Congo: Battle for Katanga

This is a dead city, a battlefield where vultures circle overhead and the smell of panic is stronger than the stench of the unswept, palm-fringed boulevards. The shops are barred, the restaurants deserted. Hour after hour, day and night, the tomblike hush is broken only by the distant crump of exploding mortar shells, the whoom of bazookas, the crack of anti-aircraft cannon, and the short, chattering bursts of machine guns.

Somewhere, blocks away, the U.N.’s Indians, Swedes and Irish are fighting hard. But on the wide pavement outside the seedy Hotel Leopold II, no human stirs except Moise Tshombe’s tough, sharpshooting paracommandos in their red berets, and the grim, seasoned, Belgian-trained Katanga regulars in their steel helmets and jungle camouflage. Fighting and dying on a daily ration of a handful of maize, they dart stealthily from corner to corner, searching grimly for a target. After four days of fighting, the pickings are slim, for their proudest boast is that not a single U.N. soldier is to be seen in the city’s core today.

So reported TIME Correspondent Eric Robins last week from Elisabethville, the dry and dusty capital city of the province that wants to be a nation—the Congo’s Katanga. Only a few miles away are the mine shafts and chimneys of the huge copper and cobalt complex that makes secessionist Katanga the envy of its neighbors. For months the United Nations had kept its uneasy peace in Katanga, always hopeful that somehow the territory could be brought back into the Congo fold. Now, for the second time in three months, the U.N. was trying, with no great success, to do the job with guns.

Out of Bed. The shooting started after a week of growing tension. The brutal beatings of Acting U.N. Katanga Chief George Ivan Smith and Special Adviser Brian Urquhart (TIME, Dec. 8) had already left the U.N. soldiers tense, angry, and spoiling for a fight. Many of Tshombe’s troops, whipped up by the strident anti-U.N. propaganda of Radio Katanga, were drinking heavily and walking through town with guns at the ready. Something had to happen; it did, one afternoon at the main airport. When brawling Katangese soldiers molested airport workers, Indian soldiers arrested 32 of them in a flurry of gunfire.

That did it. Suddenly, Elisabethville’s streets were alive with Katanga patrols. Seeking revenge, one Katangese squad swooped on a U.N. villa where ten sleeping U.N. staffers, mostly Swedish, were awakened, arrested and hustled away. At the same time, roadblocks, guarded by armored cars and Tommy-gun-waving soldiers, went up on the main roads from the town to U.N. installations outside. When a car with three Swedish soldiers tried to drive through one barrier at a strategic highway tunnel, the Katangese shot the driver in the stomach, then mowed down the other two after the vehicle crashed into a tree.

The Lone Dornier. Strongest of all the roadblocks was established on the airport road a day later; there, a company of Katanga’s paracommandos cut the highway with three armored cars and several 60-mm. mortars. At least three white men in civilian clothes were with them, apparently in command; they seemed to be part of Tshombe’s force of hired Belgians, Rhodesians, British and South Africans, which the Katanga government only a week earlier had said was disbanded and out of the country.

Three times, U.N. Civilian Chief Smith communicated with Katanga’s Foreign Minister Evariste Kimba, demanded that the roadblock be removed. Kimba promised to comply, but as time went by, it became clear that he had little or no control over the determined Katanga forces. It was now apparent that the U.N. personnel could reach the town only by using force. Then came word that Katangese units were moving up to encircle the airport itself, and one of Katanga’s Dornier planes flew over the field. Certain that an attack against the U.N. was imminent, Smith turned to the U.N.’s military commander in Katanga. India’s Brigadier K.A.S. Raja, and told him: “Matters are in your hands now. Deal with the roadblock by military means.”

With Arrows. Within an hour. Raja’s tough Gurkhas had slipped into position around the dug-in Katangese on the airport road. Suddenly shots rang out. When the dust cleared half an hour later, one Indian was dead and four wounded, but among the shambles of the smashed roadblock lay 38 dead Katangese and still more wounded. The road was at last open, permitting a convoy of 240 Swedish reinforcements, just in by air from Europe, to move into the town itself.

This was war, and although Katanga’s President Moise Tshombe was away in Paris, Katanga Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo proclaimed: “We are all here, resolved to fight and to die if necessary. The United Nations may take our cities. There will remain our villages and the bush. All the tribal chiefs are alerted. We are savages; we are Negroes. So be it. We shall fight like savages with our arrows.”

Holes in the Fuselage. As Munongo spoke, the radioteletype to New York was chattering in U.N. headquarters 1,000 miles away at Leopoldville, seat of the Congo’s central government. On the line was U.N. Acting Secretary-General U Thant in Manhattan, with his approval for any action the U.N. authorities on the scene deemed necessary, on the ground or in the air.

The air action was already in the works, for just that afternoon one of Katanga’s Dorniers had dropped three bombs near U.N. troops at the airport. Next morning all 15 of the U.N.’s jets—Indian Canberras, Swedish Saabs and Ethiopian Sabres—were off in search of Katanga’s meager air force. The Indian jets found four planes on the ground at nearby Kolwezi and destroyed them all. The air strike was just in time, for some of the Kolwezi planes were loaded with bombs and ready for another counterattack against the U.N. in Elisabethville.

These were the planes that might also endanger the steady stream of U.S. Air Force Globemasters which had already begun to pump vehicles, artillery and troops into Elisabethville from Leopoldville at U Thant’s urgent request. Other Globemasters were bringing more U.N. troops direct from Europe; a battalion of Swedish and a battalion of Irish soldiers arrived at the height of the battle. One Globemaster pilot, coming in for a landing, had not been advised that his glide path took him directly over Premier Tshombe’s own residence; before he touched ground, his fuselage and one of his engines had been peppered with small-arms fire aimed skyward by Tshombe’s own house guards, leading the U.S. to suspend the airlift for a day until the U.N. could guarantee fighter escorts.

Bombs in the Garden. One group in particular difficulty was the team of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries and their families. 29 people in all, trapped in their mission building. They were at a dangerous spot: halfway between U.N. headquarters and an important Katanga army building a few hundred yards away. For hours the missionaries ducked, as blast after blast struck their walls and plowed up the garden outside. Then they realized that badly aimed bazooka shells from the U.N. compound itself were doing the damage; during a lull in the firing, they hastily evacuated the buildings.

The doctors at Prince Leopold Hospital complained about the aim of some of the U.N.’s gun crews. For ten hours one night, mortar shells blasted the hospital walls and roof; patients crawled screaming into the corridors; one African woman in the process of giving birth rose in terror and fled before her delivery, was not seen again. A U.N. spokesman admitted the firing, said the rounds were aimed at a Katangese army camp 800 yds. beyond the hospital. But some of the shells even hit a Roman Catholic cathedral in an African residential section, and others exploded near the Lido Hotel, a U.N. rest camp that was eventually abandoned to the Katangese.

Next day, two Indian Canberras swooped down for a shot at Elisabethville’s central post office, a Katangese strongpoint in the heart of town, just around the corner from the Leo II. The jets were after the post office’s central switchboard and telegraph machines, soon reduced the machinery to molten ruins as Katangese operators fled for their lives.

It was the U.N.’s Katangese victims and not the U.N. troops who attracted the sympathy of Elisabethville’s white, largely Belgian, population. Belgian women stopped wounded paracommandos and kissed their bloodstained bandages. Belgian men sniped at U.N. headquarters with rifles from their own apartments.

The government, reported Correspondent Robins, constantly prodded Katanga’s civilian populace to fight against the U.N. “Bring out your guns, spears, knives, axes and clubs, and kill all the U.N. to combat the murder campaign of Secretary-General U Thant and his international minions!” demanded a government proclamation. Cried Radio Katanga: “Please attack the United Nations dogs!” But things were not all serious. Radio Katanga also played “victory” cha cha chas. And after the heat of battle was over one day, most of the Katangese officers, chewing their entrecôtes de veau and pommes frites at the Leo II’s dining room, could talk of little else but the tragedy of the Sabena guest house, where artillery that day had shattered one of the best restaurants in town.