Gunship Over Angola

It turned out to be a tanker truck painted a uniform forest-green colour. Closer inspection revealed that there was only one occupant, the driver, who, despite wrestling fiercely with the steering wheel, was clearly having difficulty with the directional force imposed by the deep ruts in the sand. Upon leaving Vila Roçadas he had probably hoped to set the hand throttle for a constant speed, let out the clutch to get the vehicle moving, remove his hands and feet from the controls and curl up for a nap until he reached his destination 60 kilometres away at Calueque. Fifty kilometres later, he was trying manfully to exercise some degree of control over the bucking tanker, but to no avail.

Some movement or sound must have got his attention. His head snapped to the right and he saw our two gunships, less than 100 metres way. Without hesitating for even a second, the driver opened the door and hurled himself out into space. He had barely touched the ground in a puff of dust before he shot off into the bush faster than my eyes could follow.

The tanker lumbered on down the road.

Unable to resist the temptation, our two gunships pulled back to a range of around 200 metres from the vehicle and I instructed my engineer to open fire with the 20 mm side-firing cannon, mounted where the Alo III’s port sliding door would normally be.

The Oerlikon or Hispano 20 mm cannons mounted in our aircraft could fire 600 rounds of thumb-sized projectiles per minute, but good flight engineers would only fire two- to three-round bursts. Longer bursts affected the pilot’s ability to control the aircraft, as the cannons had a fierce recoil, and the Alo III had really not been designed as a gunship.

The 250 rounds of ammunition for the gun were packed in an ammo pan fixed to the floor in the front of the aircraft and belt-fed to the gun’s firing mechanism. (Later, the ammo pan was moved out of the cockpit and into the left rear luggage compartment.) Engineers normally loaded the ammo in the ratio of three solid or ball rounds to one high-explosive (HE) round. The HE rounds were, in effect, high-velocity fragmentation grenades.

Simultaneous two-to-three-shot bursts from the two gunships hit the tanker. Fluid emerged, staining the areas around the holes where the projectiles had penetrated.

‘Hit it again,’ I said, and my engineer squeezed the trigger again.

Whatever was in that tank I do not know, but there was a blinding flash as the contents exploded. The inspection hatch on the top of the 30 000-litre tank parted company from the main body and disappeared, hundreds of metres into the sky.

Instantaneously, the path that the hatch cover followed was tracked by an eye-scorchingly bright pale-blue column of flame that just climbed higher and higher and higher. It was still burning with high intensity about ten minutes later when I looked back on the scene while we streaked away (high speed is possible in an Alo III during those shit-yourself episodes), like bandits departing a bank robbery.

To be honest, we headed westwards in a naive attempt to avoid being linked to the destruction of the tanker, which, we figured, was unlikely to have been an authorised target or to have contributed much to the war effort. By giving Calueque and surrounds a wide berth, and approaching Ruacana from the direction of the Kaokoveld, to the west, we reckoned that if blame were to be apportioned, it would not be to us.

Very low on fuel, thanks to the detour we’d taken, we landed at Ruacana airfield about 45 minutes later. We observed that the entire staff complement of the base, and many of the townsfolk, had gathered at every elevated point, many with binoculars, all looking northwards, across the border and into Angola, where a thick column of smoke still spiralled tellingly into the sky.

‘What are you looking at?’ we asked, nonchalantly.

‘There was an almighty explosion about an hour ago over there where that smoke stack is,’ said a young officer pointing at the distant object. ‘Didn’t you guys see it from the air? It lit everything up!’

‘Nah, we were at low level out there,’ we said, probably too quickly, pointing vaguely to the distant Kaokoland mountains.

Chuffed with our brilliant ingenuity and spur-of-the-moment innovation under great pressure, we thought we’d escape unscathed, and the four of us agreed to keep the details of the incident under our bush hats. So, imagine our surprise when, at the next intelligence briefing, the intelligence officer turned to us and congratulated us on a job well done.

It seems that our actions in spontaneously taking out the tanker had significantly curtailed FAPLA activity in the Calueque area (we weren’t told what mysterious substance the tanker was carrying), even though the attack was a violation of Angolan sovereignty, according to the United Nations, as officially we were not at war with Angola.

‘How did you know it was us who klapped (hit) the truck?’ we asked.

‘Intelligence!’ replied the officer proudly.

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