The SADF in the Border War. Leopold Scholtz
1982. In 1977, 22 South African officers attended courses at the IDF’s combat school, and others followed in subsequent years. Officers who attended mechanised warfare courses in Israel included men who became commanders of elite conventional units like 61 Mechanised Battalion Group (61 Mech), men such as commandants (both later colonels) Gert van Zyl and Ep van Lill.[45] The SADF’s tank doctrine was, in addition, much influenced by that of the Israelis.[46]
The SADF took over the Israeli operational planning cycle, as perfected during the Six Day War of 1967 and the October War of 1973. This boils down to simultaneous planning on an integrated basis with free liaison between different staffs. In other words, armour, infantry, artillery, logistics, air force – all involved – would come together and thrash out one or alternative operational plans, which would then be submitted to the senior commanders.[47] This debating procedure was more democratic than rigid decision-making at the top.
The downward devolution of decision-making played an important role for the SADF. As Roland de Vries writes:
The South African combat leaders were afforded a great measure of initiative down to combat group and combat team [more or less battalion and company/squadron] level. This stimulated independent thought and conduct to a great extent down to ground level. The FAPLA enemy did not have this powerful and flexible attribute. The poor devils had to ask permission for everything and were not allowed to think for themselves.[48]
He points out, though, that things were different for SWAPO and UNITA guerrillas.[49] However, this devolution of power was in sharp contrast to the rigid control in FAPLA and the Cuban army, and helps explain the operational success the SADF repeatedly achieved in its conventional operations inside Angola.
Operation Savannah was indeed the first practical test for the SADF’s new doctrine. On an operational and tactical level, it worked very well, although Savannah was a strategic disaster. After the operation, the Commission of Investigation into the Future Planning of the South African Defence Force was set up, with Jannie Geldenhuys as chairman, for what would, in effect, be a defence review for the 1980s. In the wake of Savannah, the committee report emphasised, among other things, the influence of the “space factor”. “Area is the only relatively stable factor as far as the RSA’s environmental analysis is concerned,” the committee wrote, although it noted that “the space between the RSA and its enemies has narrowed alarmingly”. For the SADF’s operational doctrine, this meant that “[t]he RSA is a vast country with extended borders and a long coastline. This means that the SADF has to operate in an area and not along a front. This requires special attention to logistics, strategic and tactical mobility, the need for blanket cover, decentralisation of execution and a night-fighting ability.”[50]
One prerequisite, as the army realised, was to couple mobility with devastating firepower. As Roland de Vries, at the time second in command of the Army Battle School at Lohatlha, and a junior officer wrote in 1987: “After conducting outflanking manoeuvres or penetrations, the force which has taken the offensive, can attack vital installations behind enemy lines, wreaking havoc. If the enemy’s warfare doctrines favour positional rather than mobile warfare, defeat should be imminent and swift.” In support of the concept of mobility, they offered a quotation from the British historian Thomas Pakenham about the Anglo-Boer War: “There was one iron law of strategy imprinted on the mind of the Boers like a law of the wild: the answer to superior numbers is superior mobility.” With this mobility the objective should be “to out-manoeuvre, rather than engage and become involved in a full-scale confrontation with the enemy”.[51]
De Vries, in fact, was one of the foremost SADF thinkers in developing a new mobile warfare doctrine suited to the African battle space. As second in command of 1 SAI in the late 1970s, he – together with Ep van Lill and André Kruger – “developed the training systems, training programmes, training doctrine and aides-memoire for mechanised infantry”. They tested their ideas in battle simulation exercises at De Brug and Schmidtsdrif, and even involved the air force in order to experiment with the “evolving tactical and operational mobile warfare concepts – one of these being the comfortable utilisation of air support with the close coordination of indirect fire support and ground manoeuvre”. He also writes, “We taught our combat leaders situational awareness, thinking one step ahead, fast moving action, leading from the front, quick orders and smoothly attacking from the line of advance.”[52]
A new structure and new equipment
Operation Savannah had mixed consequences for the SADF. In Willem Steenkamp’s words: “For the South Africans – short of men, short of equipment, their defence force still struggling to wrench itself free from the decades of neglect that had followed World War II – the situation was immensely worrying.”[53] Yet it was the army’s first experience of mobile warfare in the southern African bush, and as such created a laboratory where the new doctrine could be tested.
One of the most important consequences of Operation Savannah was that it showed the inadequacy of the South African weaponry. Magnus Malan lamented the country’s lack of “comparable firepower”: “It was a shock to compare the obsolete weaponry of the Defence Force with those of the enemy. This shortcoming needed urgent rectification,” he wrote in his memoirs.[54] The need for an infantry fighting vehicle to replace the obsolete Saracen armoured personnel carrier had been identified by 1968,[55] but development really took off in the wake of Operation Savannah.
The fact is that the motorised infantry’s main vehicles – Unimog and Bedford trucks – were too soft for the harsh African terrain. A proper infantry fighting vehicle was necessary in order to transform the motorised infantry into mechanised infantry. The four-wheeled Eland armoured cars also found it difficult to move everywhere – the setback at Ebo occurred partly as a result of this deficiency.[56] The army had very little with which to counter Soviet-supplied T-34 and T-54/55 tanks used by FAPLA and the Cubans; the Eland’s low-pressure 90-mm gun did not have the necessary penetrative capacity. The Second World War-vintage G-2 140-mm (5,5-inch) gun used by the artillery had a range somewhat shorter than the enemy equivalent – 18 km versus 23 km – while the BM-21 (“Stalin organ”) tactical rocket system used by the Cubans was greatly worrying. The need for something similar in the SADF was identified.[57]
A re-equipment programme had started in 1974, but Operation Savannah emphasised the need for rapid action. One of the first breakthroughs was the development of the Ratel IFV. Three years after the prototype saw the light of day, in 1974, the Minister of Defence reported to Parliament that the Ratel had been “successfully industrialised”.[58]
The significance of the Ratel can hardly be exaggerated.[59] It was the single most important weapon system in the execution of cross-border operations in Angola. With its six wheels, later equipped with “flat-run” tyres, the Ratel was the army’s most mobile vehicle in the bush throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The infantry fighting version was equipped with a rapid-firing 20-mm gun, able to fire both armour-piercing and high-explosive ammunition, and the gunner was able to switch instantly between the two types. It had space for a section of infantry, who could either stand with their upper bodies out of hatches on top or shoot out of portholes in the side of the vehicle.
The infantry could therefore enter the battlefield in an armoured vehicle that had a formidable fighting capability in its own right. When needed, the section could jump out within seconds and fight further on foot. Not only did the Ratel give the infantry a hitherto unheard-of degree of mobility, but it also enabled the troops to enter battles relatively fresh – at any rate, compared with soldiers who had to walk long distances carrying heavy packs to reach the front. Furthermore, the Ratel gave protection against small-arms fire, although not against the formidable Soviet-supplied 23-mm anti-aircraft gun, with which both SWAPO and FAPLA were equipped.
There were various models of the Ratel. Apart from the above-mentioned Ratel 20, there was one with a 90-mm gun, which was basically the Eland 90’s turret on top of the Ratel chassis. This model was utilised as an armoured car and as an antitank weapon, and even at times successfully took on the Soviet T-54/55 tank, although its gun was not really up to the task. Against infantry or lightly armoured targets, it was very useful. In close-quarters fighting, as against the T-54/55, its main protection was its formidable mobility, although the lack of a stabilised gun somewhat