Rhodesians were most concerned about the Portuguese ability to contain FRELIMO in Tete. Should they fail, which we guessed they would, we would lose our two greatest military advantages. These were having the Zambezi River as abarrier along which to detect crossings and the wide stretches of difficult terrain between the river and the inhabited areas.
Portugal was already facing major financial and morale problems in her wars against communist-backed liberation movements operating in all three of her African territories. These were Portuguese Guinea, Angola and Mozambique where most men under arms were conscripts from metropolitan Portugal. They showed little interest in fighting for territories that neither interested nor concerned them, which gave us the distinct impression that their whole approach to service in Africa was to take as little risk as possible and get home in one piece. One could hardly blame them! Nevertheless we hoped that the Portuguese would play a leading role in preventing Russia from achieving her goal of establishing a communist bridge across central Africa from which to drive south. Angola constituted the most important target in Russia’s plans but Rhodesians saw the Tete Province as the immediate threat.
Unlike the Portuguese, Rhodesian forces, though small in numbers, were fighting on home soil and would not shy away from taking risks. To protect her interests, South Africa was providing much-needed manpower along the strategically important Zambezi River, intent on beating Russian supported terrorism in depth. An extension of this strategic defence line was in the offing because, unbeknown to us at squadron level, plans were in their final stages for Rhodesians to participate with Portuguese forces in Tete.
This happened to be a quiet time when operations within Rhodesia had returned to routine border-control operations and 7 Squadron had been awarded the Jacklin Trophy. For my part I completed helicopter conversions for Randy du Rand and Barry Roberts and was involved in a Police ATOPS (anti-terrorist operations) exercise codenamed Mannix. Norman Walsh and I flew two of the three helicopters assigned to this large exercise conducted close to Umtali.
Casevac of gored ranger
EXERCISE MANNIX INVOLVED TWO GROUPS of police—the ‘Rats’ and the ‘Terriers’. The Rats were small teams acting the part of terror gangs. Terriers, the good guys, were policemen whose job it was to eliminate the Rats. We were amazed that war games conducted in the mountainous eastern districts were almost as exciting as the real thing, but with no danger to ourselves.
Within the pine forests and thick bush of the area I was having the usual problem of picking up men wearing camouflage. Remembering how easy it had been to find Lance-Corporal Lahee during Op Excess and the way we kept track of our radio tracker dogs, I asked for small red day-glo patches to be affixed to the top of Terrier caps. This worked very wellfor the helicopter and Police Reserve Air Wing crews and thereafter red and orange day-glo patches were used from time to time during offensive operations.
One evening my father visited me at Grand Reef, the airfield we used for Exercise Mannix. We were having a few drinks together at the end of the day when I was called to the Ops Room. Air HQ required me to fly to Buffalo Bend immediately to casevac a wounded game ranger to Chiredzi Hospital; an elephant had gored him.
Having had three beers, I approached Norman Walsh who had also been drinking. We agreed it would be much safer to fly together, one piloting whilst the other navigated. Big Alan Aird was our technician. Norman piloted the 370-kilometre leg to the distinctive loop on the Nuanetsi River, named Buffalo Bend in Gona re Zhou (Place of the Elephants) Reserve. Thanks to half-moon and clear-sky conditions I was able to direct Norman along the precise track. From a long way out we could see the huge bonfire at our landing place. When we landed the injured man’s girlfriend and three game-rangers, all with loaded rifles, were watching out for the angry cow elephant that had gored the ranger. She was lurking about close by and trumpeted once just to make life interesting. I was most disappointed that my pilot training coursemate Ron Thompson, then the Senior Warden at Gona re Zhou, was not present because he was away from his base at the time.
I cannot recall the injured ranger’s name but can still picture him lying on his back exactly where he had been downed. In the late afternoon he had been out on foot with his little dog and another ranger. They were watching elephants browsing when the dog became excited and started barking. This made one cow angry. She charged, knocked over the ranger and quick as a flash drove one long tusk through his pelvis then kneeled on his body to extract it. The other ranger managed to drive the cow off by firing a shot over her head. Once the cow was clear, he fired three shots in quick succession—the recognised SOS signal to anyone in earshot.
The injured ranger gave us instructions on how to manoeuvre him ever so slowly onto the helicopter stretcher because he was in too much pain to be handled in any other manner. When, however, we got him into the helicopter his six foot, seven inch-length was greater than the helicopter’s width. There was no option but to subject him to excruciating pain by bending his legs to close the rear doors. We had just enough fuel to get to Chiredzi and the moon was about to disappear below the western horizon, so I elected to navigate again whilst Norman Walsh piloted the helicopter. We landed at Chiredzi Police Station with five minutes of fuel to spare. Having seen our casualty safely into a waiting ambulance we refuelled for the dark leg back to Grand Reef. Since they could be of no assistance to me on the return flight, Norman and Alan accepted cold beers whilst I drank strong black coffee.
The flight to Grand Reef in pitch-blackness had to be made entirely on instruments using heading and time alone because there were no visible features to assist navigation along the route. I climbed high and was quite settled. Beside me I could see that Norman had fallen asleep as had Alan Aird who was sprawled out in his rearward-facing seat. We were about halfway home when, without warning, Norman grabbed the cyclic control and pulled it back sharply. I shouted andNorman let go, instantly realising he had responded to a bad dream. Although normal flight was regained immediately, I was unsettled by the incident and remained tense for the rest of the route, expecting Norman to react to another dream. Fortunately this did not happen.
When eventually I picked up the lights of Umtali and then Grand Reef it was almost 03:00. I was really tired and could not bring myself to do a simple straightforward descent onto the lights of the base. It took me an age to let down in a series of orbits over the unlit runway despite the fact that I knew we were well clear of the high mountains to the north of the airfield. Even in real emergency situations I had never suffered such uncertainty as on this particular descent. Norman Walsh was awake and, even though he must have been fully aware of my predicament, he did not say a word; such was the nature of my boss.
Having had less than two hours’ sleep, I was awakened early for a deployment of Police Terriers at sunrise. Just as I was about to place them down in a vlei my technician John Ness shouted, “Lines, lines,” but it was too late. The rotor blades severed the thin telephone wires whose posts, both left and right, where hidden by clumps of trees. Many farms were without telephone communications for the day and I received one hell of a ribbing from the Police Reservists in the Odzi Sports Club that evening.