The Third World War: August 1985

What had been done militarily within the homeland had been done elsewhere by the Swiss and the Israelis, but by few others. All male and most female citizens underwent initial training as recruits for six to twelve months. Refresher training for up to one month each year was the rule for all up to the age of fifty. South Africa’s regular armed forces were by 1985 about 60,000 strong with reserves about equal in number. The combined LandwehrlVolkssturm, which could be mobilized in forty-eight hours, was nearly half a million. Of this well over 100,000 were Kommandos with their own air, armoured and communications units, organized into brigade-like formations of several thousand each. The Boers were not going to be caught napping. What is more they had absorbed 250,000 white Rhodesians and 100,000 white refugees from Namibia, who did not intend to pack their bags again. They were further strengthened by plentiful volunteers from Australia and New Zealand.

The antipathy of many in the world outside South Africa to the policies pursued there towards coloured peoples and the consequent deep reluctance of the US and British governments to give military aid to South Africa, even in a struggle against the spreading power of the USSR, meant that no forces from either country could be expected to come to help her in war, and there was little prospect of significant military aid from any other Western source. They were on their own. There was by the end of the seventies no longer even the hope of procuring military supplies in any quantity from other Western sources. Some were had from France but not enough. South Africa turned to Japan and her associates in South-east Asia. By the beginning of the eighties the trickle of military equipment which began to come in at the end of the seventies had become a flood. Compelled to rely solely on her own manpower for her defence South Africa had now no need of Western hardware to equip it.

In Angola there was the greatest Soviet presence and at the same time the greatest anti-communist activity. The battle for Angola was not yet over. Harassed by UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), mauled by Zaire, Sovietized by Russian masters, and manipulated by Cuban puppets, the reign of President Ageto had stumbled to a humiliating conclusion, replaced by a coalition of his rivals, still essentially Marxist, propped up by the Soviet Union and Cubans. The Cuban and Nigerian military contingents were now increased to 40,000 and 20,000, respectively, with two battalions of Jamaicans. The Soviet advisers numbered some 15,000 and included radar, communications and industrial technicians plus port-operating experts. But even all this foreign support could not alter the fact that UNITA’s forces in the south were growing in strength and now numbered about 25,000, that Angolan National Liberation Front (FNLA) forces were still active in the north, and that the Cabinde Liberation Movement, with Zaire’s assistance, was gaining support. Whatever the difficulties of establishing absolute control over the whole of Angola, however, the Soviet Union was clearly determined to keep a grip of what she most wanted — the ports, the airfields, the jumping off ground for driving through Namibia to South Africa, and a general area which could be used as a relatively secure base for her proxy troops to go anywhere in Southern, Central or even West Africa. In strategic terms the Soviet victory in Angola had been of immense significance. South Africa’s Prime Minister at that time had seen it as the whirlwind before the storm, as simply one exercise in a series of exercises aimed at providing bases for black guerrilla troops and Soviet proxy mercenaries to launch their attack on the final target of South Africa.

Of all the black African countries and their leaders which most wished to tread the path of moderation and evolution, Zambia and President Luganda stood out from all the others. He had wholly supported the creation of Zimbabwe. He was not sure, even in 1985, that the time had come to deal with South Africa, for he felt that the African front-line states could not do it without enormous and prolonged Soviet and Cuban assistance and that to tolerate the presence of these in Southern Africa on the scale required would simply be to exchange one sort of subjugation for another. Nor with armed forces numbering a mere 8,000 and growing concern about Zambia’s borders with Angola, could any troops be spared from Zambia for the great trek south.