Battle of Cuito Cuanavale

The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a long campaign fought on and off between 14 August 1987 and 23 March 1988 in south-eastern Angola, south and east of the town that gave it its name. Angola's government army, FAPLA, later reinforced by Cuban troops, faced the UNITA rebel movement and the South African Defence Force (SADF). It was the biggest single engagement of the Angolan Civil War and the biggest conventional battle in Africa since the Second World War, and both sides claimed to have won it.

After Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975, the Soviet-backed MPLA government, whose army was FAPLA, fought a long civil war against Jonas Savimbi's UNITA. The government was backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and UNITA by the United States and South Africa. South Africa, which then controlled neighbouring South West Africa, today's Namibia, also wanted to stop Namibian guerrillas of PLAN from operating out of southern Angola.

In August 1987, after failed attempts the year before, FAPLA launched Operation Saluting October with eight brigades. Their goal was Mavinga, a key UNITA base and supply centre, and after it UNITA's headquarters at Jamba. The Soviet Union provided more than a billion dollars' worth of new equipment and attached advisers to every brigade. South Africa responded with Operation Moduler. Fighting on the Lomba River began on 6 September, and through September and October the SADF threw back repeated attempts to cross it, destroying most of FAPLA's bridging equipment. FAPLA's 47 Brigade was wiped out, and the surviving units fell back towards Cuito Cuanavale.

The South Africans and UNITA then tried, in Operation Hooper, to trap and destroy the retreating brigades before they could dig in. They failed. FAPLA concentrated its forces in a narrow area between the Cuito, Tumpo and Dala rivers, protected by the terrain and dense minefields and stiffened by Cuban armoured units now directly committed to the fighting. Over two months the SADF and UNITA made six unsuccessful assaults on the position, the last phase known as Operation Packer. The final attack, on 23 March 1988, became stuck in minefields under artillery fire, and several damaged South African tanks were left behind and captured. Operation Packer was formally ended on 30 April, though a small South African force went on shelling the area until the end of August.

The SADF officially acknowledged 31 dead in combat during the campaign, with another seven deaths from accidents and other causes. UNITA's fighters suffered around 3,000 dead. FAPLA lost 4,768 dead and more than 10,000 wounded, along with large quantities of armour and vehicles, and Cuban ground forces had 42 confirmed dead.

FAPLA and the Cubans counted the battle a victory because they held their positions around Cuito Cuanavale, which they believed the South Africans meant to seize. South Africa and UNITA pointed out that the offensive on Mavinga had been shattered. Fidel Castro called it an overwhelming victory that forced South Africa to negotiate, and Nelson Mandela later described the success as a turning point for the liberation of the continent. Many analysts, by contrast, describe a tactical stalemate; the political scientist Jeffrey Herbst called it "the Angolans' Dunkirk", not the Cubans' Stalingrad.

Talks mediated by the United States had been under way throughout the fighting. Fresh clashes followed in south-western Angola in mid-1988, before a peace accord, brokered by Chester Crocker, was signed in New York on 22 December 1988. It led to the withdrawal of Cuban and South African forces and to Namibia's independence.

Our 1994 map, the nearest after the battle, shows Angola and an independent Namibia.