There were some traitors, and cheats, defectors, profiteers and racketeers; they come to the surface in every war. But from the people there was not a riot, nor a demonstration, nor a mutiny. As they watched their land devastated and their kinsfolk killed two things were born among the debris; a sense of nationhood and a hatred of the Nigerians. What had started as a belief was transmuted to total conviction – that they could never again live with Nigerians. From this stems the primordial political reality of the present situation. Biafra cannot be killed by anything short of the total eradication of the people who make her. For even under total occupation Biafra would sooner or later, with or without Colonel Ojukwu, rise up again. Throughout the year 1969 there occurred remarkably few large territorial changes and by the end of that year the shooting war had degenerated into stalemate. The year started with the transfer on 3 January by Colonel Ojukwu of two brigades of the ‘S’ Division from the Aba front under the command of Colonel Onuatuegwu to the Owerri front to help Colonel Kalu and the Fourteenth Division in the siege of Owerri.
For the rest of that month, their forward units being inside the northern outskirts of the town, both commanders attacked the Federal garrison head on. They suffered casualties without gaining very much, since as usual the Nigerians were well dug in and excellently supplied with all the arms and ammunition they needed, which came up the main road from Port Harcourt to the south. At the end of January, in a conference with Colonel Ojukwu and Colonel Kalu, Onuatuegwu proposed that these head-on tactics should be abandoned, and what fire-power the Biafrans had should be used to try to clear the flanks of Owerri and close the Nigerian supply line – a tactic he had been using against Aba when he was transferred.
The plan was agreed to, and throughout the month of February both commanders cleared the Nigerian-occupied villages to the east and west of Owerri, finally penetrating in force round to the south of the town. The completion of the encirclement and the final cutting of the last Nigerian supply road to the south came on 28 February. Throughout the month of March, despite repeated attempts from the Federal forces to break through the cordon and relieve the brigade surrounded in Owerri, the encirclement held and the Nigerian Air Force had to resort to supplying the imprisoned garrison with air drops of ammunition. As they were unskilled in this kind of operation, about seventy per cent of the supplies thus dropped fell outside the perimeter and into the hands of the Biafrans. These supplies included large quantities of brand-new Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 light assault guns, with ammunition to match.
Early in April even these supplies were stopped, and the Biafrans, realizing that no more manna from heaven was likely to fall, resumed their attacks on the increasingly demoralized Federal garrison, often using the Nigerian supplies that had unwittingly been dropped to them.
During March a particularly strong relieving force had been sent up the road from Port Harcourt to re-open the way to Owerri, but had been sidetracked to the west of the main tarred road and had come to rest at Ohuba, some nine miles south of Owerri. Here it remained until the end of 1969.
After twenty days of unremitting attack from the Biafrans during April, running short of food and ammunition, the Nigerian commander inside Owerri, Colonel Utuk, held a meeting with his battalion commanders on the evening of 22 April. It was decided that, despite orders from Colonel Adekunle in Port Harcourt to stay put, they would instead pull out. During that night the entire garrison, including wounded who were loaded onto lorries, lined up in a column inside the town facing south. Previous patrols probing the southern outskirts of the town had revealed a rather weak Biafran battalion guarding a road heading south. This was not the main tarred road, but another earth road slightly to the east. On the morning of 23 April, spearheaded by their two Saladin armoured cars, the column hit this Biafran battalion and broke through. From then on the column headed out of town and back towards the main body of the Nigerian Third Division, whose advance units were at Umuakpu and Amu Nelu, where Taffy Williams had halted them ten months earlier.
Hearing that the Federal garrison had slipped out of the net, Colonel Onuatuegwu hastily dispatched two battalions to chase them. These two caught the tail of the Federal column five miles south of Owerri, and from then on the latter fought a bitter rearguard action as it retreated southwards. Assailed from rear and sides, ambushed constantly, the column was cut to pieces and it was finally no more than scores of groups of stragglers who arrived in safety at the Nigerian positions around Amu Nelu, twentythree miles south of Owerri. They had lost most of their equipment and almost half their men.
The Biafrans reoccupied Owerri the same day, 23 April, and started to put the shattered and spoliated town back together again. A fortnight after the loss of this town, which hurt Nigerian morale badly, Colonel Adekunle was relieved of his command and returned to a training assignment in Lagos. Until the end of November 1969, despite repeated attempts to advance, the Federal forces were still respectively at Chuba and Umuakpu, and Owerri had become the new capital of the Biafran Government.
The Biafrans’ joy at recapturing this important and strategic town was marred by the recent loss of their previous capital, Umuahia. While the reoccupation of Owerri had been long and laborious, the Federal capture of Umuahia represented the culmination of another short all-out attack supported by an enormous quantity of hardware. During the three spring months, as the rainy season approached, the Federal Government’s concern had been to build up not the prestigious Third Division in the south, but the less renowned First Division in the north. Throughout the last three months of 1968 and the first three of 1969 large quantities of the newly arriving Russian arms were being fed to the First Division, and on 26 March, to coincide with the arrival in Nigeria of Mr Harold Wilson, the First Division launched itself out of Okigwi and Afikpo simultaneously.
Both spearheads were tipped with half a dozen armoured cars, and supported by large amounts of artillery and mortar fire. By 1 April the towns of Bende and Uzoakoli had been reached and fierce fighting was taking place in both areas. Uzoakoli was a particularly heavy loss for the Biafrans, because it was the site of the oil refinery they had built after losing Port Harcourt the previous May. This refinery was turning out about 30,000 gallons of refined petrol a day at full production and was on its way to coping with the fuel shortage that had bedevilled the Biafrans since stocks had been expended the previous November.
For a few days it seemed as if the Federal forces might be held at these two towns. Holding Bende was also important because this town dominates a ridge of hills from which the path to Umuahia is a downhill run. But on 7 April a Nigerian column cutting across country took the town of Ovim, lying on the railway line leading straight to Umuahia. By 10 April Federal shells started to fall on the outskirts of Umuahia and the town was evacuated by its population.
Umuahia fell on 15 April, although sporadic firing went on for a few days after that. The last man out of the town was Colonel Ojukwu, who had directed much of the fighting personally from his house at the end of Okpara Road.
Despite the capture, the Nigerian hold on the town remained tenuous. As usual in such cases, the Biafrans, having been disorganized as the town fell, regrouped and counter-attacked a week later. The Federal supply lines to Umuahia, running through miles of hilly country north and north-east of the town, were highly vulnerable, and several times during the early summer the garrison had to ask for air drops to keep going. By the end of the year Umuahia, like Aba, was still surrounded on three sides, an outpost at the end of a long and very vulnerable corridor of hostile territory.
Apart from these two major campaigns, all the fronts remained stable. In early March the Federal Second Division, based on Onitsha, attacked simultaneously out of Onitsha towards Awka and from Awka towards Onitsha in an effort to close the six miles of road held by the Biafrans that still separated the two halves of the Division. They succeeded in closing this gap and establishing road contact, and held it for about a fortnight. The counterattacking B
iafrans regained that portion of the road, and eventually in June re-entered the eastern outskirts of Onitsha itself.
Apart from this nothing happened in the north throughout 1969. In the south it was the Biafrans who, for the first time, were on the attack in almost all sectors. Learning their lesson from the new tactics used at Owerri, nowhere did they launch massive frontal attacks, but concentrated on clearing one by one the Nigerian occupancy of small villages. Thus by the end of the year it was possible to drive the whole length of the Owerri to Aba road, which had previously been in Federal hands, up to a point five miles short of Aba. The Federal garrisons had been swept out of Okpuala, and Father Kevin Doheny had also been able to reopen his seminary there. Owerrinta had also been cleared and the leading Federal forces were back in Amala, five miles south of this road where the Scottish and Corsican mercenaries, leading a detachment of the Commandos, had fought them back in August 1968. In all about 1,000 square miles of territory in the southern sector had been quietly recaptured by the Biafrans during 1969.
The reasons for these successes, although limited, were fivefold. Firstly, they were due to the change in tactics, the abandonment of head-on clashes with a better-armed enemy and the greater reliance on attacks from the sides, on ambushes and on commando tactics; in short, on the tactics for which Williams, who had left in February without his contract being renewed for a third term, had unavailingly pleaded. Secondly, they were due to a steadily decreasing morale among the Federal infantry; throughout the year, as the summer rains poured down and the appalling Nigerian Army logistics caused the front-line men to go short of food and ammunition, captured prisoners complained that the men on the Federal side were fed up, wanted to go home, and did not wish to risk dying in yet another suicidal attack ordered by senior officers who kept themselves well to the rear. A general war-weariness set in on both sides, but the Biafran soldiers were at least on their home territory, supported by the peasantry behind them, and considerably better armed than they had ever been.
The last three reasons for the changed situation concern weapons. In the first place, the main Federal advantage in all its attacks up to the late spring of 1969 had lain in its armoured cars, with which the Biafrans had been quite unable to cope. During 1969 they acquired a substantial number of good-quality bazookas, and rockets to go with them. Some were of the Soviet type, an extremely light and efficient bazooka, accurate up to 300 yards and easy to maintain. Others were the more complex French LRAC bazookas made in the Western world. Whereas in 1968 training for use in these weapons had been rudimentary in the extreme, during 1969 two European officers trained the Biafran bazooka crews to use their weapons properly, with the effect that the Biafran infantry soon lost their fear of Saladins and Ferrets; it became rare for these vehicles to show their noses too prominently as their life expectancy became shorter and shorter.
Secondly, the general level of Biafran weapons and firepower went steadily up during 1969. Speaking at a press conference on 4 November in Owerri, General Ojukwu (he had accepted promotion to the rank of General from the Consultative Assembly in March 1969) said: ‘We are infinitely better off in firepower than at any time since the war began.’ He added that the main increase had been in support weapons, that is, bazookas, artillery, mortars and heavy machine guns. Again, training in the use of these weapons was more general in 1969 than in 1968. The effect of these two changes in the Biafran situation was almost to nullify the advantages the Federal Army had possessed so long that they had almost come to be regarded as built-in.
Lastly, the difference was made by the new Biafran Air Force, which made its first raid on 22 May and grew steadily stronger for the rest of the year. The story of the Biafran Air Force cannot yet be properly told since so much of it is still unknown, but most of its activities and its successes lie in the personality of a remarkable Swedish veteran pilot, Count Carl Gustav von Rosen.
This aviator (see Chapter 11, page 211) was the man who, while flying as senior pilot for the Nord Church Aid relief scheme, brought in the first daylight hedgehopping aircraft from São Tomé on 10 August 1968 to show that Wharton’s monopoly of the relief route could be broken. By the end of September, after several differences of view with his direct employers, Transair, and his more recent masters in Nord Church Aid, he resigned from his post at São Tomé and returned to Sweden.
He next appeared in Umuahia, Biafra, at Christmas 1968, having brought a letter from the Emperor Haile Selassie, a personal friend, to Colonel Ojukwu. On Christmas Day he came to the author’s caravan in Umuahia almost in tears, having witnessed the scene of devastation and carnage that had been left behind after one of the three separate bombing raids carried out by the Nigerian Air Force on Umuahia that day. Some of the bombs had hit a house full of children and the spectacle had badly upset the Count, just as it had already upset various journalists who had previously seen similar sights.
In subsequent conversation over coffee, the elderly Swedish pilot, within one year of a pensionable retirement from Transair, spoke of his determination to return to Biafra and smash the Egyptian-piloted Federal Air Force. As the hours dragged by he elaborated step by step, visualizing and solving the problems as he went along, a plan to buy light aircraft of an extremely manoeuvrable type, fit them with rockets or bombs, and use them at tree-top level to destroy the MiGs and Ilyushins on the ground. Escape, he maintained, would be afforded by the element of surprise and the low altitude of the planes. Painted green on top, blue underneath, flying scarcely above the tops of the palm trees, they would be undetectable until they struck and impossible to follow afterwards.
At the time it seemed like such general talk as pilots often indulge in. But he did exactly what he said he was going to do. On 22 May Count von Rosen led his first strike against Port Harcourt airport, destroying with rockets fired from Swedishmade MFI Minicon light monoplanes one Ilyushin and two MiGs parked on the tarmac. There were five Minicons in that raid, three flown by Swedes and two by Biafrans whom von Rosen had trained in Gabon.
In succeeding months the Minicons pounded away at the Federal airfields, destroying by the end of the year some thirty war and transport planes, including three of the bombers that almost nightly harassed Uli airstrip as the relief aircraft came in. After hitting the airports, the Minicons, by now flown by Biafrans alone, started in mid-June on the oil installations that provided Nigeria with most of its foreign currency and credit with which to buy war weapons.
By the end of the year this tiny force of hedgehoppers had done enough damage to have persuaded Shell-BP temporarily to suspend its operations from mainland Nigeria. As other companies followed suit after watching their installations rocketed, oil flow out of Nigeria slowed to a trickle and caused the first serious rethink in British commercial circles since the war started.
By mid-summer Count von Rosen had handed over the flying role to enthusiastic young Biafrans, trained by his two Swedish associate pilots in Gabon, and had taken on a more organizational role. This bore fruit on 2 November 1969, when two Harvards flew into Uli airport to join the Minicons in the bush fighter strip where they were based. There were by now fifteen Minicons. The two-seater Harvards, single-engined low-wing monoplanes, were originally built as advanced trainers for the Canadian Air Force, but later proved sufficiently powerful and adaptable to be flown against the Simbas in the Congo crisis with great effect. Equipped with bombs, rocket or machine guns, they form an ideal platform for air-to-ground operations in the African type of war, better than jet fighters.
The pilots were both Germans, one of them being Fred Herz, previously the pilot of the old B-25 back in January 1968. On 10 November the two Harvards, accompanied by three Minicons to take care of the anti-aircraft fire, made their first attack on Port Harcourt, destroying three of the new MiGs, three freighter aircraft including the latest of the Uli-bombers, the main hangar, fuel dump and control tower. By the end of the year two British Meteor jet fighter-bombers were expected to join what General Ojukwu r
eferred to as Biafra’s mini-Air Force.
The raids against the oil installations, representing throughout 1969 Ojukwu’s top Nigerian and British Government policy to exert pressure for a ceasefire, were conducted only partly by the Minicons. These were backed up with commando-style attacks on lonely installations in the bush.