The South African Defence Forces in the Border War 1966-1989

Leopold Scholtz

• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781913118044
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The SADF in the Border War 1966-1989 offers the first comprehensive analysis of the South African Defense Force's role in the Border War in Namibia and Angola since the end of this conflict in 1989. It investigates the causes of the Border War and follows its progress and escalation in the 1980s. It also considers the broader international context against which this conflict took place. The author brings vital new information to light gained from documents which have since been declassified. This includes documents from the State Security Council, the department of foreign affairs, the SADF itself, as well as from the Cuban and Soviet governments. It sheds light on the objectives of the National Party government in both Angola and the former Southwest Africa, the SADF's strategy in the war and its cross-border operations in Angola. To sketch as complete a picture as possible of individual operations, the author not only interviewed several high ranking SADF officers, but also included information from the Cuban archives and testimonies of Cuban and Russian officers. All the major operations and battles are discussed, including Savannah, Reindeer, Sceptic, Protea and Moduler, as well as the battles of Cassinga and Cuito Cuanavale. Where a battle had no clear winner, the author asks what the aim was of each of the parties involved and whether they succeeded in achieving that goal. In this way, he offers fresh perspectives on long-running and often controversial debates, for instance on who won the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. In the last chapter, the author looks at the objectives of all the parties involved in the war and whether they achieved them. In the process he tries to answer the all-important question: Who won the Border War?

1

THE ORIGINS OF THE BORDER WAR

The origins of the Border War may be traced to the annexation of what was then called South West Africa by Germany in 1884. This was much against the wishes of the German Reich Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, who viewed his country primarily as a European continental power. But he had to give in to the pressure of a powerful lobby, which saw that other European powers – especially Britain and France – had already annexed several prime pieces of land in Africa, and that Germany had to be part of the “Scramble for Africa” if it wanted to count on the international scene. The present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon and Togo were thus also brought under German rule.1

The Germans were no benevolent masters to the indigenous population. Immigration of German (and Afrikaner) settlers was encouraged, and the indigenous people were – as happened in several British colonies as well – confined to “agreed” territories to create space for the settlers. Several uprisings ensued, especially by the Herero people, which were mercilessly suppressed. In 1904, another revolt occurred. In reaction, the German military commander, General Lothar von Trotha, enacted the first genocide of the 20th century. On 2 October 1904, he ordered that the entire Herero people – men, women and children – be driven into the desert to die of hunger and thirst. Some made it to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) or Walvis Bay (a British enclave on the coast), but by far most of the Hereros died. In total, only some 16 000 Hereros survived out of a population of 60 000 to 80 000.2

An uprising by the Nama people in the south was also drenched in blood, and by 1907 the German colonial government controlled the entire territory. Many of those who survived were incarcerated in concentration camps, where approximately half of the inmates died. By 1911, the Nama population, which was estimated to be about 15 000 to 20 000 in 1892, had been reduced to 9 800.3

In 1914, the First World War broke out, and the new Union of South Africa decided to weigh in on the side of Britain against Germany. South African forces invaded and occupied German South West Africa, and later German East Africa (now Tanzania), in a campaign lasting only a few months. At the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919, it was decided to turn the German colonies over to members of the victorious Allied coalition to administer in the name of a new international body, the League of Nations. South West Africa (SWA) became a so-called C Mandate territory, to be administered by the Union of South Africa, without the prospect of independence.4

An uprising of the Kwanyama clan, the largest among the Ovambo people of the far north, was forcibly put down, although not with the terrible ruthlessness of the German campaigns. King Mandume ya Ndemufayo was killed and the Kwanyama were subdued. “The Ovambos never forgot this thing, just as we Boers never forgot that the Zulus murdered Piet Retief. It is a long story which has nothing to do with communism …,” Louis Bothma writes.5 Apparently, this memory played a significant role in SWAPO’s uprising against South African rule in the 1960s.

In South West Africa (SWA), South Africa maintained a policy of racial segregation between the indigenous people and the settlers – as was the case in the rest of the colonial world. After the National Party (NP) won power in South Africa in 1948, the policy of apartheid was extended to SWA as well. In accordance with the apartheid idea of partitioning the country into black reserves or “homelands” and “white territories”, the so-called Odendaal Commission recommended a similar policy for SWA. Borders were drawn on maps, and it looked like the territory was set to become a mirror image of South Africa.

These plans never came to fruition. Just after the Second World War, the South African government had tried to convince the United Nations (UN), the successor to the League of Nations, to allow it to annex SWA. However, with newly independent India leading the charge, permission was refused due to South Africa’s racial policies. South Africa continued to administer SWA “in the spirit of the Mandate”, which meant that the territory became, to all intents and purposes, a fifth South African province.

International pressure against South Africa started building up in the 1960s. Liberia and Ethiopia took South Africa to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, arguing that its occupation of SWA was illegal. But in 1966 the court accepted the South African defence that Liberia and Ethiopia had no legal standing in the matter. The General Assembly of the UN reacted by revoking the original League of Nations mandate, and this was ratified by the International Court of Justice in 1971. The SWA matter was fast becoming internationalised, and the South African government could not ignore the trend.

In 1967, the South African Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hilgard Muller, formally accepted that SWA was a separate territory in international law. In 1972, the UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, and his personal representative, Alfred Escher, visited the territory and elicited from Prime Minister John Vorster a promise that South Africa would not annex SWA. Vorster also undertook to scrap the partitioning of the territory and to keep it together as one international legal entity.6 Although this was a long way from the international demand for immediate independence, it represented a certain limited movement on the South African side. By negotiating with the UN, Vorster also accepted in practice that the world body had a say in SWA’s future. Exactly how South Africa’s SWA policy evolved will be analysed in a later chapter.

Organised resistance to South African rule started in 1959 with the founding of the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) and the Ovamboland People’s Organization (OPO). The latter was renamed the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) the next year and became the focus of resistance to the South African occupation, while SWANU dwindled into obscurity.7

There can be no doubt that South Africa’s race discrimination policies contributed considerably to the rise of dissatisfaction among many blacks. The heavy-handed way in which the government suppressed public demonstrations exacerbated black discontent. In December 1959, a protest against the forcible resettlement of Windhoek’s black township exploded into violence in the so-called Old Location. The police reacted harshly and shot 11 people dead and wounded 54. As Marion Wallace remarks in her history of Namibia: “This pivotal historical moment thus served further to radicalise the population and to unite opposition to South African rule, as well as causing [Sam] Nujoma and other OPO leaders to take the decision to go into exile.”8

Pastor Siegfried Groth, a German churchman who in later years became one of SWAPO’s greatest critics, wrote of the situation in the 1960s:

Namibian men and women were no longer prepared to accept oppression and humiliation. The prisons in Ovamboland were full to overflowing. Hundreds of people, including women, were whipped in public. The victims had to undress and were then brutally beaten on their buttocks with a six-foot-long palm-tree cane.9 Anyone who tried to resist the South African dictatorship received electric shock treatment and was imprisoned without trial for months or even years.10

This led directly to SWAPO’s decision, in 1962, to resort to armed struggle in order to end the South African occupation of SWA, or Namibia, as the country was called by the organisation. However, it was not until September 1966 that the first shots were fired.11

The Border War in South West Africa and Angola pitched two armed coalitions against each other in a protracted conflict that lasted 23 years and ended, not with a clear-cut victory for either side, but in a compromise. On the one hand, there was the South African government and its armed force, the South African Defence Force (SADF), in alliance with the Angolan rebel movement União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), or National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. (A second Angolan rebel movement, the FNLA, was eliminated early on and did not play a meaningful role.) On the other hand, there was the Namibian liberation movement, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), in alliance with the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – recognised as the government of Angola – and the communist dictatorship of Cuban President Fidel Castro, as well as the Soviet Union.

This brought about at least three layers of conflict. One was a civil rights struggle against the South African government’s policy of institutionalised race discrimination against black people, better known as apartheid. The second was an anticolonial liberation war for the independence of SWA against the South African occupation of the territory. And lastly, although the first two layers were generated by an indigenous dynamic, there was the global Cold War between the Communist bloc and the West (of which South Africa saw itself as a part) superimposed on it.

It is seductive, especially from an ideological point of view, to interpret the conflict simply as a war against the injustices of apartheid and colonial domination, or resistance against the dangers of communist imperialism. Actually, all three paradigms are valid. The three layers were, as happened elsewhere in the world, fused together so tightly that to try to separate them would be at the cost of truth. If we could bring all three layers together under one roof, it would be that of revolutionary war, which manifested itself in insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare.

From a professional military viewpoint, the Border War is also very interesting. It was a revolutionary war, an insurgency and counterinsurgency war, a fast-moving, mobile, conventional war and ended in an attritionist set-piece conventional war. Not many wars have all these characteristics in one. This makes a proper analysis of this war all the more necessary.

The operational area

2

THE FIRST YEARS AND OPERATION SAVANNAH

The Border War is generally assumed to have started on 26 August 1966 when a force of 130 men –121 policemen and 9 members of 1 Parachute Battalion hastily attested as temporary policemen in Alouette III helicopters – under the command of Captain (later Colonel) Jan Breytenbach attacked a base of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN, SWAPO’s armed force) base at Ongulumbashe in Ovambo.1 Apparently, because of its unwillingness to acknowledge that SWAPO formed a real danger to South African domination in South West Africa, the government decided to entrust the fight against the insurgency not to the Defence Force, but to the South African Police (SAP). This would remain the case until 1974, when the SADF did take over responsibility.

At this stage, the army still suffered from the after-effects of neglect during the post-Second World War era, and particularly from the exodus of experienced English-speaking members. This was a direct result of the policy of the first National Party Minister of Defence, Frans Erasmus, who instituted a kind of affirmative action in favour of Afrikaner officers.2

Most of the army’s weaponry dated from the Second World War, although a limited modernisation programme had started in the early 1960s.3 The infantry’s Lee-Enfield rifle was replaced with the R1, and the Bren light machine gun (LMG) with an LMG of 7,62-mm calibre. The infantry also had a number of Saracen armoured personnel carriers (APCs) dating from the early 1950s. But their most important antitank weapon was still the old Second World War-vintage six-pounder gun and 3,5-inch rocket launcher (the ENTAC antitank missile was imported in 1966). The process of replacing the old 3-inch mortar with the 81-mm had barely begun. The First World War-vintage Vickers would remain the main medium machine gun for a good decade more. The army had purchased some 206 Centurion tanks from the UK in the 1950s, but quickly sold half of them to Switzerland. For the rest, Shermans and Comets from the Second World War were still operational.

The army did have a useful new armoured car, the Eland – an improved version of the French Panhard – with a 90-mm gun. But the four-wheeled Eland (affectionately known as the “Noddy”, due to the way it rocked when riding over uneven terrain) had limited mobility in the African bush, was powered by an inflammable petrol engine instead of diesel, and carried only 20 shells for its gun, so it was not really adequate.4 The artillery was equipped with light 25-pounder (88-mm) and medium 5,5-inch (140-mm) guns, both dating from before 1945.5

The voluntary military service system was replaced in 1962 with a ballot system, according to which some young white men had to serve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps
• Author’s note
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1. The origins of the Border War
• 2. The first years and Operation Savannah
• 3. The SADF reinvents itself
• 4. A new strategy
• 5. Into Angola: Reindeer
• 6. The pattern evolves: Sceptic
• 7. The SADF shifts gear: Protea and Daisy
• 8. No end in sight: Askari
• 9. Counterinsurgency in South West Africa
• 10. SWAPO: the seeds of failure
• 11. Cuba, the USSR and UNITA in Angola
• 12. Operation Moduler: clash of the titans
• 13. The SADF’s problematic choices
• 14. The road to stalemate: Operation Hooper
• 15. Stalemate at Tumpo
• 16. Endgame
• 17. The air war, 1987–1988
• 18. Peace
• 19. Who won the Border War?
• Notes
• List of sources
• Plate section