The SADF in the Border War. Leopold Scholtz
the lines of communication with South West Africa, while the SADF would take responsibility for the southwestern part.[40] This went hand in hand with a massive SADF aid programme to UNITA. According to a top-secret Military Intelligence report of 1979, South Africa had transferred about 1 400 tonnes of equipment to UNITA in the two previous years. In fact, “UNITA can thank the RSA for about 90% of its present force,” the report stated. In addition “[i]f the RSA did not aid UNITA, UNITA would have vanished from the vicinity”.[41]
South Africa’s limited economic power over Angola may have been another factor that contributed to its more aggressive posture. In the mid-1970s, South Africa had accepted FRELIMO rule in Mozambique and refused to aid attempts by white Portuguese colonialists to prevent the liberation movement from coming to power. In this case, Pretoria had a powerful weapon – Mozambique’s integration into the South African-dominated regional economy. Maputo’s role as a port city was largely dependent on South African expertise and its position as the nearest import point to the Witwatersrand, South Africa’s economic heart. A sizeable portion of the Mozambican working population were migrant labourers in the Republic. After the end of white rule in Rhodesia, South Africa supported the Mozambican rebel movement RENAMO, but this was in part a response to ANC terrorist attacks emanating from Mozambican soil. Its economic leverage enabled South Africa to intimidate Mozambique into signing a non-aggression pact early in 1984, restricting the ANC’s ability to operate from that country.
In the case of Angola, South Africa possessed no comparable economic card. The country had its own railways, there were very few Angolan migrant labourers in South Africa, and its oil industry made Angola relatively independent.[42] This meant that not much else but military measures remained for Pretoria to exert pressure on Angola to stop its support for SWAPO. All these considerations meant that the SADF’s approach, on the levels of military strategy, operations and tactics, was often aggressive and offensive. Nevertheless, the government remained on the defensive in terms of its security strategy.
The new South African strategy was part of a comprehensive reappraisal of South Africa’s geostrategic position, of which the navy became an unfortunate but understandable victim. Traditionally, the navy was, like the rest of the Defence Force, almost a clone of the British mother service. Whereas the army and air force were fast changing their cultures, the navy could still not really be distinguished from the Royal Navy. This did not exactly endear the navy to the army and the air force.
In fact, the navy’s posture and force structure were not even driven by South Africa’s own needs. In terms of the Simon’s Town Agreement of 1955, it was the British who decided what kind of navy South Africa would have, and it had to fit in with their global Cold War strategy. According to the agreement, Britain turned the Simon’s Town naval base over to South Africa, in return for the country’s playing a role in safeguarding the strategic Cape sea route. The agreement also allowed the navy to purchase anti-submarine frigates and minesweepers from Britain.[43] This was the main reason why many in the SADF regarded the navy “as a bit of an ‘oddball’ ” and others even “as a complete anachronism” in the words of Vice Admiral Glen Syndercombe, Chief of the Navy in the 1980s.[44]
But four factors changed all of that. The first was the cancellation of the Simon’s Town Agreement by the British Labour government in 1975. The second was the loss of Angola as a buffer territory, which focused strategic thinking very much on the country’s continental war needs. Thirdly, there was the retirement, in late 1976, of the Chief of the SADF, Admiral Hugo Biermann, under whose long leadership the navy had fared rather well. He was succeeded by General Magnus Malan who – as did other army generals – viewed the navy and its expensive ships as something of an unaffordable luxury. The fourth factor was the imposition of a UN arms embargo against South Africa. This meant that France cancelled a contract for two corvettes and two submarines, and refused to sell further aircraft as well. Most of the available resources were thereafter used for the development of army and air force weapons systems.
Against this background, the SADF, with input from navy officers, produced two documents, the so-called Mandy and Hogg reports. These questioned the navy’s role as custodian of the Cape sea route and, in effect, recommended that the force be transformed to concentrate on coastal defence. At about the same time, Minister of Defence PW Botha announced that South Africa would no longer defend the Cape sea route on behalf of the West.[45] This meant that the navy’s frigates would be phased out, and it would concentrate on its new Israeli fast missile strike craft and submarines.[46] As Admiral Syndercombe wrote,
the frigates, fine ships though they were, were not what we required in our existing operational scenario. We needed small, fast ships with massive surface to surface firepower to present an effective counter to the missile-armed fast attack craft being supplied to the Angolan Navy by the Soviet Union. Their small size also meant that they were difficult to detect, either visually or by radar, while their shallow draft, speed and manoeuvrability gave them the ability to penetrate into restricted waters where other vessels dared not go.[47]
The strike craft and submarines would play a substantial but unsung role in inserting and extracting special force operators behind enemy lines.
Angola: the political objectives
The fact that the proposals in General Malan’s strategic reviews of 1979 about an offensive posture towards Angola were formally accepted by the State Security Council elevated them to the level of official, albeit clandestine, policy. That, at least, was the case in 1979. In some SADF documents, there are casual comments that show that the military saw a regime change in Luanda as their eventual goal.[48] But none of these documents presented any operational plan to achieve it. Did it ever go beyond mere proposals? Several considerations suggest it did not.
Firstly, one should remember that the South African state was not a single, monolithic entity. From the outside, US Secretary of George Shultz remarked to President Ronald Reagan that “[t]he South African leadership is of several minds and the military, in particular, is disinclined to take chances or to favour negotiated solutions”.[49] Malan’s aggressiveness, for instance, was not greeted with whoops of joy by Foreign Affairs officials.
Secondly, the SADF’s military strategy shows that all operations up to 1985 were not primarily aimed at FAPLA, the Angolan army, but at SWAPO. In at least one instance, the South African government warned its Angolan counterpart in diplomatic language of an impending SADF cross-border operation, and assured Luanda of South Africa’s “consistent policy” that these actions were aimed “solely against SWAPO terrorists and any contact with forces of the People’s Republic of Angola is avoided”.[50] (Of course, UNITA’s guerrilla operations against the MPLA necessitated the deployment of about 50% of SWAPO’s forces to help the MPLA, which meant that far fewer SWAPO fighters were available to infiltrate SWA.)[51] The first SADF operations specifically aimed at FAPLA took place only in 1985 and 1986, and then they were on a small, clandestine scale. As we shall see later, the 1987 operation started the same way, suggesting that a forcible regime change in Luanda was not on the immediate military agenda.
Documents in the archive of the Department of Foreign Affairs tend to support this conclusion. In 1984, Pik Botha told Chester Crocker that peace in southern Africa would be impossible if the Soviets took over Angola, as this would help them to take over the entire region. Therefore, it was necessary to achieve “reconciliation” between the MPLA and UNITA; the two had to be forced to talk to each other.[52] On the face of it, it seemed as if South Africa was still committed to the Alvor Agreement of January 1975, according to which the MPLA, the FNLA and UNITA had to form an interim government of national unity to prepare for free elections. But things were not quite that simple.
Although it never happened, President PW Botha and Pik Botha at times actively considered the unilateral recognition of UNITA as the sovereign government of Angola.[53] As Pik Botha explained to a sympathetic Namibian interim government in 1985:
You can only get Cuban withdrawal if there is reconciliation in Angola. If you get reconciliation in Angola, [President José Eduardo] Dos Santos is finished. The moment they start talking to [UNITA leader Jonas] Savimbi, and this is Dr Savimbi’s own assessment, we agree, then this present regime in Luanda is finished, and then SWAPO will be finally finished as well.[54]
The