I screamed for Robert, but he didn’t answer. I saw him lying about a metre away from me and I crawled to him telling him that I had been hit. I grabbed him and shook him, his eyes were open but he had already gone. From seeing him lying there my mind snapped and I started shooting at what I didn’t know. While I was shooting I could hear AK rounds bouncing off the Ratel.
Crawling from under the Ratel at the back end Van der Vyver, or Van as I called him, was shouting to me: “Caforio, Caforio, jy moet dekking slaan, hulle skiet op jou.” I shouted to him: “Waar is die ouens? Waar is almal?” His reply was: “Hulle is almal dood.”[29]
Lieutenant Paul Louw, commander of 2 Platoon, which was hit badly, would never forget “the expressions on troops’ faces, the crumpled and charcoaled bodies, the smell of burnt human flesh, the smell of diesel early in the morning”.[30] Bornman remembered that “the Ratel in which I sat, one smelt just death as it was smeared with the blood of people who had been shot”.[31] Twelve South African soldiers died that day, the SADF’s largest casualty figure for one day’s fighting since 1945.
Those troops who were still unharmed, badly shaken or not, debussed immediately and attacked the enemy positions on foot. Rifleman Andrew McClean took a Bren machine gun, coolly walked towards a 23-mm gun position and shot the crew.[32] The problem was that the assault group and the support group could not render mutual aid, as doctrine called for; both were involved in desperate battles of their own. Reading the eyewitness accounts, one gets the impression that everything must have seemed very surreal at that moment. There was the deep roar of the anti-aircraft guns, the deafening chatter of small-arms fire and the explosions of all sorts of shells. But a job had to be done and the SWAPO fighters had to be killed or driven away.
To complicate matters further, Team 2’s rather rattled commander, Louis Harmse, pulled out of the fight and reported to Dippenaar. Harmse stayed with Dippenaar for the rest of the day, leaving his men to continue fighting without their commander. His report did have the advantage of bringing Team 2’s serious position to Dippenaar’s attention. He immediately took steps to remedy the situation by ordering the reserve Team 6 under Major Jab Swart to go and help Team 2. Team 1 (Paul Fouché), which had already fulfilled its task, was also ordered southwards at 16h30 to reinforce the embattled Team 2. The Elands of Team 3 (Jakes Jacobs) became the new reserve.
WO1 Peet Coetzee from Team 6 described the scene where the Ratels had been “shot and cut to ribbons”:
I . . . witnessed the devastating effects of what a 20-mm [sic; 23 mm] anti-aircraft cannon’s armour-piercing rounds could do to a Ratel. It simply went through everything, and that included the occupants sitting inside.
In another Ratel the driver was shot from behind and plastered against the driver’s front window. His flesh was protruding through the hole made by the passing round. It was not a pleasant sight and remained with me for a long time . . . I saw a critically wounded guy being made comfortable under a bush in a shady patch, his right arm having been blown off at the armpit with blood squirting out.[33]
Major Jab Swart, commander of Team 6, collected the bodies of some of the South African dead and gathered the remains of Team 2, but then ran into another contact. He swept right through it, firing all the way. Two of his Ratels lost their way, but such was the general mayhem that Swart did not wait to gather them, but continued onward. One Ratel found its way back; the other group spent an anxious night in the bush, fearing a SWAPO attack at any moment.
Dippenaar struggled to maintain his command. It needed a superman to re-establish control in a situation where sight was extremely limited and navigation difficult due to the dense bush, coupled with the shock of the tremendous noise and the losses on the South African side. But Dippenaar was a very good officer. When Major Paul Fouché from Team 1 ran into yet another ambush as he was moving southwards, Dippenaar ordered Jacobs and the Elands of Team 3 forward. Once again, mechanised infantry doctrine kicked in: Fouché pulled back about 200 m to disengage from the ambush and then moved around the enemy’s left flank, while Jacobs’s armoured cars supported them with their 90-mm guns. At last, everything came together in a textbook attack, and even the air support, in the form of two Impala IIs, was bang on target. In the process, a large number of enemy fighters were killed and two SWAPO prisoners taken. Some of the highly charged troops wanted to kill them, but Constand Viljoen and Johann Dippenaar strictly forbade it, saying, “Shoot at or touch those people [and] you’ll be court-martialled!” This was just as well, because the prisoners supplied the South Africans with much valuable information about other targets in the vicinity.
This attack finally broke SWAPO’s back. At 17h30 a signal was intercepted: “Enemy infantry had attacked our positions. We tried but we lost conduct of controlling the troops. We are evacuating.”[34]
But SWAPO still had a sting in its tail. While moving further southwards in the dark to a spot where they could spend the night, the combat group once again ran into a classic L-shaped ambush. But every South African vehicle brought down maximum fire on the enemy, and this proved too much for the defenders, who broke and ran after about 20 minutes. The night was spent in great anxiety, a massive SWAPO attack being expected any minute. But it never materialised. Most probably, SWAPO was equally, or even more, rattled by the day’s carnage.
The sun rose on the morning of 11 June on a scene of utter destruction. Military equipment was strewn about – some destroyed or damaged, some still intact – among dead bodies and the general chaos of war. In the course of the morning, the two companies of paratroops finally arrived in lorries from the echelon area at Mulemba and were used to mop up the area. The mechanised part of Combat Group 61 was by this point very low on fuel and ammunition, and some vehicles even had to be towed, having run dry. A while later, the rear echelon also arrived, as did Combat Group 10 (Chris Serfontein), and the whole Smokeshell complex was examined carefully for survivors and intelligence during the next few days.
At this time, something potentially serious happened. While Dippenaar was moving his headquarters, his command Ratel detonated a double mine. General Constand Viljoen happened to be in the vehicle, but he was thrown clear and was not injured. But at the operations headquarters at Eenhana, where Major General Jannie Geldenhuys was following the progress on radio, there were a few tense minutes until they heard Viljoen was unhurt. This did not stop Geldenhuys from joining Serfontein’s combat group just the next day!
In his detailed report, Dippenaar mentions that Viljoen, with “his inexhaustibility and activity was at that stage my biggest worry. The best I can describe General Viljoen is undoubtedly like an ant, because whenever there was a chance, he walked about, looked at equipment and talked to the soldiers. At no stage did he interfere with my command, although, from time to time and when asked, he gave his opinion.”[35]
By early afternoon on 13 June, the Smokeshell complex was completely free of SWAPO and in South African possession. Altogether, 267 bodies of PLAN fighters were found and buried, while 10 anti-aircraft guns and huge quantities of ammunition were also taken. Because of the length of the operation, it was judged that the insurgents had evacuated their bases at Ionde and that it would be unnecessary to attack that as well. Then 61 Mech moved back to the base area at Mulemba, where the following day the troops crowded every available radio to listen to the rugby Test between the Springboks and the visiting British Lions. Their day was made when the Boks trounced the Lions 26–9, which made up somewhat for the traumatic battle of four days before.
According to Geldenhuys, a pattern developed during Operation Sceptic that would be repeated later. “Firstly, an ants’ nest is kicked open and the ants scatter. Secondly, there is a search around the nest for ants. Smokeshell was the ants’ nest. Most cadres swarmed out in little groups to seek refuge at their other nests, or bases. Then a combination of area operations, follow-ups, and search-and-destroy operations were launched to locate and destroy them.”[36]
It is not necessary to follow the operations of the next few days in detail. Suffice to say that