₦airaland Forum

flokii:
But biafura miscreants on NL claimed they fought Nigeria all alone, with ogbunigwe or whatever.. why do they love lies like this?

I know South Africa, Ivory coast took sides with biafura. Ojukwu fled to Abidjan when the heat almost consumed him. France and co. would have re-colonized them and still take the Oil they fought and died for.

longetivity:
RIP to the innocent souls wasted during the war

Bluntguy:
I thought you would think with your brain this time. All the world powers were on Nigeria's side then.
You still don't think there is a reason why your lifeless presido is asking the US to move AFRICOM headquarters to Nigeria? Stop thinking and talking from your yansh, ewu.

AniOmaa:
Until you can tell there's a difference between proferring DIPLOMATIC support and MILITARY support for those countries listed on the Biafran side, then there's no point even having this argument with a daft cow-dung sniffing Aboki. Majority of those countries that supported Biafra with the exception of France (as documented and collaborated by various foreign war journals and correspondents that covered the events of the Nigerian civil war) only gave their support diplomatically to Biafra... the so called mercenaries you posted only fought in Biafra for a few months at the early stage of the war, but majority of them left Biafra due to insufficient payments or were killed in action... it's on record that the only mercenaries that actually stayed on and fought with Biafrans inspite of all the crippling odds were Major Taffy Williams from former Rhodesia (a man who had nothing but great respect and admiration for the bravery and tenacity of the Biafran troops under his command) , Rolf Steiner, and the popular Swedish pilot Count Carl Gustaf Ericsson von Rosen who was famous for flying the "Biafran babies" till the end of the war.

Biafra largely depended on its home made weapons ingeniously manufactured by Biafrans themselves to sustain the struggle, it was only late in 1968 that France actually began to give some military aid to Biafra by sending tons of arms and ammunition via the Uli airstrip.. but the effort from France however noble in its intentions, was simply too insufficient and belated to salvage the already precarious and demoralizing Biafran war situation already made worse by starvation.

Please actually educate yourselves more about the facts of the Nigerian civil war even though your palpable ignorance can be pardoned since they extricated these things from our school curriculums, go read books, journals interviews and various other credible databases about the war instead of accentuating your stupidity by picking your "facts" from Wikipedia!

Asgard73:
Fulani changing narratives

Used to think op different from those plate carrying humans

So you wan use stenin and he’s military adventurers as foreign support..

And yet forgot to add Soyinka and Musa as countries that fought for Biafra

Atimes sense is truly lacking

And trust Yoruba people... they’ve invaded the thread to pour their frustrations and hopefully believe their yorubaic propaganda go sell

Nonsense and rubbish

People still reason from their anus no be lie..

From the outset, the war between Nigeria and secessionist Biafra loomed as an unequal contest. It was not surprising that, as in the earlier Congo conflicts, foreign mercenaries were drawn to Biafra to practice their trade: fighting. Nor was it surprising that the beleaguered Biafrans accepted their services—despite the fact that mercenaries can be narrow, violent men who often harbor a deep contempt for Africans. In the midst of the idealism with which Biafra pleaded its cause for independence, the mercenaries have operated—sometimes ugly, certainly anomalous, but perhaps necessary to Biafra's continued survival.

In 16 months of often brutal fighting, Nigerian federal troops have whittled Biafra down to one-tenth of its original area. They are now closing in on Umuahia, the secessionist state's last major town and the current seat of Lieut. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu's movable government. Umuahia would have long since fallen had it not been for the exploits of the best unit in Ojukwu's small army, Biafra's Fourth Commando Brigade. Commanded by nine white mercenaries, the Fourth spent the first three months of the year operating behind Nigerian lines. Later, it held sectors on the Western front but, outgunned and outmanned by the federals, was forced to retreat. By early September, after a doomed attempt to defend Aba with supplies equal to only a daily average of five rounds of ammunition per man, the Fourth was down to barely 1,000 effectives. Of the 7,000-odd men with whom it had started the campaign, more than 300 had been killed and 2,200 had been wounded. The rest were missing in action.

Record Supplies. Last week the Fourth Commandos were once more rebuilding under the command of a German-born ex-Foreign Legion sergeant who became a sector commander for the S.A.O. (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria and then a colonel for Ojukwu in Biafra. He is Rolf Steiner, and he considers the war to be far from lost, contemptuously dismissing the territorial gains of the heavily armed Nigerians. "If any corporal serving under me in the Legion had taken more than a week to conquer West Africa with their kind of equipment," he snorts, "I'd have him shot for dereliction of duty." Ojukwu, for whom Steiner has immense admiration, has authorized the Fourth to be expanded to two brigades, or 20 strike forces of 360 men each. The new men are being armed with weapons apparently bought with private European credits and flowing into Biafra from neighboring Gabon and the Portuguese island of São Tomé. Up to as much as 40 tons are said to be arriving every night—more than ever before in the war.

Colonel Steiner, 38, has been soldiering for most of his life. In the final days of World War II, he fought as a Hitler Youth in Germany's last-ditch defense against the advancing U.S. Army. After the German surrender, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He spent seven years in Indo-China, an enfant terrible who was at least twice busted from sergeant to private. At Dienbienphu, he was wounded and lost the use of a lung. After five years of service in Algeria, a spell with the S.A.O. and a suspended sentence, he was living in Paris last year when he heard of Biafra. He set out to serve Ojukwu's cause, first as a "technical adviser," then as company commander, finally as boss of the Fourth Commando Brigade.

Red and Green. He has taken the Legion with him to Africa. Legion marches blare from a transistorized pickup that he carries almost everywhere, and the Fourth Commando standard bears the red and green of the Legion. At inspections, Steiner often gets his troops' attention by firing off a few rounds from his Browning, then lectures them, his walking stick under one arm. "You are not Legionnaires," he will rant after a particularly bad showing. "You are not men." He has demoted at least one captain to private, but has also been known to pick a good man from the ranks and make him an officer. When he recently elevated a private to 2nd lieutenant, one of his officers complained: "My dear chap, we can't have someone in the mess eating with his fingers." Steiner, who speaks French and German, replied that he did not care if the man ate with his feet, as long as he was a good soldier.

Steiner likes beer, Benson & Hedges cigarettes, violence and very little else. Compulsively clean, he throws even slightly dusty plates at his mess waiters, then kicks them to drive the point home. But he also plucked a 21-year-old Ibo boy from the side of his dead parents, adopted him and named him Felix Chukwuemeka (after Ojukwu) Steiner.

The troops do not seem to mind the harshness of the command; they follow Steiner because they believe he is a winner and because he has juju (good luck). Thus Steiner has had no trouble refilling the depleted ranks of the Fourth at this late stage in the conflict. Guerrilla warfare may be the way out, he thinks. "If the towns are taken, we will go into the bush," he says. "We could do the job. But we must have weapons. We don't need armor. We need trucks. We don't need much air. But spotter planes would be useful."

Bulletproof. Steiner's mercenary officers are a mixed lot, united only by loyalty to their commander, distinguished only by their combat experience and their foibles. Major Taffy, 34, Welsh and a veteran of the Fifth Commando mercenaries of the Congo, thinks he is bulletproof. By now, so do the federals, who have reported him dead at least five times since last December. Taffy came perilously close to being killed a few weeks ago, when a round smashed into his binoculars. Short-tempered, he curses his black troops constantly, threatening to kill them if they don't obey orders. "You rotten bastards!" he roars, when things go wrong. "You bloody, treacherous morons!"

Captain Paddy, an Irishman who has spent 22 of his 54 years in Africa, is the unit's master mechanic. Just before Port Harcourt fell to the federals early last summer, he scrounged up a convoy of trucks and liberated—under fire —the entire workshop of the Shell-B.P. refinery there. When Aba had to be evacuated last month for lack of ammo, Paddy was one of the last men out, a machine gun in one hand, a demijohn of wine in the other. Captain Armand, a former French paratrooper and veteran of Algeria, sports a Yul Brynner pate and fights on despite bazooka fragments in one hand. Another veteran has just left Steiner. Captain Alec, a onetime British paratrooper, used to walk around with a Madsen submachine gun, an FN rifle, and a shotgun, "just in case I have to shoot my way out of this bloody place." He believed in the "little people," who, he would say in all seriousness, "will jam your machine guns and cause your rockets to misfire." He was wounded four times in six days before he left Biafra.

Outcasts. The mercenaries' salaries run from $1,700 a month upward. But payday is at best a sporadic affair in besieged Biafra. In any case, money is probably not the major reason for their presence. It is not the land, either, for they seem to have no eyes for the green rolling infinity of the African bush, the visionary sunsets, the humming, warm, smoky nights. They are lobos, outcasts from society who fight every day in order to taste the excitement that comes in living close to violent death. If they survive Biafra, they will doubtless drift on in search of another war. Until then, their allegiance, temporary though it may be, is to Biafra and to Ojukwu.

De Gaulle saw the conflict as a means to weaken the “anglophone giant” of west Africa, which was surrounded by former French colonies closely aligned with Paris through a policy of defending French interests that would come to be known as Françafrique.
While French Foreign Affairs Minister Maurice Couve de Murville declared that his country was observing a “complete embargo”, the presidential palace’s notorious “Africa cell”, headed by the controversial Jacques Foccart, sent large quantities of arms to the Biafran side, taking care to keep the operation secret from the Quai d’Orsay.

The planes carrying the weapons had to pass through the airspace of several countries that opposed the process, prompting a complaint by Morocco, which had not granted them access.

They landed at Uli, “Africa’s busiest airport”, according to Biafra supporters. But it was in such a poor state that pilots flying for Nigeria, including South African mercenaries, sometimes mistook it for a stretch of road. Pilots recruited by Biafra were in the know and managed to bring 75 tonnes of rifles, assault rifles, bazookas, grenades and cannon in just 11 days in 1969, documents show.

Appeal for more weapons

But, with the Biafran side losing ground, Foccart’s men appealed for more.
Warning that the breakaway territory could fall “before the end of October [1969]”, one of them Philippe Lettéron, wrote in a note now in the national archives and seen by RFI, “to take back control of the situation and have some hope of regaining the lost territory, a massive effort of at least 600 tonnes of arms and munitions would be needed in a very short space of time.”

Defeat did in fact come in January 1970 but not for want of French arms, as telegrams from the French embassy Lagos reported, notably when French expatriates in Port Harcourt, the region’s main port, notified it that the Bounty, hailing from Bordeaux, had broken the blockade and delivered weapons.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry did find out about the arms traffic and drew up an “inventory”, declassified at RFI’s request, in 1968.

It lists 16 Alouette and 12 T6-G helicopters and two planes for training pilots, delivered before the war, and two B26 bombers delivered after the independence declaration.
Support for the Biafran cause did not prevent France selling some arms to the Lagos government, mainly parts of orders placed before the war broke out.

And planemaker Sud-Aviation, then headed by Maurice Papon who was later convicted of war crimes during the Nazi occupation, lobbied to be allowed to sell helicopters, while sending a note the Africa cell, now declassified at RFI’s request, advocating “secret backing” through the supply of mercenaries to Biafra, to guarantee France a “privileged position” in an independent Biafra where high-quality, low-sulphur oil had recently been discovered.

Many French mercenaries

In fact, a number of mercenaries, many of them French, had been in the area since at least five months before the declaration of independence, as ambassador Marc Barbey had been informed by French nationals in Port Harcourt and a Soviet diplomat.

But Barbey, either believing or pretending to believe that they were working for the Lagos government, discussed their presence with Nigerian military leader Colonel Yakubu Gowon, urging him to refrain from recruiting French citizens.

Gowon warned the diplomat against any action that might threaten Nigeria’s territorial integrity but Barbey told his superiors that “France is certainly not the target” of the warning, since it was Israel that was sending mercenaries to the territory.

How did you come to fly for the Biafran Air Force?
Lord Revelstoke was a friend of Ojukwu’s father. James and I met Ojukwu through friends who had attended Sandhurst with him.

My article will reveal some basic elements that have never been discussed. The idea of small aircraft, in small wars, was generated by me during the very early sixties in California and Biafra saw the elements fall together because of my exposure to Von Rosen.

There was a marked lack of combat skills, among the pilots. It is one thing to get up and down. It is an entirely different matter to fly and fire machine guns or rockets with any certainty of hitting anything, without a lot of training and experience. Same goes for dropping bombs. Anyone can salvo a bomb load, but hitting within a useful distance is something else.

Frederick Forsyth was in Biafra, during the conflict. He went on to write Dogs of War, plus The Biafra Story, from his experiences. We both trained in the RCAF, under the NATO Plan, at the same time. And, during the seventies, he lived off the end of my runway, in Ireland, when I was doing feature films.

What inspired the Biafran Baby concept? Arming light aircraft for attack missions.
It really doesn’t matter now, but history credits Count Gustav von Rosen as being the overall creator of the Biafra Babies concept. This was not the case. He was the final initiator for the acquisition of the 5 surplus MFI-9s in Sweden, after I had outlined our concept of armed light aircraft, operating off roads, unprepared fields…..etc. To Ojukwu. Von Rosen possessed the Swedish contacts through which to purchase the aircraft.

Von Rosen had no real concept of the dynamics involved with accurate, low-level rocket attacks or, for that matter, low-level navigation. It is one thing to fly with radio compasses and altitude and quite another to operate at 100 feet with nothing more than a map in your lap and a course in your mind. Things happen very fast and one small mistake can spoil everything.

John Fairey, of the Fairey Aircraft family, was also one of my film pilots. He had contacts within the French aviation industry and was instrumental in acquiring French government support for supply of MATRA rocket pods and rockets.

James Baring’s banking contacts helped with some funding, although this upset his father. The UK government/Shell/BP were firmly behind the Nigerian government and Lord Revelstoke almost had a stroke. Lord Revelstoke was in charge of a European commission to stamp out “barter deals.” He was also upset when I proposed Marchetti provide Ireland the SF-260s in exchange for potatoes, Irish whiskey, mutton and Aron knit sweaters, since the Irish government was short of funds.

The entire Biafran effort was a sort of “old boys network” with pilots from all over Europe and America lending a hand.

One of my directors, Bud Mahurin, got the USAF leadership interested. They offered the loan of 4 Boeing C-97 freighters to create an air bridge into Biafra. At the time Mahurin was a senior level executive in the Apollo Project with North American-Rockwell. Bud was a War Two/Korea fighter ace.

IRELAND:
During the Biafran War a DC-6 operated from Shannon, Ireland to San Tome with food and relief supplies. It was flown by a guy named Lynch, who had a brother, Father Lynch with CONCERN. It would fly into ULI, or other spots, to drop of the load. Return to San Tome, pick up weapons, and fly these into Biafra. It would then return to Ireland for another load, sponsored by the Catholic group CONCERN.

I led the first 4 attacks at very low-level, with some success. The 5th attack was to be against troop concentrations and I declined this mission.We had some vocal debates about committing the aircraft against targets of low-value.

I mapped the tracks out for the team but the formation got lost and didn’t find the target.
I wanted to disrupt the Nigerian infrastructure along with that of the Shell installations. To this end, I targeted a number of petroleum facilities that effectively shut down a great deal of the productive capabilities. Having grown up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada’s oil centre, I was very familiar with refineries, pipeline, pumping stations, and their vulnerabilities.

SHELL/BP was largely responsible for Nigerian support and hitting them made SHELL reconsider is position when Nigeria had them cut off payments to Biafra for oil being exported.

The first 5 missions:
MAY 22 PORT HARCOURT
MAY 24 BENIN
MAY 26 ENUGU
MAY 28 UGHELLI DELTA 1 POWERPLANT
MAY 30 TROOPS – didn’t participate

Later in the year, I believe it was November, we attacked an airfield using some Harvards and the MFI-9s. One of the Harvards was a MK2 Armament trainer that I had flown with the RCAF. I will dig around for more information on this.

It must also be realized that Von Rosen, at that time, was what would be described as an “elderly transport pilot” who told me he was a year from retirement. Ground attack is not something you learn from a brochure. We were faced with an immediate requirement, for immediate action and I was pressed into service, on condition that they left my name out of the game.
The other pilots were not really much above “amateur” level, although keen to try. One has written a book in which he says we fired our rockets from 800 M. My goodness! That is very close to half a mile! At that range the target is a “fly speck” on the windscreen. A slight jiggle on the controls and your rockets would miss, miss, miss.
He also suggests we fired 2 rockets at a time, making sure we destroyed our targets.

WOW!

Let’s say that saw us take 3 minutes, after firing 2 rockets, to make another decision, and fire another 2. Added up, that gives 18 to 20 minutes a couple of hundred feet above a dangerous place.
One mission like this and all 5 aircraft would be downed by ground fire!

Never this approach. It is the explanation of someone who knows nothing about ground attack, or its inherent dangers. The idea was to get as close as possible, pointing directly at your target, then salvoing all 12 missiles in level flight, about 5 feet above the ground.

I never missed and almost blew myself up a couple of times, but you never, never,never linger over a target at low level. And, the Cardinal Rule is – Never make a second pass! They will be waiting for you!

On several attacks, other pilots salvoed their missiles very early. I can remember being focused on my target ahead, waiting to get into range, and being surprised by clusters of rockets passing me on the left and right.
To prepare, I parked my aircraft, on the ramp, and paced off 300 yards. I then put 2 markers 40 feet apart. This represented the wingspan of a fighter, length of a fighter. On returning to my aircraft I looked through the windscreen, sitting myself in the position I would be in during the attacks, and placed 2 bandaids on the plexiglass, one covering each of the ground markers.

I learned this concept from Wing Commander Joe McCarthy, my OC in RCAF pilot training who few with the Dambusters.
Now, when I was running in on a target, I would know exactly – well almost exactly – when I was 300 yards away.

I never made an attack without destroying something of value. The rockets were expensive and couldn’t be wasted.

AniOmaa:
Until you can tell there's a difference between proferring DIPLOMATIC support and MILITARY support for those countries listed on the Biafran side, then there's no point even having this argument with a daft cow-dung sniffing Aboki. Majority of those countries that supported Biafra with the exception of France (as documented and collaborated by various foreign war journals and correspondents that covered the events of the Nigerian civil war) only gave their support diplomatically to Biafra...

AniOmaa:
the so called mercenaries you posted only fought in Biafra for a few months at the early stage of the war, but majority of them left Biafra due to insufficient payments or were killed in action... it's on record that the only mercenaries that actually stayed on and fought with Biafrans inspite of all the crippling odds were Major Taffy Williams from former Rhodesia (a man who had nothing but great respect and admiration for the bravery and tenacity of the Biafran troops under his command) , Rolf Steiner, and the popular Swedish pilot Count Carl Gustaf Ericsson von Rosen who was famous for flying the "Biafran babies" till the end of the war.

AniOmaa:
Biafra largely depended on its home made weapons ingeniously manufactured by Biafrans themselves to sustain the struggle, it was only late in 1968 that France actually began to give some military aid to Biafra by sending tons of arms and ammunition via the Uli airstrip.. but the effort from France however noble in its intentions, was simply too insufficient and belated to salvage the already precarious and demoralizing Biafran war situation already made worse by starvation.

Please actually educate yourselves more about the facts of the Nigerian civil war even though your palpable ignorance can be pardoned since they extricated these things from our school curriculums, go read books, journals interviews and various other credible databases about the war instead of accentuating your stupidity by picking your "facts" from Wikipedia!

QuotaSystem:
Going to war ill-prepared & depending on your local ogbunigwes was the height of foolishness, so it's no wonder Biafra stood no chance especially against the well orchstrated blockades. If you were half as smart as you fancy yourself to be, you'd have noticed this is a rejoinder thread so the Wiki screenshots were pulled from the other thread. You should't be so dim that you have to be spoonfed logic all the time.

AniOmaa:
Until you can tell there's a difference between proferring DIPLOMATIC support and MILITARY support for those countries listed on the Biafran side, then there's no point even having this argument with a daft cow-dung sniffing Aboki. Majority of those countries that supported Biafra with the exception of France (as documented and collaborated by various foreign war journals and correspondents that covered the events of the Nigerian civil war) only gave their support diplomatically to Biafra... the so called mercenaries you posted only fought in Biafra for a few months at the early stage of the war, but majority of them left Biafra due to insufficient payments or were killed in action... it's on record that the only mercenaries that actually stayed on and fought with Biafrans inspite of all the crippling odds were Major Taffy Williams from former Rhodesia (a man who had nothing but great respect and admiration for the bravery and tenacity of the Biafran troops under his command) , Rolf Steiner, and the popular Swedish pilot Count Carl Gustaf Ericsson von Rosen who was famous for flying the "Biafran babies" till the end of the war.

Biafra largely depended on its home made weapons ingeniously manufactured by Biafrans themselves to sustain the struggle, it was only late in 1968 that France actually began to give some military aid to Biafra by sending tons of arms and ammunition via the Uli airstrip.. but the effort from France however noble in its intentions, was simply too insufficient and belated to salvage the already precarious and demoralizing Biafran war situation already made worse by starvation.

Please actually educate yourselves more about the facts of the Nigerian civil war even though your palpable ignorance can be pardoned since they extricated these things from our school curriculums, go read books, journals interviews and various other credible databases about the war instead of accentuating your stupidity by picking your "facts" from Wikipedia!