Adrien Fontanellaz - War of Intervention in Angola. Volume 1: Angolan and Cuban Forces at War, 1975-1976

Also by Tom Cooper and Adrien Fontanellaz in the Africa@War series:

Wars and Insurgencies of Uganda, 1971-1994

(Volume 23)

The Rwandan Patriotic Front, 1990-1994

(Volume 24)

Ethiopian-Eritrean Wars, Volume 1

(Volume 29)

Ethiopian-Eritrean Wars, Volume2

(Volume 30)

Published in 2018 by:

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Text Adrien Fontanellaz and Tom Cooper 2018

Colour profiles Tom Cooper and David Bocquelet 2018

Maps Tom Cooper 2018

Photographs as individually credited

Designed & typeset by Farr out Publications,

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Cover design by Paul Hewitt, Battlefield

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Dorchester, Dorset

ISBN 978-1-911628-19-4

eISBN 978-1-9131185-18

MobiISBN 978-1-9131185-18

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication

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The silence with regards to the reporting of military-related affairs from Angola in our time is outright amazing especially for the authors that grew up accustomed to a steady flow of reports about the newest military operations in and around this country. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, hardly a month passed without a major media outlet bringing a report from one of the multiple battlefields of Angola. Of course, the impressions about what exactly was going on were extremely diverse depending on the part of the world where one grew up. At first, there were reports about a bitter and brutal war between Portuguese forces and diverse leftist rebels. Then the usual story in the West switched to that of a country that had been subjected to an outright invasion of Communist forces, whether native (which were usually ignored in the coverage), of Cuban, Soviet, East German, Romanian or of whatever other origin. Reportedly, these forces were in the process of exporting the leftist revolutionary ideology into the territory of what was then South West Africa, defended by pro-Western forces of South Africa, a country with close links to Great Britain and widely perceived as one of most important even though not especially popular in the public allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Correspondingly, reports about the South African military launching repeated externals into Angola, with the aim of destroying communist military bases, were a matter of at least monthly coverage.