EUGLOGY: COL JAN BREYTENBACH (SADF)
Passing of a Warrior: Jan Breytenbach
By John Elsegood from Australia / October 17, 2024
(Republished with permission)
Photos by Alex Faria
South Africa’s most decorated combat soldier, Colonel Jan Breytenbach, has died in his homeland at 91.
Appropriately the Father of the Special Forces, 44th Parachute Brigade and 32 Battalion died on Father’s Day in South Africa, June 16. He was one of only two men to win the Van Riebeeck Decoration (DVR) – for distinguished service in the field against the enemy – and also the Southern Cross Decoration (SD).
Not only was he the country’s best-known soldier, but he was also a writer, conservationist, and Christian missionary. It was also fitting that the Colonel became a writer, as bestselling novelist Frederick Forsyth identified him as his inspiration for The Dogs of War.
His long military career included being with the Royal Navy Fleet Arm during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956; the Biafran War; and the Border War (1966-89) against Marxist forces, including Soviet-Cuban troops in Angola.
After Suez, he rejoined the South African Defence Force (SADF) after South Africa left the Commonwealth, and helped to establish 1 Reconnaissance Commando, in 1971, after being involved in SAS operations in Rhodesia. In the Biafran genocidal war in Nigeria, he led a company of SA paratroopers to rescue Christians from federal forces in that country. His 1970 flight from Uli was the last out of Biafra, complete with fire and explosions, on departure.
In 1975, as a Major, he led Operation Savannah, the SADF’s covert operation in the Angolan civil war. Not only did he rout communist forces, but he returned with thousands of black Angolans recruited to fight for his legendary 32 Battalion. He related this in two of his many books (Forged in Battle and They Lived by the Sword). Promoted in 1977 he then led an assault on SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) HQ, the next year, at Cassinga (mentioned in Eagle Strike).
As a senior staff officer in Northern Transvaal Command, he commanded 44 Parachute Brigade (1980-82); later being founder/leader of the School of Guerrilla Warfare until his retirement in 1987.
Breytenbach was involved in operations in the African Cold War struggle, played out on the periphery, and on one occasion he was thrown from his jeep after hitting a landmine but displayed great courage to extricate a badly wounded soldier, Dave Barr, from the burning wreckage.
‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’
Frontline Fellowship is a missionary organisation that works especially in war zones. Its founder and director, Rev Peter Hammond, was shocked to receive an application from the recently retired military legend to join his team. Hammond himself was a fighter but one attempting Christian penetration of Marxist African states, (and behind the Iron Curtain in Europe), being once jailed in Mozambique for Bible smuggling!
“Jan had read my publication, The Christian at War, and wanted to join. I drove to Wilderness to meet him and his wife Rosalind. It was clear we had much in common as he was also outraged by ivory poaching in the Caprivi Strip of South West Africa (now Namibia) and Angola. Jan had adopted two lions and a leopard as pets.”
From January 1989, the Colonel trained Rev Hammond’s Christian missionary recruits in bushcraft, tracking and anti-tracking behind “enemy lines” (his words), infiltration and exfiltration procedures and tactics.
“Some of his chaplaincy services made us wince, when he would unleash withering sermons in exposing sins and crimes, including in front of General Meiring, (the future SADF chief and eventually the first to serve the Mandela government). The Colonel preached as he fought, relentlessly and boldly and he hit his targets.”
It didn’t stop there either. The missionary chief recalled Jan rolling over in his sleeping bag and saying: “Peter, let’s go to Angola and preach to the communists.” Well, why not? There were 55,000 Cubans, plus Soviet supervisors and more local enemy soldiers to hear the Word!
This “sortie” involved getting the local Commandant to give them a helicopter, a Portuguese-speaking interpreter, from 32 Battalion and flying to three separate locations on the South West African/Angolan border. The Colonel and the Reverend Hammond were actually behind the lines, in Angola, preaching to the communists. After opening in prayer, the rival forces would hear a sermon that “took no prisoners”, including describing the Marxist atrocities and destruction of Angola once the Portuguese left!
He was an “equal-opportunity attacker”, managing to “get up the nose” of the world’s longest serving foreign minister, his own, R.F. “Pik” Botha. At one border airstrip, word came to him: “You and Hammond are to be out of there, first thing tomorrow.” Jan mused: “I fired the first shots of this war back in 1966, now I am expelled from the country I devoted 24 years to defending for telling the truth to our communist enemies! There is some irony here.”
Perhaps as much as him also having two high achieving brothers: Cloete and Breyten: Cloete the photographer who photographed Nelson Mandela as a prisoner, and Breyten a noted radical writer!
He is remembered by many as a key warrior in the fight to prevent Soviet-Cuban expansion in South West Africa and in preventing the Angolan imbroglio being repeated across the Orange River, in Northern South Africa.
He is survived by his wife, two children and two grandchildren.
