Venter - War dog: fighting other peoples wars: the modern mercenary in combat

These are interesting times in which we live. Weve all recently seen the consequences of the botched attempt by a fairly large group of South African mercenaries headed by former British SAS officer Simon Mann to invade Equatorial Guinea.

But may I, with due modesty, point to my novel of 1974 The Dogs of War ? That was a blow-by-blow manual for the invasion of that very same island of Fernando Po, as it was called before it gained its independence from Spain in 1968.

After exploring all the options when writing that novel, I became convinced that a mercenary invasion by air would not succeed. I was right, because it didnt work for Mad Mike Hoare and his group when they tried to take the Seychelles in 1981, and it certainly didnt work almost a quarter century later for the boys from Pretoria in Equatorial Guinea.

In both cases, I believe the plotters ignored the basics by trying to come in by plane. I was always convinced that the attackers would need the freedom and invisibility of the ocean to launch such an operation.

Invasion from the water is an obvious option because until you arrive, nobody knows youre there. Also, you do all your training and kitting-up onboard. The ocean is ideal for target practice, getting your weapons battle-ready, perhaps removing manufacturers grease and that sort of thing. In other words, you prepare. And when you come in over the horizon and your target island is ahead of you, your men are landed and they storm the capital.

Not long after The Dogs of War was published, Bob Denard invaded Grand Comores by trawler out of Le Havre and he did exactly that. In the back pocket of every one of the forty mercenaries involved in that action was a paperback copy of Les Chiens de Guerre , the French edition of my book. The same with Hoares ill-fated party. Both teams, I was told afterwards, used my novel as a manual. Theyd pull the book out and keep referring to the text, asking each other, what do we do now? What comes next?

Why Simon Mann made such an evident cock-up leaves me baffled. Anyway, what he managed to demonstrate is how not to conduct a putsch on a tropical island.

There is no question that a good deal of what appeared in my original novel came from time that I spent in Biafra reporting on that dreadful conflict, first for the BBC and then, after I had resigned, independently. There was a steady flow of mercenary hopefuls entering the enclave, though only a handful stayed the distance.

The first group arrived at the behest of French President Charles de Gaulle, who, you will recall, had no real interest in Nigeria, it being a former British territory. Having virtually nothing to lose, he made a speech that was not so much helpful as favorable toward the breakaway Republic of Biafra. That was followed by an offer of French mercenaries.

General Odumegwu Ojukwu, the British-trained Biafran leader told me at the time that he simply had to accept because it would have been a considerable rebuff to the French to tell them and their mercenaries to get lost. It was also unfortunate that Paris charged him a hefty quarter of a million pounds, money he so desperately needed for his war effort.

So Roger Faulckes, a very distinguished Indo-China veteran whod also been in the Foreign Legion and had every gallantry medal in the book, arrived in Biafra a short while later. The group was comprised of about thirty-five, perhaps forty men.

It didnt take anybody long to realize that these veterans actually knew very little, either about Biafra or the kind of problems they were likely to encounter in that breakaway state. In fact, it seemed as if they thought they were going on a picnic. To their horror, on their very first trip south, they ran straight into an ambush east of Port Harcourt.

Ojukwu told me later, as we sat talking late into the night with coffee and brandy, that immediately after extricating themselves from that mess, they did an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back to the airport. One of their representatives came into his office aftewards, sat down and told him that he wished to withdraw all his men. The Biafran leader had no option but to say yes. Nor did he get any of his money back.

Return to Europe the French soldiers did. Ojukwu said afterwards that it was probably the shortest military assignment in the history of warfare. A couple of the men decided to stay, one of them an ex-Legionnaire by the name of Rolf Steiner. The other was a burly Belgian national, Marc Goossens. Both men went on to play useful roles in this terrible internecine conflict, though Steiner eventually overstepped the bounds and was abruptly hustled out of the country. He refused to go, but ended up in restraints when they put him onboard an aircraft headed for Libreville.

Meanwhile, a few more unlikely war dogs dribbled in, all of them volunteers. One was Alec Gay, a Scott. There was also Taffy Williams, a South African, though ethnically Welsh. An Italian who had been fighting in the Congo until a short while before, George Norbiatto, also showed up but he was later killed while on a solo op when he went down the Imo River, south of Port Harcourt. Finally there was Armand Ianarelli, a Corsican from Paris who later secured a more comfortable assignment as bodyguard to Madame Claude in Paris; she was then the worlds most famous procuress of top-class call girls.

Another German, Christian Oppenheim, joined the group later. Unlike the others, his job was to fly a twin-engine B-26 light bomber that crashed on its second raid over Lagos. The Biafrans had no bombs of their own so they improvised and used hollowed-out fire extinguishers with a couple of fins welded onto them to guide them downward. Packed with industrial explosives, these devices were fitted with impact fuses with the hope that theyd land nose downwards and explode.

The mercenary group that ended up in Biafra was an unusual bunch. Wed all get together evenings and after a few drinks Taffy Williams would tell us that we were all crazy to be there and that he was the only certifiably sane person in the group. What he omitted to tell us was that hed got the certificate to prove it after being released from a lunatic asylum sometime in his obscure past.

Getting Dogs of War published in the early 1970s wasnt something that just happened.

After Harold Harris of Hutchinson accepted Day of the Jackal , he came to me with what I thought was a stunning proposal and said that he was prepared to offer me a three-book contract. Id get five hundred pounds down and six thousand pounds each for books Two and Three. Also, the money was up front, so that Id have something to live on while I researched and wrote. I didnt yet know what a threebook project was, but it sounded good. Harold explained that it was Jackal plus two more and he suggested that I come up with some ideas for the other two.