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Introduction

This book is primarily a military, rather than a political, history. Politics do feature, insofar as war – as the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote – is a continuation of politics by other means. It is also not a social history, because the impact of the war on South African and other societies is not the main focus and these fields have already been extensively analysed.[1] The book is a history of the armed actions of the combatants – the South African Defence Force (SADF), the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN, SWAPO’s armed force), FAPLA (the armed forces of Angola’s MPLA government) and the Cuban military – on the field of battle. It focuses on the levels of security strategy, military strategy, operations and tactics alike.

I have written this book for several reasons. Firstly, there is a continuing and growing interest in the Border War among the South African public, especially the white population, judging by the number of publications seeing the light of day. Many people who participated in the war, mostly in the SADF, have set down their experiences in writing or published them on the Internet, where it is apparently lapped up by both the generation who actually served in the military and a young generation keen to know more of a war they have heard so much about.

Secondly, no comprehensive history of the war has been written yet. Military correspondent Willem Steenkamp did an admirable job with a coffee-table book,[2] published in 1989 when the crack of the guns was still reverberating in the air. Since then, many original SADF and other government documents have been declassified by the SANDF and the Department of Foreign Affairs, and some have been published on the Internet.[3] These have enabled historians to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding aspects of the war. The books by military analyst Helmoed-Römer Heitman and journalist Fred Bridgland, on the last year of South Africa’s involvement in Angola, are also noteworthy,[4] but they too appeared in 1990 – too soon after the events for a proper historical perspective to develop.

Thirdly, during the war the SADF – rightly or wrongly – believed that it had to control the flow of information very tightly. While this benefited battlefield security, it also gave rise to an untold number of rumours, many of which persist today. Even now, strange stories circulate about what “really” happened in certain battles. It is perhaps time to put these rumours to rest.

The fourth reason flows from the third. The lack of information during the 1970s and 1980s created a vacuum into which SWAPO, the MPLA, the Cubans and left-wing journalists and academics gratefully stepped. They wrote thousands of newspaper reports, as well as books and scholarly articles, in which SWAPO, MPLA and Cuban propaganda was uncritically repeated as gospel. One cannot blame these three parties for this – propaganda, after all, has always been an intrinsic part of warfare: winning the battle of perception is often as important as winning the shooting war. This is something the SADF and the South African government understood but dimly and never practised properly.

Besides, because of apartheid the South African government had become morally tainted in the eyes of most of the world. Regardless of what government and SADF spokesmen said, the world was not inclined to believe them. Whatever their opponents said was eagerly embraced as the truth. In the process, the SWAPO/MPLA/Cuban propaganda became conventional wisdom. Where possible, it has become time to test these accepted beliefs against original sources.

On the subject of sources: the (non-)availability of sources prevents this book from being balanced. More than 90% of the sources utilised are South African in origin – archival SADF and government documents, accounts by SADF participants, and so on. A few SWAPO sources have become available, but most of these are so propagandist in nature that they are not of much use. The MPLA archives are still firmly shut, although one gets a glimpse of the Angolan decision-making process through Soviet sources, partly unearthed by Russian academic Vladimir Shubin.[5] But Shubin, having been the main Soviet liaison official with the southern African rebel movements, is understandably biased towards them, and his account has to be approached with caution. Some accounts of Soviet advisors among Angolan units at a grassroots level have also been published. These accounts are interesting, but – as with the accounts of most South African participants – they suffer from the fact that the war is viewed through a keyhole.[6]

The only historian who has been admitted to the Cuban archives is an American, Professor Piero Gleijeses, who has done historical writing a great service by lifting the veil on the Cuban side. Unfortunately, because of his uncritical admiration for Fidel Castro, as well as his utter revulsion for apartheid South Africa, one is also forced to read his writings critically.[7]

This book can therefore not be truly balanced, as the accuracy and completeness of the existing accounts from the Soviet and Cuban perspective cannot be guaranteed. One may be able to piece together a battle or operation rather accurately from the South African side, but the picture on the other side of the hill remains obscured. Had it been clearer, it is possible that my interpretation of certain South African actions would also have been somewhat different.

This book is not the final word on the Border War; it is anything but that. While the SADF sources have not nearly been exhausted, in time many more sources will also come to light to fill in the gaps on the Soviet, Angolan, Cuban and SWAPO side. Such new sources may even still turn on its head everything expounded in this book. That is the nature of academic research. This book may best be viewed as an interim report, which could be followed up by either other academics or me – just as long as the political and ideological tail does not wag the academic dog.

There is yet another thing this book is emphatically not. It is not politically correct. To put my cards on the table: I come from a conservative Afrikaner family who sternly believed in God and the National Party. I served in the old SADF Citizen Force and in the new SANDF Reserve Force. However, I have left apartheid behind me and therefore do not feel the urge to defend either the National Party government’s ideology or its actions. At the same time, I have no desire to pander to left-wing pressure to interpret in the worst possible light everything done by the previous government and the SADF.

I am an academic historian, not a moral judge. Moral judgments should be left to those who find emotional satisfaction in pronouncing them. My task as a historian is to try to reconstruct the past as accurately as I can, to analyse the facts as fairly as possible and to understand (which is not the same as condoning) as best I can. In the process, I try to steer away from two extremes – on the one hand romanticising the SADF, and on the other blankly condemning everything the previous government and the SADF did. Those who romanticise the SADF in the war usually see any criticism of the military as tantamount to treason.[8] Another variant of this is the belief that whatever the military did was good and wonderful, but that the politicians mucked everything up. Those who have nothing good to say about the SADF are often left-wing politicians, academics and journalists whose criticism is seldom backed up by proper research.

In the course of my analysis, some criticism will be levelled at a number of individuals. Some of them – including SADF members who fought in the war – might ask what gives me the moral right to criticise them, given that I did not see action in the real sense of the word nor was I an eyewitness to the events described and analysed. I can only say that if being an eyewitness were a prerequisite for writing about historical events, then 90% of all history books would be worthless.

The research material is analysed thematically as well as chronologically. The book starts with the rude shock of the failed Operation Savannah. Then I switch to a thematic approach, analysing the development of the SADF’s military doctrine and its military and security strategy. This is followed by a chronological analysis of the successive cross-border operations from 1978 to 1984, when there was an attempt at peace negotiations. Three further thematic chapters examine the counterinsurgency war inside South West Africa, SWAPO’s exile record and international developments. Then the climax of the war – the so-called Battle of Cuito Cuanavale – is once again discussed chronologically.

A final word: the central theme of the book is that the South African posture was offensive on the tactical, operational and military strategic levels, but defensive on the security-strategic level. My reconstruction of the South African security strategy is that the government wanted primarily to preserve the status quo, but realised that a defensive military strategy and operational and tactical approach would not be sufficient to win the war. Therefore, in a certain sense, the armed actions of the SADF in northern South West Africa and southern Angola may be seen as a counteroffensive.