The terrorist had not fallen into view so Flying Officer Tudor Thomas and his gunner, Senior Technician Butch Phillips, put in a pass into the same spot were troops immediately found the bullet-riddled body of a terrorist lodged in tangled roots that had been exposed by erosion. This brought the tally to twelve with three remaining.
I landed to relieve Jerry’s men of the three captured terrorists and flew off to hand them over to the Special Branch at Kanyemba. I can still picture the combination of arrogance and fear etched on their faces when they looked at Alan and his MAG machine-gun, but they dared not move because Alan had them covered with his FN rifle. Two of the terrorists had long deep furrow-like wounds to arms and legs that typified those received from steeply inclined helicopter gunfire. Though these looked pretty frightful at the time, medical attention at Kanyemba and later in Salisbury prison resulted in their full recovery.
An RLI callsign of five men under Fanie Coetzee had been put down ahead of Jerry’s callsign to cross-grain along the Angwa River. With contact having been made, Tac HQ asked me to get Fanie’s callsign over to Jerry to assist in the follow-up on the three missing individuals who had become separated from each other.
With the burly Alan Aird and 400 pounds of fuel I knew a lift of six men and equipment would be difficult. I had not seen Fanie before and groaned inwardly when I realised just how big and heavy he was as he lumbered across the soft river sand with his men. Lift-off necessitated the use of emergency power, but I was able to reduce this within the gearbox time limit once in forward flight. On return to the contact area my landing in a small hole between high trees with such a heavy load was difficult enough, but seeing a terrorist go to ground directly ahead of the aircraft made my hair stand on end because it was too late to abort the landing.
I shouted to Fanie, “Terrorist directly ahead,” just before touch-down then I lifted smartly as the troops cleared. Fanie’s attention was drawn to firing over to his left so he did not get to clearing the area I had indicated to him. Two days later an uninjured terrorist, captured by Mozambican villagers, was brought to Tac HQ. He recognised me immediately and told his interrogators that I was the pilot he aimed to kill if he thought we had seen him hiding in an antbear hole. The reason he recognised me was because, instead of wearing a helmet and mask, I wore earphones with a throat microphone. Thank goodness he did not fire. It would have spelled disaster for eight men and a helicopter.
The two remaining terrorists were killed in separate actions and the focus of Op Excess swung over to the larger terrorist group. Their tracks had not been found by either of two cross-graining callsigns patrolling the main dirt road on the line of Dumpy’s follow-up. The reason for this became clear when Dumpy reached the road. The terrorists had applied effective anti-tracking procedures over long stretches, moving singly in a widespread line-abreast formation. When they reached the road they grouped and laid clothing, like stepping-stones across a river, which all the men followed, leaving no boot prints on the roadway.
Unexpectedly, locals well to the south in the Dande Tribal Trust Land reported the terrorists’ presence. Following this, a series of contacts occurred but each firefight had ended before helicopters arrived. During the first and largest of these, Fanie Coetzee’s leading scout and part of his callsign came under heavy fire from a high ridge towards which the trackers were moving. Fanie manoeuvred elements around the flank and from their rear gave the terrorists a serious walloping.
Shooting had just ended when I arrived and the troops were sweeping through the contact site. I landed and switched off close to big Fanie who nonchalantly handed me an RPD machine-gun, barrel forward. I took hold of it but dropped it immediately when the hot barrel burned the palm and fingers of my right hand. The weapon fell to the ground still smoking where some of my skin was stuck to it. For over a week flying, eating and every other activity involving the use of the right hand, was absolute agony.
As with most operations there occur amusing incidents that remain clear in ones memory. The first of my Op Excess memories involved a toilet. A concrete plinth set over a deep hole had once been the road-camp latrine. It was on the high bank of the Angwa River and now, with a ‘thunder box’ in place, served as the officers’ loo. A hessian screen surrounded three sides of the toilet with the open end overlooking pools in the river below. In the heat of the valley this facility started to smell and its stench invaded the operations room tent and the officers dining table set under trees. I was present at the lunch table for the first time when Major Rob Southey asked Sergeant-Major ‘Bangstick’ Turle to attend to the problem.
The sergeant-major ordered two RLI troopies to get rid of the smell, fully expecting the youngsters to do the usual thing of pouring lime into the pit. But he had not spelled this out to them. Obviously the soldiers did not know the standard procedure because they set out to deal with their task in their own way. One poured a gallon of petrol down the hole and turned to his mate asking for matches. His mate did not have any and ran off to find some. By the time he returned, the heat had turned the petrol into concentrated vapour so, as a match was struck, the vapour ignited instantly setting off a powerful explosion that sent everyone in camp diving for cover believing the base was under attack.
Only when a shower of indescribable, stinking muck rained down, did someone shout, “Some silly bugger has blown the shithouse down!” The force of the explosion threw both young troopies down the bank, one having lost most of his hair to flame. They both recovered, but the concrete plinth and the thunderbox were totally destroyed.
The second incident involved Tudor Thomas who was still airborne one evening and became disoriented in the haze and blackness of the night. I got airborne immediately to orbit over our base with my landing light on to assist him. It took a long while before Tudor picked up my landing light because he was miles away. On the ground some troopies knew a helicopter was having difficulty in locating the base and, seeing me orbiting above, one asked another, “Why doesn’t that stupid Blue Job just look down? There is plenty of light in this camp.”
Concern for Tete Province
ZANU HAD FAILED AGAIN BY losing all but two of its men in Operation Excess. However the operation showed us that ZANU had at last come to realise that they must find the shortest route to the African population if they were to avoid being mauled again and again by Rhodesian forces. The Mozambican pedicle of Tete Province provided them the only viable option to achieving this and FRELIMO (the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) had already established its secondfront in this region. Rhodesian fears were that FRELIMO would eventually gain control of those areas where tribal clans overlapped the international borders of Mozambique and Rhodesia. To be in a position to take advantage of this, ZANU had to be accepted by FRELIMO who also depended on Zambia as its rear base for second front operations.
