Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
upon the enemy and the kill rate per contact for this period has not been bettered to this day,’ his OLM citation reads.8
Joining the Selous Scouts on 18 August 1975, Swart held various command positions and led several operations against FRELIMO in Gaza province, Mozambique, being wounded in one operation. His citation concludes: ‘In the course of conducting operations in the RLI and the Selous Scouts, he has been responsible for the elimination of 320 terrorists.’
Meanwhile, collaboration between the South Africans and the Rhodesians had intensified, driven in part by the SADF’s interest in ‘pseudo-operations, small-team reconnaissance operations and the use of armed vehicle columns to execute cross-border raids’. It escalated from early 1 Recce operations with C-Squadron SAS in 19749 to Recce training with the Selous Scouts in 1976 and static-line and freefall parachute training for the Scouts alongside the Recces in South Africa.10 From late 1977 until June 1978, C-Squadron SAS was augmented by the Recces under the cover of D-Squadron, consisting of Alpha Group (1 Recce) and Bravo Group (5 Recce), which conducted joint and stand-alone ops in southeastern Rhodesia and into Gaza province, and later in the Lake Kariba area under Operation Splinter. Six members of D-Squadron were killed in action during the Recces’ deployments to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
Among those in D-Squadron were two operators who will play a key role in this story: Lieutenant André ‘Diedies’ Diedericks of 1 Recce, with his slick bowl-cut hair, arrow-straight moustache and piercing eyes, and pint-sized, thin-moustached Corporal Neves Thomas ‘Balthazar’ Matias of 5 Recce.
Born in Pretoria on 7 December 1955, Diedericks had enlisted for training at 3 South African Infantry Battalion in Potchefstroom as a national-service rifleman on 7 January 1974. He was so impressed by a Recce recruitment team lead by the towering Captain Malcolm Kinghorn, who had shown the trainees a film on the Rhodesian SAS, that he applied to go through the gruelling selection process.
Diedericks took the oath as a Permanent Force member on 31 May 1974 and later that year qualified as a Recce operator at Fort Doppies. The following year, he qualified as an attack diver, then took part in Operation Savannah, the SADF’s incursion into Angola to attempt to topple the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Marxist–Leninist government that had installed itself in Luanda after defeating the rival National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). He received an Honoris Crux medal for valour as a 1 Recce corporal after directing artillery fire from a forward observation post at the critical Battle of Bridge 14 on 2 December 1975.
Hailing from Lobito in Angola, Neves Matias, on the other hand, was a former FNLA guerrilla. Following the FNLA’s defeat by the MPLA in early 1976, many of its guerrillas were absorbed into the SADF, mostly into Jan Breytenbach’s 32 Battalion. A splinter FNLA faction, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), under Jonas Savimbi, remained in the field and went from being an enemy of the SADF to its key ally in the Border War.
After 5 Recce was established on 5 December 1976, Matias and many other former FNLA fighters transferred to an old farmhouse and World War II military airfield at Dukuduku in northeastern Zululand for Recce selection. Diedericks and Matias would meet in D-Squadron in southeastern Rhodesia in 1978. From July to September of that year, the young lieutenant was in charge of teams of ten to fifteen D-Squadron SAS (actually Recce) operators who would parachute into battle. Among his teammates was Matias, who Diedericks recalled was ‘rated as one of the best operators. On several occasions, I saw him in action during contacts with the enemy. I was impressed with his calm and calculated attitude.’11
Diedericks later received the Chief of the Defence Force Commendation Medal (later renamed the Military Merit Medal) for his D-Squadron actions, including his unit’s killing of guerrilla fighters in combat, and for safely evacuating a wounded operator. Diedericks later worked at the Army College in Pretoria, then served as Officer Commanding 21 SA Infantry Battalion at Doornkop, west of Johannesburg. He died of cancer on 7 May 2005, two years before his autobiography was published.
5
Neo-Nazis and mercenaries enter the fray
As the Rhodesian Bush War neared its peak, a number of colourful and sinister characters entered the scene, attracted for a wide variety of reasons to the white redoubt’s grand finale. They included soldiers of fortune, white supremacists, thrill-seekers, opportunists, criminals on the run, Algeria and Vietnam vets with an adrenaline addiction – and soldiers wanting to sharpen their black-ops skills.
Starting in 1974, Major Nicholas Lamprecht of the Rhodesian Light Infantry drove the recruitments and also trained the Rhodesian mercenaries.1 According to Stuart Christie’s probing study of neo-fascist networks, many were drawn from the ranks of the German Soldiers’ Combat League, a 1 500-strong, Frankfurt-based neo-Nazi organisation.2
By 1977–1978, it is estimated that there were some 1 500 foreigners serving with the Rhodesian armed forces.3 Apart from the outright neo-Nazis keen to blood themselves in what they viewed as a race war, they brought with them a wide range of opinions and military experience. Influential in Rhodesia for a short period of time were mercenaries, largely French, who had served under the infamous Bob Denard in attempting to thwart Moïse Tshombe’s anti-communist secessionist government of Katanga in the southeastern mining belt of the Congo (later Zaire) in 1961. Denard’s mercenaries at times reportedly wore Nazi swastika armbands in the field.4
Among the few Frenchmen who stayed on was Lieutenant Jean-Michel Desblé, who had first seen service in Africa in 1965 as a slender, handsome young officer with the 1st Shock (1er Choc) of the 6th Foreign Commandos, consisting of Frenchmen, Belgians, and Italians, all former parachutists or Foreign Legionnaires – loyal to the Congo’s US-backed president, Mobutu Sese Seko – under then-‘Commandant’ Denard. ‘At the end of the contract, he [Desblé] returned to France. In 1967, he saw news of his comrades besieged in Bukavu,’ these being Denard’s 1er Choc plus Belgian mercenaries of the ‘Leopard Battalion’ under Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Schramme and Katanganese rebels. ‘He decided to join them, passing alone and clandestinely via the border of Burundi [to where] 15 000 soldiers of the ANC [Armée National du Congo] were besieging 120 mercenaries and a thousand Katanganese who resisted [for] three months. He would be wounded during the last fighting but would remain on the ground until surrender to the Red Cross.’
Back in the 1er Choc, Desblé had got to know Roger Bruni, a former French paratrooper and veteran of the disaster at Dien Bien Phu in Indochina in 1954. By late 1977, Bruni was the Paris-based recruiter for a new Francophone unit of volunteers to fight in the war in Rhodesia.
The volunteer unit was formed in November 1977 under Major Roland de l’Assomption, an ex-officer of the 11th Shock Parachute Regiment, who had served on the presidential guard of Gabon’s Omar Bongo; Major Mario La Viola, a veteran of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment; and then-‘Colonel’ Denard. It was attached to the Rhodesian Army as the 7th Independent Company. Desblé appears to have signed up not so much for the untaxed pay of R$245 than for the adventure and camaraderie of serving once again with Denard. In the end, the 7th was only deployed twice. The experiment was a disaster, partly because the Frenchmen knew no Shona and their English was poor; discipline was as irregular as one might expect of mercenaries; and their interrogation methods were brutal and alienated potentially friendly black populations. The unit was disbanded in May 1978, and Denard went off to stage one of his periodic coups d’état in the Comoro Islands, which provided both Rhodesia and South Africa with a weapons-shipment route to evade international arms embargoes. Desblé had already signed up to the Selous Scouts, the sole Frenchman to do so.
Also among the mercenaries who became specialist soldiers in Rhodesia were men from the USA, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War ill at ease with their indifferent or hostile treatment at home following the end of that unpopular war. One of them was Sergeant Chris Pessarra, a tall former Legionnaire with tousled blond hair. He had been blooded as a paratrooper with the Foreign Legion’s renowned 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, its sister regiment, the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment, having been forcibly disbanded after its key role in the failed Generals’ Putsch in Algeria in 1961.
Pessarra joined the Rhodesian war in about 1975. By March