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Reviews
The search for Puma 164
by Leon Engelbrecht – Defenceweb 11 September 2011
There seems to be no end of excellent titles from the 30 degrees South publishing stable, and The search for Puma 164 – Operation Uric and the assault on Mapai is among the latest.
Operation Uric, in September 1979, was one of the final acts of the Rhodesian bush war and involved – as the title implies – an assault on targets around the Mozambican town of Mapai. The raid that largely involved a series of demolitions in the Limpopo river valley drew in elements of the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI), the Special Air Service, the Rhodesian Corps of Engineers – and South Africa's 1 Reconnaissance Commando. Airlift was provided by the country's two air forces, the SouthAfricans providing 13 Aérospatiale Puma medium helicopters.
A great deal of secrecy surrounded the South African participation and a good deal of misinformation would circulate for years after the event. “Uric wasn't our best performance, nor one of our really successful operations … although it did achieve its laid-down aim,” former-Rhodesian combined operations commander Lieutenant General Peter Walls says in a foreword written shortly before his death last year. It also involved the single largest Rhodesian loss of life in a single day: on the afternoon of September 6, while withdrawing troops from the vicinity of Mapai, one of the Pumas was struck by a rocket propelled grenade and crashed – killing all 14 Rhodesians and three South Africans aboard.
Because of tactical conditions the bodies were not recovered and were abandoned in the wreck of the Puma – adding to the trauma. Van Malsen, then 2IC of 1 Commando, was on the ground that day and took a patrol to the crash site where he could confirm all had died on impact. Some of the troops aboard had been from his company – indeed he should have been aboard himself – and he would have to inform their next of kin.
Ever since he – and others, including those next of kin – had wondered what had happened to the remains. At last, in 2008, things fell into place and the next Easter a search party left South Africa for Mapai to locate the wreck site. This was expeditiously achieved with the assistance of the local people. Also located was the unmarked mass graves of the victims – one for the passengers and one for the crew; the locals having interred them shortly
after the Rhodesian-SA withdrawal.
This fine work, in short, sets the scene by re-telling the story of Operation Uric. It then records the Easter 2009 expedition to the wreck site and the subsequent effort to inform the next-of-kin as well as a subsequent pilgrimage back to the wargraves as well as other Operation Uric sites in July 2010, including the wreck of an AgustaBell 205 downed in the town of Aldeida de Barragem the day before the Puma shoot-down. The tailboom of the helicopter remains there in a traffic circle as a war memorial. The exact location of the grave of a crewman killed in the incident and buried nearby could not be determined, although townsfolk could give an approximation. Also included are detailed personal reminiscences by soldiers and airmen
involved in the events as well as responses by family members to the finding of the wreck sites. Several have since visited Mapai and its environs themselves and their accounts are recorded as well.
Who Killed Hammarskjold?
Commentary by Trevor Grundy, Africa Correspondent of the Commonwealth Journalists Association
A new book about the legendary UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, has been lauded by academics and journalists as the world remembers the great statesman’s mysterious death on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) during the early hours of 18 September 1961.
"Who killed Hammarskjold by the Susan Williams is a short, taut and highly readable account of Hammarskjold’s death that suggests strongly that the Secretary-General was the victim of a conspiracy hatched by some supporters of continued white domination in central Africa," writes the African expert and author Stephen Ellis (Season of Rains - Africa in the World Hurst & Company London 2011)
"The death of Dag Hammarskjold is a major historical puzzle," writes James Mayall, the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. "Susan Williams has left very few stones unturned in her attempt to unravel it."
And author Gerard Prunier declares - ". as exciting as a James Bond novel, this important book, which vividly conveys the tumultuous decolonization of the Congo is the one for you."
The book was launched at the University of London on Friday 2 September after a one-day seminar on Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations and the End of Empire held under the auspices of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Uppsala and the UN Association of the UK.
Some of the world’s best authorities on Africa - including Professor David Anderson, Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford and Professor Wm. Roger Louis, CBE, the Kerr Professor of English History and Culture and Director of British Studies at the University of Texas, Austin and author of the The End of British Imperialism - The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonisation (I.B. Tauris, 2006) - spoke at the seminar.
Others were Dr Benjamin Zachariah, Reader in South Asian History, University of Sheffield: Ludo De Witte from Belgium and author of the best-selling The Assassination of Lumumba (2001): Lord (Douglas) Hurd, diplomat, historian and former British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Dr Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.
The conference was attended by a cross-section of influential African academics, authors and journalists. One of the world’s great authorities on Latin America, Hugh O’Shaughnessy was in the audience. So was Barbara Hall MBE who lived and worked in Northern Rhodesia at the time of Hammarskjold’s death. It was also attended by the Deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Secretariat, Mrs Mwasekgoa Masire-Mwamba. Susan Williams has published widely on Africa. She received widespread acclaim for her book on the founding president of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.
Although Hammarskjöld’s death/murder/assassination took place such a long time ago, it is attracting fresh attention from academics, UN scholars, Africanists and journalists because of the date - 50 years ago on 18 September. During the previous evening, a UN-chartered DC-6B plane code-named "Albertina" took off from Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) capital of the freshly independent Republic of the Congo on a 1,000 miles circuitous route to Ndola, where Dag Hammarskjold was scheduled to hold talks with Moise Tshombe who was the leader of the break-away copper-rich Katanga. Reports say that soon after midnight, a large flash of light was seen in the sky near Ndola Airport and that afternoon the wreckage of the plane was found nine miles away, along with 15 badly burned bodies.
Who Killed Hammarskjold: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa by Susan Williams is published by Hurst and Company, London, September 2011 306 pp and is available from 30 Degrees South UK priced £20.00 + P&P.
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