to check for telltale iron filings. Fortunately nothing was found, so no damage had been done. But it took a number of exciting ‘arrivals’ on terra firma before I got the hang of making full-load landings safely, particularly on sloping ground.
Having established the right techniques I vowed to myself that, when I was instructing on helicopters, I would prepare future pilots better than I had been prepared myself. This in no way reflects on Mark Smithdorff’s instructional abilities because mine was the first genuine operational deployment for a helicopter.
Once the PR had been taken to their assigned locations I decided to take a look around the search area with Ewett Sorrell who had remained on the ground whilst I deployed the PR. It makes me shudder to think how, having first orbited suspect locations and old roofless buildings, we moved close in hovering to inspect every nook and cranny. Within six years this would have been suicidal and no pilot would have been so foolish as to think of terrorists simply as peasant farmers with guns.
During the early evening of 27 April, John Cannon received hot intelligence from Police General Headquarters in Salisbury to say that a ‘Police source’ was in contact with the Armageddon Group. This police undercover man, operating within the ZANU organisation, was due to meet up with the group near Sinoia the next day when the gang would be changing into black dress for their first planned attack against a white farmstead. The contact man was delivering some supplies and written instructions from ZANU HQ. He was not expected to be with the gang for more than ten minutes.
The contact was going to travel by car from Salisbury to Sinoia where he would be met by one of the gang at about 11 o’clock. He had been briefed to proceed along the main road to a point where the old strip road went left off the main road. Along this road he would find a member of the gang who would take him to the gang’s night camp. He understood that the gang would be between the main road and the old strip road. For us this was a gift for both planning and execution of a classical police-styled cordon and search operation.