DICK GLEDHILL'S STORY EPISODE 3 Operational Dispatching

OPERATIONAL DISPATCHING

As well as instructing on courses, we also had to rotate out in the bush dispatching on Fire Force or external operations. I must say that operational dispatching duties was often a bit of a gentleman’s war. Compared to life in the R.L.I where we walked around the bush carrying heavy gear, swapping bullets with the enemy, this was a breeze.

Apart from actual airtime, throwing the troops out of the plane, the majority of one’s workload was ordering parachutes, laying them out for the next drop. Kitting the para’s out and checking them. Once the troops had been dispatched and the plane had returned to the relative safety of the Fire Force Base, time could be spent lazing by the pool catching up on a suntan or reading. It was quite nice really. The fact that there were two other dispatchers, made the workload easy too.

It was not always like that though. We often had to fly to tiny little dirt airstrips to pick up the troops for another jump into another contact. We always kept spare parachutes in the cargo hold for that reason.

This photograph shows a load of RLI troops being checked by the dispatchers prior to boarding the Dakota for an operational fire force jump from a forward airfield. This airfield has a reasonable looking tarmac runway with a gravel hard standing.

One of the bonuses of this type of work was that if the Dakota had to go back to New Sarum for repairs or for change over, the P.J.I could snivel a ride back to Salisbury for a night stop. The plane would only be there for one night and had to be back in the bush before first light.

This meant that your night was quite short, but worth it if you had a girlfriend or wife, or even if you just wanted to go out for a night on the town .

Frank Prendergast, one of the P.J.I’s checked his watch after one such night as he was leaving a night club and to his horror, realized that if he didn’t hurry, he was going to miss his plane. He caught a taxi straight to New Sarum. He arrived just as the plane was warming up. Arriving at Grand Reef just before first light, he noticed that the Para’s were kitting up for a sortie. The story goes that the plane didn’t even shut down the motors before the para’s were boarding. The problem was that Frank was still wearing his evening attire.

It must have looked absolutely absurd to see a man dispatching paratroops out in the middle of the African bush, wearing winkle picker shoes and a snazzy suit and tie.

The majority of the Dakota’s had at least a couple of bullet holes in the fuselage and it was definitely not pleasant hearing the tick tick as the odd round hit the plane, although it was usually the external raids that resulted in most hits.

One of the most frightening experiences I had whilst dispatching was on an external raid into Mozambique.

Our task was to dispatch sixteen S.A.S on “The other side” as we liked to call externals. 

We were to drop one stick of four, followed a few minutes later by another four, then just after dark, the last eight.

Most of the flight was uneventful and we were flying low to avoid early detection.

At one stage we passed over some large powerlines, one of the S.A.S looked out in horror. “Jesus mate, tell the pilot to go up. We have some electrically sensitive equipment here.”

I switched the mike on.

“Hey skipper, the boys want a bit of height, some of the gear they are carrying might go boom with the high tension power lines we are crossing over.”

“Roger that.” came the calm voice of the pilot.

We were in for another shock too. We flew over a large road construction works.

“Geeze will you look at that, there’s millions of dollars of earth moving equipment down there and it looks to be East German stuff.”

It looked as though the whole Communist bloc was giving aid and succour to the terrorist cause.

Not long before last light, we had dropped of the first two sticks and the eight man stick had kitted up and were ready to go.

“Bring the men to action stations.” Came the voice of the pilot through my head set.

I pointed to the number two dispatcher and made the sweeping motion to bring the men down to the door.

“Action stations.” Shouted the number two. The eight men shuffled down to the back of the aircraft.

It had just gone to complete darkness outside.

“Watch the lights.” Came the pilot’s voice and I pointed to the lights above the door.

A minute later came, “Red light on”

“Stand in the door.” Called number two.

The men took one pace forward, with the first man standing in the door.

Then, several things happened at once.

I saw tracer shooting up past the aircraft. I heard the dreaded tick, tick, tick, as rounds hit the plane. I heard the pilot’s voice saying “Going down.” Then eight burly fully laden paratroopers and three dispatchers were pinned momentarily to the roof of the aircraft as the plane went into a power dive.

Just as suddenly, all eleven of us were sprawled all over the floor as the plane levelled out.

Static lines were splayed out in untidy heaps all over the interior, pulled out of their stows by the violence of bodies being flung about.

“Fucken hell, what the frig happened there?’ shouted a couple of the boys as they tried to scramble to their feet.

The cable of my headset had been pulled out of its socket and I hurried to plug it back in.

“Everybody OK back there?” the pilot’s voice still seemed fairly calm.

“I’ll check sir.”

“Hey, is everybody Ok? No injuries or wounds?”

“No I think we are OK.” Replied the callsign leader. The men were climbing back onto the seats now and checking themselves for broken bones or bleeding from any wounds.

Everything seemed to be Ok considering what we had just been through.

The pilot was starting to ask if we should go round again when the stick leader aborted the mission. It had been well and truly compromised.

As we were heading back to Grand Reef, the S.A.S trooper who had been standing in the door reached over and touched my knee. “Hey Sarge, when we get back to base I’m gonna buy you long dops ek,s’e (Lots of beers) we are going to get lekker pissed.”

It transpired that during the dive, most of his body had been thrown out of the plane, in fact, his legs had actually been bent over the top of the fuselage. The only thing stopping him from leaving the plane completely was the three dispatchers who had been holding onto him prior to the jump.

“Shit mate. The only reason we probably held  you was for something to grab onto in total fear.”

It had all happened so quickly that none of us would ever know whether it was self preservation, or whether we had thought to try and save the man.

“I don’t care what the reason was Sarge, I am still alive because you held onto me.

We mostly sat in silence all the way back to Rhodesia. But we did get very drunk.

On yet another raid, this time into Zambia, we were chased by a Russian built M.I.G 17.

 I believe this operation was the attempt to take out Joshua Nkomo, the Z.I.P.R.A leader,

The M.I.G had been chasing us for a while and had had plenty of opportunity to shoot at us, but for some reason it had not fired and the last we saw of it was when it peeled off as we flew down a re-entrant and over the Zambezi River and back home.

It has been said before but it needs saying again. Throughout the war, the Rhodesian Air-force pilots were amongst the best and the bravest in the world. They flew long hours in stressful, dangerous conditions, and yet they maintained their cool air of professionalism at all times. They seemed unflappable even under the most arduous conditions. We owe them a debt of gratitude.

FREE FALL TRAINING.

As well as static line deployments, the S.A.S and the Selous Scouts needed to infiltrate deep into enemy territory and often the only way they could do it clandestinely was by free fall or H.A.L.O as it is known. (High Altitude, Low Opening.)

Carlos Gomez and I were fairly experienced free fallers in the civvy world and we were to be the schools next free fall instructors.

Because of our experience, instead of going through a whole new course, we were put as supernumeraries for one of the courses. The instructor I had was an Englishman by the name of Ralph Gratton. Ralph was very fit and extremely dedicated to his work, he taught the class well and I learnt a lot from him.

One of the difficulties encountered by this type of parachuting is carrying equipment in free fall.

The Bergen is carried behind the legs, strapped to the bottom of the parachute harness.

The Bergen’s extra area acts as a wind break as one builds up speed towards terminal velocity and unless one is a fairly competent free faller, this can cause major problems such as getting into a spin or going unstable.

This had been an ongoing problem for years in military circles.

After the first course, Carlos and I were discussing ways to fix the problem.

As I mentioned before Carlos was a very smart man, he gave the school quite a few ideas that improved training methods.

We were sitting in the training room catching up on a bit of admin work. Carlos was leaning back in his chair, ankles crossed and he was deep in thought. You always knew when his brain was working overtime. He would hold a pencil in his mouth, usually tapping his teeth with it. As soon as the thought came to fruition, the pencil would come away from the mouth and would start waving in circles around the air.

The pencil was doing its circles.

“You know, I reckon the problem is because we are not doing enough clean fatigue jumps before doing the equipment jumps. They do not have the jump numbers or the confidence to handle kit jumps by the time we throw them in at the deep end.”

“Fair enough. But if we do more clean fatigue jumps, that will mean less kit jumps. Wouldn’t that negate the whole reason for the course? To get guys and their equipment on the ground?”

“Yeah, but if extra jumps fix the problem, then we can push for extra jumps on the course.”

I thought about it for a while.

“Granted, but you know the military, they already think sixty jumps is enough as it is. How are we going to justify adding more?”

The pencil had been tapping for a while, when suddenly it was doing its circles again.

“Well we won’t tell them. We’ll just do it.”

“Fucken Hell, we’ll get right in the poo if we do.” I replied.

A cheeky grin appeared on Carlos’s face.

“Well you know the old adage. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission.”

#26 Free Fall course with their course instructors seated in the middle of the middle row Sgt Richard (Dick) Gledhill and Sgt  Carlos Gomez. I wonder what happened to Dick, because I see that for once, he is properly dressed in uniform?

 At about this time, the Parachute school had a new O.C. Squadron Leader Frank Hales. Frank Hales had come to us from the S.A.S, and previous to that the British S.A.S.

 From the stories I have heard form the soldiers under his command, he was an extremely brave man. He was well into his forties during our war, but Henri Lepetit, a Frenchman serving with the Rhodesian S.A.S related to me how, once in Mozambique his callsign, led by Captain Hales, had been compromised by Frelimo soldiers. During the day, they had had to run about thirty kays in the hot sun. During that time, they were involved in several running contacts. Henri stated that they were so stuffed that they had wanted just to give up. Captain Hales bullied and threatened them this kept them going until they were picked up by chopper, close to the Rhodesian border.

“Without him. We would have all been dead.” Henri said this with awe, and he was no mean soldier himself.

Squadron Leader Hales was a bloody good O.C, but he was a stickler for the rules, and we knew he would not change them for a couple of young upstarts.

On the next course, we did what Carlos had suggested.

The results were predictable.

“What the blazes is going on?” The boss had stormed into the room and he was angry, very angry.

Carlos and I went into our rehearsed speech as we tried to explain what we were trying to achieve.

“This is not your jump shack on Delport Farm Carlos. This is a military establishment. We do things by the book here.”

Carlos’s pencil was doing its thing.

“We meant no disrespect sir, all we were trying to do was improve the chances of the men keeping stable during the kit jumps.”

“I don’t care what you were trying to do. Why didn’t you come and see me first?”

Carlos now brought out his ace.

“I have to ask this question sir. What would you have done if we had asked you?”

The boss took a moment to digest this.

“You know I would have refused.”

“We did know that sir, and to be honest, it is a trial for us too, but we wanted to have something to give you as positive proof when we came to you.”

Well, the three of us sat down and thrashed out what we were going to do. Carlos wanted five jumps. The boss wanted one. In the end we settled for two extra jumps.

“I should charge the both of you for insubordination for this.” the boss remarked. “So you had better come up with the goods.”

The two extra jumps did indeed make a difference and at the end of the war Squadron Leader Hales wrote two very good references for us about our conducting several successful courses.

During the latter days of the war, the S.A.S and Selous Scouts started to use square or ram air parachutes as they are known (We had been using round parachutes up till then.) At first the only people who knew how to pack them were Paul Hogan, Carlos and myself, this meant an added workload, as we had to pack as well as instruct. In the end, Carlos and I were sent down to Safety Equipment to teach the packers how to pack. They learnt quickly and they were as keen as mustard and soon we were jumping regularly with squares. Unfortunately the end of the war came before the elite units had a chance to use them to any real effect.

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