denial had always been a bit too shrill.
There was certainly no such presence until 1968. My only time west of the Niger had been as a BBC correspondent with the Biafran invasion across the Onitsha Bridge the previous year. After my return in 1968, I had always been inside the Biafran enclave. The only time my contentedly sipping bar friend could have seen me was through a screen of trees deep inside Biafra.
So much for official denials.
BITS OF METAL
Of all the bits of metal that have been thrown in my direction, the nastiest are mortars. This is because they are silent. The only thing you hear from a falling mortar shell is a soft, feathery whisper just before it impacts. Usually not even long enough to dive for cover.
If the ground it falls on is soft or swampy, as sometimes happened in Biafra, the bomb might embed itself at the moment of impact, spending much of its explosive force and its sheets of shrapnel in the surrounding mud.
But if it falls on hard ground, it detonates with an earsplitting crack. That is not the problem; the real problem is that the casing transforms into many hundreds of fragments of razor-sharp metal that spray outward from knee-high to well over the head, and in a 360-degree circle from the explosion. Anyone caught in that hail of shrapnel will probably be torn apart and killed, or at least crippled.
That is why I came to loathe them—the silence. The Nigerians, unlike the Biafrans, had artillery with shells constantly resupplied by London, despite the lies. But they were comfortingly inaccurate as gunners, and an incoming shell makes an audible whoosh like a subway train entering a station. Just enough time to go facedown in the dirt and hope the blast will go over your back.
Machine guns are not funny, but the Nigerians simply put the gun on full automatic, using the entire magazine in one blast, usually aiming high and taking the tops off innumerable innocent trees. Time enough to hit the dirt or dive into the friendly rain ditch and get below ground level.
When it came to rifles, the Nigerians used the NATO-issue SLR, or self-loading rifle. These, too, they put onto the automatic fire setting and went through the magazine in seconds. When you saw the branches above your head start to shred, if you hit the dirt, you would probably stay alive. That apart, the half-trained (if that) compulsory recruits had trouble hitting a barn door at ten paces. Literally hundreds of millions of bullets went through the treetops.
The Biafrans had far more limited supplies, coming in by planeload rather than shipload, but the mercenaries trying to teach ammo-conservancy had an impossible task. In Africa, “spray the landscape” seems to be the only infantry tactic.
Among the Biafrans, the two most feared weapons were the Saladin armored car and the Ferret scout car, both London-supplied. The Saladin had one cannon, which the crew did not know how to use, and each had a heavy machine gun, which was really nasty. But you could hear them coming, too, the growl of the Ferret and the whine of the Saladin usually giving you time to get out of the way. Unfortunately, if the Biafrans heard the Saladin whine coming their way, they would just run for it, and down went another defended village.
At a certain point, Nigeria acquired an air arm; Ilyushin twin-jet bombers and MiG-17 jet fighters, both flown by mercenaries, Egyptians or East Germans. The Biafrans had no anti-air forces, though that did not stop them wasting ammunition by blazing upward whenever they saw one. The Nigerians had no pilots at all, because the only ones they had ever had were Ibos. So the Ilyushins and MiGs could fly low, pick their targets, and bomb or strafe them. But they never changed the course of the war. I was only once caught by a MiG.
I happened to be on a long, straight laterite road with grass fields on either side, so no tree cover. The MiG appeared to my right, visible through the driver’s-side window of my Volkswagen Beetle (Nigeria then drove on the left of the road). I had seen him, but he had also seen me and he was flying in the same direction at about 3,000 feet.
Through the windscreen, I watched him drop the port wing and haul the fighter through 180 degrees, diving to level out just above the road. I slammed on the brakes, bailed out, and went into the rain ditch just as he opened up.
He came down the road with his cannon, ripping small fountains out of the laterite surface, roared overhead, and was gone, making only one pass. He could not have been much good. Despite plowing up the road, he missed the Beetle completely. When he was a dot on the horizon heading for the Niger and home, I was able to start up the VW and crawl through the potholes and thus get back to my bungalow in Umuahia town.
But the one who came nearest to sending me to a new and apparently better place was the mortarman outside Onitsha. I had been visiting the front line south of the riverside city by the bridgehead, but it meant a long hike back across a bare and exposed hillside to where I had parked my car, deep in a grove of trees. I was a third of the way across the flank of the hill when someone across the river must have seen me, presumably with field glasses. It must have been the white face that irritated him, because he really let fly.
I heard that soft whisper and went flat. It was a ranging shot and landed more than a hundred yards away. No damage, but also no cover. I looked around for a friendly rain ditch and spotted one twenty yards to one side. I made it just in time as the second one landed.
Rain ditches make good cover, but the locals tend to use them as latrines. In the rainy season, the waste matter is washed away, but this was during the dry months, so a rain ditch is not recommended for a crawling holiday. Still, it was better than getting shredded. I lay and counted the seconds. Seven. Then the third landed. Closer, but above my head.
I jumped out and began to jog, counting the seconds and hoping my new friend was going to be short on imagination.
He was. At six seconds, I went back into the ditch, and at seven the next one came down. This was not a 60mm party planner, but an 81mm “company” mortar. Very nasty.
I hoped he was watching the fall of his shot, then dropping his next effort down the tube. Travel time for the bomb, exactly seven seconds. I have never liked jogging and this jog least of all. Up-run-dive-bang. Then I made it to the point where the hillside curved away from the river. Two more runs and I would be out of sight.
Hoping he could see me, I turned and gave him a rigid middle finger. Then I was out of sight. There were three more, but they became wider and wider, until I could reach my car and drive home. And that is why I hate mortars.
OF MORE MICE—AND MERCS
For the Biafrans, the experience of foreign white mercenaries was extremely patchy. Both sides used them, but the idea that they were invincible game changers, a reputation deriving from the Congolese wars a few years earlier, proved to be a myth.
For the Biafrans, the first intervention came from France, then ruled by Charles de Gaulle. His principal “fixer” in Africa, Jacques Foccart, responsible for a wide range of skulduggery in the ex-French empire and elsewhere, arranged for about forty mainly French “mercs” to be recruited by ex-Legion icon Roger Faulckes and sent down to show how warfare should be done. They cost Biafra a fortune in its scarce hard-currency reserves.
They duly arrived and were assigned to the Calabar sector, where Nigerian and Biafran troopers were locked in a struggle for the riverine city. On their way there, driving without forward scouts, they ran into an ambush and lost several men. Retreating in disarray, their next stop was the airport, where they demanded to go back home. General Ojukwu, in disgust, just let them go.
But seven opted to stay and were joined by three non-French who came later. They were a mixed bunch. Two were deluded fantasists, two had a taste for killing, and one enjoyed cruelty. Some of the French group stayed because they were wanted in France for various offenses. Finally, there were ex-soldiers from national armies who had simply failed to adapt to civilian life.
There were also three mercenary pilots who flew in Biafra’s short-lived air force until they were shot down or crashed their aircraft an
d left. Three of the land-based mercs died in combat.