Quote:
Originally Posted by MK262MOD1
Guy,
Would you mind giving more background history on the jump / mission. This is a great photo and as a Mid 70s Africa military history reader I would be fascinated to hear your account.
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MK, the full account of this operation is in my book which is available from Amazon, either for Kindle or a printed copy (I suggest the printed copy so you can see the colour pictures in full colour) or you can buy the OC of the operations's book Eagle Strike from Bushwarrior.com.
My book is called The Battle for Cassinga by Mike McWilliams and the Colonels is Eagle Strike by Jan Breytenbach. If you dont feel like buying either one, the book Skymen, by Bob Kershaw has a chapter on the raid.
If you still dont want to read those, here is a very brief summary.
The base Cassinga was 250 km into enemy territory in Angola. It was SWAPOs main transit and training camp for terrorists infiltrating into South West Africa in the south. We only had the facilities to drop 367 paratroopers onto the camp, so we executed a box drop around the camp at the time of their morning parade. Although the camp housed around 5000 troops, we hoped that the element of surprise and a brief bombing run would enable us to prevail. For various reasons, the attack group was dropped half on one side of a river and half on the other, delaying the attack by at least an hour and a half. This meant that the fight which we had hoped would take about two hours lasted most of the day. The enemy was well entrenched and used AA guns both at us in the air and in a ground role. Eventually we prevailed and helicopters came to extract us. We only had enough choppers to take half of us out and then refuel and return for the other half. While we were at half strength, waiting for the second lift, an armoured column of Cubans arrived form a nearby base to help SWAPO. We blew up the lead tank with a mine we had laid for this eventuality, but had to destroy the other twenty odd vehicles with RPG fire and some help from a Buccaneer, who was out of ammo. We inflicted Cubas biggest single days loss of men in the war on that day and were finally extracted by chopper thereafter. Scorecard showed about 1500 SWAPO dead, 150 Cubans dead and 3 of our Paratroopers KIA and one MIA in the croc infested river.