According
to Colonel E. A. Etuk (rtd),
“The rebels knew that we were helpless
because the main route that we used from Port Harcourt to Owerri was blocked
totally and there was no way to go in or come out. Whenever morning came
as we would sit praying, the next thing we would hear was the noise of
airplanes bringing cargo to Ojukwu and soon as that was done, throughout that
night the whole area would be on fire; bombing everywhere.“
Given
this degree of sequestration, therefore, the only option available to 3MCDO HQ
and AHQ was to resupply the beleaguered Brigade by air. In aerial
logistics jargon, this is known as a “tactical airlift in support of an
isolated land battle area.” Without water, ammunition, food rations,
fuel, blankets, medical supplies, tents, spare parts and other equipment etc,
no fighting unit can sustain morale, nor remain cohesive and effective for
long.
The Owerri Airdrop
There is
some disagreement about the duration of the Owerri air resupply effort. A
one-time Nigerian Chief of Air Staff, the late Air Marshall Ibrahim Alfa
claimed the effort actually lasted for four months while Army sources claim it
lasted for six weeks. Clearly, therefore, for at least six long
weeks, inclusive of the period from March 14th and continuing until April
19th 1969, air resupply was the method by which the 16th Brigade of
3MCDO was logistically supported while under Biafran siege. Even then,
there were complications.
Explaining
how it all began, Colonel Etuk said:
“I got in touch with Adekunle and informed
him that things were really bad. He told me to find a location for drops
and to let him know. I never knew that as we were discussing, the
rebels were picking the message. So when that time came I told him I was
going into the war zone and that there was going to be a big flame at so and so
time and at so and so point. Of course, the rebels had got [the entire]
message. Before that time the rebels had gone down and prepared a big
flame. Adekunle rang me and said his pilot had taken off [from Port Harcourt]
with all the goodies for my troops.
The poor pilot sighted that first lighting point and
dropped everything there while I sat waiting because I heard the plane when it
took off hovering around. The pilot must have been a stupid man for I
don’t know whether he couldn’t read his map to know exactly where I told my
Divisional Commander things should be dropped. The whole stock was
released to the rebels.
When I got back to the radio and then called Adekunle
and said I have not seen anything, he said, “You bastard son of a bitch, do you
think you are the only commander I have?” The pilot went back and told
him that he had delivered the goods and he said the pilot was there by him and he
claimed to have dropped everything. Of course I replied that I saw
nothing. That was the beginning of my woes, no supplies.”
What the
barely four year old Nigerian Air Force (NAF) was attempting to do at Owerri in
1969 was the resupply, by airdrop under potential hostile fire, of an army
infantry brigade of about 2,000 - 3,000 men – whose numbers dropped as
casualties mounted. It is not as simple as it might appear on the
surface. Be that as it may, to start with, no aerial resupply effort can
proceed without appropriate quantities and quality of aircraft. Such
aircraft include not just transport aircraft equipped to do the job, flown by
trained pilots in reasonably good weather and free from competing obligations,
but fighter escorts to protect against intercepting opposing aircraft and
bombers to suppress opposing anti-aircraft ground fire. Such
transport aircraft would need airfields to fly into, or possess the equipment
and skills for low-altitude parachute extraction, ground proximity extraction,
or para-drops of usually aluminium-based cargo pallets. To
ensure a high delivery/requirement ratio that in turn assures the appropriate
tonnage per soldier ratio, such para-dropped cargo pallets should land within
designated drop zones, preferably as close as possible to the desired combat
impact zone.
When,
however, the civil war began in 1967, the NAF had only three aircraft types,
namely, a few piston engine Piaggio P.149D trainer/liaison/utility and Dornier
DO-27A general purpose light transport planes, along with some light Alouette
Helicopters. When the first wartime forward operational base was
established at Makurdi under then Captain John Yisa Doko, the inventory
expanded to include not only a few Jet Provosts handed down from Sudan and
Egypt, but also two Douglas DC-3 twin-engine 21-passenger aircraft acquired
from the Nigerian Airways.
Just as
Biafran engineers had done with an old DC-3 in their possession, NAF engineers
refitted the NAF DC-3s to carry bombs and machine guns. In addition, they
were used for casualty evacuation. When additional forward operational
bases were opened at Calabar, Benin and Lagos, the DC-3s were moved to Enugu,
while subsequently acquired long range and larger DC-4s were later based in
Lagos. The DC-3s saw action over the strategic Biafran Uli-Ihiala
airstrip. They were used for nighttime high-altitude combat air patrol,
waiting patiently in holding pattern high in the clouds for relief aircraft to
arrive below. When the runway lights were briefly turned on for incoming relief
and gunrunning planes, the DC-3 would swoop down to destroy the runway. Eleven
relief aircraft were destroyed and 21 relief aircraft pilots killed at
Uli-Ihiala in this manner. In time to come, however, one of the “Ihiala”
DC-3s was redeployed to Port-Harcourt to perform tactical airlift support for
the besieged 16th Brigade at Owerri. Meanwhile, fighter jets and
bombers bombed the besieging Biafran forces.
Experience
gained at Stalingrad, Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh suggests that required
resupply tonnage per soldier ranged from about 5 pounds per day per soldier at
Stalingrad to 60 pounds per day per soldier at Khe Sanh. During the siege of
Dien Bien Phu the calculated requirement was 25 pounds per day per French
soldier. The intensity of combat, weather, terrain and the degree of
mechanization of the besieged troops account for the differences. Using
this range, and assuming the resupply of 2000 soldiers, it would have
required at least 10000 pounds and as much as 120,000
pounds per day of accurate airdrops sustained over several months to
keep the 16th Brigade in full combat mode. With one DC-3 unable to
lift more than 6000 pounds of cargo, this would have meant 2 –
20 round-trip flights every day in and out of potentially
hostile Owerri airspace per DC-3. And Nigeria had only two DC-3s in its
inventory. This illustrative calculation shows how potentially awesome
the task was, even if drops were accurate. The projection outlined does not
even factor in the psychological effect on besieged front-line troops knowing
that they had no option for the evacuation of serious casualties.
I
commented earlier that the experience of Dien Bien Phu was relevant to
Owerri. One reason is that of the three classical examples mentioned, it
was only at Dien Bien Phu that supplies and reinforcements had to be
exclusively delivered by parachute once the resupply airstrip was destroyed by
General Giap’s guerillas. The second reason for the importance of the Dien Bien
Phu experience is that the aircraft type that was most often used for aerial
resupply was the C-47, which is the military variant of the DC-3. Because
of the inverse relationship between the altitude at which a cargo load is
dropped and its degree of dispersion, particularly when crosswinds are strong,
French practice was to release cargo at low altitude, from 2500 feet.
However, as opposing anti-aircraft artillery fire became more violent and
effective, the drop height was adjusted upwards, first to 6000 feet, and then
to 8,500 feet. The effect of these high-altitude drops, as can be
surmised, was that over half of the supplies meant for the French garrison
drifted outside the drop zone into grateful Viet Minh hands. They then
proceeded, not only to eat the food rations and enjoy the blankets, but to load
high caliber artillery rounds supplied by the French Air Force into their field
guns and use them with devastating effect against the French garrison.
As
Colonel Etuk (rtd) said, and Generals Oluleye and Madiebo (among others) have documented,
Biafran units took custody of well over 50% of the para-dropped supplies meant
for the 16th Brigade during the siege of Owerri. Air Marshall Alfa
supports Etuk’s opinion that this was the result of inexperience on the part of
federal pilots. But Alfa also goes further to blame high-altitude
drops and lack of operational coordination between the Army and Air
Force. According to him;
“The Air Force was faced with a lot of difficulties in
convincing some Army Field Commanders of the need for joint planning and
briefing, in that some Army Field Commanders who had little or no knowledge of
air operations were impervious to useful operational suggestions from the
relatively young NAF Commanders. This action often resulted in crises of
confidence which disrupted the smooth operation of the war.”
However,
in addition, based on what we now know, the guile of Biafran officers, logistic
requirements of the besieging Biafran units, and limited ability of the
besieged Brigade to support airdrop operations in an increasingly small
drop zone must be factored in. Until towards the very end, although
unaware at that time, NAF pilots tasked with the resupply of the
16th Brigade had no need to fly at high altitude because Biafran
anti-aircraft units – fully aware of their flight times and drop arrangements -
had no intention of shooting them down. Neither, even if they wanted, at
that stage of the war, was there any effective Biafran air combat or
interceptor capability. The devastating ground attack of Count Von Rosen’s
MFI-9B ‘miniCOIN’ aircraft against Port-Harcourt airport during “Operation
Biafra Babies” took place on May 22nd – well after the Owerri situation
had resolved itself. Thus, maintenance of air-superiority – which is
always a big concern for military transports – was not in the picture.
Airlift distance was not a problem for federal pilots either. The airlift
distance from Port-Harcourt to Owerri was only about 40 miles. The flight from
Enugu was just over 60 miles. There is no record of Biafran commandos
attempting to sabotage federal airfields from which DC-3s were taking off for
Owerri, as occurred during the siege of Dien Bien Phu. Viet Minh
commandos immobilized over 70 French transport planes on the ground at the Cat
Bi and Gia airfields to undermine tactical air resupply of the beleaguered
French garrison.
Instead,
the Biafrans made arrangements to collect from the DC-3 overflights at Owerri
what they had been denied by DC-3 airfield denial attacks at
Uli-Ihiala. According to Madiebo,
“After two months of daily promises of a link-up by
Port Harcourt had failed, the enemy resorted to air dropping of ammunition and
food. What was left under enemy control in Owerri was so small that most
of what was dropped fell into Biafran hands. Any Biafran unit around
Owerri which wanted something dropped for it by the enemy, only needed to clear
a bit of bush, spread a white sheet of cloth over the clearing, and he would
get a drop. Unfortunately, due to the gross inefficiency of the enemy
air-drop operations, the very large quantity of ammunition we acquired through
it was almost all damaged and therefore useless to the Army. Gunpowder
was however laboriously extracted from the damaged ammunition for use by the
BOFF and other civil defence organisations. As a result of enemy air
drops, the 14 Division was for some time fairly well fed and thus became fitter
for its operations”.
This
situation was obviously frustratingly evident to the men of the
16th Brigade. According to Colonel Etuk (rtd),
“They [NAF] used passenger aircraft to be dropping
things – so you come and see another line of battle – when this plane started
coming and hovering around town, the rebels were waiting – when they knew that
the plane was there they would be waiting for any drop that came – so it was a
battle for my troops to be able to collect these things and for the rebels to –
so it was cross-fire. So this thing continued and continued; each time
the plane took off [from Port Harcourt] everybody was ready. At times the
pilot would come but because of the firing from the rebels he would go back
with all the cargo. He couldn’t come down nor could he even go within the
level at which he should drop these things.”
The
interesting thing about this scenario is that at no time were the NAF resupply
DC-3s accompanied by NAF bombers. Tactical airdrops – usually
launched in response to requests from the Divisional Commander -
occurred independently of close air-support and ground-attack missions,
which took place at other times!
“Biafra
Kwenu!”
Quite
apart from the drama of airdrops, life in the 16th Brigade under siege
provided an opportunity to become intimately familiar with the mettle of
opposing Biafran troops. According to Colonel Etuk (rtd),
“They [Biafrans] were more determined than the Federal
troops from my own assessment because as a field commander certain times you
move and think it was just going to be a child’s play but by the time you get
there you’ll be faced with a different situation [sic] entirely. You may,
for example, reach a point where you’ll have to dislodge three rebels.
[Then] at a point you realize [sic] that you have put up a strong battle to
dislodge them. What about the woman who had always been threatening my troops,
a female Captain! So a number of times my boys will come and say as
soon as this woman comes she will stand just on the road like that and with her
walking stick as soon as she surfaces she will say, “Biafra Kwenu! Biafra
Kwenu!” They will follow up.
So one day, one Fulani boy came to me and said, “Oga,
Walahi! Talahi! Zai kacheta” meaning, “I will kill her.” I asked him how
he was going to do that. So when she came and started doing all that the boy
just kept quiet. He took [sic] only one round. He dropped it on the ground and
sharpened it, squeezed the sand off, tucked it in, aimed at her – because each
time she came she would do that [and] the boys would run away. The boy
aimed and got her right there and by the time we went to and recover the body –
Oh! My God! That is why I said the rebels were determined. For us
to succeed in getting this woman it was a tug of war. The rebels refused
to let us carry this woman.”
"Ebé uzo Naze EKEMBATO"
ReplyDeleteO hitié laooo!