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Could have sworn this was a Saigaman thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvTv-I2Y390

And I think I will root for the Katangese, based upon the very little I know.

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Who do we root for?

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Who do we root for?

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arfcom is not gonna rot for the UN.. is it ?

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An amazing story. Those soldiers may have been there due to the UN, but they fought against incredible odds. If the UN hadn't thrown them under the bus they'd have won against worse than 20 to 1 odds.

I can't wait for the movie.

ETA: It's worth keeping in mind that the UN wasn't quite as bad then as it is today, and the Katanga state (and the Belgian government who supported it) was pretty screwed up.

Quoted:
arfcom is not gonna rot for the UN.. is it ?

Quoted:
...
The Irish dealt with forces greatly outnumbering them, but they were also fighting mostly Bayeke and Baluba tribesmen.  Most of those men were armed with muskets, single-shot cartridge rifles, bows and arrows, war clubs, pangas, spears, etc. with only a minority having any sort of modern firearms and none having any crew-served weapons.
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The Irish at Jadotville got put into a shitty position because the UN believed its own propaganda about Katanga and Moise Tshombe and acted accordingly
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Certainly, the Irish did well enough considering that, while the forces arrayed against them were mostly primitives, even a primitive force approaching 6,000 in number can be rather deadly.  But they did so in service of a terrible cause in a war that was their own making.  
...

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Never even heard of this conflict before. Interesting

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Best thing to happen to Africa was colonization. Worst to to happen to Africa was de-colonzation.

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Never even heard of this conflict before. Interesting

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Very interesting. Bigstick might be biased, and perhaps rightly so. However, he's laid out a pretty good explanation of the events portrayed. I will watch, just to see how it's laid out. I have a hatred for the UN that comes directly working with those fucksticks.

Quoted:
Could have sworn this was a Saigaman thread.

Quoted:
arfcom is not gonna rot for the UN.. is it ?

Quoted:
Didn't realize that the Rhodie mercenaries were on the other side of the conflict... they just referred to the mercs as "whites."

During those last days of the fighting, the atmosphere in Elisabethville had a dream-like quality of unreality. The streets were filled with rubble and lined with blasted palm trees and shattered cars, their tires flat and their windows broken. Four trainloads of white women and children--about 1,100 people altogether--had been evacuated to Northern Rhodesia. Perhaps another 100 had made the risky road trip to safety. This left Elisabethville, which before independence had had a white population of 14,000, with about 3,000 white males and perhaps 1,000 women. Many of these--nearly a quarter--had been driven from their homes by the fighting. Perhaps 200 were huddled in the Grand Hotel Leopold II, sleeping eight to a room and on mattresses in the lobby and in the corridors. During the fighting, the Leo Deux had been fairly gay. There was whisky but no beer or soda.. The restaurant always managed to produce something in the way of food. This and Michel's were the only places in town where you could get anything to eat. At the latter it was still possible to munch a chateaubriand bernaise and enjoy a modest bottle of Beaujolais by candlelight, while machine guns chattered in the darkened streets and mortar shells whistled overhead. Both places were hangouts for gendarmes and Les Affreux ("the Terrible Ones"), the mercenaries, who ate in their camouflaged battledress with their floppy jungle hats on their heads and their rifles slung over their shoulders. We got to know some of these mercenaries pretty well.

All of us will remember Luigi, who in many ways was a typical mercenary. Luigi, despite his nickname (many mercenaries, for obvious reasons, preferred to use a nom de guerre), was a Pole. Like most Poles, he was a Catholic. Like almost every Pole outside Warsaw's orbit, he nurtured an abiding hatred of Communism which, as is natural, he associated with Russia, his country's ancient foe and present conqueror. The Poles, because of their geographical position on the eastern marches of Western European civilization, have had to develop certain natural qualities. They've had to fight to preserve their national identity since the days when Genghis Khan swept over the treeless steppes from Central Asia. When they haven't had a nation of their own to fight for (and this has been the rule rather than the exception throughout history), they've been perfectly willing to fight for other people, as long as the cause seemed just. Kosciusko, for instance, served as a "mercenary" in another separatist movement--that of the thirteen American colonies. Luigi had been part of this great martial tradition. He'd fought in the Polish Legion against the Italians and Germans in the Western Desert at Monte Cassino. When he was wounded in Italy, nobody thought to call him a "mercenary." Then he was a patriot, as were those American "mercenaries" who served in the RAF before America entered the war against Fascism. After the war Luigi, deprived of a homeland, wandered around from continent to continent performing, like most men. a series of not very interesting jobs that furnished him with food for his belly but gave him little satisfaction. His most recent job had been as chef to a high British official in nearby African territory. Then Luigi's wife ran off with a man he described as "a glamorous person." Luigi, always restless, decided he would become "a glamorous person." At the time Katanga was under attack from anti-Western Congolese elements and troops from a bunch of nations which, Luigi noted, had done nothing to help Poland when it was assaulted simultaneously by Russia and Nazi Germany. The pay was good (when it came--the mercenaries were often unpaid for as long as three months at a time), and Luigi settled for a captain's commission. However, to describe him as a mercenary is to ignore Luigi's religious faith, his political convictions, and his people's "soldier-of-fortune" tradition. Luigi was a mercenary only in the sense that he was paid for his services, as was every U.N. soldier in Katanga. But was Luigi, after all, more a mercenary than the Swedish soldier who had no real interest in Katanga, religious or otherwise, yet who received double the pay for fighting the local inhabitants of the region? And what of the Gurkhas of the Indian Army in Katanga? Nepal had no U.N. contingent in Katanga, yet these were Nepalese. The Gurkhas, mercenaries in the purest sense, had served first Imperial Britain and now republican India with equal impartiality, ferocity, and skill. Finally, since the most vicious assaults on the motives and characters of whites serving Katanga comes from the Left, let us ask this question: Whatever one may think of their politics, were those Americans who served in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War "mercenaries?" Of course they were not, and to suggest that they were is to dishonor the dead. The same holds true for the majority of the whites who fought for Katanga. Some were nothing ore or less than paid killers. Many others were emotional cripples of some sort or another. But the majority of them fought for a variety of reasons, only one of which was money.

Luigi was always a jaunty figure around the Leo Deux or Michel's in his camouflaged battledress festooned Ridgeway-style with hand grenades, Bren gun slung over his shoulder, a red silk scarf at his throat, and a helmet on his head. He was very Polish in appearance, short and barrel-chested with sandy hair, high cheekbones, and grey eyes that glimmered with splinters of light when he laughed. He laughed a lot. Sometimes it would be an old joke from the last war, or something about the railway underpass (which he commanded)--how his mixed force of whites and Katangans had thrown back an Irish attack or how he'd taken a pratfall when surprised by an exploding mortar shell. He was only solemn when the talk drifted around to Poland, the native land he knew he'd never see again.

The U.N. badly wanted Luigi's tunnel because it provided direct and covered entry into the center of the city for their Ferret armored cars. So they gave it considerable attention. In the daytime, Saabs or Canberras would come hedgehopping in at rooftop level to blast Luigi's boys with cannons and machine guns, and the Irish would lob mortar shells at the tunnel. At night, there would be more mortar barrages and probing attacks. We used to squat on the balconies of the Leo Deux with all lights extinguished, listening to the dull roar of explosions and the chattering of machine guns from the tunnel while tracer bullets burned across the night sky. Somebody would say "Luigi's catching hell tonight" or "Luigi will have a thirst tomorrow." We never talked about the tunnel except in terms of Luigi. It was his personal real estate, his own small slice of Poland. Luigi had neither wife, nor home, nor nation of his own but the tunnel was his. In the tunnel with the ricochets whining like angry bees and the ground shaking from exploding mortar shells, Luigi was somebody. He was Kosciusko. He was the Polish barons standing up against the Huns and the Mongols. The tunnel made Luigi real and gave him meaning and he loved it as only a Pole could love his mistress. He was definitely "a glamorous person." Without the tunnel, Luigi was just a squat little man who used to cook other people's meals, a fellow who couldn't keep his wife in line. I often wished the errant lady could have seen him in all his glory.

We almost lost Luigi on the 13th. When he came into the bar the next day, there was a bloody bandage wrapped around his head where a shell fragment had taken a hunk out of his skull. He was dirty, unshaven, and tired, and the going had obviously been pretty rough. But Luigi could still laugh, a great rumbling thunder of a laugh that began somewhere down by his belt buckle and gathered strength as it bounced up through his chest.

On Friday evening, Luigi did not come in for his usual pernod at the Leo Deux and we knew things must be bad at the tunnel. There was heavy firing from that direction and from the north. Away off to the west we could hear muffled explosions and the angry stutter of automatic weapons from the Lido area, through which the Ethiopian conquerors of the golf course slowly were pressing. There were few mercenaries or gendarmes in the bar and most of those who were there were wounded. In the early days of the fighting, the bar had been packed with journalists, soldiers, and local white volunteers who spent their days in their normal civilian occupations and then went "moonlighting" with Tshombe's troops. These, again, could hardly be termed mercenaries. They were bitter men whose friends and relatives had been killed or wounded by U.N. fire, whose homes had been smashed into rubble, whose businesses had been ruined. They had an odd assortment of weapons and even odder attempts at uniforms. Nobody paid them. They fought because Katanga was their country and they hated the U.N.

Now there were few of them around the hotel. There were plenty of civilians but none with arms. The Katangan police came through checking the identity cards of the Africans in the hotel, a bad sign because it meant things were falling apart and the authorities were looking for deserters and traitors.

The night of the 15th was bad. U.N. mortar shells rained down on the center of the city all night long, bracketing the hotel and sending fragments into the rooms and rattling off the walls. At first I'd had to content myself with two chair cushions on the floor as a bed. But as the U.N. edged closer and the shelling became more intense, one of my more fortunate colleagues had vacated his bed and gone back to Rhodesia. So I had a place to sleep. The other bed was occupied by a former British mercenary. Things were not so good for him. If (or rather when) the U.N. captured the city, he stood a good chance of being turned over to the Leopoldville Government. If he tried to get out of Katanga, the gendarmes might well shoot him as a deserter. As the night wore on, we became quite skillful at rolling off our beds onto the floor in the split second given one between the time one heard the whistle of an incoming mortar shell and the explosion. Finally, we gave up and dragged our mattresses onto the floor and slept there. All night long the mortars came down and fragments rattled off the roof like acorns falling in the autumn.

In the morning there was no food, water, or electricity in the hotel. The lobby was jammed with taut-faced Belgians talking quietly in little knots. Mortars peppered the streets outside and the acrid smoke poured into the hotel. Dogs ran about barking crazily. Wounded gendarmes, sullen and tired, streamed south towards the one remaining gap in the U.N.'s pincers. One hard-looking mercenary in battledress with his Bren gun slung over his shoulder and a suitcase incongruously in one hand came into the hotel and disappeared upstairs. Minutes later he appeared unarmed and in civilian clothes. There were still a few gendarme mortar crews in the area and one went into action in front of the hotel, which indicated that the U.N. was no more than a few hundred yards away. There were no more white mercenaries in evidence except for a single French officer who careened around the streets in a jeep on which a heavy machine gun was mounted. The tunnel was ominously quiet and it was rumored that it had fallen. When fire began to come into the city from the tunnel, we knew that this was the case. Luigi was gone, probably dead or captured, although there was always a chance that he'd pulled out and headed for Kipushi. I was sorry that I had not had a chance to say good-bye but glad that he had had his red scarf, his few months of recapturing the brittle gaiety of World War II, of being "a glamorous person."

Quoted:I think you guys might appreciate this vignette of a foreign Katangese Gendarme, a Polish exile, excerpted from Rebels, Mercenaries, and Dividends: The Katanga Story by Smith Hempstone (pp. 197-203).