At two minutes past 7am on the cool autumn morning of May 4 1978 scores of extraordinary round red objects that looked like bowling balls fell out of the sky onto a dusty field at the small southern Angolan former iron-mining dorp of Cassinga, bounded into the air — and exploded.
The open field had been selected as the first target by Canberras of the South African Air Force (SAAF) in Operation Reindeer because military intelligence had gathered information that at 7am daily, their enemy, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan), held a parade.
Plan was the armed wing of the South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo), and it had entrenched itself in Angola under the aegis of its allies, the People’s Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola (Fapla) and a Cuban expeditionary force, to organise raids into then South West Africa (now Namibia).
Operation Reindeer was designed as a three-pronged pre-emptive strike, the most daring component of which was a SAAF raid against Cassinga, 260km behind enemy lines, not only with bombers, but with boots on the ground in what would be the largest parachute drop on the African continent since the Allies took Tunisia in 1943.
The first problem with Cassinga, which would become one of the most hotly argued-about clashes of the 13-year South African Defence Force (SADF) engagement in the Angolan Civil War, was that only three Plan guerrillas were killed on the Cassinga parade ground that day.
This fact, stated by paratroop commander Col Jan Breytenbach in his 2019 paper “Airborne Assault on Cassinga Base” and confirmed by his photographer Mike McWilliams, would help fuel a narrative that still holds sway today: that Cassinga was a raid not against a well-defended Plan base of perhaps 1,200 combatants, but a Swapo camp of 3,798 refugees protected by a mere 300 guerrillas.
Yet pre-raid aerial surveillance photographs had shown Cassinga boasted several concrete bunkers, linked by zigzagging trench systems, so after the Canberras came four Buccaneers that bombed the concrete targets and then two Mirage III fighter jets that strafed the trenches.
A lone rocket-fitted Buccaneer stayed to protect the next wave: a composite parachute battalion under Breytenbach, consisting of four understrength companies plus two independent rifle platoons, a mortar platoon and an antitank platoon, totalling 364 paratroopers.
About 22km to the east, the SAAF’s Maj John Church had set up a “helicopter administration area” (HAA) for choppers to extract the paratroopers after the raid. To the consternation of the junior officers at the HAA, chief of the army Constand Viljoen flew in with them.
The phalanx of SAAF transport planes disgorged their loads of paratroopers who descended into incoming anti-aircraft and small-arms fire that holed a few canopies but hit no-one. But air-photo interpreters had wrongly scaled some of the drop-zone maps.
A third of the paratroopers overshot the drop-zone as a result, the mortar section landing in the Culonga River — one of them, Rifleman André “Skillie” Human, is believed drowned — and losing half their mortars, or on the opposite bank or fields outside town.
This allowed Plan Commander Dimo Hamaambo and Commissar Greenwell Matongoh to escape. The independent platoons under Johan Blaauw and Piet Botes had been dropped reasonably accurately, however, and Botes’ platoon landed in and engaged the enemy at a tented camp northwest of Cassinga, killing 54.
Bretyenbach calls this a rest-and-recuperation camp, while former paratrooper Brig-Gen Edward McGill Alexander calls it a “recruit camp” and says the paratroopers found some children there, but left them behind in their advance on Cassinga proper.
Fapla and Cuban tank and motorised infantry were at Techumatete just 15km south of Cassinga, so after assaulting the engineering complex, Capt Tommy Lamprecht’s Delta Company set up a stop-line and sent the antitank platoon to set up an ambush on the road south.
Commanded by Breytenbach, Alpha Company under Capt Gerrie Steyn and Bravo Company under Hugo Murray began their main assault, but encountered stiff resistance, especially from Plan anti-aircraft guns being used in a ground-attack role, which brought their assault to a halt.
Lamprecht and a platoon of his men then attacked through the western trenches towards the anti-aircraft guns, while Blaauw’s platoon entered the trenches from the north and the 60mm mortar platoon under Second Lieutenant Piet “Graspol” Nel fired on the guns.
When the guns finally fell silent about 11am (by which time Breytenbach had originally planned for the paratroopers to be airlifted out), the butcher’s bill in the trenches was 95 dead uniformed Plan guerrillas for three dead SADF soldiers.
By this time, though the raiders were running two hours behind schedule, the back of the resistance at Cassinga had been broken and the paratroops set about their assigned tasks of retrieving documents from Himaambo’s HQ then burning the camp’s buildings and grass huts.
And yet it was precisely then that the horror of Cassinga truly began.
As Breytenbach recalled: “While advancing into Cassinga from the south, and with our stopper groups deployed on the northern escape route, we had driven Swapo before us until they were all compressed within the northern system of trenches.
“They had pulled women and children with them into the trenches and had, without shame or hesitation, used unarmed women as ‘bullet catchers’ by pulling them across their own bodies as human shields. Thus most of the civilians killed in Cassinga were killed in the trenches.”
The delay at Cassinga had enabled a Fapla-Cuban column of about 30 vehicles consisting of T-34 tanks and armoured personnel carriers, to advance up the road from Techumatete. It was reduced by the Buccaneer’s rockets and the antitank platoon.
Meanwhile, the first extraction of parabats by helicopter to the helicopter administration area took place, but there was confusion in the operation’s command-and-control as Brig MJ du Plessis, who had come along for the ride, commandeered Breytenbach’s radio operator and ordered the extraction prematurely, ordering the wounded to be taken out first, whereas it had been planned differently.
The charismatic Breytenbach and the dour Du Plessis were old rivals, but this was a disastrous moment for them to cross swords. Not one to miss a good dust-up, Viljoen flew in himself to try and sort out the chaos, but Du Plessis had already flown out the two engineers tasked with destroying enemy weapons before they had done so.
“Meanwhile, back in the centre of Cassinga, I was suddenly confronted with a most difficult situation,” Bretenbach recalled. “A girl, about 16 years old, clutching a small boy of about six by the hand and accompanied by about 20 or 30 … school children, approached me diffidently and asked me to take her, and the children, back to their mothers.”
The children were among 119 who had been kidnapped with their teacher from the Anglican St Mary’s Mission School in South West Africa by Plan. “I had to say ‘no’ because there were only enough choppers for my paratroopers. She turned away from me and began to cry. To this day I have been pestered by a sense of guilt.”
Even the 40 captured Plan prisoners had to be left behind, and the paratroopers got out of there by the skin of their teeth with the lead T-34 tank, of a much-reduced enemy column, firing a shell at the last helicopter.
Cassinga’s dead were reported in a strictly confidential Swapo Central Committee report by Peter Nanyemba, Swapo’s defence secretary, to have totalled 582 by midnight on May 7: 326 men and 256 women, which may have included an estimated 150 Fapla and Cuban soldiers killed on the Techumatate road. Complicating a proper accounting is that many Plan guerrillas were women, and mostly teens served in its ranks.
The Angolan news agency was the first to report a raid on a “refugee camp” at Cassinga, on the same day it occurred, and this made international news that evening when a special session of the UN Security Council was convened at the request of Angola.
Swapo propaganda initially disingenuously claimed Plan had killed 102 paratroopers and downed three SAAF aircraft at Cassinga, but this is fictional, and it quickly realised that this heroic tale undermined the much more saleable refugee camp narrative, so the claim swiftly disappeared.
On May 8, Swapo took a group of foreign journalists to visit Cassinga where they found scenes of devastation and two mass graves: a covered grave was said to contain the bodies of 122 children, while the open grave was half-filled with scores of bodies and clearly showed several women in cotton dresses among the corpses in fatigues.
Photographed by journalists such as Gaetano Pagano, a producer for Swedish TV2, pictures of the open grave were syndicated internationally and brought waves of opprobrium down on the SADF.
Only a month before the firefight, a UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) visit to Cassinga had found it ill-equipped to deal with a camp population of 11,000-12,000, 70% of them children, so by Swapo’s later figures, at least two thirds of the civilian population must have been relocated just before the battle.
Unicef also noted, however, that it had not counted “the armed ‘freedom fighters’, who were certainly numerous and who were responsible for protecting the areas surrounding the camp”.
The SADF never produced an official account of the Battle of Cassinga, but in the most detailed examination to date, which treats claims of a massacre of civilians seriously, Alexander’s 2009 study “The Cassinga Raid”, interrogates the SADF’s claims that Cassinga was a Plan Command HQ (CHQ).
He offers as proof a declassified Plan document, “The 8th Minutes of the Military Council”, dated 04.1.1977, at “Mongolia” base (Efitu) and signed by the chair and secretary of the Plan Military Council, Hamaambo and Martin Shalli.
“In the document there is one reference to ‘Moscow CHQ’ [Cassinga] as being required to provide supplies to five different active guerrilla areas. Another reference speaks of all fronts forwarding problems and requirements to the CHQ. That this document was appended to a South African Army document dated 8 March 1978 is evidence that it was in the possession of the SADF prior to the Cassinga raid,” Alexander argues.
A June 1977 interrogation report, “Cassinga CHQ”, identifies it as a training camp with a strength of 7,000, though the prisoner may have been deliberately exaggerating its manpower. Colin Leys and John Saul’s 1995 study “Namibia’s Liberation Struggle” agrees that Hamaambo “had even set up a Plan Command Headquarters at Cassinga, in southern Angola, by 1976”.
However, even if Cassinga was a significant Plan Command HQ, the question of the presence of civilians cannot be avoided — and it seems likely that the blame for the probably high civilian casualties lies on both sides of the border. On Plan’s side, it should have known better not to combine military and civilian facilities; on the SADF’s side, it appears military intelligence ignored the civilian presence in its preraid briefings. The parachute brigade’s operational orders only makes passing mention of “prostitutes” there.
Breytenbach argues: “Bishop Kobo [formerly MK Captain Joseph Kobo], who was seconded to this Swapo base by MK, confirmed with me that there was no refugee camp, that Cassinga was the HQ of Plan’s overall commander, Dimo Amaambo [sic], that it was the main logistics base for stocking up forward Swapo bases for the upcoming mass incursion” of guerrillas into South West Africa.
In May 2007, a retired Viljoen told me: “It is true there were some women and children, but completely untrue to say they made up most of those killed. Swapo had some women in uniform and there were also girlfriends of fighters present.”
As historian Gary Baines concludes in his 2008 paper “The Battle for Cassinga”, “there is no consensus whatsoever about Cassinga in South Africa’s collective memory. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission singled out Cassinga as the most controversial external military operation undertaken by the SADF … the raid ‘violated international humanitarian law’, including by ‘the failure to take adequate steps to protect the lives of civilians’.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.