Nobody seemed to have missed him whilst he was away but Bert Barnard had no time to listen to our plan claiming he had more important matters to attend. When eventually he did find time, he made continuity of our presentation almost impossible by interjecting after every statement we, the ignorant Blue jobs, made.
At one point a very irritated Terence Murphy, referring to his own Army training and experience, but without actually being rude, made it known that he had never known such arrogant interference from any senior officer during any of many staff presentations he had attended. Though surprised and somewhat taken aback by Terence’s clever wording, I was pleased that he had made it possible for us to pick up on our thoughts and continue the briefing without further interruption.
At the conclusion General Barnard thanked us for what we had done but said our plan would not work. So it came as a surprise to learn from Squadron Leader Jock McGregor, who was one of two secretaries who attended all NATJOC meetings, that General Barnard had presented NATJOC with his personal plan for the deployment of Auxiliaries. Jock said it was identical to the presentation he had attended when Terry and I put our plan to him and other Officers. I realised immediately that we should be pleased that the ‘Barnard Plan’ had been adopted rather than become thoroughly fed up with the whole affair. Nevertheless Barnard’s underhandedness was galling.
ZANLA infiltration continued unabated and many CT groups were operating in depth in southern Matabeleland and the central Midlands. In one particular follow-up close to Ian Smith’s farm at Gwenora, there was a contact with CT’s that led to a serious air accident.
Flight Lieutenant Ray Bolton had been conducting helicopter conversions for non-Air Force pilots with a view to establishing if this was a viable way of bolstering operational helicopter pilot numbers. One of Ray’s students was game-ranger Kerry Fynn who had been trained by the Air Force some years earlier. Ray and Kerry were at Thornhill when news of the contact came through and both flew troops to the scene and placed them down under direction of the unseen callsign on the ground.
Ray then saw the callsign but he could not see any CTs. Feeling certain that game-ranger Kerry stood a better chance of spotting them, he called Kerry over to look around. It so happened that the ground callsign then started giving a helicopter direction to turn ‘right’ to position over the terrorist group, but each pilot thought the direction was for him and both responded. Almost immediately Kerry spotted terrorists, rolled sharply to port to bring his gunner Corporal Turner into position to open fire, but collided with Ray’s helicopter, which was crossing his path.
Both helicopters were crippled and crashed. Kerry and his technician died instantly, as did Corporal Cutmore, who was flying with Ray. Miraculously Ray survived the inverted crash because of the protection given his head and body by his armoured seat.
It was at about this time that we received a visitation in COMOPS from ex-RLI Major Alan Lindner, long-serving intelligence officer to Selous Scouts and now attached to Military Intelligence. He came to make a preliminary presentation of a detailed study he had undertaken. Alan made this presentation to General Barnard, Brian Robinson, Peter Burford, Terence Murphy, the COMOPS SB representative Chief Superintendent Mike Edden and me. Quite a bit of what he had to say involved the same matters Terence and I had considered in formulating our Auxiliaries plan. However, Alan’s presentation went much deeper and moved through many steps before unfolding into a clearly defined strategy.
On his own and drawing from his experience with Selous Scouts, Alan had worked out the very military strategy that COMOPS should have produced many months earlier. His maps with well-defined overlays built up a picture that, because of its un-embroidered simplicity, unscrambled the multiplicity of problems facing us. It specifically revealed the most fundamental flaw in COMOPS operational management. Put simply, it showed that, in attempting to secure all internal ground and conducting external operations, our forces had been spread too thinly to prevent the cancer of CT encroachment into economically important areas that Alan called ‘The Vital Ground’.
Vital Ground encompassed all commercial areas including white farms, isolated mines, main roads and rail routes. From those areas in which the CTs were strongest, the tribal areas, Alan’s plan advocated almost total withdrawal of forces to make them fully available for external operations and to secure the Vital Ground in strength. Only then would Selous Scouts and high-density operations be mounted to progressively reoccupy adjoining TTLs with the odd probe into hot spots to keep abreast of developments and, more especially, to take out key CT groups.
External operations would obviously have to be stepped up and sustained to ensure that the CT presence in the semiabandoned areas, some of which ZANLA had already claimed to be ‘liberated areas’, did not become too strong. Robert Mugabe had named 1979 Gore re Gukurahundi (Year of the Peoples’ Storm) because his intention was to push in as many trained CTs as possible. We knew ZANLA had more men than they had weapons to arm them with but, at that time, we were unaware of just how serious this problem was.
Alan Lindner’s plan was so convincing to those of us who heard it that an instruction was issued to all main players to attend a repeat presentation to the National JOC where Alan’s proposals were accepted and put into immediate effect.
The virtual abandonment of the Tribal Trust Lands by the security forces did not affect the Sub-JOC locations as all of these lay in Vital Ground. However, many police stations remained in the unattended areas because, to its credit, PGHQ was determined to retain every single one of its many stations, no matter the dangers. This placed a few stations, particularly those close to the Mozambican border, in a very hostile environment often necessitating Dakotas to run the gauntlet to para-drop critical provisions to hard-pressed policemen and, occasionally, helicopters to change over personnel and undertake the evacuation of casualties. Nyamapanda, right on the border with Mozambique next to the main road to Malawi, was the most harassed and dangerous of all the police positions.
Protective villages continued to be manned by Guard Force with Pfumo re Vanhu auxiliaries in the consolidated villages. They could call upon Fireforce during daylight hours. Inevitably, however, ZANLA’s many relatively ineffective stand-off attacks occurred at night.
One huge problem in leaving many hapless tribesmen to their own devices was that it caused streams of refugees to move out of the countryside to the safety of cities and towns. In consequence, shantytowns sprang up in untidy knots around many built-up areas.
Mozambican National Resistance
PRIOR TO HIS POSTING TO COMOPS, former Commander of SAS Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Robinson had been attached to an establishment specifically created to handle Special Operations. This Special Operations HQ had been under OCC control until COMOPS took over and brought special operations under its wing. Initially Brian was horrified at the prospect of working with Bert Barnard but he was able to conduct most of his work with Group Captain Norman Walsh with whom he had a good personal working relationship, as witnessed before and during Operation Dingo.
Although Brian enjoyed initial planning and tasking work, all of which was conducted in an operations room expressly reserved for top-secret operations, he sorely missed the nittygritty planning that SAS and Selous Scouts did back in their respective headquarters. Consequently, Brian spent much of his day prowling the corridors of COMOPS like a caged lion.