Fatfox9's Blog

We always arrived at Mukumbura towards late afternoon.  This was dodgy for a number of reasons.

Firstly, travelling towards evening on roads in any of the operational areas was not recommended.  The gooks liked to ambush at these times so they could slink away into the shadows quickly with very little threat of a follow-up in the darkness.  Our choppers did not usually fly at night in those days so Fire-Force and Casevac support were problematic and if someone was injured they were in a serious situation.  Additionally it was never good to get into base too late in the day or early evening due to the possibility of a last-light attack on the camp.

Secondly, passengers on these long trips may also have become tired and having lost concentration and alertness (the nodding-dog syndrome) became easy prey for gooks lying in wait with evil intent.

Most importantly of all was that dinner would probably have been gobbled up in it’s entirety by the personnel already in the base (thus two squashed hamburgers and a sticky Chelsea bun in my pocket from the Mount Darwin WVS canteen mentioned in previous post).

On arrival at the Mukumbura Engineer camp we would be shown where we would be sleeping for the next 8 or so weeks and given a security brief by one of the senior members of the base HQ element.  On my initial trip to Mukumbura there was a Regular Army Lieutenant running the operations with a Territorial Force Sergeant as his right hand man.  Little did I know at the time but the Lieutenant was to become one of the legends of the Rhodesian Engineers.

His name was Charlie Small.

After we had stowed our kit in our accommodation and had our brief we moved to the base perimeter stand-to positions.  These positions were located all around the camp and were lightly fortified with sandbags and berms.  They all had defined arcs-of-fire to cover the most likely enemy approaches.  Each evening at last-light and each morning at first-light we all went to our allocated stand-to positions to repel any attack or assault by the gooks.  These were the times they favoured for such attacks which could take the form of a stand-off mortar bombardment or a small-arms shoot-out from an appropriate distance.  I was to have first hand experience of these attacks in the future so remain a firm believer in the value of stand-to activities.  Stand-to normally lasted for about 30 minutes.

Our camp consisted of tents, bunkers to duck into in case of a mortar attack, a medical post, HQ area, kitchen/mess area, and an explosives/ammunition storage area.  We also had the pleasure of having Tsetse Fly Control personnel on the camp.  I will discuss these gentlemen in a later post but they were a good bunch of blokes and great characters who worked very closely with us on Cordon Sanitaire.

Our next mission was to learn the science of mine-laying and I will cover this in the next post.

Here is a video taken during Operation Hurricane.  Mukumbura Engineer camp was in this ops area: