In January 1977, the Republican administration of Gerald Ford was replaced by the Democrat administration of Jimmy Carter, and relations deteriorated even further. South African suspicion of US machinations did not diminish until President Ronald Reagan took over in 1981, and even then a certain wariness survived.
Operation Savannah did have one lasting advantage for South Africa. The SADF gained a new ally, namely, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, which had previously supported SWAPO.[109] The liberation movement had made the mistake of treating UNITA supporters harshly, which had angered Savimbi. By the end of 1975, he had rescinded his permission for SWAPO fighters to use UNITA bases in southeastern Angola.[110] “We will never let them operate against the South Africans in Namibia again. Never!” he exclaimed in November 1976 to a British journalist.[111]
The military consequences
On an operational level, the Angolan debacle had negative consequences for South Africa. Firstly, the harshness of the apartheid system and the perceived South African beating at the hands of the Cubans and the MPLA increased support for SWAPO,[112] which moved swiftly to exploit this support and the opportunities it offered. Many young South West Africans crossed the border to join the guerrillas. According to SADF intelligence, SWAPO’s military strength increased from about 400 trained guerrillas in 1974 to approximately 2 000 in 1976.[113] From radio intercepts, it became clear to the SADF that Angola had ceded several bases to SWAPO in the south of the country, and that Cuban instructors were training SWAPO fighters. Within a few months, SWAPO was transformed, as Magnus Malan writes, “from a plodding organisation into a powerful, well-trained and well-oiled military machine”.[114]
From just south of the Angolan border, where he was engaged in building up what would become 32 Battalion, Jan Breytenbach reported that “the military and political situation in South Angola has deteriorated to such an extent that it presents a critical threat”.[115] Military Intelligence established the existence of some 52 SWAPO forward operational bases immediately north of the border.[116]
By 1977, there was an average of a hundred contacts per month between SWAPO insurgents and SADF soldiers. The army estimated that there were about 300 insurgents inside SWA,[117] indicating that SWAPO was very active indeed. “The picture from this time on,” Susan Brown writes, “is of regular land-mine casualties among troops in Ovamboland, abduction or assassination of Ovambo headmen, construction workers shot at or injured (South Africa was constructing tarred roads, water towers, pipelines and canals), white construction foremen abducted, stores raided and burned . . .”[118]
SWAPO made use of typical guerrilla tactics – “little more than hit-and-run contacts”, as ex-soldier Piet Nortje recounts. “Even when they far outnumbered their opponents, it was customary for them to pour on the heat for a brief period, then disappear into the bush.”[119] Bombs were set off in Windhoek and even in Swakopmund and Keetmanshoop.[120] According to SADF planners in May 1977, SWAPO bands were avoiding contact with the security forces and concentrating on “intimidating and activating the local population”.[121] It was very effective, and indicative of the extent to which the movement had imbibed the guerrilla doctrines expounded by Marxist strategists like Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.[122]
In order to combat SWAPO, the SADF relied mainly on white conscripts and reservists, often from the cities, who proved to be unsuitable. Being a fair sample of the white community, with the paternalistic and often racist attitudes of the time, they were at a disadvantage in dealing with tribal people in northern SWA. This certainly did not help in winning the loyalty and support of the locals, which meant that the security forces got little or no intelligence, and when they did get it, it was mostly too old to be useful.[123]
According to Eugene de Kock, who was a station commander in Ruacana at the time, SWAPO “seemed to be doing what it liked”. In his memoirs, he writes that SWAPO “was ahead of us in most respects”. The main reason was that “our troops were not bush-savvy. We took a boy who had just matriculated, gave him a gun, two to three months of basic training – and then threw him in the middle of a country that he did not know, people he did not understand and an enemy that he had never seen. No wonder he did not do very well.”[124]
Indeed, how could one expect city boys to track and find guerrillas, who had grown up in the area and knew every bushcraft trick in the book, when they did not want to be found? A typical example of how the conscripts fared is given by a troepie who calls himself “Dennis” and shared online his experience of a patrol in 1979 near Etale in northern SWA:
The platoon sergeant was not interested in walking any further that day, so we bedded down where we were. We didn’t do any protective movement. We stayed where we were. We found a big tree and we slept in a half moon around the tree.
While we were there, about 45 terrorists actually crept in, and the nearest guy was about 20 feet away from me, and they were also in a half circle around us. Because we were close to a waterhole, there were cattle and we wouldn’t have heard them anyway. They dug in about 8 inches and made themselves a little wall in front of them. The guys were armed with AK47s and RPGs in between them. Then when they had set up, they looi-ed [hit] us.
I woke up and I thought I was dreaming. There were green and red tracers flying over my head. I could feel sand actually hitting me from the bullets that were landing around me. The guy sleeping next to me on a groundsheet was hit in the leg and in the stomach . . . He was pretty badly injured, and he was screaming and sitting up. I was trying to keep him down. I was trying to keep my head as low as possible as well, with my chin in the ground.
These guys were looi-ing us big time – RPGs were hitting the tree above us and exploding. I shot off one shot with my R1 and I had a storing [stoppage] because I had got sand in it while trying not to be hit. I managed to get hold of the weapon of the guy next to me, and I shot one shot off and that also had a storing.
By this time, the fire had going down – it only lasted maybe 30 seconds or a minute – I don’t know. Then these terrorists took off and ran.[125]
These shortcomings were caused partly by the SADF’s inefficient personnel system. As Willem Steenkamp explains, large numbers of Citizen Force and Commando members were regularly called up to man bases and escort convoys. Time for travel and refresher training “cut the actual operational service to something over two months . . . and no one stayed long enough in an area to build up a comprehensive knowledge of people and places . . .”[126]
South African tactics also were clumsy and unwieldy. Jan Breytenbach relates, with more than a touch of sarcasm, how Operation Kobra was launched in May 1976 with “masses of infantry”; “[s]upply bases, bursting at the seams, were set up in the operational area to provide everything from hot showers to ample issues of daily ration packs . . . It was the biggest deployment of South African troops since the Second World War. But this huge force did not get a single kill.”[127]
Eugene de Kock observed that the security forces had a disdain for SWAPO at the time because the guerrillas never stood and fought. “The fact that SWAPO soldiers were seldom seen, and resisted getting into set-piece engagements, reinforced the view that they were ineffectual and merely a nuisance. This was not so. SWAPO groups – large ones at that – moved freely around Ovamboland. But, because they could not be found, they did not exist for the security forces.”[128]
Recalling that era, a senior SWAPO commander told Susan Brown years later that “the enemy had no influence among the masses . . . During that time, even the SADF were under-trained. They were not specialised in guerrilla tactics. That is why they found it difficult to track down guerrillas during that time; they were not in a position to move in the areas where we used to operate and they got demoralised. At that time we had the upper hand.”[129]
SWAPO also moved to broaden the geographical scope of the war. PLAN’s chief of staff, David “Ho Chi Minh” Namholo, related: “[Strategy] was changed to cross into farming areas, going to urban areas rather than just being in the north or in Caprivi