The SADF and Cuito Cuanavale, by Leopold Scholtz
The SADF and Cuito Cuanavale, by Leopold Scholtz. Jonathan Ball Publishers South Africa, Delta Books. Johannesburg-Cape Town, South Africa 2020. ISBN 9781928248033 / ISBN 978-1-92-824803-3
The SADF and Cuito Cuanavale. Author Leopold Scholtz hopes that his contribution helps understanding a pivotal time in the history of South Africa and of southern Africa as a whole.
Author's note
On 23 March 2018 I participated in a colloquium, organised by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, at its London headquarters in Chatham House, about the so-called Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. This was, of course, exactly 30 years after the third and last failed South African attack on the Angolan/Cuban defenders in front of Cuito Cuanavale. As the event was sponsored by the Angolan government, it was understandably a rather onesided affair, with numerous speakers repeating the official Cuban and Angolan version of events. The 'other side', so to speak, was left to Major-General Roland de Vries, British journalist Fred Bridgland, Chester Crocker (former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) and myself. In the paltry ten minutes allowed to me, I made one major point. Differing interpretations are perfectly legitimate, but interpretations must be based on original research. None of the speakers following the Angolan/Cuban line had done that. (The sole exception was Professor Piero Gleijeses, whose work is discussed in Chapter 12.) The wildest intentions were ascribed to the South African government of the time and to the South African Defence Force (SADF), without reference to the original documents. I had seen many of those documents during a previous research visit to the Documentation Centre of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). But, as I had no plans at the time to write about the controversy surrounding Cuito Cuanavale, I did not copy them. The Chatham House colloquium was the deciding factor for me to go back to the SANDF Documentation Centre, get the documents, and use them for a proper analysis. This book actually started as two. First, I wanted to explore the role played by the town of Cuito Cuanavale in the strategic, operational and tactical planning of the SADF during Operations Moduler, Hooper and Packer in 1987-1988. After all, it is often alleged that the South Africans wanted to take the town. This would have been, it is said, a precursor to a push into central Angola and even on to Luanda in order to bring about regime change. The Forgas Armadas Populares de Libertagao de Angola (Fapla), the armed forces of the governing Marxist Movimento Popular de Libertagao de Angola (MPLA), would be driven out and South Africa's ally, the Uniao Nacional Para a Independencia Total de Angola (Unita), would become the effective Angolan government. The remarkable thing about this allegation is that it is nowhere buttressed by archival research. All sorts of plans and strategies are ascribed to the South African government and the SADF but without any documentary proof. My purpose, then, was to have a look at the original documents and see what they revealed. The second book was to be a professional tactical study of six selected battles of the campaign. These were the battles on the Lomba River (3 October 1987), the two on the Chambinga (9 and 11 November 1987) and the three SADF attacks on the Tumpo area (25 February, 1 March and 23 March 1988). The South Africans won the first three devastatingly, but lost the last three badly. Why the difference? The forces involved, after all, did not change that much. I wanted to identify the factors why the South Africans at first had won three victories and then lost the last three battles. [...]
This is an excerpt from The SADF and Cuito Cuanavale, by Leopold Scholtz.
Title: The SADF and Cuito Cuanavale
Subtitle: A tactical and strategic analysis
Author: Leopold Scholtz
Genre: Military history
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers South Africa
Imprint: Delta Books
Johannesburg-Cape Town, South Africa 2020
ISBN 9781928248033 / ISBN 978-1-92-824803-3
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 288 pages, 1 map
