Missing in Action (21 page)

In the wake of Operation Morthor and the death of Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash, Conor Cruise O’Brien resigned from his post with the UN. Within the Irish army, the shock of Niemba was now followed by the hammer blow of the Jadotville surrender. Politicians and military chiefs alike effectively chose to ignore the courage and heroism displayed by the soldiers at the isolated outpost and, instead, chose to remember the fact that they had surrendered.

Captain Art Magennis finished his tour with the 35th Battalion and rotated back to Ireland in January 1962. The captain didn’t return to the Congo until early 1963 when he was stationed at Kolwezi. By 1964, Ireland and the UN were winding down their operation in Katanga after a soon-to-be-breached peace deal had been signed between the various Congolese factions. Within twelve months of Ireland withdrawing from the Congo, the country entered the darkness of the US-backed Mobutu regime where corruption, incompetence and brutality left one of Africa’s potentially wealthiest countries on the verge of collapse.

Meanwhile, in Ireland
in September 1961, a nightmare began for the Mullins family. Two ashen-faced army officers climbed the winding road to Boher to explain to Catherine and her children that her youngest son was missing and feared dead. Tom Kent heard the news and, fearful of his wife Mary hearing about the tragedy before he had a chance to bring her to her family, he disconnected one of the fuses in the radio so that no Radio Éireann broadcasts could be heard.

In early January 1962, Lt Col Hugh McNamee and Captain Art Magennis also travelled to Boher to explain to the family at first hand as much as they could about what happened to Pat. A short time later Sgt Tim Carey also made contact with the family to explain what had happened. Cmdt Pat Cahalane, who hailed Pat as a loyal and courageous soldier, also made contact.

But the family didn’t hear the full details of what happened between Avenue Wangermee and Boulevard Elisabeth – in part because the army itself was not certain back in 1961/62 precisely what had happened. So Catherine Mullins simply knew that her youngest son had died in an ambush, that he had done his duty and that his body was now missing. It would be almost four decades before crucial details could be added to that summary.

Pat Mullins’ armoured car minutes after it was towed back to the Irish battalion’s Prince Leopold Farm base following the ambush. (Photo: Art Magennis)

Irish troops marvel at modern armoured weaponry. Note the shamrock armbands worn by the soldiers. The Swedish armoured car boasts proper hardened steel plate, four-wheel drive, wide visibility for the driver and, most intimidating of all, twin box-fed Madsen machine guns which could fire 1,100 rounds per minute. (Photo: Art Magennis)

As Irish troops
prepared to pull out of the Congo and bring the curtain down on the country’s first major UN peacekeeping mission, it didn’t seem like much of a victory – at least not at the time. The secession of Katanga had successfully been prevented and the integrity of the Congo preserved, but, for the first time, UN troops had sustained significant losses and there were question marks over just how far ‘peacekeeping’ could go.

The uneasy ceasefire after Operation Morthor broke down on 5 December when heavy fighting again erupted. The UN launched Operation Unokat, which was aimed at clearing routes of Katangan gendarme roadblocks and getting mercenaries out of the country. The 35th Battalion’s return to Ireland was delayed for a fortnight due to the heavy fighting. They ultimately left the Congo when the new 36th Battalion relieved them in the line under fire. On 10 December, John O’Mahony and other elements of the battalion were ordered to Rousseau Farm near Elisabethville Airport and they began to fly home on 18 December. John flew out on 20 December, but due to an engine failure on his USAF flight home, was forced to spend three days at Wheelus Field Air Base in Libya before finally arriving back to Baldonnel on Christmas morning.

Ireland ended its Congo mission and words like ‘Niemba’, ‘Katanga’ and ‘Baluba’ permanently entered the Irish lexicon. To this day, half a century on, the phrase ‘Baluba’ is still used in a derogatory sense in some rural areas of Ireland. The Irish had mixed emotions about the country’s involvement in the Congo – Niemba and Jadotville had been a massive shock to the system of an army relatively untouched by the Second World War and the military developments of the Cold War. Worst of all, soldiers from the Southern Command – and, in particular, the cavalry units – returned home in the knowledge that the body of a comrade lay in an undiscovered African grave.

The Congo was a bruising experience for the UN as well as Ireland. The UN had experienced the cataclysmic difference between peacekeeping and peace-enforcement – and the resultant political fallout. It also, for the first time, had the spectre of bloodshed to deal with due to rumours filtering out about how some blue-helmeted troops, most notably some of the Indian contingents, had dealt with Katangan soldiers in and around Elisabethville during Operation Morthor.

In his excellent history of the UN’s first half century,
United Nations – The First Fifty Years,
Stanley Meisler pointed out that the Congo represented the steepest learning curve in the organisation’s short history and became a conflict that would mark UN operations for decades to come. The Congo not only cost the UN the lives of some of its peacekeepers, and arguably its finest secretary-general, but also a substantial chunk of its innocence.
‘The Congo had also jarred the mood of confidence about the emerging Africa. The UN had not mounted such a large and audacious military force before. At Suez, the troops were performing what would be known as the classic peacekeeping tasks – the impartial patrolling of ceasefire lines between belligerents who were content, for the time being, to avoid conflict. The blue helmets at Suez fired their weapons only to protect themselves. The Congo operation took the UN onto much more dangerous ground,
’
Meisler wrote.

‘The Congo now appears a greater triumph for the UN in the microscope of history. When the UN (eventually) withdrew its troops after four years, an era of chaos and murderous suppression still lay ahead in the Congo. But, amid much bitter controversy, the UN had managed to suppress the secession of Moise Tshombe’s Katanga province with his mercenary-led army. It was a grand victory of sorts.’

What is most noteworthy is that it would be another three decades before the UN was prepared to mount an operation in any way comparable to that undertaken in the Congo. The UN was deeply reluctant to endure the kind of headlines that marred some of its military operations in Katanga. For example, the shooting of a Swiss banker by an over-enthusiastic Ethiopian UN soldier armed with a bazooka provoked such outrage in Europe that Britain’s Prime Minister Harold MacMillan was moved to comment that: ‘Even Swiss bankers have rights.’

The Swedes and Irish left the Congo with a deep mutual respect for each other’s peacekeeping skills. Both European nations were also deeply impressed by the fighting qualities of the Dogra and Gurkha solders with the Indian contingent, but regarded them more as fighting troops than peacekeepers. They took a similar view of the Ethiopian troops, who were considered to be trigger-happy by virtually everyone in the theatre. In contrast, the Irish were less than impressed with the Malaysian forces when they effectively refused to put their armoured units in harm’s way in 1962–63.

The cause of UN peacekeeping was similarly not helped by the misguided bombing missions undertaken by UN jets in late 1961 and throughout 1962 and 1963, which hit the Catholic cathedral in Elisabethville, the crowded Prince Leopold hospital and a local mine among other things. UN mortars also missed assigned targets and hit a mission run by the Seventh Day Adventists. Worst of all were the rumours that continued to swirl around what precisely happened when Indian troops captured the Radio Katanga building. In official terms, the UN did little or nothing to quash the rumours and that, in turn, damaged the fledgling reputation of the blue beret. Not until the ethnic strife in Somalia and Bosnia would the UN be willing to run such a gauntlet again.

Congo and Katanga also – unlike Suez – underlined how difficult it was to match military realities with rapidly shifting political priorities. The US was the UN’s primary driving force and every UN operation depended, to varying degrees, on US support and goodwill. It is worth remembering that Ireland could never have deployed its battalions to the Congo without US air support via the Globemaster II transport planes. Similarly, US bases like Wheelus Field became major staging posts for UN troops en route to and from the Congo.

With the removal of Patrice Lumumba and the emergence of a western-friendly Mobutu regime in Leopoldville, the US saw no reason to deepen the UN’s involvement in the Congo. President Dwight Eisenhower had once famously commented that Africa should be left to the experts – Britain and France. The US was wary of a deepening UN commitment to Africa – which it would ultimately be asked to either fund or facilitate – when its forces were already committed in West Germany, South Korea, Japan, Cuba, central America and, increasingly as the 1960s wore on, in South Vietnam.

If the US showed a rekindled interest in African affairs with the election of President John F. Kennedy, his assassination and the nascent presidency of Lyndon Johnson ensured a swift cooling of that ardour. In areas where there were no strategic interests at play and no obvious threat of Soviet-Cuban involvement, the US was willing to accept the local pro-western strongman. With the US reluctant to deepen its involvement in African affairs given the mounting Vietnam crisis, the UN’s commitment to the region was always going to be short-term.

Another disincentive for western countries to get involved in African affairs – particularly in southern Africa – was the status of the Republic of South Africa. Run on an apartheid basis, with its black majority effectively disenfranchised, South Africa was wealthy thanks to its vast gold and mineral reserves and, equally as important, was militarily independent. South Africa had the largest and best-equipped army south of the Sahara and was willing to use that power to destabilise bordering countries that it perceived as a threat to itself and its regime. South Africa did not appreciate excessive European interest in its African affairs and, in the 1960s and 1970s, still had the power to make those feelings known. The Congo was generally outside the South African sphere of influence, but neighbouring countries, particularly Nyasaland and southern Rhodesia, were hugely important to Pretoria and could not be destabilised.

For Ireland, the Congo represented a similarly steep learning curve. Politicians and military commanders realised that you couldn’t send soldiers into harm’s way in the 1960s and 1970s with equipment designed for combat in the 1920s and 1930s. The Vickers machine gun may have set firing records in the First World War, but was it really suited to the UN operation in the Congo? Communication was now also appreciated as a vital element of battalion co-ordination, as was proper logistical support for isolated units such as the one at Jadotville. The importance of air support, armoured support and operational co-ordination would never be underestimated again.

The reality was that the Congo was like a classroom for an army that, in its forty-year history, had only ever undertaken static defensive tasks. In the space of just two years, the Irish army went from using Lee-Enfield rifles and doing combat marches between major Irish towns, to deploying a modern assault rifle and dealing with firefights against more numerous and better-armed opponents.

After Niemba, Irish units never again made the same mistakes about clearing roadblocks. After Jadotville, troops were never again assigned to isolated locations unless they could be properly resupplied by air or by road. Within a few years of returning from the Congo, Ireland quietly replaced the old Ford AFVs with modern French-built Panhard armoured cars that offered vastly greater flexibility and potency in operations. It is worth noting that Ireland deemed the Fords of such low worth that most were simply left in the Congo despite the fact they were still fully operational. The Air Corps – until then reliant on British hand-me-downs such as the Supermarine Spitfire and De Havilland Vampire – moved to purchase helicopters that, as the US was to shortly prove in Vietnam, were a crucial weapon in modern warfare.

Having witnessed the havoc that even a humble jet-trainer armed with machine guns and rocket pods could cause against opponents with no air cover, the Air Corps also decided to acquire a new jet aircraft. The aircraft chosen was the Fouga Magister with its distinctive butterfly tail, which, until its retirement in the 1990s, remained Ireland’s principle air defence weapon.

The Congo was so important because it gave the Irish army a chance of proving itself in a combat situation. For the first time since the War of Independence, Irish troops were thrown into a combat situation from which they emerged wiser and more skilled. Irish troops displayed admirable courage throughout the four-year Congo deployment and, as Tpr Pat Mullins personally demonstrated, were capable of the most incredible acts of bravery, loyalty and sacrifice. If the soldiers who served throughout ‘The Emergency’ were the core of the Defence Forces in the late 1940s and 1950s, the soldiers who returned from the Congo between 1960–64 formed the bedrock of the army which, in the 1970s and 1980s, emerged as one of the UN’s most respected and skilled peacekeeping forces.

Irish troops who arrived in the Congo and Katanga ‘green’, went home as experienced operators who had witnessed the best – and the worst – elements of modern conflict. Some of the things that Irish soldiers witnessed in the Congo would remain with them for the rest of their lives. Most of the experiences helped make the young troops better soldiers by reminding them that warfare is a terrible thing and that simple mistakes can sometimes have catastrophic consequences.

‘There is no substitute for having been under fire. You either have combat experience or you don’t. And you never really know how a soldier is going to react under the pressure of combat,’ Des Keegan explained. ‘We were all pretty innocent when we went out there, but the Congo had a way of shocking you and showing you that it wasn’t all stories like
Beau Geste.
I remember during the fighting of late 1961, after the ceasefire following Operation Morthor in September had broken down, a Katangan sniper started taking pot-shots at the Irish camp at Prince Leopold Farm. He only started shooting at night, usually as we were sitting down in the mess tent for something to eat. His shots all fell high which meant he wasn’t in the best of firing positions. It was more of an annoyance than a threat I suppose. But we had an ex-Congolese army sergeant [working on the base] with us. He had no love for the Katangans and, one night after the sniper started shooting, he turned to us in the mess tent and said, “I will fix sniper.” He borrowed a combat knife and slipped out of camp into the darkness. He was so black himself that he blended into the night like a shadow.

‘To be honest, none of us took much notice. I think a few of us thought he only wanted an excuse to get out of camp and maybe go looking for a woman or a beer. But then, about an hour later, we noticed that the firing had stopped. Not long after that, the Congolese sergeant slipped quietly back into camp and walked proudly over to a group of us having a smoke outside our tents. He handed one of the lads a soggy newspaper, which had been wrapped in a ball. “Here is sniper,” he grinned. The Irish lad opened up the package and almost vomited up his dinner. In the newspaper in his hand was a bloody penis and a pair of testicles. The sergeant had crept up on the sniper and cut his throat. He only cut off the guy’s penis and testicles just to prove to us that he had done what he said he would.’

It wasn’t just the military that discovered that the Congo could be a bruising classroom rife with conflicting interests and priorities. In December 1961, Conor Cruise O’Brien resigned as UN Special Representative in the Congo.
Irish Independent
reporter, Raymond Smith, writing in 1962, was prescient when he mused that, had Operation Morthor proved a success on 13 September, Dr O’Brien ‘would probably have emerged as a world hero’. But the reality was that, far from being a success, Morthor had come close to wrecking the UN mission.

In announcing his resignation just three months after Operation Morthor, the Irish diplomat said that nothing should be left in place that might impact on settlement talks between the various Congolese parties. ‘As most members of the [UN] Security Council have laid great stress on the necessity of conciliation in the Congo and as some powers have maintained that my contribution has been an obstacle to conciliation, I feel it would be better for me to go lest I should be thought to be frustrating the policy of conciliation. By its nature the UN must pursue such a policy by every means, setting aside any obstacle that there may be in the way,’ Dr O’Brien explained.