1 Recce. Alexander Strachan
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unsure of the Recces’ numbers, and the Recces might also have entered the ambush from the wrong side.
Trevor grabbed the LMG, took aim across the engine and opened fire, but there was far too much bush in front of him. He clearly heard Breytenbach call out to Fred, who was sweeping the bush along with Chris. This involved walking in an extended line, combing the area for signs of the enemy. When Trevor opened fire, these two immediately provided fire support, and the contact started in earnest. It felt as if everything was happening simultaneously and time was standing still.
Breytenbach was constantly shouting fire control orders at the group. At the Land Rover, the bullets were whizzing over the heads of Trevor and Koos. Luckily, the Swapo soldiers fired high. Trevor replied with another few salvoes across the engine. He and Koos heard their own people in the bush and could therefore not aim too low, but they hoped at least to keep the Swapos’ heads down. Then he closed the bonnet since he did not really know what was going on.
Everyone was now searching the bush, with Fred as the scout on the left flank of the sweep line. ‘Get into fuckin’ line!’ Breytenbach shouted at him. Those might have been the last words Fred heard. The next moment, more shots rang out. Dewald remembers some of the fire control orders to this day: ‘Kenaas, go forward! Peel off to the right! Buddy-buddy!’
With the opening salvo Chris was immediately pinned down, but Fred fearlessly and instinctively stormed the ambush and shot dead an enemy machine-gunner. Chris had the clearest view of what happened in the crossfire. Fred had advanced a good 40 to 60 m with his charge. Then more shots rang out from Swapo’s side. ‘Fred! Fred!’ Breytenbach shouted again. ‘The lieutenant’s been floored, Commandant,’ Chris replied. It was as if a brief moment of silence suddenly descended – the time was exactly 17:45. Fred Zeelie’s death was a great loss to the Recces.
While the contact was still under way, Eric came walking out of the bush with his new SKS gun and glumly dumped it on the back of the Land Rover. At first Dewald thought the Bushman was going to run off, but he had merely come to fetch his old .303. Eric could not get along with the modern SKS. Then he returned to the bush with his faithful .303, the only weapon he was absolutely familiar with, and confidently rejoined his team.
Sporadic fire still continued for another 15 minutes, with neither side suffering further casualties. Swapo then stopped firing and fled. The Recces wanted to pursue them, but it was already late afternoon.
Breytenbach urgently requested choppers to evacuate the deceased Fred Zeelie and assist with the follow-up. He was intent on catching up with the insurgents before they reached the Zambian border. But the high command wanted to deploy Breytenbach’s team in the vicinity of an old airfield in south-eastern Angola instead. He refused point blank, and kept insisting that the Swapos were not there. It would be a waste of time because they were on their way to Zambia, he said. Nobody would convince him otherwise.
More recounts that they drove to a small thicket where they set up a temporary base for the night. There they wrapped Fred in a groundsheet. More lay fairly close to him. He remembers it being a very, very long night full of strange noises which he hoped never to experience again – a corpse is not silent. Fred was dead, and it was as if the rest of them had no appetite for conversation.
Practically the only words spoken were when Trevor told Koos: ‘Your Land Rover’s fine again.’ Just before dark they heard gunfire in the distance. Later they would learn that it was one of the wounded Swapos who had been cornered by a group of paratroopers – Capt. Johan Verster and SSgt. Gert Kitching, both of whom would later become Recces, were part of this stopper group.
Throughout the night they kept hearing occasional sighs. But no one wanted to talk. It seemed as if no one wished to be reminded of the events of the day; everyone was preoccupied with his own thoughts. Only the following day was a helicopter dispatched to collect their fallen comrade.
Breytenbach and his team then returned to Fort Doppies. But two days later the security police arrived and begged him to carry on with the follow-up operation. Breytenbach said he could not cross the river with the Land Rovers, he needed helicopters. By that time the spoor was a few days old, and Breytenbach decided to call for reinforcements as their numbers were limited. Johan Verster and Gert Kitching of 1 Parachute Battalion were already deployed with a platoon in the vicinity of southern Angola. Lt. Charl Naudé and Sgt. Frans van Dyk (who later became Recces) were also there with a paratroop section.
So Breytenbach ordered Charl and Frans to follow Swapo’s trail as quickly as possible with their paratroop section, supported by Bushman trackers. They were instructed to radio reports at regular intervals on the direction in which the guerrillas were fleeing as well as the strength of the enemy force. On the basis of this information, the Recces would then ambush them at possible river crossings.
With Dewald’s help, Charl and Frans estimated that the Swapo group consisted of 23 men. The guerrillas ran in single file and the tracks showed up clearly in the soft Angolan sand, which facilitated the tracking. To estimate the number of people, they drew two lines in the sand, a metre apart. They counted the number of tracks between the lines and divided them by two. In soft sand where tracks are clearly visible, this is a very accurate method. It was full moon (the period during which Swapo usually operated) and the tracking team could keep running on the spoor for the most part. The pursuers were fitter and advanced faster, and gradually they started catching up with the Swapos. Each time the telltale signs of the places where the guerrillas had stopped to rest and prepare food were fresher. Later the ash on the spots where they had made fires was still warm – depending on weather conditions, ash stays warm for three to four hours after the fire has burnt itself out.
One evening it was Frans’ turn to navigate on the spoor, and he took the compass bearing. He explained to Charl, who stood behind him, that the good-sized tree on the horizon was the next navigation point. As the team hurriedly started moving towards it, Frans ran slap-bang into the tree, with Charl bumping him still deeper into the thorns from behind. It was a clear sign that the team was by now so exhausted that they had mistaken the tree right in front of them for a distant object on the horizon. Thanks to the white Caprivi sand and bright moonlight they could follow the 23 Swapos’ spoor uninterruptedly, and at that stage Charl, Frans and their paratroop team had been on their trail for three days and nights, with little sleep in between.
After another two days, they were less than half a day behind the Swapos – the ash of the fires was still very warm. The tracking team expected to make contact at any moment. They kept strictly to the established procedure and radioed the information to Breytenbach so that he and his team could get moving. The Recces headed right away for a possible crossing at the Kwando River, an area they knew well.
They swiftly located the site where the Swapos had crossed the river. To their disbelief, the spoor was only a few minutes old, so fresh that water was still seeping into the sand from the drag marks left by the makorros (canoes made from hollowed-out tree trunks). The Swapos had escaped across the Kwando in the makorros and were safely inside Zambian territory for the time being.
‘The terrs ran; bloody hell, they ran like blazes during those few days,’ Trevor recalls the follow-up operation. ‘As you know, that was the very first time the terrs were hit in Angola!’
Breytenbach was equally furious with the security police about the way things turned out: ‘We could’ve nailed and shot dead those bastards on the first day already, but then you people wanted us to go to the damn airstrip!’
That was the end of the follow-up operation.
Lieutenant Fred Zeelie was the first Recce operator to be killed in action, on 23 June 1974. In the bigger scheme of things, he was also the first South African soldier to die in action in the Border War. For his valour under fire, he was later posthumously awarded the Louw Wepener Decoration (LWD) on Breytenbach’s recommendation. He was buried in Alberton with full military honours.
Sgt. Dewald de Beer received the Van Riebeeck Medal (VRM.) for his bravery during the firefight. This was the first and only time that the VRM was awarded for an operation on land.
Years later, the very last soldier of the SADF to be killed in the Border War also happened