The SADF and Cuito Cuanavale: A Tactical and Strategic Analysis

By Leopold Scholtz

"A shooting war is often followed by a second war. This war is not fought with bullets or artillery shells, not with tanks or bombers, but rather with words. The war is, in effect, fought again on paper."
In 1987–1988 the dusty Angolan town of Cuito Cuanavale was the backdrop for the final battles of the Border War. Ever since the war ended, the fighting around Cuito has been the subject of a fierce public debate over who actually won the war.
While the leadership of the former South African Defence Force (SADF) claims it was never defeated, the supporters of the Angolan MPLA government, Cuba and SWAPO insist that the SADF was vanquished on the battlefield. They contend that the SADF wanted to overrun Cuito Cuanavale and use it as a springboard for an advance on Luanda.
But was Cuito Cuanavale ever really an objective of the SADF? Leopold Scholtz tackles this question by examining recently declassified documents in the SANDF archives, exploring the strategic and tactical decisions that shaped the six main battles, from the SADF's stunning tactical success on the Lomba River to the grinding struggle for the Tumpo Triangle.
His incisive analysis untangles what happens when war, politics and propaganda become entwined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Feb 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781928248040

Leopold Scholtz

Leopold Scholtz is a former journalist and military historian. He has published numerous books - including The SADF in the Border War (Helion, 2015) and The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale (Helion, 2016).

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

On 23 March 2018 I participated in a colloquium, organised by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, at its London headquarters in Chatham House, about the so-called Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. This was, of course, exactly 30 years after the third and last failed South African attack on the Angolan/Cuban defenders in front of Cuito Cuanavale. As the event was sponsored by the Angolan government, it was understandably a rather one-sided affair, with numerous speakers repeating the official Cuban and Angolan version of events. The ‘other side’, so to speak, was left to Major-General Roland de Vries, British journalist Fred Bridgland, Chester Crocker (former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) and myself.

In the paltry ten minutes allowed to me, I made one major point. Differing interpretations are perfectly legitimate, but interpretations must be based on original research. None of the speakers following the Angolan/Cuban line had done that. (The sole exception was Professor Piero Gleijeses, whose work is discussed in Chapter 12.) The wildest intentions were ascribed to the South African government of the time and to the South African Defence Force (SADF), without reference to the original documents.

I had seen many of those documents during a previous research visit to the Documentation Centre of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). But, as I had no plans at the time to write about the controversy surrounding Cuito Cuanavale, I did not copy them. The Chatham House colloquium was the deciding factor for me to go back to the SANDF Documentation Centre, get the documents, and use them for a proper analysis.

This book actually started as two. First, I wanted to explore the role played by the town of Cuito Cuanavale in the strategic, operational and tactical planning of the SADF during Operations Moduler, Hooper and Packer in 1987–1988. After all, it is often alleged that the South Africans wanted to take the town. This would have been, it is said, a precursor to a push into central Angola and even on to Luanda in order to bring about regime change. The Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola (Fapla), the armed forces of the governing Marxist Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), would be driven out and South Africa’s ally, the União Nacional Para a Independência Total de Angola (Unita), would become the effective Angolan government.

The remarkable thing about this allegation is that it is nowhere buttressed by archival research. All sorts of plans and strategies are ascribed to the South African government and the SADF but without any documentary proof. My purpose, then, was to have a look at the original documents and see what they revealed.

The second book was to be a professional tactical study of six selected battles of the campaign. These were the battles on the Lomba River (3 October 1987), the two on the Chambinga (9 and 11 November 1987) and the three SADF attacks on the Tumpo area (25 February, 1 March and 23 March 1988). The South Africans won the first three devastatingly, but lost the last three badly. Why the difference? The forces involved, after all, did not change that much. I wanted to identify the factors why the South Africans at first had won three victories and then lost the last three battles. In this respect, the 14 principles of warfare applied by the SADF at the time proved to be a useful tool. (These principles are discussed in detail in Chapter 10.)

Having submitted the two manuscripts, my publisher came up with the idea of combining them into a single volume. I have, therefore, chopped and changed a lot. The strategic and operational approach is interspersed with the tactical minutiae of the selected six battles in a manner that more or less preserves the chronological order of the campaign.

I hope the book will make a contribution to our understanding of a pivotal time in the history of South Africa and of southern Africa as a whole.

INTRODUCTION

It often happens that a shooting war is – either immediately or after a while – followed by a second war. This is not fought with bullets or artillery shells, not with tanks or bombers, but rather with words. The war is, in effect, fought again on paper.

In this ‘re-enactment’, historians normally play an important role, and their debates sometimes become rather robust, to put it mildly. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl famously described historical writing as ‘a discussion without end’.¹ For instance, the stream of books about the First World War began shortly after the Peace of Versailles in 1919. The focal point was the question of how the war broke out and Germany’s alleged guilt for starting it. In his seminal examination of the matter, Australian historian Christopher Clark writes about ‘a bewildering variety’ of interpretations: ‘There is literally no viewpoint on its [the war’s] origins that cannot be supported from a selection of the available sources. And this in turn helps to explain why the WWI origins literature has assumed such vast dimensions that no single historian … could hope to read it all in one lifetime …’²

Something similar, though on a far more modest scale and with a different focal point, applies to the conflict generally known in South Africa as the Border War (1966–1989), and especially to the final, conventional phase in southern Angola, mostly referred to as the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. In this case, however, professional historians have long played second fiddle to politicians, journalists and other non-academic authors. Perhaps it is time that historians reclaimed the terrain they have ceded to others.

For the sake of clarity, though at the risk of oversimplification, one can identify two schools of thought. One, led by the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, contends that the alliance of Cuba, the Angolan MPLA government and the Namibian rebel movement Swapo (South West Africa People’s Organisation) won a great victory at Cuito Cuanavale. This victory, so that version goes, not only thwarted the racist South African government’s imperialist plans to neutralise the socialist revolution in Angola, but also broke Pretoria’s back and forced the apartheid politicians to withdraw from Angola and Namibia and, finally, in 1994, to transfer power to the African National Congress (ANC). This narrative is supported by the communist establishment in Cuba, the MPLA, Swapo, the ANC and by a number of left-wing academics and authors.

Even before the end of the fighting, in May 1988, Castro triumphatically told a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana: ‘The battle and its outcome are of historic importance. More than six months have passed and they are far from taking Cuito Cuanavale, and they will not be able to take Cuito Cuanavale. There has been a total change in the balance of power.’³

A few months later, he resumed his verbal barrage: ‘There, in Cuito Cuanavale, South African aggressiveness broke its teeth and all this with a minimum of casualties – minimum casualties! – on the part of the Angolan and Cuban forces … The fact is that the balance changed drastically. The South Africans had suffered an overwhelming defeat in Cuito Cuanavale …’⁴

If one may identify a leader of the opposite school, it would probably be the late General Jannie Geldenhuys, who was Chief of the SADF at the height of the Border War. In his memoirs, as well as in several articles and newspaper interviews, he made the case that South Africa had only limited objectives in Angola and achieved nearly all of them. Geldenhuys’s view is supported by the old SADF and National Party government establishment, and by some writers.

British journalist Fred Bridgland quotes Geldenhuys’s denial that Cuito Cuanavale was ever an ‘objective of strategic importance to the SADF’. Geldenhuys reportedly told Bridgland a few months after the war: ‘Cuito Cuanavale was put into the limelight by the Cubans. I actually forbade the Chief of the Army [General Kat Liebenberg] to take Cuito Cuanavale. I made just one concession: If our operations so developed that Cuito Cuanavale fell into our lap and we could capture it without fighting, then our troops could occupy it.’⁵ In his memoirs, Geldenhuys states: ‘We did not attack Cuito Cuanavale. We did not even in our wildest dreams think about the central highlands and the Benguela railway line.’⁶

The lynchpin of the two opposing views is the town of Cuito Cuanavale. The Castro camp says the SADF’s objective was to take the place, push westwards to Menongue, move into the Angolan midlands, and eventually take the capital, Luanda. The idea was to overthrow the MPLA government and replace it with the Angolan rebel movement Unita – viewed as a South African puppet – and then to dominate Angola. The Geldenhuys camp maintains that the SADF never seriously had any interest in taking Cuito Cuanavale and that the communist camp’s logic therefore falls flat.

This difference of opinion is not as esoteric as it may sound to uninformed readers. If you can prove that the SADF had its heart set on taking Cuito Cuanavale, you may credibly argue that the South Africans wanted to use it as a springboard for an advance on Luanda. You may then allege, as Castro did, that the SADF’s overwhelming strength was only stopped by the intrepid and stubborn action of the heroic defenders, and that this was a glorious victory for the communist revolutionary forces. However, if it can be shown that the SADF had no interest in the town, the Castro logic is nullified. And if the communists didn’t win, the outcome of the campaign, and of the war itself, has to be seen in a different light.

The problem is that most participants in this debate (in particular those in the Castro camp) have not produced any serious research. They simply parrot the dictator’s narrative. Geldenhuys and many of his ex-SADF supporters were, of course, participants in the events, but do they speak the truth? Isn’t their interpretation dominated by self-interest, and therefore untrustworthy? Perhaps the time has come to lay the matter properly to rest on the basis of serious research.

The SANDF Documentation Centre has in recent years declassified a mass of original documents that throw light on the planning and debates behind the scenes in the SADF. My intention is to examine those documents, place them in proper historical context, and come to a responsible conclusion.

A basic theme of the book, therefore, is to consider the role of the town of Cuito Cuanavale in the evolution of the SADF’s strategic, operational and tactical planning, and the way this was perceived by the other side. Another is to examine certain battles in the campaign and analyse why one side or the other won or lost. In doing so, I have depended on the 14 principles of warfare used at the time by the SADF (see Chapter 10).

Two final thoughts. First, very few sources are available from the side of the communist alliance. It is true that US historian Piero Gleijeses has done historical writing a big favour by unlocking the Cuban archives about Cuba’s participation in the Angolan civil war. Gleijeses has been the only outside historian to be afforded this privilege by the Cuban dictatorship. However, his clear bias towards Castro and the Cuban system of government and his utter revulsion for the apartheid regime brings his objectivity into question. One has to be very careful indeed when relying on his version of events.⁷

At the same time, Russian academic Vladimir Shubin has unearthed many useful facts from the Soviet archives, though these were not as open to him as the Cuban archives were to Gleijeses. Shubin is the former head of the Africa Section of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). As such, he was the main liaison official between the CPSU on the one hand and the MPLA, Swapo and the ANC on the other. His writings thus have the definite advantage of intimate subject knowledge. However, one should bear in mind that he was clearly very close to – even part of – the events, and to my mind struggles to analyse the subject with anything approaching academic objectivity. Therefore, his contributions, too, have to be handled with care.

The MPLA archives are still firmly closed. Luckily, both Gleijeses and Shubin, through Cuban and Soviet eyes, afford us a valuable glimpse of decision-making behind the scenes in Luanda. Nevertheless, these sources are at best of secondary value. They tell us little about the planning and ideas in the upper echelons of the SADF, which is the focus of this book. For that we have to depend on archival documents in the SANDF Documentation Centre, augmented with what participants and eyewitnesses tell us.

Secondly, I have to put my cards on the table. I am a product of a conservative Afrikaner family. I served in the SADF and its successor, the SANDF. As such, my natural inclination is to side with the SADF rather than with its opponents. However, being aware of this, I try to counter it with the intellectual apparatus given to all academic historians who inevitably grapple with the problem of objectivity. In this, I am guided by the words of my late father, the historian GD Scholtz, who discussed the task of the historian in his inaugural lecture as Honorary Professor of History at the Rand Afrikaans University in 1968. Although total objectivity is impossible, he reasoned, the question may be asked whether the historian should let his love or hate for a certain matter be decisive in his work. The answer is no, he argued: ‘A historian who becomes victim of his own subjective feelings when he takes up the pen is not a historian in the true sense of the word … One of the most important tests for the greatness of a historian is the way in which he is prepared to advance a truth which may be unpleasant for his own feelings and opinions and to put it in the right perspective.’⁸

Whether I succeed in this lofty ideal, I will leave to others to decide.

Chapter 1

THE RELEVANCE OF CUITO CUANAVALE

Why do the battles around Cuito Cuanavale remain such a conten–tious issue, drawing so many directly opposing viewpoints? Why all the noise around this small dot on the map of southern Angola? Was the town really so important that it justified becoming the subject of a war of words?

Of course, Cuito Cuanavale has become much more important since the war as the fighters on both sides have unleashed their verbal bombardments. It has acquired a crucial symbolic and propaganda value far beyond its intrinsic importance during the campaign of 1987–1988. For instance, General Jannie Geldenhuys avers that the town ‘had no strategic significance at all. It didn’t in the least play a role, from whatever angle you look at it.’¹ And, shortly before his death, the late Brigadier-General JNR ‘Junior’ Botha – Senior Staff Officer Operations at Army HQ in Pretoria – also dismissed Cuito Cuanavale’s importance. There was no advantage for the SADF in occupying the place, he wrote: ‘The little place literally meant nothing, except that it is an enormous logistical burden to keep a large force there – for whomever controls it.’²

Geldenhuys, of course, had a vested interest in his assertion. Botha, a staff officer who never ventured far from his desk, was never known for his military acumen. Both these and other similar statements were made decades after the event.

Therefore, let us attempt to assess the strategic, operational and tactical value of the town to both sides at the time.

The prehistory

When SADF units crossed the Angolan border in August 1987 to aid Unita against the Fapla spring offensive, a long history had gone before. During the 1980s, the South Africans were gradually sucked into the Angolan civil war between the MPLA and Unita. The catalyst for this was South Africa’s role in South West Africa (SWA), now the Republic of Namibia.

South West Africa had been a German colony from 1884 onwards. In 1915, the then Union of South Africa invaded and conquered it on Britain’s behalf. After the First World War, SWA was made a mandate territory, to be administered by South Africa on behalf of the League of Nations.

In 1948, the National Party won the general election in South Africa and started enforcing its policy of apartheid – converting the informal separation of white and black into a legally enforced system. Apartheid was also introduced into SWA. This had two consequences. First, indigenous SWA nationalists formed a freedom movement, known as the South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo), to oppose the enforcement of apartheid, throw off the – as they viewed it – South African colonial yoke, and convert the territory into an independent state. Secondly, in 1971 the United Nations (UN), the successor to the League of Nations, revoked the South African mandate and ordered the government to grant independence to SWA/Namibia.

In August 1966, the first armed clash of the Border War took place when a South African force, consisting of paratroopers and policemen, swooped on the only base Swapo ever had on SWA soil. The Swapo members scattered and fled. From this time on, a low-intensity insurgency war was waged. Swapo’s armed wing, known as the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan), infiltrated from Zambia through Angola (then still a Portuguese colony) into the north of SWA or directly into the Caprivi Strip.

For political reasons, the burden of the South African war effort was borne by the police. This conflict simmered for several years. But in 1974 there was a sudden escalation when a group of army officers overthrew Portugal’s conservative dictatorship and made it known that the country would withdraw from its African colonies – Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. The Portuguese army also stopped fighting against the indigenous rebel movements in these territories.

The Portuguese coup coincided with the South African government’s decision to put its war effort on a more professional footing and transfer control of operations to the SADF.

These two developments changed the strategic and operational situation dramatically, and in several respects. In the first place, Angola quickly sank into chaos. There were three contending rebel movements, namely, the Marxist MPLA, the FNLA (without a discernible ideology) and Unita (at this stage Maoist, but later pro-Western). In January 1975 these three organisations signed an understanding, the Alvor Agreement, with the Portuguese to form a government of national unity and organise free and fair elections shortly after independence, which was set for 11 November 1975. However, the simmering rivalry between these groups quickly degenerated into civil war.

At this stage, the outside world started meddling as well, and the conflict in Angola became a theatre of the broader Cold War. The United States (US) and France gave limited military support to the FNLA, but the Soviet Union and Cuba intervened in a big way on the MPLA’s side. The result was that the MPLA drove its adversaries out of Luanda and started encroaching on the traditional FNLA and Unita territory.

South Africa looked on in growing alarm at what it saw as a communist threat in a neighbouring country. Egged on by the US and by several African states, a South African force invaded Angola clandestinely to put Unita and the FNLA in a strong negotiating position when the expected peace talks started. Several SADF columns made rapid advances. But Cuba immediately retaliated with a massive force, which tipped the balance. Sharp clashes followed in which the South Africans and Cubans gave as good as they got, but in the end the international support for the South Africans evaporated, and they had to withdraw completely.

In the years that followed, Unita withdrew into the Angolan bush and started an insurgency against the MPLA. South Africa continued to give covert material aid to Unita, but by and large stayed out of the Angolan civil war. The SADF concentrated its counterinsurgency campaign against Swapo in the north of SWA. At this stage, Swapo held the initiative and made rapid advances in its quest to win the local population’s hearts and minds.

From 1978 onwards, a new phase in the conflict started. South African strategists came to the conclusion that it made no sense to sit south of the Angolan border and wait for the Plan insurgents to cross the border before going into action. So, from May 1978, the SADF adopted a new strategy. In the years that followed, several brigade-sized operations were launched across the border to disrupt Swapo’s training camps and insurgency preparations even before they started. Large battles took place, often involving SADF mechanised forces, during which the South Africans’ mechanised and mobile doctrine was honed.

In 1983, Unita requested help from the SADF to capture the central Angolan town of Cangamba. The town was taken with the aid of South African Air Force (SAAF) bombers and a 120 mm mortar battery after heavy fighting and many casualties on both sides, but true to Unita’s guerrilla nature, it was soon abandoned again to Fapla. In 1985 and 1986, Fapla launched ponderous offensives towards the town of Mavinga, in Cuando Cubango province. Both times Unita, with clandestine SADF help in the form of Special Forces, artillery and air support, beat the government forces back with heavy loss of life and equipment.

Therefore, by 1987 the Border War had been transformed. From a low-intensity insurgency in which poorly armed and trained guerrillas faced a few policemen, it became a high-intensity conventional war involving thousands of troops, artillery pieces, tanks, armoured vehicles and bombers. In fact, the Border War became fused with the Angolan civil war.

The South African government and the SADF high command had no interest in becoming embroiled in the Angolan civil war. Their war, as they saw it, was against Swapo, not the MPLA government.³ Against this background, a considerable effort to aid Unita was, to some extent at least, a bothersome distraction. In fact, the SADF generals were considering a quite different operation when their attention was drawn to the coming Fapla offensive against Unita. At the end of 1986, Army HQ received orders to ‘create a situation in the Fifth Military Region of Angola which is similar to the one which applied before the Lusaka Accord’.⁴

The Fifth Military Region was the province of Cunene, a region where Swapo had several base camps that were used to prepare their fighters for infiltration into SWA. South Africa and Angola had concluded the Lusaka Accord in February 1984, following Operation Askari, (1983–1984). By this time, the SADF totally dominated Angola as far north as Techamutete (250 kilometres north of the SWA border).⁵ In other words, the SADF was planning another major cross-border operation into Swapo’s backyard.

However, the intelligence pouring in from Cuando Cubango thwarted those plans. Following an appraisal, the SADF came to the conclusion that the situation in southeastern Angola had to be ‘stabilised’ first, lest the planned operation in Cunene be ‘disadvantaged’.⁶ (In the end, of course, nothing came of the Cunene plans, which had to be shelved.)

It is worth noting that the Soviets were the driving force behind the planned Fapla offensive. The MPLA had misgivings, but gave in to Soviet pressure. The Cubans resisted, but they were overruled and during the first phase of the operation resolutely boycotted it. As a matter of fact, even at the end of August the Cubans vainly tried to get the Soviets to pull back the four brigades east of the Cuito River. A Cuban intelligence officer’s accurate appraisal was: ‘The situation is becoming dangerous for the Fapla, and they may end up … suffering a major defeat.’⁷

As Fidel Castro wrote to Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos on 23 November 1987: ‘Unfortunately, what we had predicted has occurred because of an ill-prepared offensive [against Mavinga] on the terrain most favourable to the South Africans, near their bases … Twice in two years [1985, 1986] the same grave error has been made, and errors always entail a high military and political cost.’⁸

We shall see later on how this influenced the strategic and operational situation.

The strategic picture

As the SADF troops started approaching Cuito Cuanavale in November 1987, unleashing a sustained artillery bombardment lasting at least six months, red lights started flashing at military headquarters in Havana, Luanda and Moscow. The Cubans, Angolans and Soviets apparently had no doubt that the town was the South Africans’ immediate objective. But to what end?

On 20 February 1988, Castro cabled his commanding general in Angola, General de División (Major-General) Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez, saying that if the South Africans broke through the Fapla defence line in front of Cuito Cuanavale, it would be a ‘total disaster. Should that happen, it would be hard to hold Cuito [Cuanavale] and the political and moral consequences for Fapla and the Angolan government would be terrible.’⁹

A few months later, he made the point again in a speech: ‘This would have meant a disaster for Angola. It would have meant the chance to destroy Angola’s independence and revolution … Otherwise, the effort of many years would have been lost.’¹⁰ This indicates Castro’s conviction that the South Africans would not stop once they took Cuito Cuanavale, but rather that they would push on to effect a regime change in Luanda, thereby nullifying the socialist revolution in Angola. One of his lieutenants, Jorge Risquet, explained in March 1989 – in the dying days of the war – to Marxist author David Deutschmann how the Cubans interpreted the South African grand strategy towards Angola:

At stake was a region of the world with 100 million human inhabitants, covering six million square kilometres, and holding enormous natural riches. If the South African invasion of Angola had been successful, racism would have extended its borders, fulfilling the dream of the racist regime. Apartheid is in essence militarist, aggressive and expansionist … They made no bones about their intention to continue advancing through puppet governments, or about their view that South Africa was the ruling power over all black countries south of the equator.

A little further on, he continued: ‘And given the arrogance of the South Africans, one thing was clear. If they crushed the Angolan forces at Cuito Cuanavale, they would have demanded nothing less than Angola’s full surrender at the negotiating table.’¹¹

The MPLA government was clearly of the same mind. Shubin quotes General ‘Ngongo’ (the pseudonym of General Roberto Leal Monteiro, the Angolan interior minister), who believed ‘that South Africa was especially interested in the