Free Dingo Firestorm by Ian Pringle Page B

Altena farmstead at midnight, cut the phone wires and laid a Soviet TM-46 landmine in the entrance road. In the early hours of 21 December 1972, Jairos fired the opening rounds of what white Rhodesians would mark as the beginning of the Bush War.
    The attack with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47 automatic weapons was brief. But De Borchgrave, fearing another attack, stole out into the night on foot to get help. For those in the house, the long wait for De Borchgrave’s return became unbearable. Eventually, a house guest spirited the kids into the car and, without turning on the headlights, they fled the farm in the dark, narrowly missing the landmine outside the farm gate. The De Borchgrave family were given refuge on a neighbouring farm, Whistlefield, owned by Archie Dalgleish.
    It was a bad choice: Whistlefield was attacked 48 hours later. This time, the hapless Marc de Borchgrave and his young daughter, Anne, were injured by shrapnel from an RPG that slammed into a window near where they were sleeping. Once again, the insurgents laid a landmine on the road to the farm.
    A massive explosion rocked the early-morning air when a truck carrying the RLI reaction force detonated the TM-46 mine. Corporal Norman Moore, riding on the tailgate, was flung high into the air and fatally wounded.
    The RLI immediately started looking for spoor so that they could mount a follow-up. However, unlike in previous encounters with ZANLA, the spoor was very difficult to follow, a sure sign that ZANLA had learnt from their earlier setbacks.
    The attacks on Altena and Whistlefield shocked Rhodesians, just as the attacks on the Norton family had shocked the pioneers nearly 80 years earlier at the start of the First Chimurenga. Prime Minister Ian Smith had warned in a radio interview two weeks earlier that ‘if the man in the street could have access to the same information which I and my colleagues have, then I think he would be a lot more worried than he is today’. Despite the warning, the attacks still came as a shock.
    The intelligence services now understood why weapons were being brought into the country via Mukumbura, Mzarabani and as far as the Nyapakwe Mountains further east. And they had also learnt that many young people were leaving north-east Rhodesia to join ZANLA in Mozambique. The threat had indeed been underestimated.
    Stanton’s ultimate boss, Chief Superintendent Mike Edden, would later tell journalist David Martin in an interview: ‘We didn’t expect the ZANLA guerrillas to come through Tete and we didn’t know about ZANU’s new policy. If we had we might have taken FRELIMO and the threat from Tete more seriously.’
    Yet there were other powerful clues of this threat; they were provided by the RhAF. Peter Petter-Bowyer, who by now was commanding No. 4 Squadron, was not one to sit back and enjoy the trappings of the new rank. The new squadron leader got stuck in to developing visual reconnaissance, or recce.
    PB had become adept at studying human and animal pathways from the air, differentiating between what is normal activity and what is not. Flying at 1 500 feet between 10:00 and 15:00, when the sun cast the least shadow and the ground reflected light well, he was able to quickly spot unusual pathway patterns that indicated a temporary guerrilla campsite. These camps would usually be in bush cover and not far from a village, where the guerrillas would obtain food and female company.
    Together with his trainee recce pilots, PB was busy meticulously plotting pathways over a large area between Centenary and the Zambezi River in Mozambique. It was long, tedious work and tough on the bladder, but once the pathways were plotted, any changes to established patterns were relatively easy to see. Besides spotting numerous temporary camps, PB identified a single well-trodden route from Mozambique south along the Musengezi River and up the escarpment near St Albert’s Mission.
    ‘I was convinced ZANLA terrorists were