RIP Colonel Jan Breytenbach, 1932–2024: Inspirational South African paratroop commander, who almost captured Luanda in 1975
“Glory, glory, hallelujah
He ain’t going to jump no more, no more”
– I Parachute Battalion Bloemfontein marching song
*
Colonel Jan Breytenbach, who has died peacefully in bed in his nineties, was arguably South Africa’s finest soldier in the latter half of the 20th century.
Older brother of writer Breyten Breytenbach, Jan Breytenbach was a romantic soldiering legend in his own lifetime, in the mould of men like David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Services (SAS), and Colonel Lawrence (of Arabia).
He was a true soldier’s soldier, who could have stepped out of the playbook of French legionnaire film Beau geste – always “pen regop”. An early black and white photograph of Breytenbach, striking in his trademark beret and cravat, with his dark saturnine features, trademark unshaven cheekbones, and eyes that bored into one, reminds of similar iconic photographs of Che Guevara. And like the Cuban revolutionary in the Congo, Breytenbach also saw action in post-colonial Africa (Biafra and Angola).
Similar to his namesakes, he was an officer who always led from the front, an inspirational figure to numerous South African conscripts and professional soldiers alike. As author Jan Morris so eloquently put it:
I admired the military virtues, courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline, and I like the look of soldiering. I like the lean humped silhouettes of infantrymen, and the swagger of paratroops, and all the martial consequence of embarkation or parade.
(Conundrum, Faber 1974)
Breytenbach was exactly drawn to these enticing markers of the military way – especially the paratroops.
He joined the South African army in 1950, and after three years signed up with British forces and saw action during the Suez crisis, where he absorbed important tactical lessons. He returned to South Africa a few years later, rejoining the SADF, and successfully won his Parabat wings in Bloemfontein. After a stint commanding I Parachute Battalion in the sixties, he persuaded the army to allow him to create a home-grown version of the famous SAS. This became the famous Recce force, which blitzed its way up the 3 000-kilometre Angolan coastline to within reach of the Luanda docks in October 1975, a truly extraordinary achievement, a bit like Lawrence of Arabia traversing thousands of miles of hostile desert to reach Aqaba in the First World War. The difference was that Lawrence was given the green light by Allenby to capture it, which he did. Breytenbach was less fortunate: Prime Minister John Vorster got cold feet, failed to seize the moment and cancelled the operation.
Breytenbach was convinced he could have overwhelmed the ships, even then debouching Cuban soldiers, and so capture Luanda for non-communist elements led by Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. An opportunity was lost to change history, and the issue has divided counterfactual scholars ever since.
Armchair historians interested in counterfactual “what if” methodology will find worthwhile pointers in The armchair general World War One by John Buckley (Century 2023).
Back in South Africa, he was later tasked with leading the controversial SADF airborne assault on the Cassinga insurgent staging and training camp in southern Angola. In a situation perhaps reminiscent of the current war in Gaza, the camp was also home to large numbers of camp followers, among whom the insurgents were intermingled, and several hundred civilians were killed in the raid.
The presence of non-combatants and combatants in the same space continues to be a source of tension between military planners and civilian authorities in many war zones in the world.
Breytenbach successfully completed the full gruelling jump course at I Parachute Battalion when he was already in his thirties – no mean accomplishment. I speak from painful experience, having done my own national service at I Parachute Battalion in 1966, when he was the OC (commanding officer).
The routine of reporting for basic training will be familiar to those who have been through conscription. Lights out was at 9:00 pm, and you woke up to the sound of a bugle, calling reveille at 5:00 am. Shower in cold water at the ablution block, shave in strictly rationed tepid warm water, inspection, breakfast, and then drill, unrelenting drill, followed by punishing five-mile runs and exercises.
After six weeks – the primary basic training period – you were all ten pounds lighter and very fit. You all had a personal army number, which you were never allowed to forget. You also knew how to dismantle your rifles, had memorised their stock number and could reassemble them in the dark, shoot accurately over 200 yards, run two miles with a full pack weighing 60 pounds and do a forced march for five hours, with ten-minute breaks every hour, at 105 paces a minute. This was based on the American, rather than the British, infantry manual – the “General Stilwell pace” he set for his troops crossing Burma into China in 1943.
If you opted for the Parabat option, you were regarded with dark pity by the sergeant major. “You don’t know what you’ve let yourselves in for,” he bawled, adding for good measure, “Not one of you has the guts to make it.”
What came as a shock was the sheer, unbelievable exhaustion of daily parachute training, which Breytenbach, a few years before but much older, had had to endure. Not only that, but he had gone on to high-altitude free-fall jumps, for which serious courage is required.
The object was to weed several hundred volunteers down to about 60 men, who would eventually qualify for their wings after ten jumps under varying battlefield conditions. These 60 would join the I Parachute Battalion to make up the complement for that quarter.
“Weeding out” began immediately – heavy wooden telegraph poles were unloaded from a lorry, and each pole was given to three men to carry. Together with two other blokes (I was in the middle of the pole), we hoisted them on our shoulders, and the idea was that the pole would accompany us everywhere we went – including to the toilet.
With the 5:00 am reveille bugle, we leapt out of bed and started the old routine of shave and shower, kit inspection and the like. The only difference was that this was now done at the double – always running on the spot, for instance, and never allowed to stand still. The logs went everywhere we went.
By the end of day one, we had already lost four volunteers – rather than their facing the ignominy of being “expelled”, it was broadly hinted that they might consider requesting a “new transfer” - less shame that way.
I was fitter by now, and more alert to the little “cheats” that might make all the difference. Stay in the middle of the log, hang back at the wall so as to catch your breath before tackling 20 feet of rope climb. Then the liquid mud bath. Scramble through with a one-armed swimming motion. Eyes closed, head down. Discreetly wrap a handkerchief around your hand so as to grip the muddy log.
Jump training started in earnest, six hours a day. Theory and practice, learning to land safely and how to control the chute, undo the harness, clip on the static line, check your jump partner’s (the man in front of you) chute, roll up the chute in a wind on the ground, and much more.
We began by clipping on the harness and jumping from a height of 70 feet into a void. The tower was called the “aapkas” – ape cage – and you put all your trust in a fan-like device that slowed you down sufficiently to land safely if you did it properly – in theory. All I know is that it was more or less equivalent in impact to jumping off a ten-foot wall, and terrifying.
Once we had the hang of that, we were swung across the vast expanse of a hangar, back and forth, adjusting our harness as we swayed to and fro to emulate a real parachute. Equally terrifying on first encounter, but we got used to the sensation of leaving your stomach behind.
Our first real jump was approaching. The tempo of training increased, as did the physical exercises and running. Five-mile, full-pack runs were virtually an every afternoon thing. Fortunately, it was winter in the Free State and very cold most of the time. Once again, the gods of timing were with me, because the summers were so hot that I certainly wouldn’t have made the grade.
One morning, without any warning, we were loaded onto a Bedford and driven at high speed to the aerodrome. This was a deliberate tactic to prevent pre-jump nerves, and rather like the hangman’s victim being rushed out of the cell to the noose in quick order, we found ourselves bundled into a venerable Dakota in our harnesses and parachutes within minutes of our arrival at the runway. The engines roared, we were coerced into bellowing out a dark humour song (“He ain’t going to jump no more, no more”) and we promptly took off, climbing to 2 000 feet.
We were never to jump from as high again, except as a gift from the government in our last week.
The jump light changed from red to green. The door was opened inwards with a great whooshing sound.
“Prepare to jump!” shouted our sergeant major (the never-to-be-forgotten Smittie), who was jumping with us. We stood up clumsily and checked each other’s Capewell fittings and static line clasps on the overhead cable.
“Stand in the door!” yelled the jump master over the scream of the wind.
“One, two, one, two!” we responded loudly and tramped forward.
The jump master physically grabbed the first guy in our line by the arm, and turned him to the door sill.
“Go!”
The trooper disappeared. Very rapidly our line moved forward. Suddenly it was my turn. I had a sense of ground and blue sky and then I was out, legs together, arms folded, looking up as the tail passed over me in seeming slow motion.
The next moment, I was dangling from my chute in utter silence. I kicked into the seat position in my harness and prepared to land, legs together, feet at an angle to my body. The ground never seems to get any closer, until at around 70 feet it suddenly rushed towards one. Seventy feet is when vertigo kicks in for human beings. I pulled my control lines back, the chute slowed, and I hit the ground with a wallop and rolled over in the accepted manner to break my fall.
I stood up shakily. All round me, others were standing up as well, already gathering their chutes.
There would be more to come, mostly battle altitude jumps at 400 feet, with your kit and rifle swinging on a rope below you which made landing doubly difficult, with the kit going one way and you another.
The night jumps were the worst. In theory, the indistinct green and red markers that had been lit before the jump by the ground staff, should have given you some idea of how close the ground was and when to brace for the landing. You had to line them up, and when they converged you were down.
In theory, at least. In practice, it proved impossible to line them up, and we all crashed into the veld, never able to anticipate the moment of contact with the iron-hard earth. Another obstacle was the ant heaps, some of which were waist-high and caused multiple injuries, like tank obstacles. Finally, one morning, our hawk-eyed OC, Jan Breytenbach, took the parade and awarded the company their wings and maroon berets.
He was not a man given to many words, but as teenage troepies we deeply respected him, knowing that he had been through what we were going through to win his own wings, and his presence on some of our jumps from the Dakota was enough to quell the trembles.
To celebrate, we were given a home leave pass of five days, the only break I was to have all year. But the extraordinary sensation of proudly stepping out of camp in our Number One kit, with wings pinned to our chests and on our shoulders the bald eagle parachute emblem, and with maroon berets on our domes, was one not lightly to be forgotten.
The year 1966 was a relatively peaceful year for the SADF. My intake was mercifully never sent to the Bush War, and so we never got to see the later legendary fighting qualities of Colonel Breytenbach in the Angola theatre. But he was a soldier’s soldier, alright, the real deal and a very difficult man to forget, with his dark, brooding eyes, hooked nose, beret and rakish cravat. He cut a figure straight from central casting, a truly inspirational officer, one of a kind.
He was also, incidentally, a prolific author, having published several well-regarded books on military affairs in his later years.
- Photography. Jan Breytenbach: The undated photograph has been used in numerous articles, including those of Netwerk24 and Die Burger, Defence Web and Bush War Books. Dakota by Izak de Vries, bald eagle parachute emblem by David Willers.
See also:
Die Slag van die Chambinga, 9 en 11 November 1987: ’n taktiese en operasionele ontleding
1 Recce, die nag behoort aan ons: ’n LitNet Akademies-resensie-essay
Suid-Afrika se Grensoorlog 1966–1989 deur Willem Steenkamp: ’n resensie