The SADF in the Border War. Leopold Scholtz
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The SADFin theBorder War
1966–1989
Leopold Scholtz
Tafelberg
To my parents
Author’s Note
During the Border War, I worked as a journalist at two Afrikaans newspapers – first at Beeld in Johannesburg (1979–1982) and then at Die Burger in Cape Town. These newspapers often carried reports of clashes and operations in which the South African Defence Force (SADF) was involved in northern South West Africa or across the border in Angola. Our job was not an easy one, as the Defence Force was rather poor at providing information. As a matter of fact, almost throughout the war there was a measure of tension between the newspapers and the Defence Force; the journalists always wanted more information, while the Defence Force gave as little away as possible.
Apart from the question of whether the Defence Force at the time could have elicited more support from the white population by issuing more information, the relative shortage of facts greatly frustrated me as a military historian. Even then, I had wanted to write a proper independent analysis of the military operations, but this was obviously impossible. The only known facts were those issued by the Defence Force, SWAPO, the MPLA and the Cubans, and the propagandistic nature of their statements made their accuracy highly dubious.
However, a few years ago several web pages started publishing original documents, inter alia, of the State Security Council (SSC), the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Defence Force, United States, Cuba and the Soviet Union. To me, this tipped the scales. With the use of additional unpublished documents in the Documentation Centre of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and contact with SADF veterans, I decided to tackle this book. It is only a first attempt; as further sources become public, the picture will become even fuller and more nuanced.
I made good friends with several veterans while writing this book. Among them I have to mention especially major generals Roland de Vries and Johann “Dippies” Dippenaar, as well as Ariël Hugo, formerly a second lieutenant with 61 Mechanised Battalion Group and now involved with this unit’s veterans’ society. They displayed endless patience by reading parts of the manuscript and identifying mistakes. De Vries went to great lengths to write down his observations of several aspects of the Border War especially for me. I am encouraging him to adapt these in book form, as I really think he has an interesting story to tell.
Two more individuals whose patience I have tested to the utmost are Lieutenant Colonel Erika Strydom and Steve de Agrela of the SANDF Documentation Centre, who spent hours finding documents for me. I also conducted personal interviews, or had e-mail correspondence, with the following: General Jannie Geldenhuys; brigadier generals Piet Muller, McGill Alexander and Willem van der Waals; colonels Paul Fouché, CP du Toit, Gerhard Louw, Leon Marais, Jan Malan, André Retief, Gert van Zyl and Ep van Lill; Commandant Dr Jakkie Cilliers of the Institute of Security Studies; Lieutenant Colonel Professor Doctor Abel Esterhuyse of the Military Academy at Saldanha; Major Hans Kriek; and lieutenants Ariël Hugo, Paul Louw, Gert Minnaar and Hubrecht van Dalsen. The maps were kindly drawn by Camille Burger.
To all these people, I want to express my sincerest thanks. Without their help, this book would have been a meagre harvest.
Last but not least, a special mention of my wife, Ingrid Scholtz, who is also a historian. In general, she is my sharpest critic, but also my greatest support. Without her, I am nothing.
Leopold Scholtz,
Delft
Introduction
This book is primarily a military, rather than a political, history. Politics do feature, insofar as war – as the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote – is a continuation of politics by other means. It is also not a social history, because the impact of the war on South African and other societies is not the main focus and these fields have already been extensively analysed.[1] The book is a history of the armed actions of the combatants – the South African Defence Force (SADF), the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN, SWAPO’s armed force), FAPLA (the armed forces of Angola’s MPLA government) and the Cuban military – on the field of battle. It focuses on the levels of security strategy, military strategy, operations and tactics alike.
I have written this book for several reasons. Firstly, there is a continuing and growing interest in the Border War among the South African public, especially the white population, judging by the number of publications seeing the light of day. Many people who participated in the war, mostly in the SADF, have set down their experiences in writing or published them on the Internet, where it is apparently lapped up by both the generation who actually served in the military and a young generation keen to know more of a war they have heard so much about.
Secondly, no comprehensive history of the war has been written yet. Military correspondent Willem Steenkamp did an admirable job with a coffee-table book,[2] published in 1989 when the crack of the guns was still reverberating in the air. Since then, many original SADF and other government documents have been declassified by the SANDF and the Department of Foreign Affairs, and some have been published on the Internet.[3] These have enabled historians to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding aspects of the war. The books by military analyst Helmoed-Römer Heitman and journalist Fred Bridgland, on the last year of South Africa’s involvement in Angola, are also noteworthy,[4] but they too appeared in 1990 – too soon after the events for a proper historical perspective to develop.
Thirdly, during the war the SADF – rightly or wrongly – believed that it had to control the flow of information very tightly. While this benefited battlefield security, it also gave rise to an untold number of rumours, many of which persist today. Even now, strange stories circulate about what “really” happened in certain battles. It is perhaps time to put these rumours to rest.
The fourth reason flows from the third. The lack of information during the 1970s and 1980s created a vacuum into which SWAPO, the MPLA, the Cubans and left-wing journalists and academics gratefully stepped. They wrote thousands of newspaper reports, as well as books and scholarly articles, in which SWAPO, MPLA and Cuban propaganda was uncritically repeated as gospel. One cannot blame these three parties for this – propaganda, after all, has always been an intrinsic part of warfare: winning the battle of perception is often as important as winning the shooting war. This is something the SADF and the South African government understood but dimly and never practised properly.
Besides, because of apartheid the South African government had become morally tainted in the eyes of most of the world. Regardless of what government and SADF spokesmen said, the world was not inclined to believe them. Whatever their opponents said was eagerly embraced as the truth. In the process, the SWAPO/MPLA/Cuban propaganda became conventional wisdom. Where possible, it has become time to test these accepted beliefs against original sources.
On the subject of sources: the (non-)availability of sources prevents this book from being balanced. More than 90% of the sources utilised are South African in origin – archival SADF and government documents, accounts by SADF participants, and so on. A few SWAPO sources have become available, but most of these are so propagandist in nature that they are not of much use. The MPLA archives are still firmly shut, although one gets a glimpse of the Angolan decision-making process through Soviet sources, partly unearthed by Russian academic Vladimir Shubin.[5] But Shubin, having been the main Soviet liaison official with the southern African rebel movements, is understandably biased towards them, and his account has to be approached with caution. Some accounts of Soviet advisors among Angolan units at a grassroots level have also been published. These accounts are interesting, but – as with the accounts of most South African participants – they suffer from the fact that the war is viewed through a keyhole.[6]
The only historian who has been admitted to the Cuban archives is an American, Professor Piero Gleijeses, who has done historical writing a great service by lifting the veil on the Cuban side. Unfortunately, because of his uncritical admiration for Fidel Castro, as well as his utter revulsion for apartheid South Africa, one is also forced to read