failure and had to make the best of the situation.
Fluff Templer and I spent many hours in discussion with the ZANLA and ZIPRA commanders and provided them with every single idea on many matters relating to the integration of forces. Along the way, agendas were raised for repeat discussions with General Walls, the Commanders of the Army and Air Force, the Commissioner of Police and Ken Flower who continued to head CIO.
Nothing that Fluff and I recommended was accepted in these long drawn-out meetings that covered the same ground but resulted in totally different agreements. I felt we were wasting our time but General Walls insisted that Fluff and I should continue because we were exposing ZIPRA and ZANLA to many issues and complications that prepared them better for the high-level meetings.
When I submitted my resignation to Air HQ, the only real resistance to my leaving service came from Air Commodore Norman Walsh and Group Captain Hugh Slatter who both tried to persuade me to stay on. At Joint High Command ZIPRA and ZANLA received the news badly. All four commanders, individually, begged me to remain because they said they knew me better than any other RSF officer and had come to trust me above all others. This was the continuing issue of preferring Air Force to other services.
My situation became especially difficult when Rex Nhongo said that he and all ZANLA and ZIPRA commanders wanted me to take overall command of all forces. He said Mugabe had supported this. I told Rex this was an absolute impossibility. Not only was I five rank-levels below the rank he was considering, I was totally unprepared in experience for such a position. His reply showed how differently he thought. “When the sergeant is better than the lieutenant-colonel, the sergeant becomes the full colonel.”
This situation was altogether unexpected and I saw great danger in it. In Rhodesian terms, I knew I was totally unprepared for such a responsible position, and even less so for what promised to become a political post. Why I even thought the matter through I couldn’t say because my heart was already set on getting out of uniform. Strangely, I was helped in making a final decision by one of ZANLA’s field commanders who warned me that Zimbabwe would soon be driven by ideologies that would fail to fill peoples’ stomachs. He was certain that the ordinary man would fail to realise any of the ‘freedom’ promises made by politicians whose future actions would all be driven by personal greed.
On Tuesday 27 May 1980, four days before my last day in office, I was leaving home for work when I spotted a stationary grey Land Rover with a long HF aerial. It was parked just beyond our garden gate on the other side of the street. Immediately I became suspicious and, as I passed by and looked towards the driver, I saw a white man of about sixty years of age flick his head away and raise a newspaper high enough to prevent my seeing his face through my rear-view mirror. Day and night for the next 730 days my movements were monitored from grey CIO Peugeot 504 sedans with long HF aerials.
Air Marshal Mick McLaren had retired four months earlier and became Director of Shell and BP Subsidiary Companies. When I retired, he offered me a position as general manager of one of these companies. Within eighteen months I was managing two more and became a member of the Board of Directors of Subsidiary Companies.
This must have been a headache for the CIO who monitored all my movements. From early morning until about midnight, one of four vehicles was always in one or other of three shaded parking spots outside my house. But what really floored me was that the other three vehicles were waiting at the three companies, all manned by elderly white men whom I deliberately ignored. My business telephones were fine but my home telephone was tapped whenever I was at home. About one second after line connection, a distinct click was followed by a dull background noise that persisted for the duration of each call.
I can only assume that my reasons for refusing to stay on with the Zimbabwe forces were treated with suspicion, something along the line “If he is not with us he must be against us!” Funnily enough I became so used to being monitored that, when surveillance was lifted on 27 May 1982, I experienced a strange sense of nakedness knowing that I was no longer important. In November and December I went overseas to explore a business opportunity. Upon my return, full surveillance of my movements was reinstated, but only for one week. This made it safe for me to move out of Zimbabwe.
In April 1983 I left the country of my birth for good. Beryl stayed on for another five months to wind up her hairdressing business and sell our home. Both our children had moved ahead of us to South Africa. Debbie was nursing at Groote Schuur Hospital and Paul was at Rhodes University in Cape Town doing Chemical Engineering.
There was much pain in leaving such a beautiful country, but we had decided that Rhodesia no longer existed. This had nothing to do with the change of the country’s name or the fact that blacks were in power. It had everything to do with a top-heavy government bent on establishing a Marxist-styled one-party dictatorship that would almost certainly destroy our country. Anyway Mugabe’s promises of a country in which all could live in harmony and peace were already showing serious cracks.
Many officers and men stayed on with the Air Force of Zimbabwe, all enjoying hugely accelerated promotion to fill gaps left by senior men who chose not to serve under the new political order. Those who remained were all fine men who gave their all to maintaining the Air Force they loved. But then things took a nasty turn on Sunday 25 July 1982 when South African-based saboteurs launched an attack against aircraft based at Thornhill.
What these saboteurs hoped to achieve one cannot say but the repercussions of the incident were horrifying. Determined to find someone to blame for the embarrassment of losing four brand-new Hawk Mk60 fighters, Hunters and a Lynx, Mugabe’s bullyboys turned on Air Force officers who suffered arrest, foul torture and false accusations. This hysterical action by ignorant political thugs showed that ZANU did not understand that Air Force men could never have considered destroying the very aircraft they loved so much.
I have to say that this horror made me pleased I had left the service when I did. But knowing my friends were in prison I sought to see what I could do to help. The Commander of the Air Force of Zimbabwe, Air Marshal Norman Walsh, told me to stay well clear of these matters, as they were very sensitive. He himself was under twenty-four-hour surveillance and did not require any more help than he and the imprisoned officers were receiving from lawyers Mike Hartmann, Rhett Gardener and Mike d’Enis.
More than a year passed before the officers were acquitted and released by a black judge on 31 August 1983. Outside the court they were immediately re-arrested and another long year followed before all were eventually released and deported from Zimbabwe, their service pensions having been denied them.
How those guys managed to put on a brave face on the few occasions they were seen during trial baffled me until I learned how Air Force technician-turned-chaplain, Boet van Schalkwyk, and the men’s wives had given so much support, love and spiritual guidance.
Barbara Cole’s book
One of the few officers who remained in service with the Air Force of Zimbabwe was Ian Harvey who, with twenty-two years of service to Rhodesia, was a flight lieutenant from 1967 to 1980. Even before I moved to COMOPS, Ian had recorded 4,000 flying hours on Alouettes but then went on to exceed 6,000 hours; a world record I thought until I learned Mark Smithdorff had many more from his military service and fire-fighting operations in America.
Following another twenty years in service with Robert Mugabe’s Air Force, Ian finally retired in the rank air vicemarshal. For this he received no more than his Mercedes staff car.
