Heroes of Jadotville

The Soldiers' Story

Rose Doyle

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781848404892
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In this new and updated edition of Heroes of Jadotville: The Soldiers' Story, Rose Doyle uses interviews, reports, journals and letters to bring answers and clarity to an episode long ignored.

In 1961, during the United Nations intervention in the Katangan conflict in the Congo, central Africa, a company of Irish peacekeeping troops was forced to surrender to soldiers loyal to Katanga's prime minister, Moise Tshombe. They were isolated, without water, supplies or support when they were attacked and forced to defend themselves in a brutal and bloody five- day battle. Shamefully neglected by their superiors, they were portrayed as cowards upon their return home. In this new and updated edition of Heroes of Jadotville: The Soldiers' Story, Rose Doyle uses interviews, reports, journals and letters to bring answers and clarity to an episode long ignored. She blows the lid on the real story of what happened in Africa, exposing how Irish peacekeeping soldiers became pawns in an international struggle for control of Katanga and its mineral wealth. Doyle seeks to grant these soldiers the recognition their bravery deserves. This is their story.

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

The Katangese are good soldiers, and brave, and this is their country. I don’t blame them for attacking us.

Comdt P. Quinlan, September 1961

The trenches, five feet deep in the dry, African soil, were what saved them. The trenches and the defensive tactics of their commanding officer and their own bloody-minded courage.

God helped too. They agreed on that afterwards. God had been on their side in the trenches.

They were parched, filthy, exhausted, fly-encrusted and dug in when the enemy Fouga jet fighter, piloted by the Belgian Major Jose Denlin, appeared out of the sun on the second day of battle. Dark in the scalding sky, its whine incessant above machine-gun and mortar fire, it came in over the valley below Jadotville, circled their position several times and disappeared in the direction of Kolwezi.

A Company of the 35th Irish Battalion, UN peacekeeping force, 156 in number and commanded by Patrick Quinlan, was made up of three platoons, a special Support Platoon, cavalry section of two armoured cars and Swedish Interpreter Lieutenant Lars Fröberg. The soldiers of A Company, to a man, had come to the Congo believing they could help restore peace.

The Congo, newly independent after 80 years’ rule from Brussels, was in turmoil following mineral-rich Katanga’s secession from the new state with the backing of Belgium.

Comdt Quinlan, 42 years old and reared in the savage grandeur of the Iveragh peninsula’s Atlantic coastline, was less than inspired by the Katangan landscape.

‘The whole of Katanga,’ he wrote, ‘is on a plateau—flat as a table for hundreds of miles around with small stunted trees and elephant grass 5–6 feet high. Slow moving, twisting dark green muddy rivers wind their way to God knows where. It’s a featureless, uninteresting sun-baked land with clouds of red dust from the hard red earth. It is now mid-winter, sometimes very hot, sometimes cold enough, especially at night….’

But then Pat Quinlan, according to those who fought with him and to Noel Carey, from Limerick and at 24 the youngest of the company’s officers in Jadotville, ‘…was the one went out to the Congo with a realistic view and expectations.’

Quinlan’s expectations didn’t include Jadotville. No one expected Jadotville.

A Company arrived in the Katangan mining town, which was dominated by mining giant Union Minière and had the third largest concentration of Europeans in the Congo, ten days before the battle. The men had been made immediately unwelcome, hostility and the sour air of potential trouble all pervasive. They were in a state of boycott; their water and electricity had been cut off and shopkeepers and hoteliers refused to serve them. Gendarmerie patrols drove through their position; the exit roads to Elisabethville and the rest of the Irish Battalion had been blocked; and enemy reinforcements were converging on Jadotville. Quinlan had started digging trenches at once.

Liam Donnelly, a Dubliner, 33 years old in Jadotville and a captain with charge of the Special Support Platoon, remembers Quinlan saying: ‘“We’ve a problem here. We’d better be prepared.” Then he got us dug in and got us positioned. There were complaints from some of the men but he was right.’

Everyone has trench memories. Quartermaster Sergeant Paddy Neville recalls:

There were patrols of Gendarmerie up the road every hour, on the hour, watching us. Pat Quinlan said, ‘every man in this company will dig trenches.’ We were dug in at night, nice and easy. A lot of the company would have been in their teens, only schoolboys.

Corporal Sean Foley was 20 years old. Digging the trenches was, he says, ‘like digging concrete; the red earth was so dry it had a formulation like cinder-clinker in some parts. We found the trenches safe though; you could protect yourself inside them.’

Cook/Corporal Bobby Allan is absolutely convinced about their live-saving qualities: ‘We’d have been slaughtered if it wasn’t for them.’

Quinlan’s positioning meant pinpointing areas the enemy was likely to attack and deciding on potential targets for the company’s mortars and machine guns. No.1 and the Support Platoon were positioned nearest Jadotville with a gap of 200 yards between them and the area occupied by HQ and Numbers 2 and 3 platoons.

When they found themselves surrounded and all exit routes cut off by Katangan Gendarmerie, they dug further trenches, by night.

Their position, on the edge of Jadotville, was exposed, unsuitable and chosen for them by UN Procurement officers. The trio of villas (bungalow-style houses) they had been allocated, along with HQ rooms over a garage called Purfina, were enclosed by dense bush, elephant grass, low buildings, ant hills and, now, some 3,000 heavily armed Katangan Gendarmerie soldiers and an unknown number of Jadotville’s male civilians. The Gendarmerie soldiers were led by mercenary officers, most of them ex-French paratrooper com­mandos, others ex-Belgian Army.

Katangan reinforcements to hand in surrounding villages included men of the Beyeke, tribal brothers of Katanga’s Interior Minister, Godefroid Munongo. Backup included the Fouga jet.

The UN had no fighter aircraft and no anti-aircraft guns.

A Company had small arm weapons, 60mm mortars, four WWI Vickers machine guns, a few 84mm anti-tank guns. They were supported by two 1940s vintage cavalry armoured cars with Vickers machine guns mounted on them. They had no flak jackets, no functioning internal communication system and they wore plastic UN helmets. They had requested, but had not been given, barbed wire and flares. Lack of transport had prevented them from bringing their 81mm mortars and ten-day stock of emergency rations.

Their limited rations were now all but gone, their ammunition running low, their water contaminated and the supply from the town cut off.

They were cut off too from their main HQ base in Elisabethville, 80 miles away, and the support of their colleagues in the Battalion. This was against every military principle.

Reinforcements, small in number and inadequately equipped, had so far failed to cross the strategic Lufira Bridge, 18 miles distant.

Jadotville’s white population, 5,000 strong and allegedly in need of A Company’s protection, adamantly did not want the UN in the town. The 75,000-strong Congolese population had not been consulted. The threat of attack, the gathering strength of the enemy surrounding, the very real danger of annihilation, had been apparent for days.

Group Mide, consisting of the Swedish APC Company under Major Mide and B Company of the 35th Irish Battalion, had been sent on an abortive mission to Jadotville a week before A Company’s arrival. Their orders were to protect the white population in the event of rioting. Ordered out of town by the Burgermeister, Mide withdrew, followed by B Company. As they crossed Lufira Bridge, A Company passed them on their way to Jadotville.

A Company had been sent to Jadotville by order of HQ, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien of the UN, and at the very specific request of Belgium’s Foreign Minister, Paul Henri Spaak. Although Quinlan and his officers had repeatedly made clear the danger of their situation, they had been told to stay where they were.

So it was that Quinlan, unwilling to allow his men to die, planned a defence and dug them in.

He would not be silent either. Sending A Company to Jadotville was, he declared, ‘a well-thought-out Belgian plan to take us prisoner and use us as hostages in negotiations for Katanga. As for our army and Battalion HQ … all their military training was forgotten, every principle of war violated.’

Liam Donnelly agreed: ‘It’s my belief we were meant to have been cut off in Jadotville. The Belgians wanted us as bargaining power with the UN.’

Belgian mining interests were hugely vested in Katanga; an independent Katanga was very much in Belgium’s interests. Providing the Katanganese with hostages would frustrate UN efforts to bring an end to Katanga’s defiance.

Quinlan reassured the men under his command that God on their side and five-foot trenches offered ‘protection against almost anything. Except thirst.’

And hunger. And dust. And the humid, unmoving air and the parasites that settled quickly into broken, unwashed skin. And disease.

And bombs from the air.

The night before the attack, when a big gun (French 75mm) was discovered trained on their position, Quinlan ordered more digging. A Company finished the last of the trenches just hours before the battle began.

The men were consulting with God when they were attacked.

CHAPTER 1

I was left in the lurch. Only for our own alertness we would have been wiped out that morning.

Comdt P. Quinlan, September 1961

DAY ONE

Jadotville. Wednesday, 13 September 1961

The Congolese say that the sting of a fly can launch the end of the world. In the case of the Jadotville Affair, the stinging fly had been busy long before the battle. Comdt Patrick Quinlan had had intimations of this, seen writing on walls from the moment he and his troops arrived in the Congo. ‘Small things,’ he believed, ‘alter world events.’

So it would prove, for A Company, the UN and the Congo.

A Company could have been caught off guard when the attack came. They had been spied on and they had been betrayed. But their defences were well prepared.

None of them, however, from commanding officer down, was prepared for the radio messages: one before the attack, one near the end of the battle. Nothing in their military training had prepared them for betrayal by their own army.

When the first message came, at 7.25 on Wednesday, 13 September, most of A Company was assembling for a daily, open-air Mass. They carried loaded weapons. Others manned the fortified villas. All of them, for days, had slept in their clothes, with their boots on and fully loaded weapons beside them. More than a third remained, constantly, in the trenches.

Quinlan was in the Company’s HQ rooms over the Purfina Garage. He was shaving when Lieutenant Noel Carey brought him the radio word from Battalion HQ that Operation Morthor, a major UN offensive against Katangan separatists, had started in Elisabethville more than three hours earlier.

A Company, cut off and vulnerable in Jadotville, had been given no warning that it would take place.

0725 HRS. ELISABETHVILLE: OPERATION MORTHOR. SUSPENSION OF KAT GOVERNMENT. ARREST OF CERTAIN CABINET MINISTERS AND OF WHITE OFFICERS OF SURETE OF POLICE. SEIZURE OF RADIO STATION AND ALL COMMUNICATIONS COMMENCED 0400 HOURS TODAY. OPERATION HAS BEEN COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY.

Operation Morthor was, in fact, a shambles.

The UN forces involved had been fiercely resisted and had fail...