Rudolph
12-30-2007, 10:25 AM
As reported by Australian reporter Robert Moss, in four parts, for the Sunday Telegraph, 1977:
CASTRO'S SECRET WAR EXPOSED
How Washington Lost its Nerve and how the Cubans subdued Angola
How Fidel Castro's 15,000 Cuban invaders of Angola, armed by Russia, won a victory by default over the anti-Communist forces is told in detail for the first time in an exhaustive study, which begins on this page today, of this largely secret war.
The author, Robert Moss, shows that the United States, having begged South Africa to put troops in to offset the Communist intervention, lost its nerve and failed to stop the great build-up of men, guns and aircraft from across the seas, which had started, trucked right across the African continent, way back in 1964.
The Russians' motives were far from ideological. They were after oil, diamonds, minerals - and naval bases.
Only now, when the war is nominally over but guerrilla resistance continues, does the truth of this extraordinary adventure begin to emerge.
The pro-Communist forces outnumbered the anti-Communists by 10 to 1 in weaponry. Ten times as many Cubans as South Africans went in. But it was failure of will which determined the issue in the end.
New details gathered in South Africa, Washington, Barbados, Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, Jerusalem and the States neighbouring Angola show how the plot was hatched, the war fought and the political capitulation of the West ensured. The captured diary of a Cuban soldier vividly recreates what it was like for these interlopers in a black civil war.
On the morning of October 7, 1975, a company of teenage soldiers from Jonas Savimbi's anti- Soviet UNITA movement was heading west through central Angola. The men belonged to one of three black guerrilla movements which had been promised a share in Angola's independence from Portugal, then only a month away. Their mission was to intercept a column of pro-Soviet MPLA forces that was reported to be striking east towards Nova Lisboa, Angola's second biggest city.
The UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) column had started out from its base in Silva Porto with two old Panhard armoured cars (a gift from President Mobutu of Zaire) but one had broken down along the way. Its other weaponry was not impressive: three jeep-mounted anti-tank missile launchers, two 106mm recoilless guns, and four .50 Browning machine-guns. But at this stage that was virtually the full inventory of UNITA's hardware.
The column included 14 South African infantry instructors acting as advisers, led by a major. They were tough professionals who had volunteered to go to the aid of UNITA in what had so far been a losing battle against superior Soviet-supplied weapons. They wore UNITA uniforms.
Some four-and-a-half miles outside the village of Norton de Matos, the little column reached a bridge. Scouts were sent forward, and reported that the enemy was not in sight. But then a spotter plane appeared overhead, and one of the black soldiers opened up on it with a machine-gun. This was the signal for all hell to break loose. From over the brow of the hills beyond the river the concealed MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) forces opened up with recoilless guns, light artillery, air-burst mortars - and five Soviet-built T-34 tanks with Cuban crews joined in.
The South African major's jeep was knocked out from under him by an armour-piercing projectile from one of the tanks, but he escaped uninjured. UNITA's young soldiers - who had had only two weeks to prepare them for war - scattered in confusion. But UNITA's solitary armoured car, commanded by a South African lieutenant, swung forward and lobbed a 90mm shell into one of the Soviet tanks, which disappeared in flames. The South Africans managed to knock out a second tank with one of UNITA's 106mm guns. After this the other three Soviet tanks pulled back.
While the enemy mortars kept up an intensive fire, the South Africans, ducking and weaving, slammed six anti-tank missiles towards the hidden positions, without any certainty of hitting anything. But a UNITA patrol subsequently claimed that 116 of the enemy had been killed. There were no South African casualties.
This skirmish at an obscure spot in central Angola (never before reported) was the first armed confrontation between the Cubans and the South Africans, the prelude to an extraordinary war in which one of the most brazen land-grabs that the Russians and their satellites have attempted proved to be successful - not because of victory on the battlefield, but because of the political failure of the United States to deliver sufficient support to the anti-Soviet guerrillas.
The Communist invasion of Angola is one of the most decisive, and most sombre, turning- points in the whole period since 1945. It is the story of how more than 15,000 troops from a sugar-cane republic in the Caribbean were transported 6,000 miles across the Atlantic to serve as the Gurkhas of the Soviet Empire, and how a pro-Communist Government in Lisbon, and a number of Third World Governments, smoothed the way for that invasion.
It is also the story of how the South Africans - supposedly pariahs - were begged by the United States and by moderate black African leaders to put troops into Angola to offset the Communist intervention. By the end of a lightning armoured offensive the South Africans came within a hair's breadth of securing a total military victory for the anti-Communist black movements of Angola. Why that victory was thrown away is the most complex story of all. But the most damning factor was the failure of nerve in Washington.
In an age of televised battles, the war for Angola was a remarkably secret war, and the truth of what happened is only slowly beginning to seep out. The Cubans have just produced their authorised version, in the form of a book-length article published by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Mexican magazine Progreso. In the midst of a wealth of factual detail, his account is littered with distortions and plain untruths.
For example, Garcia Marquez states that the decision to send Cuban combat soldiers into Angola was taken on November 5, 1975. But Cuban troops were on the battlefield months before then. He gives the impression of a triumphal Cuban march to the south in the early months of 1976, but does not mention that it took the Cubans more than two months to occupy the territory that the South Africans vacated after they took the political decision to withdraw.
But there are two basic truths in the Garcia Marquez account. The first is that the Cuban invasion was encouraged by the belief that the Americans, after Vietnam, Watergate and the witch-hunt against the CIA, were in no shape to respond effectively to Communist aggression. The second is that the Cubans were confident that, if they ran into real trouble, their Russian sponsors would not allow them to fail.
For the rest of this article: http://rhodesia.nl/moss1.htm
Part 2: http://rhodesia.nl/moss2.htm
Part 3: http://rhodesia.nl/moss3.htm
Part 4: http://rhodesia.nl/moss4.htm
CASTRO'S SECRET WAR EXPOSED
How Washington Lost its Nerve and how the Cubans subdued Angola
How Fidel Castro's 15,000 Cuban invaders of Angola, armed by Russia, won a victory by default over the anti-Communist forces is told in detail for the first time in an exhaustive study, which begins on this page today, of this largely secret war.
The author, Robert Moss, shows that the United States, having begged South Africa to put troops in to offset the Communist intervention, lost its nerve and failed to stop the great build-up of men, guns and aircraft from across the seas, which had started, trucked right across the African continent, way back in 1964.
The Russians' motives were far from ideological. They were after oil, diamonds, minerals - and naval bases.
Only now, when the war is nominally over but guerrilla resistance continues, does the truth of this extraordinary adventure begin to emerge.
The pro-Communist forces outnumbered the anti-Communists by 10 to 1 in weaponry. Ten times as many Cubans as South Africans went in. But it was failure of will which determined the issue in the end.
New details gathered in South Africa, Washington, Barbados, Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, Jerusalem and the States neighbouring Angola show how the plot was hatched, the war fought and the political capitulation of the West ensured. The captured diary of a Cuban soldier vividly recreates what it was like for these interlopers in a black civil war.
On the morning of October 7, 1975, a company of teenage soldiers from Jonas Savimbi's anti- Soviet UNITA movement was heading west through central Angola. The men belonged to one of three black guerrilla movements which had been promised a share in Angola's independence from Portugal, then only a month away. Their mission was to intercept a column of pro-Soviet MPLA forces that was reported to be striking east towards Nova Lisboa, Angola's second biggest city.
The UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) column had started out from its base in Silva Porto with two old Panhard armoured cars (a gift from President Mobutu of Zaire) but one had broken down along the way. Its other weaponry was not impressive: three jeep-mounted anti-tank missile launchers, two 106mm recoilless guns, and four .50 Browning machine-guns. But at this stage that was virtually the full inventory of UNITA's hardware.
The column included 14 South African infantry instructors acting as advisers, led by a major. They were tough professionals who had volunteered to go to the aid of UNITA in what had so far been a losing battle against superior Soviet-supplied weapons. They wore UNITA uniforms.
Some four-and-a-half miles outside the village of Norton de Matos, the little column reached a bridge. Scouts were sent forward, and reported that the enemy was not in sight. But then a spotter plane appeared overhead, and one of the black soldiers opened up on it with a machine-gun. This was the signal for all hell to break loose. From over the brow of the hills beyond the river the concealed MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) forces opened up with recoilless guns, light artillery, air-burst mortars - and five Soviet-built T-34 tanks with Cuban crews joined in.
The South African major's jeep was knocked out from under him by an armour-piercing projectile from one of the tanks, but he escaped uninjured. UNITA's young soldiers - who had had only two weeks to prepare them for war - scattered in confusion. But UNITA's solitary armoured car, commanded by a South African lieutenant, swung forward and lobbed a 90mm shell into one of the Soviet tanks, which disappeared in flames. The South Africans managed to knock out a second tank with one of UNITA's 106mm guns. After this the other three Soviet tanks pulled back.
While the enemy mortars kept up an intensive fire, the South Africans, ducking and weaving, slammed six anti-tank missiles towards the hidden positions, without any certainty of hitting anything. But a UNITA patrol subsequently claimed that 116 of the enemy had been killed. There were no South African casualties.
This skirmish at an obscure spot in central Angola (never before reported) was the first armed confrontation between the Cubans and the South Africans, the prelude to an extraordinary war in which one of the most brazen land-grabs that the Russians and their satellites have attempted proved to be successful - not because of victory on the battlefield, but because of the political failure of the United States to deliver sufficient support to the anti-Soviet guerrillas.
The Communist invasion of Angola is one of the most decisive, and most sombre, turning- points in the whole period since 1945. It is the story of how more than 15,000 troops from a sugar-cane republic in the Caribbean were transported 6,000 miles across the Atlantic to serve as the Gurkhas of the Soviet Empire, and how a pro-Communist Government in Lisbon, and a number of Third World Governments, smoothed the way for that invasion.
It is also the story of how the South Africans - supposedly pariahs - were begged by the United States and by moderate black African leaders to put troops into Angola to offset the Communist intervention. By the end of a lightning armoured offensive the South Africans came within a hair's breadth of securing a total military victory for the anti-Communist black movements of Angola. Why that victory was thrown away is the most complex story of all. But the most damning factor was the failure of nerve in Washington.
In an age of televised battles, the war for Angola was a remarkably secret war, and the truth of what happened is only slowly beginning to seep out. The Cubans have just produced their authorised version, in the form of a book-length article published by the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Mexican magazine Progreso. In the midst of a wealth of factual detail, his account is littered with distortions and plain untruths.
For example, Garcia Marquez states that the decision to send Cuban combat soldiers into Angola was taken on November 5, 1975. But Cuban troops were on the battlefield months before then. He gives the impression of a triumphal Cuban march to the south in the early months of 1976, but does not mention that it took the Cubans more than two months to occupy the territory that the South Africans vacated after they took the political decision to withdraw.
But there are two basic truths in the Garcia Marquez account. The first is that the Cuban invasion was encouraged by the belief that the Americans, after Vietnam, Watergate and the witch-hunt against the CIA, were in no shape to respond effectively to Communist aggression. The second is that the Cubans were confident that, if they ran into real trouble, their Russian sponsors would not allow them to fail.
For the rest of this article: http://rhodesia.nl/moss1.htm
Part 2: http://rhodesia.nl/moss2.htm
Part 3: http://rhodesia.nl/moss3.htm
Part 4: http://rhodesia.nl/moss4.htm