To command, control and co-ordinate the strategic movement from Lagos to Bonny.
The Army on the other hand, was tasked with providing the human capacity to actualise the capture of Bonny and it's environs.
The subsequent downplaying of the economic strategic importance of Bonny by the Kaduna Mafia through their mouthpieces, New Nigeria and Radio Kaduna was one of the callous economic designs of the Northern clique.
Preparation For Bonny Invasion
Training
The troops were raw, absolutely out of shape, due to the lack of training. The officers though rusty were good war materials. Training began in earnest, with nothing being left to chance. Tarkwa Bay was used as the training ground for the Bonny operations.
Before 1967, the Nigerian Navy had never had battle or war experiences. As stated earlier, the Army and Navy had never previously been permitted to engage in joint military exercises, for policy reasons. This circumstance was capable of compromising the command and control aspects of the pending Bonny operation so the policy was reversed. The joint exercises by the Army and Navy in preparation for the invasion of Bonny provided it with its first exposure to warfare. Naval manoeuvres on the high sea off Lagos drove home the lessons of ship pitching, embarkation, disembarkation in daylight and darkness. The capabilities of naval gunnery were not left out. Naval ship drills, such as abandoning ship, thrilled the boys during the training exercises and kept their attention for less interesting exercises. The assimilation looked promising.
To get the best out of Bonny Task Force, the welfare of the troops' families was of paramount importance. Arrangements had to be made by the government for the dependants who were to return to their hometowns. In addition, the means of ensuring the timely payment of the troops entitlements, had to be put in place. Education and medical attention for the soldiers' dependants was given high priority. It was anticipated that if these measures were conscientiously implemented, the troops morale would be boosted.
Of all the military operations, amphibious operation is perhaps the most dreaded, due to its complexity in preparations, planning and execution. It is therefore necessary to examine in detail the rebel projections for the defence of Bonny and its eventual loss.
Rebel Defence Of Bonny
In view of Ojukwu's well publicised bragging about the strength of his forces, particularly the "...no power in Black Africa can defeat Biafra" boast, one would have expected that the effective defence of Bonny would be given very high priority. More so, bearing in mind the centrality of Bonny to the main bone of contention - the control of Nigeria's oil resources.
Before the declaration of 'the police action,' it became known to the federal said that Major Kalu had been designated Sector Commander for Port Harcourt rebel sector including the Bonny area. Battles are not won on the basis of logistics alone. The whims and caprices of the overall Commanders are important indicators of the appropriate strategies that should be adopted in specific battles. Kalu was a trustworthy officer, a federalist at heart. He had joined the officer corps from the ranks; thus his knowledge and application of the principles of strategy was limited. He was not known to hold definitive political views. Kalu could be assessed as an average professional and a jolly good fellow with bags of humour. He was my opponent, another family man.
We worked on the assumption that Kalu would bust his gut logistically to see to the retention of Bonny at all cost. We were to find that elementary military considerations were subjected by the Biafrans, to political ambition.
The Bonny River is treacherous due to the shifting sands surrounding it, particularly from the entrance. To safeguard ships, the entrance to Bonny River had been dotted with buoys. The deep waters between the buoys mark out the dredged navigational lanes. To impede a landing by federal troops, the rebels had the option of shifting these buoys either to the shallow areas east or west of the officially dredged channel. This would have hampered Nigerian ships and doomed our invasion. In addition to the false buoyed passage, it was reckoned that the rebels would sink explosive filled drums along the true channel, which would be set off by approaching federal ships. Also, a string of barrier nets strung across the channel and invested with sea miners would have doomed the passage of the Navy to Bonny. Gunboats could have been employed to ply and patrol the channel. Bonny had an inshore crude oil tank farm: with a little ingenuity, the Biafrans could have run pipes from this crude oil tank farm into the channel. Additionally if this tank farm were to be set ablaze by the rebels, the fate of the invasion would have been a spectacular disaster.
It is a mark of traditional military tactics for pile-boxes to be constructed for defensive purposes. Finima, Ebongon, Kanamant, Elema Ifoko were ideal locations for siting shore batteries encased in pile-boxes which would have delayed the Nigerian Navy from approaching Bonny. To strengthen the defence of Bonny, mines could have been littered on the South-western portion of Bonny. The absence of watchtowers and coast guards implied oversights that sealed the fate of the rebels because the risk of surprise by federal troops would have been compromised. Underwater obstacles constructed of steel would have made ideal obstacles to break the momentum of any Nigerian Navy approach.
The Bonny River is subjected to tidal waves, both high and low. One would have expected that 'The Ibadan', which they had captured by good fortune, would have been deployed by the rebels to cover the various Bonny River approaches. They failed to do this or to make any sort of use of this asset. Given the declaration of hostilities, they should have had no difficulty in predicting the time of the invasion. To our astonishment, upon the capture of Bonny, we found 'The Ibadan' anchored leisurely at Bonny - a sitting duck.
I have dealt with the military unpreparedness of the rebels at Bonny to show that they had all the advantages of the defender...but no military defensive plans to counteract the might of the Federal Navy.
*****
Bonny Island is the defender's paradise and an attacker's nightmare. The approach to Bonny is the Bonny River. On a clear day, the visibility exposes all approaching ships. The habitable area is strung like a ribbon along the hard-ground on the western shore. The whole island looks like a clenched fist with the thumb stretching out. It was the stretched thumb area jutting out towards Port Harcourt that featured the only sizeable and militarily ideal assault and landing area. The northern tips of the thumb contain the ideal sand beaches and shallow water for berthing landing crafts. As a landing point it also had room for rapid expansion of the landing area crucial for pumping in logistics and supplies for re-enforcements. The eastern portion of Bonny was totally mangrove swamp. Bonny at that time had one major road running paralleled to the western coastline. The width of dry land is only five hundred yards wide. This was the gateway to the area of the Shell-BP tank farm and the government school that housed rebel soldiers.
Little or nothing was known about the rebel disposition in Bonny. Unattested information filtered to the Federal side about the loyalty of the people of Bonny. However, there was a practically no reliable information to go by. It dawned on the military/naval planning syndicate that military/naval appreciation from our maps were the only reliable source of rebel intentions and logistics build up.
It became evident that the naval capabilities of the rebels in Bonny were next to zero in terms of firepower and naval vessels. The rebels had undeniable superiority in land forces if the forces were strategically located at Finima on Bonny Island and the mainland to the east of Finima.
To add to the naval problem, Bonny River is subjected to tidal waves that would indicate likely attack windows. The tidal information indicated that 56 minutes was the longest period for high tide while low water was 47 minutes. Thus Nigerian naval ship would by natural phenomena become sitting ducks to be easily plucked out of the sea if coastal batteries were mounted at either Bonny or Finima. The sinking of the bulk of the Federal Navy could have been the first major decisive victory of the rebels had they given sufficient consideration to the military dogma that preparation is the only guarantee against defending an attack.
The first line of defence in the phases of war, is information. Relevant information about your enemy, his preparedness, his economy, the morale of both the public and armed forces, his intentions, his military prowess, his officers and likely commanders, his initiatives and its capacities. All these are imperative to a serious defence of territory and well-known principles of military doctrine. They can hardly be described as secrets of warfare. Furthermore, the rebels had ample information available to them. For unfathomable reasons, they failed to make appropriate use of it. The collation of these pieces of information by them would have provided them with a definitive portrait of our naval capabilities.
The buoys in Bonny River are anchored ranges, to which the coastal batteries could have been trained to sink Nigerian naval ships in the event of attacks. Biafra was not lacking in flat trajectory guns that could have buried any invasion vessel. Rather than take concrete action, Biafra was totally pre-occupied with rhetoric and propaganda to keep the flames of he newfound nationalism alive. Their fate was sealed.
Their sloppiness and lack of professionalism was mystifying. Ojukwu's educational background is impressive. He had adequate supply of officers of the finest military material and bearing. It is still cloaked in political mystery that Ojukwu was unable to appreciate that the deployment of the major portion of his forces to counter the northern Federal offensive left his southern area open to surprise attacks.
The Biafran naval capabilities were restricted to one seaward defence vessel - "Ibadan," which the rebels had seized at the commencement of hostilities from the Nigerian Navy. This should have been assigned patrol duties around Bonny. "Ibadan" had a four-inch gun, with various other defensive structures. In addition, the scores of local motorised boats that abounded in Bonny could have been converted into gunboats.
Churchill had stated in his World Crisis -
"War is a business of terrible pressure and persons who take part in it must fail if they are not strong enough to withstand them."
Victory cannot be purchased or achieved by the stroke of a wand. The gods of war have no faith in prophecies; it might be admissible to human thinking and psyche to conjure results, but the wise and the professional keeps to the omen of his immediate horizons. The adoption of flexibility generally described as initiative or resourcefulness, are the strength of the non-political military officer. The efficacy of prayers is the prerogative of all, but to preach religion when confronted with a hostile war as Ojukwu did was as good as enlisting the devil incarnate rather than God on his side. In war, nothing must be left to the realm of probabilities. Every fact and possibility must be dissected until it bleeds and pleads for the graveyard rest.
The naval Chief Coordinator, Commander Rowe was subjected to varied questions, to establish the capabilities of our ships, their weakness, resourcefulness and suitability for tropical warfare on which we were about to embark. Comparatively, the Federal navy had the firepower for a sustained sea battle and amphibious landing. My inquiries refreshed my memory of the few days spent in training in Libya. Rommel, the "Desert Fox" and one of Hitler's most capable Generals, once spoke of the capabilities of German warfare during the initial campaign in 1942:
"The initial advantages were of no avail once the material conditions for it no longer existed." He affirmed, "that the bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns can do nothing without plenty of ammunition..." and that "the battle is fought and decided by the quarter-master before the shooting begins."
Having established that the Navy was endowed with the best Officer material available and supported by equally dependable ratings, I was convinced that the Navy would ferry us to our military objective at Bonny. The Nigerian Army had practically no experience of sea-borne operations. Of course, some officers had acquired the basic rudimentary principles of sea-borne operations. It was fashionable during late 1966 and early 1967 for some others and senior civil servants to confer at Dodan Barracks to review and to hammer out new paths of Nigerian action during those turbulent days.
Command And Control
As has been stated earlier, the Navy under the seasoned Captain Soroh was the overall Bonny Task Force Commander. Once the troops were ashore, the command and control of the military forces would pass to me. The preparations and planning as had been indicated had to be a joint affair. Nigerian thanks should go to a Briton, Commander Rowe, whose experience contributed immensely to our success. To combat the acute shortage of communication, code words coordinated at all levels were rigidly instituted. All forces taking part in the operation were addressed within the limits that security permitted. To further enhance confidence between Naval and Army officers, a series of joint mass dinners were organised.
Surprise Element
The surprise element was another critical factor that would enable us to diminish Biafran resistance. At the onset of the war in 1967, Lagos was a spy's paradise: thus secrecy, stealth was essential to sustain the surprise element. As stated earlier, the naval personnel of Biafran origin had carried out an excellent job of sabotage prior to their departure. Guns, navigational aids, and communication equipment had been extensively damaged. Only a few loyal officers knew the extent of the damage inflicted by the fleeing personnel. New communication crystals were installed in Nigerian Navy radios. The Apapa naval yard was placed totally out of bounds to civilians and suspected Biafran sympathisers. The repairs and restoration were conducted in absolute secrecy to the utter consternation of the Biafrans, who had calculated on a crippled and incapacitated Navy.
Liddle Hart, in his publication 'Strategy: The Indirect Approach' had this to say about strategy:
"Movement lies in the physical sphere ... movement generates surprises, and surprise gives impetus to movement."
The capture of Bonny entailed a lot of movement. To sustain the surprise element for the projected strategic movement from Lagos to Bonny, it was decided to load and embark the troops and to sail from Lagos, under the cover of darkness. The assault was to be carried out at dawn. The Biafrans were to be attacked while they slept. To further sustain the surprise impetus, the following were instituted at Ikeja cantonment:
