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Our Books:
- How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs
- Dive South Africa
- Wreck Hunt
- Mercenary Invasion of Seychelles
- Jack Malloch
- Deadline Africa
- Battles of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879
- Diving with Sharks
- Neall Ellis
- Barrel of a Gun
- South Africa's Border Wars
- The 'Coloured' People of South Africa and Apartheid
About our Authors:
Al J Venter
John H. Visser
Charles Shapiro
SITEMAP
JACK MALLOCH: The Most Illustrious Freebooter of them all
BY ALAN BROUGH
Due for Publication 2009
World War 2 Spitfire pilot, erstwhile CIA agent and participant in a dozen African wars, coups and revolutions.
This book is due for publication in the United States, Britain and South Africa in 2009. It will deal with the life and times of one of the most unusual characters to emerge in Africa after World War 2.
It is a classic series of tales about one man's determination to help those whom he believed needed assistance during a period when many of Africa's conflicts were fuelled and abetted by Cold War politics. Africa was not only the battleground of Moscow and Washington, it was also a remarkable cauldron of intrigue, violence and power play that often overflowed national borders.
Jack Malloch was closely involved with Rhodesia's Special Air Service regiment, including having direct involvement in some of that unit's long-range cross border operations.
The CIA also enters the picture, from their initial involvement with Jack in Katanga, through the civil wars in the Congo right to getting US Senate approval to sell him DC-8's in the early/mid 1970's with jet conversion training for his crews in America - which was sponsored by the wife of Claire Chennault, the founder of the CIA's Air America!
Malloch was also involved with the British Military at about the time of Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and was subsequently involved in some military support flights into the Sudan for Whitehall. There were also clandestine military flights into the Aden desert in the early 1960's delivering weapons for the British SAS in their fight against the Communists. While in the mid-1970's it seems that the British bases in Sharjah were facilitating the sale of second hand equipment and parts for Rhodesia's British built Hunter strike aircraft, subsequently used against the guerrillas who were invading Rhodesia from Mocambique and Zambia.
But most of the 'secret' work that Jack did was with the French Secret Service. The Elysees Palace was linked to a series of events in Katanga and in the Congo (once Tshombe took over) and the French appear to have financed much of Jack's support for the break-away Nigerian enclave of Biafra.
As a result one of Malloch's good friends over the years was the French mercenary Bob Denard. In fact it was Malloch that airlifted Denard and his group of fighters into both Dahomey (Benin today) and the Comoros archipelago the second time he invaded and took the country by force.
Into that mix arrives Jean-Louis Demage, who was in Jack's employ, and who was Bob Denard's second-in-command in the Congo - and apparently Africa's first hijacker. Soon after one of Jack's aircraft was shot down by the U.N. forces invading Katanga, Jean-Louis commandeered a DC-3 on the runway at Katanga's Elizabethville (Lubumbashi today) and forced the pilot to fly a group of wounded mercenaries who had been captured by the U.N. to safety in Kariba along Rhodesia's northern border.
For much of the 1970's Jean-Louis ran the Libreville office of Affretair, Malloch's aviation company which was used to very successfully break the UN's embargo against Rhodesia as well as ferrying cargo, arms and equipment into numerous other African countries.
Jack's flying career started with flying Spitfires in the Italian campaign during WWII, where he was shot down behind enemy lines. In the early 1950's he then flew a Spitfire Mk XXII all the way from the UK to Rhodesia for the embryonic Southern Rhodesian Air Force, and it was in that same Spitfire, after the Rhodesian bush war, that his flying career (and his life) came to an abrupt end in 1982.
He was a very secretive, remarkable and patriotic man who had a major influence on the military history of not only Rhodesia, but of many African countries throughout the 1960's and 1970's. He also had a rare 'flying intuition', which is summed up in the words of one of his WWII comrades: "In terms of ethics, character and flying ability I would compare him to Chuck Yeager".
This biography of Jack Malloch is indeed a true-life aviation 'epic'.
Due for Publication 2009
Images from the book
(Click on image to enlarge)
