|
A Saturday Night Story - a colourful Colonial
When I first went out to Oman as Head of Intelligence in the 1970s the Dhofar war was in full swing. As I mentioned in another post recently, Dhofar is the southern province of Oman and a communist inspired insurrection had taken place among the population of the mountains - the jebalis - backed by China and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union.
By that time almost the whole of Dhofar was under the control of the rebels, apart from a couple of coastal villages and the plain - about 8 miles by 4 - around Salalah the capital. The plain was overlooked by mountains on three sides and backed by the sea on its southern edge in Salalah itself. And apart from Salalah town, the military airport, run by the RAF, was critical to supporting the war from Northern Oman.
The defence of the Salalah plain and the airport was based on a series of strongpoints out on the plain and visible to each other in daylight so that there was no way the enemy could get between them and attack the RAF base or the town. But night-time was a different matter and under cover of darkness they would creep close enough let loose with mortars and machine guns for perhaps 5 or 10 minutes before disappearing back to the mountains in the dark.
To counter this the Sultan's Forces would patrol the area beyond the strongpoints as best they could in the dark, but there was a huge area to try to cover and operations were very much hit and miss. However, among the defending forces was a Company of Baluchi soldiers, mounted in Land Rovers each of which carried a tripod mounted Browning .5 inch machine gun - a formidable weapon when used on the ground. The Company was commanded by a punchy and enthusiastic Rhodesian named Spike Powell and whenever the airfield came under attack at night his guys would rush to the spot to provide fire support and help see the enemy off (Rhodesia is now of course Zimbabwe, ruled by the unspeakable Robert Mugabe who has bankrupted the country and blamed it all on British neo-colonialism!)
Anyway, one night the RAF base came under a new form of attack in the form of rockets fired from 2 or 3 kilometres away, outside the line of our defensive posts. About 7 of these were fired, to the understandable consternation of the RAF (one hit the officers mess) but only 5 actually exploded and we recovered the unexploded 2. We in fact had no idea what these were and, clearly, we needed to find out very quickly in order to know just what we were up against. The only way to do this was to get one back to UK where the experts would identify it for us and let us know its characteristics - range and so on. But the RAF were having none of it - "flying an unexploded round, still full of explosive, in one of our aircraft. You must be bloody joking!"
"OK" said Spike, "just leave it with me, I'll render it inert." And he sat down outside his quarter with his servant, a hacksaw and a bucket of water and sawed the round in half. Whenever he thought it might be getting a bit too hot from the action of the hacksaw, he dunked it in the bucket! Then he spooned out all the explosive filling the bits and gave the two halves of the shell case to me. The RAF did then fly the case back to UK where it was quickly identified for us (a Chinese copy of a Soviet 75mm weapon).
On another occasion, discussing the habit of the enemy on the jebel to shelter in caves from the machine-gun fire of the air force's Strikemaster jets, he said "what we need is napalm!" "Good God" said someone, "the British Government would never supply that - far too politically sensitive."
"Don't worry" said Spike "I'll see what I can do."
He had a strap welded around the outside of a 45 gallon oil drum and rigged up a strong point under the wing of a Beaver light aircraft where the strut joined the wing. The drum was suspended and retained there by a steel pin connected to the interior of the aircraft by a length of rope. With the cooperation of the pilot - a friend - he filled the drum with petrol and connected a length of slow-burning fuse. They took off and set off for a remote part of the Salalah plain to see what effect would be achieved by 45 gallons of petrol. At the appropriate point Spike lit the fuse and pulled hard on the rope, which promptly broke! Quite how he recovered the burning fuse I'm not at all certain, but he did and that was definitely the end of that experiment!
A couple of years later Spike left the Sultan's Forces and returned to Rhodesia. Sadly, and ironically, he was killed shortly afterwards when the Viscount airliner he was on was blown out of the sky by a Soviet-made SAM 7 missile near Harare airport. He was a great guy and I feel privileged to have known him when I did ...
Tony.
|
