BIG READ: Finding the roots of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale

Military battles are like watching car crashes. From Cannae, Hannibal’s perfect battle when he defeated the Romans, to Kherson, Vladimir Putin’s imperfect one at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we’re relieved not to be part of them, but they still hold a grim fascination.

Some evoke deep emotion, like Blood River or Isandlwana; others remote interest, like Stalingrad, Waterloo or Agincourt. Some are regularly commemorated; others quickly forgotten. Some change history, others do not make even a dent in it. Still others are fought over and over in arguments or debates, such as Cuito Cuanavale, a battle that changed history in Southern Africa.

The Cuito and Cuanavale rivers, which run parallel for many kilometres from their sources in the Angolan highlands, join in the southeast and give the town its name. Between 1987 and 1988 it was a critical part in a series of battles in a war of many names: Angolan civil, SA bush or border and, at a stretch, of Namibian independence.

The denouement in March 1988 is said to have been the biggest land battle on the continent since those in North Africa during World War 2, but that might have been the propaganda of the time, and possibly eclipsed by the Battle of Massawa of 1990 in the Ethiopian civil war. Whatever the case, both battlefields, like their archives and casualty lists, remain difficult to access by independent investigators.

A National Geographic expedition to Cuito Cuanavale in 2016 found evidence of serious fighting and a lethal legacy. “Plant life conceals and softens the rusting hulks of downed helicopters, tanks and other machines. More insidiously, the ground hides millions of landmines that continue to claim lives and limbs years and even decades after they were deployed,” the magazine reported.

The town was a cauldron for both sides in the Angolan war. During its Operation Alpha Centauri in 1988, SA artillery, using its famed G5 piece for the first time, pasted the place before withdrawing in good order.

Subsequent battles further to the southeast, especially on the Lomba River, were clear-cut SA victories in protecting its proxy, Unita; the final showdown of 1988 not so, allowing various parties to claim victory. The ANC, embarrassed by its lack of battle honours, claimed it as a vicarious victory over apartheid; the Cubans and the Angolan army, too, but with greater credibility. As for the South Africans, says author and military historian David Katz, the veterans of the SA Defence Force (SADF) “will tell you they won every battle that they fought”.

Katz and Evert Kleynhans, who collaborated for  their book 20 Battles Searching for a South African Way of War, 1913-2013, believe all the belligerents at Cuito Cuanavale have a case: the SADF, the Cubans and the Angolan army, Fapla.

They admit that on a purely military level, the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale is a “grey area”. “The narrative works beautifully if everyone can walk away and say, each one of us was a winner there,” says Katz. It might not satisfy everyone, but once the evidence is weighed, it’s a fair judgment.

Their book is the first published collaboration by two renowned SA military historians who have been co-operating for 12 years and had written separately on Rommel’s desert battles, high seas dramas with U-boats, Nazi spies in SA and a revisionist look at Jan Smuts’ often denigrated role as a field commander in World War 1.

They hold no political pretensions, having examined the 20 battles of their book “through a cold military lens”.

“We tried to steer away from politics,” says Katz, but the authors acknowledge some “bad politics”, as in the Battle of Cassinga, an airborne assault on what the SADF said was a Swapo stronghold in Angola but which Swapo claimed was a refugee camp.

“The book is a pure military study to try to see if there’s a continuity or discontinuity of SA manoeuvre doctrine through the 100 years, and even going back to the Boer War, which the book doesn’t cover. There was a certain republican [Boer republics] manoeuvre doctrine that we believe has persisted,” says Katz.

The authors examined the 20 battles from two of the three levels of warfare: tactical and operational, largely bypassing the strategic level, “which is where politics resides”, they say. There was also a danger of getting sidelined by the politics, says Kleynhans, especially when dealing with topics such as the 1922 Rand Revolt, a communist-inspired insurrection, or the uprising of the Bondelswarts in Namibia in the same year, which was brutally suppressed and which Ruth First called “the Sharpeville of the 1920s”.

There is a direct line between the resistance to white rule by the Bondelswarts and that of other Namibian indigenous groups such as the Rehoboth Basters, the Herero and Nama, to the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

“They rejected colonialism and imperialism from the 1880s [first against German occupiers of Namibia],” says Kleynhans. That resistance would culminate in Swapo’s guerrilla incursions into Namibia, a League of Nations-mandated territory SA refused to surrender. In response, the SADF invaded Angola in 1975, ostensibly to attack Swapo bases but it drew in Fapla, the Cubans, and even a few Russian and East German “advisers”.

While all this fighting was taking place, mostly in southern Angola, there was furious negotiating, led by the US, to settle the conflict, but that story has been told often, and at length. Katz and Kleynhans concentrate on the hard edge of the fighting.

“The SADF was superior at a tactical level,” says Katz. “And on the Lomba River [southeast of Cuito Cuanavale], the SADF was totally superior against Fapla and the Cubans [but] at the operational level, the SADF wasn’t that great.” The Lomba battle was crucial in stopping a Fapla advance on Unita’s headquarters in Jamba, further to the east.

The distinction is critical, as Katz explains. “The tactical level is the event where the bullets are flying, people are screaming and going over and bayonet-charging,” he says. “The operation is the process to get you to that event. When you do operational planning, you’re planning a process. It’s a plan that will cover the campaign. It’s the logistics and the process of getting into a tactical situation.” And he doesn’t think much of the SADF’s operational planning.

Much of this might have had to do with tactical commanders in the field being second-guessed by top brass far from it. “Guys like Witkop Badenhorst [a deputy chief of the army] were making operational and tactical decisions from Pretoria concerning Cuito Cuanavale,” says Kleynhans. “It didn’t work. In SA’s case, you had headquarters upon headquarters, upon headquarters sitting on top of one another, from northern Namibia all the way stretching towards Cuito Cuanavale. It was a shit show.”

Katz is kinder: “At the higher tactical level, verging on operations, the SADF got their act together better than the rest of the bunch [on the battlefield]. At the operational level the SADF might have done a little better — and it landed up in a stalemate. At a strategic level — and there’s no doubt about that — the South Africans lost.”

But the SADF’s tactical victory was not complete, Katz concedes. “Outside the gates of Cuito Cuanavale, they went over to a frontal assault, which they never should have done.”

Perhaps strategic and tactical had become blurred. Shortly before the final battle, then president PW Botha, visiting the SA frontline, interfered. He wanted to know why tanks were not being used by the SADF. It appeared to the brass not as an impolite suggestion (Botha was seldom polite) but an order, and Olifant tanks were introduced, escalating the tactical battle.

It might have been too late in the day for that, as the authors point out.

“Defence is a lot easier to conduct than offence,” says Katz. “Defence is the refuge of the beaten army [but] there are tactical force multipliers when you go on the defence. You multiply the strength of your forces and your firepower. The attacker will have to outnumber you, with firepower or in numbers, by three to one.

“Fapla and the Cubans realised their weaknesses: they were no match in the manoeuvre-type war with the South Africans. It really takes a lot to conduct manoeuvre warfare. It’s combined-arms operations [infantry, artillery and armour], it’s leadership style, it’s a lot of training. It is a difficult process. It looks easy but it ain’t,” says Katz.

“It’s easier just to dig in, like the Russians have done in Ukraine where they have put extensive fortifications along the line. They’ve manned it with second-rate troops because you can when you do this, and they have allowed themselves time to rebuild.

“Fapla got a good hiding on the Lomba, they retreated and went into defensive position around Cuito, and they sucked the South Africans into a trap. They had air superiority over Cuito and might have had artillery superiority.

“It also made their lives a lot simpler, operating on interior lines, making it simpler for their logistics. The South Africans had extended logistical lines, they were forced into a very narrow delta. They were forced to do frontal attacks against a system that had built up its defences.”

On that stage of the battle, Katz demurs. “I’ve got to think about it, but I almost concede that right towards the latter stages that the SADF was outsmarted at a tactical level. They threw themselves up against well-prepared defences, and they were found lacking.”

He says Fapla and the Cubans were clever operationally because they managed to hold on to Cuito and this is where Cuban leader Fidel Castro comes in “because he had a large hand to play. He said, no step backwards, you’re going to defend this town to the last.”

Three months later, while SA’s attention was still on the Cuito Cuanavale stalemate, Castro played a trump with a big drive by his 50th division about 800km away to the west, on the Calueque dam near the border of Namibia. In an attack by Cuban MiGs, 11 SA soldiers were killed.

“All of a sudden, the South Africans had to hastily retreat and leave token forces behind [at Cuito Cuanavale] to respond to what the Cubans were doing,” says Kleynhans. “It was a deep battle movement by the Cubans. They totally threw the SA planners off guard. I don’t think they ever thought the Cubans would have the balls to advance full whack, with a division, onto the border with Namibia.”

Would the Cubans and Fapla have invaded?

“I don’t think so,” says Kleynhans. “By 1988, the writing was on the wall [regarding a peace settlement], but I do think Castro wanted to show them he was not scared and was willing to move to the border and threaten them if he had to.”

Katz says: “A great manoeuvre. It outflanked the South Africans and forced them to withdraw [from Angola]. [Castro’s move] goes to what manoeuvre warfare is all about. Psychologically, he bested the South Africans by exposing their flank. I don’t think the Cubans had any intention [of invading Namibia] but it certainly got the South Africans the hell out of there.”

Cuito Cuanavale had a bearing on the political settlement, along with sanctions, especially by US banks, but whether it also had an influence further afield is debatable. Yet a year later the Berlin Wall fell, and three years later the Soviet Union, too.

As for finding SA’s way of war, the authors suggest elements can be traced to the SA War of 1899-1902 where Boer forces needed to husband resources, both human and horse, and rely on manoeuvre warfare.

In Angola, the horse was the Ratel 90, which, says Kleynhans, made a big difference from the late 1970s in taking on Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. More than 50 years later, the Ratel is still an army workhorse, but everything else has changed.

• ‘20 Battles: Searching for a South African Way of War, 1913-2013’ is published by Jonathan Ball.