According to recent research, the ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had very little interest in the Angolan situation and gave no strategic leadership to his own government on the matter. However, Fidel Castro used this power vacuum astutely to further his own goals. Nevertheless, the Soviets played along because it gave them a chance to flex their muscles globally and prove that they were as much a superpower as the US. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Kremlin was humiliated because it did not have a sizeable ocean-going navy, the Soviets developed a navy and strategic airlift capable of projecting their power considerably. They were anxious to experiment and see how far they could go.[49]
Within a few weeks, MPLA forces drove the FLNA out of Luanda, after which UNITA, which had no more than a token presence in the capital, withdrew to the south.
South Africa was drawn hesitantly and incrementally into this cauldron. As an anonymous South African military official who was “present when the decision was made” told US academic Gillian Gunn:
We had a request from these movements [the MPLA’s rivals] for aid, and we decided to expend a relatively small sum initially . . . Our intuitive feeling was that we should have the most friendly power possible on that border . . . We [subsequently] found that our new allies were totally disorganised. They could not utilise cash, so we provided arms. They could not use the arms, so we sent in officers to train them to use the arms. The training process was too slow, so we handled the weapons ourselves. We got pulled in gradually, needing to commit ourselves more if the past commitment was not to be wasted.[50]
In fact, the Cabinet was deeply divided. Prime Minister John Vorster, who had invested a lot of political capital in a détente policy with black African states – and even had some modest success – was unwilling to jeopardise it. He was supported by the influential head of the Bureau of State Security (popularly known as BOSS), General Hendrik van den Bergh, who felt that securing the Angolan border would be enough to keep SWAPO out. General Constand Viljoen wrote to PW Botha that Van den Bergh saw Angola solely as a political matter. “He says there are no SWAPO terrorists in Angola. This differs from our opinion,” he informed Botha.[51] Botha and his generals, therefore, told Vorster that South Africa needed to take the initiative if it wanted to win the war. In the end, Vorster was won over, although his misgivings remained.[52]
Castro’s propaganda after the fact was that the South Africans wanted “to rob the Angolan people of its legitimate rights and install a puppet government” and that their aim was “dismembering Angola and robbing it of its independence”.[53] He even claimed that he had to intervene in order “to prevent apartheid from being installed in Angola”.[54] He raved about the South African “tank columns, blitzkrieg-type, Nazi-type, apartheid style”. “Either we would sit idle, and South Africa would take over Angola, or we would make an effort to help.”[55]
In fact, the South African objectives were rather modest. In a first operational instruction emanating from the Chief of the SADF, the army was tasked only to help UNITA to win back the areas it had previously controlled.[56] On 24 September, the SADF’s final operational approach – a four-phase plan – was laid before the Minister of Defence, PW Botha. This was the beginning of Operation Savannah. The idea, the SADF said, was to carry it out clandestinely and with the minimum number of soldiers. The four phases consisted of the following:
• Aid to the anti-Marxist movements in Angola with regard to battle training, logistics and intelligence;
• Preventing any further advance by the enemy;
• The recapture of all areas occupied by the MPLA and Cubans in their southward march;
• The capture of the southern Angolan harbours.[57]
At the same time, the Chief of the Army, Lieutenant General Magnus Malan, also ordered operations against SWAPO, which had been ensconcing itself in the southern parts of Angola in order to infiltrate southwards over the border. A ceiling of 3 000 men and 600 vehicles of all kinds was placed on the operation.[58]
The strategic aim, as Constand Viljoen explained later, was to employ “a limited war to apply pressure on the OAU [Organisation of African Unity] so they’d put in place a government of national unity”, as the Alvor Agreement stipulated. (The OAU was scheduled to meet early in 1976 to deliberate about the matter.) This was done at the request of Savimbi and Roberto “to enable them to remain forces of influence in Angola until the Organisation of African Unity meeting scheduled to take place after the elections”.[59] The capture of Luanda by South African forces and the establishment of a UNITA/FLNA government in place of the MPLA was discussed, but rejected. The consensus was that it would entail higher costs than was justified by the prize.[60]
The South African government laboured under the naive idea that all of this could be done in secret. After the first rumours of SADF troops inside Angola hit the international media, PW Botha kept his countrymen in the dark about South Africa’s military involvement in the country. However, the government’s lack of a clear strategic view, certainly in the first weeks, filtered down to the troops on the ground. Much later Jan Breytenbach would spell out the adverse results for him and his men at the front:
At the sharp end, during Savannah, we never really knew whether we were to take over the potential SWAPO guerrilla base area by destroying the guerrillas already in residence there, capture as much of Angola as possible before 11 November, attack and take over Luanda, the capital, to install Savimbi . . . or “whatever”. As combat soldiers, we hardly knew what the hell was going on and where we were going to. But we went nonetheless.[61]
In the process, several South African battle groups embarked on a series of astonishingly rapid northward advances, flattening everything in their path. As Willem Steenkamp says, the South African commander, Colonel Koos van Heerden, led a “little half-trained army more than 3 100 km up a hostile coast in a mere 33 days of movement, winning every one of the 30 actions he fought, for a cost of five dead (including one South African) and 41 wounded (including 20 South Africans).”[62]
This was a classic rapid advance, reminiscent of the German Army in France in 1940 and the Soviet Union the following year, where the blistering pace of the movement became a weapon in itself. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative John Stockwell wrote of “the most effective military strike force ever seen in black Africa, exploding through the MPLA/Cuban ranks in a blitzkrieg”.[63] Jan Breytenbach, in command of one of the battle groups, commented: “The reason Task Force Zulu advanced so rapidly, overrunning one delaying or defensive locality after another, was because FAPLA/Cuban forces were caught off balance when the opening shots were fired. Thereafter they were totally dislocated by never being given a chance to catch their breath, regroup and redeploy into well prepared defensive positions.”[64]
But in spite of the military success, things were about to unravel on the political level, and, in the end, this would prove decisive. Although several hundred Cuban advisors and instructors had been in Angola for several months already,[65] Fidel Castro decided to send a large force of Cuban troops to Angola in reaction to the South African invasion without consulting Moscow. The first of these arrived by air in the first week of November, a few days before independence day on 11 November.[66] Within a few weeks, the Cuban contingent grew into a formidable force of 36 000 men and 300 tanks.[67]
South African troops soon clashed with advance elements of the Cuban force. On 23 November, they moved into a Cuban ambush at Ebo and were punished severely. However, a few days later, the SADF took revenge by mauling a Cuban force at Bridge 14, south of Ebo.[68] It is fair to say that the soldiers on both sides developed a healthy respect for each other. Castro noted “serious mistakes” made by his own forces and acknowledged that the South Africans broke through the Cuban lines at least once.[69] At the same time, according to the official South African historian of the operation,