Wankie Campaign – Vorster Admits to South Africa’s Involvement in Rhodesia

Wankie Campaign – Vorster Admits to South Africa’s Involvement in Rhodesia

On 8 September 1967, the Rand Daily Mail newspaper reported that a British Foreign Office official had denied South Africa’s military involvement in Rhodesia. However, on the same evening, before a crowd at Brakpan Town Hall, apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster confirmed that South African Police members were active in Rhodesia “fighting terrorists who originally came from South Africa and were on their back to commit terrorism in South Africa. I want to make it very clear that we are doing this with the approval of Rhodesia.”

Vorster further mentioned that he had instructed one of his ministers to inform the British government of such an arrangement. Later that evening, a convoy of South African armoured cars entered Rhodesia through the Beit Bridge border post. The Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, informed newspaper correspondents the following day, 9 September 1967 that only South African Police units, and not the military, were involved. According to Smith, the South African Police units were being trained alongside their Rhodesian counterparts in areas of “terrorist” activity, but had not participated in any fighting thus far.

Meanwhile, on the same day, 8 September 1967, the Rhodesian Joint Planning Staff sent a SITREP (Situation Report) to the South African Air Force Headquarters, to the effect that Operation Nickel had been terminated except for police action. Rhodesia’s security forces, consisting of the Rhodesian Army, the Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR), the British South African Police (BSAP), and Rhodesian Air Force, had been engaging in counter-insurgency operations against ANC-ZAPU guerrillas during the Wankie Campaign since 13 August 1967.

Operation Nickel had been launched by the Rhodesian security forces after guerrilla incursions were reported during the beginning of August 1967, when a combined force of 79 Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) and South African Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) fighters crossed the Zambezi about 20 kilometres east of Victoria Falls. Having mislaid 10 men along the way, they based up a week later in the Wankie Game Reserve, in the extreme west of the country, near the border with Botswana. These cadres, according to the Rhodesian Joint Planning Staff SITREP, whose intention was to recruit local black Rhodesians and subsequently attack white farms and police stations, split into two groups. One headed towards Tsholotsho, and the other made for the Lupane district, just before the Nkayi district.

One of the joint ZIPRA-MK members who had become lost earlier was captured by the RAR on the road between Victoria Falls and Wankie on 3 August, and from this captive the police and security forces learned of the two groups and of their intentions. Operation Nickel, which was described by Rhodesian military officer, Major Ron Reid-Daly, as one of “the most significant operations of the war”, was launched. At first, the incursion was countered by the RAR, but after a tactical error in its third engagement with the guerrillas, this led to severe casualties. The RAR were joined by 2 commandos, Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI) on 25 August 1967.

The insurgents were consistently undone in their incursions by the suspicion of Rhodesia’s rural blacks, whose tribal chiefs and headmen would often work together to inform the police and security forces of the infiltrators’ presence. Major Reid-Daly maintained that this proved to be no exception, when a cadre visited a local kraal early on 31 August to obtain food, an old woman invited him to stay and kept him there while she sent a young girl to alert the security forces. Seven troops and two commandos arrived at 07:20 and captured the insurgent, who then guided seven troops, led by Lieutenant Charl Viljoen, and a platoon of RAR men to where his five comrades were encamped. The combined force surrounded the guerrillas and opened fire, killing four, with the fifth managing to escape back to Zambia.

The following day, on 1 September, two commando troops in ambush were informed by a tractor driver that he had been given money by 14 guerrillas the previous night to buy mielie-meal for them and that they would be collecting it from him at his kraal that evening. A military sweep operation was planned; the tractor driver was briefed and returned to the kraal with the mielie-meal while two commandos and the RAR formed a cordon around it. The following morning the soldiers performed their sweep but failed to find the enemy, who were already gone. The 17 insurgents, who were actually all South African Umkhonto fighters, crossed the border into Botswana and were arrested there on 3 September. Hence, Operation Nickel was officially closed at 06:00 on 8 September 1967.

The presence for the first time of South African insurgents on Rhodesian soil, introduced a significant new factor to the military equation in southern Africa. Despite the eventual containment of the joint incursion, it became obvious that this operation, and the possibility of future invasions on a similar scale, had stretched the capacity of the small Rhodesian security forces to an unacceptable degree, and South African para-military police units were sent to assist the Rhodesian forces. It was a move which both outraged the nationalists, and greatly embarrassed the British Government, still claiming legal responsibility for Southern Rhodesia.

As news of South African armed units arriving in Rhodesia filtered through, Vorster admitted that South African security forces had joined the security forces of the illegal Smith regime in an attempt to suppress African resistance in Rhodesia. Vorster disclosed that South African policemen were in Rhodesia, actively assisting that country’s security forces in their fight against “terrorism, at the invitation of the Rhodesian government. He further added, “We are doing it openly because it is our duty to protect ourselves. We are doing it as a police measure because it is the task of the police to eradicate terrorism and subversion. I am not going to say how many policemen there are or where they are, because it will not be in the interests of security.”

Vorster concluded that “The world must clearly know that it has knowingly permitted terrorists to be trained and that individual nations have allowed this in their own territory for only one reason – to kill our children without warning in the night.” He further added that this was not an attempt to get involved in the Rhodesian political situation, which South Africa continued to regard as a matter for Britain and Rhodesia alone to resolve. South African policemen had been sent to Rhodesia when it became clear that South African “terrorists” in that country were part of a concentrated force, against whom South Africa had to act.

Due to the increasing guerrilla activity and the first clashes of the Wankie campaign, the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith had no option but to request assistance from South Africa, leading to the deployment of South African security forces to support the Rhodesian security forces. The sophistication of the engagement on 13 August took the Rhodesian forces by surprise, especially when they became aware of the presence of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres in the guerrilla group. The Wankie incursion, and the likelihood of future infiltration along the same route, threatened to stretch the capacity of the Rhodesian security forces to unacceptable levels, and the Ian Smith government had to call on apartheid South Africa for assistance.

When the news reached Pretoria, the National Party government was shocked, because it had always underestimated MK’s military capability and had never expected MK to succeed in advancing southwards. At the National Party’s annual congress in Durban on 17 August 1967, the Deputy Minister of Police revealed for the first time that MK cadres had been among those involved in the Wankie battles. According to apartheid Prime Minister Vorster, “It became clear to us that we must fight where we were allowed to fight … for that reason, the government decided, with the approval of Rhodesia, to send our people there to take up their posts in the frontline”. Therefore, one of the consequences of the Wankie battles was the deployment of the South African Police into Rhodesia, the logic being to keep the so-called terrorists north of the Zambezi so that any battles would be fought away from South African soil.

In the wake of the ZAPU-ANC incursion, Pretoria sent more than 2 000 men into the Zambezi Valley. By 1969, 2 700 South African troops were in the valley. As the Rhodesian bush war intensified, fears that ZIPRA would cross many MK guerrillas led to massive deployment of the South African Defence Forces (SADF) as well as military hardware. They made sure that the first line of defence namely the Zambezi River and its environs were well-secured. Chief of the Republican Intelligence Service, Hendrik van den Bergh, had planted agents in the Rhodesian intelligence services as early as the 1960s, and it was he who had persuaded John Vorster to send in a police contingent as soon as the two men received news of the ANC’s Wankie campaign in 1967.

The Rand Daily Mail newspaper reported that the newly appointed Deputy Minister of Police, Abe “A.M.P.” de Jongh, told the congress that “most of the alleged African terrorists involved in the clash with Rhodesian police four days ago – in which five of them were killed – were South Africans”. He further added that the South Africans “were armed to the teeth” and were “on their way back to South Africa through Rhodesia after undergoing military training abroad”. In response, the apartheid government allocated $1 million for 12 months to send around 2,000 South African Police plus equipment to Rhodesia, including the establishment of 6 base camps in the Zambezi Valley bordering Zambia. The apartheid South African Air Force (SAAF) deployed 3 Allouette choppers and 2 Cessna aircraft.

On August 26, the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain issued a statement calling on Britain to act immediately to stop South African armed invasion of British territory. The AAM followed this by a letter to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, with the last paragraph saying the following, “We urge you to act now to put a stop to South Africa’s armed intervention in Rhodesia, to cease these naval visits and to end all economic and other forms of support which this country gives to the South African apartheid regime. We call upon you to take effective steps to overthrow the Smith regime in Rhodesia, and to replace it by a free, independent and democratic government based on majority rule.”

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