Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
as Neil Kriel, was born in the tiny valley of Klaasvoogds, situated 16 km from the Langeberg mountain hamlet of Robertson in the Cape Province, on 8 September 1947.1 Despite his staunchly Afrikaans name, the fully bilingual Kriel was very ‘English’ in his speech and manners.
In 1959, when Kriel was twelve, his family moved to Southern Rhodesia, where he completed his schooling at the Umtali Boys’ High School. Umtali, the British crown colony’s fourth-largest city, was perched on the far eastern border of the country flanking Mozambique, giving the school’s pupils their nickname of Borderers.
At the time, Southern Rhodesia was in the grip of a disobedience campaign by the unenfranchised black population. As their campaign became more militant, it would provoke a strong counter-insurgency response. But it is likely that, in his early days, Kriel lived the idyll of a white Rhodesian schoolboy. Developing into a strapping, dark-haired lad, Kriel demonstrated athletic prowess and threw himself into running, water polo, and especially rugby, a sport that would provide an additional bond with his future comrades.
Meanwhile, the spark for the Rhodesian Bush War was lit with the murder of a white foreman, Andrew Oberholzer, at the Silverstreams Wattle Company on 4 July 1964. He was killed by guerrillas of the newly formed Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU) and its armed-wing-in-embryo, the Chinese-backed Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Although the killing outraged white and moderate black Rhodesia, Kriel was seemingly secure in his schoolboy bubble. That year, according to his school’s alumni magazine, The Borderer, ‘Neil Kriel took the 880 yards (2 min. 3.4 sec), and the Mile (4 min. 46.7 sec.) records … In the Inter-Schools meeting, Kriel ran two excellent races to lower his personal best records in the 880 yards (2 min. 1.5 sec.) the Mile (4 min. 36.5 sec) …’2
A 1964 photograph of Kriel and the Umtali Boys’ water polo team shows a handsome lad whose levity gives no hint of the grave role he would later play in the escalating regional conflict: sitting relaxed in his blazer and shorts with a broad, engaging grin, he sports a dark V-shaped quiff that seems to owe more to the rockabilly style of the previous decade. In the same year, Kriel proved ‘outstanding’ in his rugby team’s tour of South Africa, The Borderer enthused. The team was unbeaten in all but one match, a run which included ‘a magnificent 30–21 victory over Selborne College. It was schoolboy rugby at its best …’.
However, storm clouds were steadily accumulating. Lawrence Cline writes of the era: ‘The Rhodesian insurgency developed gradually, initially appearing to be more of a law enforcement problem than an organised insurgency. It took considerable time for the Rhodesian government to acknowledge the severity of the insurgent threat it faced and to develop a coherent response.’3
Soon, added to ZANLA’s insurgency was that of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the military arm of the Soviet-backed Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). The guerrillas roughly divided the country between ZANLA, based in the east and operating out of Tanzania and Mozambique, and ZIPRA, based in the west and operating out of Northern Rhodesia and the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland (to become independent Botswana in 1966). Despite this informal partition, the two competing guerrilla forces often battled among themselves.
In 1965, Kriel’s second-to-last school year, Southern Rhodesia made its dramatic Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain, because of an impasse over Whitehall’s refusal to allow independence. The sticking point was that Southern Rhodesia wanted to maintain white minority rule – unlike Northern Rhodesia, which had been granted independence the previous year as Zambia.
Kriel’s school had an ingrained tradition of military service. The school chapel was built on a grassy hill to honour the memory of the Umtali Old Boys who had paid the ultimate price in World War II. An Old Boy who had graduated from Umtali Boys’ several years previously, Bert Sachse, had gone on to train as an officer at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in England. Pictured early in his military career with jug ears, a cleft chin, and a gnomishly winning smile, Sachse returned to Rhodesia after graduating. In 1966, at the age of 23, he underwent a forward airstrike and ground-to-air control course run by the Rhodesian Air Force alongside another soldier who would later play an important counterinsurgency role, Garth Barrett. Barrett would become a lieutenant-colonel in the famed C-Squadron, Special Air Service (SAS), Rhodesia’s airborne commando force.
In 1966, his final year at Umtali Boys’, Kriel captained the first rugby team and was picked as vice-captain of the Rhodesia Schools’ team. At the subsequent Craven Week – South Africa’s annual schoolboy rugby proving ground, named after Springbok great Dr Danie Craven – he was selected as one of the best players of the tournament. He followed his passion for rugby after graduating, playing for Stellenbosch University in 1967 – the year in which some 2 000 South African Police (SAP) members were deployed to the northern border of Rhodesia to assist the British South Africa Police (BSAP, Rhodesia’s police force) to combat a ZIPRA insurgency backed by uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).
Kriel’s rugby dreams were cut short when he was injured in the same year and his academic career at Stellenbosch was also short-lived. The following year, he returned to Rhodesia where he joined the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI), becoming a commissioned officer in 1969 and taking on duties as an RLI troop commander.
Meanwhile, in 1969, Sachse earned his wings on a parachute course alongside several other soldiers and one civilian, Hamish Murray, the mayor of Umtali – an indication of how the developing conflict was starting to militarise Rhodesian everyday life. Sachse was a member of Rhodesia’s C-Squadron of the British Special Air Service, one of only two foreign squadrons of the fearsome SAS. The squadron was founded in 1961 from a core of the thousand Rhodesian volunteers who had fought in the SAS’s counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya from 1951 to 1953. Its staunch anti-communism would prove as influential as its unconventional warfare tactics.
The roots of Rhodesian pseudo-operations
During late 1971 and early 1972, Sachse, by then a lieutenant, was briefed to conduct pseudo-operations against ZAPU in Zambia, under a Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) controller named Jack Berry, assisted by Detective Inspector Michael ‘Mac’ McGuinness of the Terrorist Desk of Special Branch of the BSAP.4 These were the first of many Rhodesian pseudo-operations against enemy targets in Zambia, Botswana, and Mozambique that increasingly shifted from pure intelligence-gathering to combat strikes.
The Special Branch (SB) was the section of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that tracked potential threats to law and order and collaborated closely with the South African, colonial Portuguese, and – prior to UDI – British and American intelligence services. Initially, the C-Squadron was the Rhodesians’ only special forces unit and the SB/CIO the only entities flirting with experimental pseudo-operations. As Cline writes, ‘Police made an early attempt to use pseudo-operations in October 1966, but the effort was stillborn. The first formal pseudo-team was formed in January 1973 as an all-African team, with two African policemen and four “turned” insurgents. The early teams did succeed in bringing in some valuable intelligence, but their overall impact was slight.’
Then, in November 1973, in the midst of a lengthy Rhodesian counter-infiltration campaign in the north of the country called Operation Hurricane, a new special forces unit built specifically for pseudo-operations was set up. It was founded by Captain Ron Reid-Daly, who was coaxed out of retirement after a two-decade-long career. The unit was named the Selous Scouts, in honour of the colourful colonial-era explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, on whom novelist H Rider Haggard had modelled his Allan Quatermain character.
‘The original strength of the Selous Scouts was about 120,’ Cline writes, ‘with all officers being white and with the highest rank initially available for Africans being colour sergeant,’ though one founding member, Sergeant-Major 1st Class (WO1) M Stanlake Mavengere, started out as company sergeant-major for the ‘African Scouts’. He would later become the black troops’ regimental sergeant-major, a formidable position in any combat regiment. The colour distinction appears to have been primarily for motivational and cultural-linguistic reasons, though the men ate, slept, fought – and died – alongside one another.
‘One major recruiting incentive