Giorgio Noriatto, whom I never met, was an Italian, and the first to die. He was killed fighting in the Imo River area as the Nigerians advanced out of the creeks toward Aba.
“Tiny Bill” Billois was a French giant, known for obvious reasons as “Petit Bill,” weighing in at around 350 pounds. He survived, but died later in a light aircraft crash in France years after the war. Always at his side was his cousin Michel, who was so self-effacing he was hardly noticed, and that included when he left.
Mark Goossens was a former Belgian paratrooper, another huge man. He died with a bullet through the liver during a forlorn attempt to recapture Onitsha city.
The third to die was a Britisher, Steve Neeley, whom I found thoroughly unpleasant. He drove around with a bone-white skull on the bonnet of his Land Rover. It was the head of a dead Nigerian, which he had boiled fleshless and mounted with steel wires above the radiator cap.
He disappeared in the Abakaliki sector and it was later rumored one of his own men might have done the job. They attested he was dead, but the body was never found.
The other five were Rolf Steiner, who had been appointed their commander and called himself colonel. He was ex–Deutsches Jungvolk (a sort of Hitler Youth), ex–Foreign Legion, invalided out of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, just in time, and one of the Faulckes group who elected to stay on. He postured and paraded around in his confiscated American limousine, his staff car, but I never recall him going into combat. He spoke only French and German, so I did a fair amount of interpreting. That made him a good source of information, but I never took to him. Then there was Taffy Williams, already mentioned.
The only three I could like were, Alec, a Scot, who survived, returned to the UK, married, and qualified as a truck driver; the Rhodesian, Johnny Erasmus, the explosives king, ex-Rhodesian army; and Armand, from Paris, who had been amicably advised by the police chief to leave the city for a while until “things blew over.” He was the one who quietly donated his salary to the missionaries to buy food for the children.
And finally there was the mythical Major Atkinson, in the form of this writer. One day in the autumn of 1968, I turned up at a Biafran advance headquarters, intending to go up to the front line to see if there was a journalistic story worth covering. Seeing me in the usual pale safari jacket, the brigade commander objected.
His case was perfectly sound. It was well known that the Nigerian army was quite paranoid about white mercenaries and had never heard of a war correspondent. To show up in a leaf-green forest environment with a white face and a pale jacket was asking for trouble. If anyone were to glimpse me through the trees, the entire zone would be drenched in automatic fire. If nothing else, it would be unfair on the Biafran soldiers who might be close by.
He insisted I change into a camouflage jacket and ordered one of his staff officers to lend me his spare. It happened to have the half-a-yellow-sun emblem of Biafra on each sleeve and a major’s crowns on each shoulder. In order not to waste the day, I put it on and went into the front.
That apart, I had taken to carrying a French automatic in a holster at the waist. This was because I’d had described to me in detail what the Hausa soldiers would do to any white mercenary who was taken alive. So my borrowed pistol had one slug in it—for me, if worse ever came to worst.
On the way back, I ran into a group of British press, also being refused access to the front line and not happy about it. One of them recognized me, and that was that. On their return to London, the Foreign Office press desk seized upon it with alacrity. Too late to protest that I always changed out of the “camo” jacket when not at the front, and that the pistol remained locked in the glove compartment of the Volkswagen.
As for the real mercenaries, I think they are all dead now, though when this book comes out, I may be in for a couple of surprises!
MEMORIES
There is nothing noble about war. The adjective may apply to those who have to fight in them in defense of cause or country. But war itself is cruel and brutal. Things happen in it that coarsen the senses and scar the memory. And the most vicious of all conflicts is the civil war.
Of the thousand memories I bore back from the two years I spent trying to convey the realities of Biafra to the readers of Britain, Europe, and the United States, the most abiding is that of the dying children.
They died in the villages, by the roadsides, and, alongside those who survived on the relief food, in the feeding centers. These were established almost wholly around the missions—churches, schools, dispensaries, and a field the size of a football pitch, where they lay in the grass, on rush mats, or in the laps of their mothers, who held them close, watching them wither and slip away, and wondering why.
As the effects of kwashiorkor intensified, the children’s curly dark-brown hair diminished to a ginger fuzz. Their eyes lost focus but appeared immense in their wizened faces. The weakness from departed muscle made them listless until, unable to move at all, they passed away and a figure in a cassock came to intone a last blessing and take them to the pit.
The bellies ballooned, but only with air; the lower limbs were drenched with feces; the heads lolled on vanished muscles. And always the low moan as they cried in pain. And one image above all, on the grass field outside the window of my hut.
I was tapping away at my typewriter with the window wide open. It was late summer 1969 and the air was balmy. I almost missed the low sound above the clatter of the keys. Then I heard it and went to the window.
She was standing on the grass outside, a scrap of a girl of seven or eight, stick thin, in a flimsy cotton shift stained with dirt. In her left hand she held the hand of her baby brother, stark naked, with listless eyes, a bulbous belly. She stared up at me and I down at her.
She raised her right hand to her mouth and made the universal sign that means “I am hungry, please give me food.” Then she held her hand up toward the window and her lips moved with no sound. I looked down at the tiny pink-palmed hand, but I had no food.
My food came twice daily from the cooking compound behind the cluster of Nissen huts where the few visiting whites lived. But that night I would dine with Kurt Jaggi of the Red Cross—good, nutritious food imported from Switzerland. But not for three hours. The kitchens were closed and locked, and there was no way either child could take solid food. Until dinner I would exist on king-size cigarettes. But you cannot eat cigarettes; there is no nutriment in a Bic lighter.
Foolishly, I tried to explain. I’m sorry, really sorry, but I have no food. I had no Ibo, she no English, but it did not matter. She understood. Slowly her outstretched arm sank back to her side. She did not spit, she did not shout. She just nodded in silent understanding. The white man in the window would do nothing for her or her brother.
In a long life, I have never seen such resignation, such towering dignity, as in that wasted form as she turned away, all last hope gone. Together the two little forms walked away across the field to the tree line. In the forest she would find a shady tree, sit at its foot, and wait to die. And she would hold on to her kid brother, like a good sister, all the way.
I watched them until the trees took them, then sat at my table, put my head on my hands, and cried until the dispatch was damp.
That was the last time I wept for the children of Biafra. Since then, others have written documentaries about what happened in those last eighteen months of the thirty months of the “ten-day war” predicted out of Lagos. But no investigative writer has ever undertaken to expose why it happened and who exactly enabled it to happen. For the Whitehall establishment, the subject is closed. It is taboo.
FLIGHT OUT
It was two nights before Christmas 1969, and clear that the last embattled enclave of the Biafran revolt was finally crumbling. The Ibos were simply exhausted to the point that their soldiers could hardly stand. In the manner of Africans when all hope is lost, they simply “went for bush.” Meaning, they just vaporized into the rain forest and returned, without weapon or uniform, to their native villages.
The Nigerian army could have taken the remnant of the enclave that night, but they continued their snaillike progress for another fortnight until the formal surrender on January 15. I had no way of knowing it would be that slow and found myself at Uli airstrip to see Emeka Ojukwu leave for years of exile.