SAAF men's graves found
Date: 30 July 2006
Thirty years after their aircraft was shot down in the maelstrom of the Angolan civil war, the graves of two SA air force pilots and an army captain have been found.
The families are trying to raise funds for a pilgrimage to their lonely resting place - and to return the remains.
After months of painstaking research, with the help of old soldiers from both sides of the conflict, amateur military historian Rowley Medlin, of Centurion, a retired sergeant-major, traced the final resting place of the three South African Defence Force (SADF) servicemen to a remote bushy calley south of the town of Ebo, in the Cuanza Sul province of Angola.
The fate of the three aboard the unarmed South African Air Force Cessna 185 spotter plane that vanished about 800km inside Angolan territory on November 25, 1975, while on a reconnaissance run, remained a mystery of the bush war. That afternoon, SADF intelligence intercepted an Angolan signal saying an aircraft had been shot down - and that night. Radio Luanda boasted that a SAAF 'warplane'had been downed.
Missing, presumed dead, were pilot Second Lieutenant Keith Williamson, 21, of Vereeniging, and co-pilot Second Lieutenant Eric Bryan Thompson, 20, of Edenvale. They had taken newly-arrived SADF battalion third-in-command Captain Daniel Jacob Taljaard, 32, of Centurion, aloft to plot the relative positions of allied and enemy forces on the front.
But because no South African soldiers actually saw the plane shot down, the location of the crash-site and the men's fate was unclear.
The families' uncertainty was made worse by the November 1977 claims by Dane Poul Mathiesen, released from a Luanda jail, of "two young white South African prisoners" who had been captured in late 1975, and who had "gone completely mad and were running around naked, shouting and screaming".
But it now seems certain that the three men died at the scene, buried by locals.
Anyone who cares to donate to the fund to enable the families to visit the grave site, is asked to contact Medlin on 012-658-5090.
Sunday Argus
