Battle of Cassinga

Battle of Cassinga
Part of the South African Border War
Date 4 May 1978 Location Cassinga, Angola Cassinga Battle of Cassinga (Angola) 15°7′3″S 16°5′11″E / 15.11750°S 16.08639°E / -15.11750; 16.08639 (SWAPO Base at Cassinga)Coordinates: 15°7′3″S 16°5′11″E / 15.11750°S 16.08639°E / -15.11750; 16.08639 (SWAPO Base at Cassinga) Result South African victory
Belligerents
South Africa	SWAPO,  Cuba
Commanders and leaders
Ian Gleeson	Dimo Hamaambo
Strength
370	300 to 600 PLAN combatants 3000-4000 refugees
Casualties and losses
3 killed, 1 MIA, 11 wounded	about 150 Cuban 582-624 people including SWAPO and PLAN soldiers and civilians, including many women and children

The Battle of Cassinga, Cassinga Raid or Kassinga Massacre was a controversial South African airborne attack on a South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) military base at the former town of Cassinga, Angola on 4 May 1978. Conducted as one of the three major actions of Operation Reindeer during the South African Border War, it was the South African Army’s first major air assault.

Claims continue that Cassinga was a refugee camp, rather than a military camp, and that consequently the raid was a massacre of civilians rather than a highly successful military operation.

While there are extensive records covering the SADF's planning and actions around the operation (declassified since the change of government in 1994), no SWAPO records other than photographic evidence of the mass grave exist.

Starting in 1976, SWAPO PLAN combatants regularly travelled south by road from Huambo through Cassinga, an abandoned Angolan mining town that was located about halfway to the battlefront at the Namibian border. The town had about twenty buildings that previously served the local iron-ore mine as warehouses, accommodation and offices.

A group of PLAN guerrillas led by Dimo Hamaambo occupied Cassinga some weeks after they began using it as a stopover point; according to both Charles "Ho Chi Minh" Namoloh and Mwetufa "Cabral" Mupopiwa, who accompanied Hamaambo when the village was first occupied, the first Namibian inhabitants of Cassinga consisted entirely of trained PLAN combatants. Not long after the establishment of the PLAN camp at Cassinga, it began to function also as a transit camp for Namibian exiles. The Angolan government allocated the abandoned village to SWAPO in 1976 to cope with the influx of thousands of refugees from South West Africa, estimated in May 1978 to total 3,000 to 4,000 people.
Two days before the South African raid, UNICEF reported of a "well-run and well-organized" camp but "ill-equipped" to cope with the rapid refugee increase in early 1978. The Cubans, who set up a base at nearby Techamutete when they intervened in the war in 1975, provided logistical support to the SWAPO administration at Cassinga.