Missing in Action (14 page)

An Irish UN patrol winds its way through a suburb of Elisabethville watched by curious Katangan residents. Note how high a silhouette the Ford AFVs have. (Photo: Art Magennis)

The plight of refugees in any warzone is heartbreaking. Here, a group of Congolese refugees flee their homes amid safety fears following inter-tribal violence. (Photo: Art Magennis)

Congolese families gather at a UN-controlled refugee camp in Elisabethville. Such was the scale of the refugee problem that UN-run camps struggled to cope with the staggering influx of Congolese. (Photo: Art Magennis)

A blinding flash
of light and a deafening roar was the only warning the patrol got of the incoming anti-tank round. But for Cmdt Cahalane and the three men inside the Ford AFV there was no warning at all. The armoured visor plate in front of the driver was raised and everyone in the car was studying the front door of the Radio College. The crew didn’t see the flash of the anti-tank round being fired behind them and their world instantly dissolved in a thunderclap of heat, noise and smoke.

The anti-armour shell covered the distance from the carefully hidden Katangan positions to the stationary armoured car in just over a second – faster than the human brain could even process the threat. The darkness had aided the concealment of the Katangans in their ambush site, which had been carefully chosen and prepared by the gendarmes’ French mercenary commander, Bob Denard. Having captured Lt Ryan and his small detachment, Denard knew the UN would send a patrol to discover what had happened – and any armoured escort would be vulnerable on its flank as it drew up outside the Radio College.

Denard had ordered the attack at precisely the moment the UN patrol was at its most vulnerable and he had carried out a textbook ambush. His Katangan gendarmes had shown admirable discipline in holding their positions until he personally ordered the anti-tank round to be fired. It helped that the Katangan troops were terrified of the French mercenary. Denard’s biggest fear was that if the ambush was launched prematurely, his men would be exposed to the withering fire of the Vickers and Browning machine guns from the armoured cars.

The round struck the lead Ford armoured car just below the turret – and the Irish troops in the jeep and bus immediately behind could only close their eyes and cringe in horror at the ball of smoke and flame that consumed the armoured car. Miraculously, the war-head struck at such an acute angle that it glanced upwards before exploding. Had the weapon – a recoilless rifle – struck dead-on and true, it would have instantly incinerated the entire four-man Irish crew.

The huge explosion of the warhead still managed to lift the entire Ford car onto its two side wheels for a few brief seconds before it finally crashed back down onto the ground. What no one realised at the time was that the sheer force of the huge explosion had fused the turret to the sides of the hull and wrecked its turning bearings.

The patrol instantly descended into chaos as the Katangans trained heavy fire on the remaining vehicles. Denard had warned his men that they had to disable all the UN vehicles – they could not afford to allow any armoured cars or jeeps to escape the killing zone for fear they would then circle around and attack the Katangans from the flank or rear.

Two squad machine guns opened up on the Irish vehicles – and the rear armoured Irish car suddenly stalled and could not be restarted. At a stroke, the Irish patrol had been stripped of its two main defensive weapons. With the two armoured cars disabled – and the crucial firepower of their Vickers and Browning machine guns lost – the Irish patrol was suddenly little more than target practice for every Katangan with a gun.

Most vulnerable were the Irish troops in the commandeered bus. Staying in the coach was tantamount to suicide because even 9mm handguns could slice through the thin metal sides of the vehicle. ‘Get out, get out, get out,’ an NCO screamed at the shocked troopers. The driver threw open the front and rear doors and in seconds the soldiers were scrambling out to reach the shelter of the nearby buildings. If they could reach the buildings, a defensive perimeter could at least be established and supporting fire laid down for the lads in the armoured cars.

The crew of the jeep faced the same stark choice. They could either speed away and leave their comrades to their fate or dismount and try to provide some kind of covering fire. Because the jeep was not armoured, staying inside the stationary vehicle meant death. They had a stark choice: flee or stay and fight. The crew had to move before the Katangan anti-tank team had a chance to re-load – and they had to move fast.

Inside the stricken armoured car, amid a blinding cloud of smoke and flame, Sgt Carey struggled to make sense of what had just happened. It was hard to draw breath inside the armoured car, which stank of cordite fumes. ‘The armoured car seemed to light up – that’s all I can remember,’ he said. ‘We were obviously hit with an anti-tank round, there were choking gasses – clothing and other items seemed to be alight.’

Struggling to clear his head, the sergeant desperately scrambled around in the armoured car to check on his three comrades. Cmdt Cahalane – who appeared to have been standing up gazing out the turret visor when the anti-tank round hit – was badly concussed and only semi-conscious. To his horror, Sgt Carey realised he was crawling over the prone bodies of Tpr Mullins and Cpl Nolan on the metal floor of the vehicle. Tpr Mullins was lying on the floor just below the turret, with Cpl Nolan motionless and spread-eagled across his body.

‘I went to go for the door and I know I went over Cpl Nolan’s body. Tpr Mullins was blocking the door – I had to get my hands around him just to open the door and, when the door opened, he gave a sigh,’ Sgt Carey said. Opening the door immediately helped clear the interior of the Ford of its noxious gases and the sergeant slowly helped his dazed commander towards fresh air.

But as soon as the main access hatch on the armoured car opened, there was a burst of well-aimed machine gun fire from concealed Katangan positions around the Radio College. The gendarmes had been trained to hit the armoured car with the recoilless rifle round – and then wait for the crew to try to scramble clear. Until the crew managed to get behind the right flank of the Ford, they were in full sight of the concealed Katangan positions. The gendarmes opened up with machine guns and assault rifles determined to settle scores with the UN.

Bullets clanged off the armoured car as Sgt Carey and Cmdt Cahalane emerged, some gouging lumps of paint and metal from the Ford’s soft armoured hide. Seconds later, Sgt Carey reeled backwards as if he had just been kicked by a horse in the leg. He gasped as he realised a round had just hit him in the upper left thigh. Grimacing in pain, he desperately reached back and tried to help the two soldiers lying inside the armoured car. A second round of machine gun fire erupted and this time the Katangans used tracer rounds to better aim their fire in the growing darkness. The sergeant knew he had only seconds left to reach a defensible position and get his commander to safety before the machine guns cut them to pieces.

‘The ammo was hitting the armoured car and everything around me seemed to be confused. Cmdt Cahalane seemed to be dazed and shocked. It looked like his eardrums had been shattered and he seemed out on his feet. I caught Tpr Mullins and tried to pull him. I don’t think I was standing at the time.’ The sergeant realised that he had to try and get his commanding officer to safety before his left leg collapsed underneath him. Courageously ignoring the waves of pain from his jagged wound and the blood now pouring down his leg, the sergeant half-pulled and half-dragged his concussed commander towards the shelter of a nearby building.

‘Cmdt Cahalane and myself made a break for the building on our left. Then a shell hit the building just over us and masonry and glass came shattering down on top of us. We managed to get through the building and into a yard out back. There were some gendarmes coming over a wall towards our position and [then someone] fired an “84” and this seemed to stop the advance,’ he said.

Cpl Dan Sullivan – a native of Cork city whose brother, Walter ‘Wally’ Sullivan, was the drum major of the battalion pipe band – had been travelling in the jeep when the lead armoured car in the patrol took a direct hit. He was responsible for the 84mm recoilless Carl Gustav anti-tank rocket, which was the Irish patrol’s equivalent to the Katangan anti-tank weapon. As the jeep’s crew desperately scrambled to safety, Cpl Sullivan had the presence of mind to take the Carl Gustav and its projectiles with him.

Inside the building, Cpl Sullivan’s colleague, Private Pat Crowley, decided Katangan efforts to overrun the patrol could best be frustrated by a warning round from the 84mm rifle. While designed for anti-armour work, the projectile’s exhaust plume and the spectacular detonation of its warhead was more than sufficient to persuade any infantrymen in its vicinity to keep their heads firmly down. One round was enough to persuade the Katangan gendarmes to abandon their assault on the rear of the building and resume their original ambush positions. Unfortunately, the back-blast from the weapon caught Sgt Carey, knocking him down as he struggled to keep his footing.

Other members of the patrol – realising the desperate plight of their commander and the sergeant – tried to offer covering fire and help the duo reach safety without further injury. But the descending darkness made it difficult to tell where the various elements of the patrol had scattered to, and it was increasingly impossible to tell friend from foe. Power cuts had left Avenue Wangermee darker than Hades and the Irish troops didn’t want to fire flares for fear of attracting further fire from the Katangan forces. The patrol’s two best weapons were mobility and the firepower of the two Ford AFVs – and they had just lost them both.

‘We managed to get into the back of another house where Captain Whyte broke a glass door and we got in. At this stage, defensive positions were taken up. I was bleeding and had by now lost a lot of blood. Captain Whyte assisted me in applying a first aid bandage. I was passing out, but I had a bottle of water and that seemed to revive me. Captain Whyte and Sgt Dignam decided they would make a break to get back to camp to raise the alarm,’ Sgt Carey recalled.

‘I placed a tourniquet on my leg to try and staunch the flow of blood. It was pouring down my leg and almost filling my boot. It was so thick that when it dried and crusted I could hardly bend my knee. I knew I had to keep releasing the tourniquet and then tightening it up again or I would be in right trouble with blood loss,
’
he added.

In a bizarre coincidence, the Irish troops had just sought shelter in the villa of Gerard Soerte – the Belgian policeman who had supervised the exhumation and disposal of Patrice Lumumba’s body the previous January. Soerte was at home with his wife, his two children and his brother, Michel, who was also a policeman. Their main concern was that the presence of the UN troops would trigger a gunfight in which they or their children could be injured.

Without the armoured cars, Captain Whyte knew the Irish patrol desperately needed reinforcement or evacuation by the remaining elements of the 35th Battalion. Someone had to let battalion know that the two Irish units were now heavily engaged by the gendarmes. Having informed a semi-dazed Cmdt Cahalane what they intended, Whyte and Dignam wasted no time in setting off to try to get help. Just minutes later the Katangan gendarmes, shrewdly directed by the French mercenaries, closed the ring around the Irish troops. The patrol was now trapped. They would either have to fight their way out, or UN reinforcements would have to fight their way in to help them. The Katangans fired the odd volley of shots towards the buildings now sheltering the Irish patrol as if to discourage any idea of movement and to persuade the now trapped UN troops to keep their heads down.

Captain Whyte, in his report to Battalion HQ, confirmed that the attack on the patrol had achieved total surprise. ‘I was observing to the rear [of the scout car] with a Bren [Browning] gun when the leading car was immobilised by an anti-tank gun. I ordered the driver to reverse and swing the gun around but could see no target to engage. The rest of the column had dismounted and taken cover beside Radio College. As I had seen no one leave the immobilised armoured car beside Radio College I thought all were dead. I had the men search for the enemy gunner and told the corporal driver to turn the near armoured car. In the meantime, I discovered that Cmdt Cahalane and Sgt Carey had escaped,’ he said.

‘I subsequently discovered that Sgt Carey was wounded in the left thigh. Cmdt Cahalane appeared deafened by the explosion. While the search was proceeding I was joined by Cpl Holbrook and the civilian interpreter. The armoured car stalled in turning. We moved into the grounds of the flats adjoining Radio College. I succeeded in gaining entry to a flat on the ground floor and Cmdt Cahalane disposed the men covering the front and rear. The men were still shocked but were recovering. I dressed Sgt Carey’s wound. Cmdt Cahalane decided that since no radio message had been sent back somebody would have to go back for assistance and inform battalion of our position.

‘The flat was occupied by a man, his wife and family and his brother-in-law. The buildings surrounding Radio College were occupied by the gendarmerie. During the original search an enemy soldier was captured, but he subsequently escaped in the dark. Cmdt Cahalane decided to stay put until daylight and asked for volunteers to make a break for it. Sgt Dignam and myself volunteered. I ordered the two Belgians to hand over the key of the civilian car in the rear. I was going to make a break for it in the car but decided against that as the anti-tank gunner was still outside. I ordered the civilians to hand over their coats and we put them on. We were covered from the back door and made a dash across the back garden, over the wall and into the grounds of a house in the rear. Keeping to the back gardens, generally, we made our way slowly in the general direction of our own lines,’ he said. Sgt Dignam and Captain Whyte, after a slow and painstaking journey, finally managed to reach an Indian supply depot near the city centre and raise the alarm.

While they couldn’t have known it, the relief patrol had walked into a trap carefully laid by the Katangan gendarmes in the hours after Lt Tommy Ryan and his unit had been overwhelmed earlier that day. When Lt Ryan and his men first deployed to the Radio College in the initial phase of Operation Morthor, everything seemed to be going well. At 2.30 p.m. a local woman called to the college and asked if the Irish troops were okay. Lt Ryan told her they were fine but would appreciate any boiling water she might be able to provide for tea. The woman’s husband brought the boiling water to the Irish troops at 3 p.m. – and returned to collect the empty water container at 4 p.m. But this time the husband arrived at the college with a second man dressed in civilian clothing. The Irish troops discovered within minutes that it was a French mercenary serving with the Katangan gendarmes, Lt San Paul, who was detailed to try to persuade the Irish unit to surrender and avoid a battle.