Mad Mike Hoare
Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare was a British-Irish military officer and mercenary who fought during the Simba rebellion and was involved in carrying out the 1981 Seychelles coup d'état attempt.
Early life and military career
Hoare was born on Saint Patrick's Day in India in Calcutta to Irish parents. His father was a river pilot. At the age of eight he was sent to school in England to Margate College and then commenced training for accountancy and, as he was not able to attend Sandhurst, he joined the Territorial Army. Hoare's childhood hero was Sir Francis Drake. Aged 20 he joined the London Irish Rifles at the beginning of the Second World War, later he then joined the 2nd Reconnaissance Regiment of the Royal Armoured Corps as a 2nd lieutenant and fought in the Arakan Campaign in Burma and at the Battle of Kohima in India. He was promoted to the rank of major. In 1945, he married Elizabeth Stott in New Delhi, with whom he had three children.After the war, he completed his training as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1948. Hoare found life in London boring and decided to move to South Africa. He quit accountancy and managed a motor car business. He subsequently emigrated to Durban, Natal Province in the Union of South Africa. In Durban, Hoare was restless and sought adventures by marathon walking, riding a motorcycle from Cape Town to Cairo in 1954 and seeking the rumoured Lost City of the Kalahari in the Kalahari desert. In 1959 he established a safari business in the Kalahari and the Okavango delta. A keen sailor, he had a yacht in Durban, then later bought a 23-metre Baltic trader named Sylvia in which he sailed the Western Mediterranean for three years with his family and wrote a book about the travels. By the early 1960s, Hoare was extremely bored with his life as an accountant, and yearned to return to the life of a soldier, resulting in his interest in becoming a mercenary.
Congo Crisis (1961–65)
Hoare commanded two separate mercenary groups during the Congo Crisis.Katanga
Hoare's first mercenary action was in 1961 in Katanga, a province trying to rebel from the newly independent Republic of the Congo. His unit was named "4 Commando". Hoare relished the macho camaraderie of war, telling one journalist "you can't win a war with choirboys".During this time he married Phyllis Sims, an airline stewardess.
Simba rebellion
In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employer in Katanga, hired Hoare to command a military unit named 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise 5 Commando, later commanded by John Peters; composed of about 300 men, most of whom were from South Africa. His second-in-command was a fellow ex-British Army officer, Commandant Alistair Wicks. The unit's mission was to fight a revolt known as the Simba rebellion. Tshombe distrusted General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the commander of the Armée Nationale Congolaise who had already commanded two coups, and preferred to keep the Congolese Army weak even during the Simba rebellion. Hence, Tshombe used mercenaries who had already fought for him in Katanga to provide a professional military force.To recruit his force, Hoare placed newspaper advertisements in Johannesburg and Salisbury for physically fit white men capable of marching 20 miles per day who were fond of combat and were "tremendous romantics" to join 5 Commando. The moniker Mad Mike which was given to him by the British press suggested a "wildman" type of commander, but in fact Hoare was very strict and insisted the men of 5 Commando always be clean-shaven, keep their hair cut short, never swear and attend church services every Sunday. The men of 5 Commando were entirely white and consisted of a "ragbag of misfits" upon whom he imposed stern discipline. 5 Commando was a mixture of South Africans, Rhodesians, British, Belgians, Irish and Germans, the last of whom were mostly Second World War veterans who had arrived in the Congo wearing Iron Crosses. Racist views towards blacks were very common in 5 Commando, but in press interviews, Hoare denied allegations of atrocities against the Congolese.
Despite his denials, an observer stated "anything black was killed indiscriminately, blindly" by Hoare's mercenaries. Hoare himself told journalists "Killing communists is like killing vermin. Killing African nationalists is like killing animals. I don’t like either of them. My men and I killed between five and ten thousand Congolese rebels during the twenty months I spent in the Congo".
To the press, Hoare insisted that the 5 Commando were not mercenaries, but rather "volunteers" who were waging an idealistic struggle against Communism in the Congo. Tshombe paid the men of 5 Commando the equivalent of $1,100 U.S dollars per month. Hoare always argued that he was a "romantic" who was fighting in the Congo for martial "glory", and insisted that for him the money was irrelevant. Whatever may have been Hoare's motivation, his men showed rapacious greed in the Congo, being noted for their looting and a tendency to steal equipment from the United Nations forces in the Congo. Due to his pride in his Irish heritage, Hoare adopted a flying goose as the symbol of 5 Commando and called his men the Wild Geese after the famous Irish soldiers who fought for the Stuarts in exile during the 17th and 18th centuries. Hoare was known for coolness and courage under fire as he believed that the best way to inspire his men, some of whom wilted under fire, was to command from the front. He put a stop to a mutiny among his commandoes by pistol-whipping the commander of the mutiny.
Hoare brought his men south and then turned north in a swiftly moving offensive, assisted with aircraft flown by Cuban emigres. A particular specialty for Hoare was hijacking boats to take up the river Congo as he began rescuing hostages from the Simbas. The Simbas were badly disciplined, poorly trained, and often not armed with modern weapons, and for all these reasons, the well-armed, trained and disciplined 5 Commando had a great effect on the Simba rebellion. The British journalist A.J. Venter who covered the Congo crisis wrote as Hoare advanced, "the fighting grew progressively more brutal" with few prisoners taken. Hoare's advance was aided by the roads in the Congo remaining from Belgian colonial rule still being usable in 1964-65. Hoare's men tended to collect the heads of Simbas and stick them to the sides of their jeeps.
Later Hoare and his mercenaries worked in concert with Belgian paratroopers, Cuban exile pilots, and CIA-hired mercenaries who attempted to save 1,600 civilians in Stanleyville from the Simba rebels in Operation Dragon Rouge. Hoare and the 5 Commando are estimated to have saved the lives of 2,000 Europeans taken hostage by the Simbas, which made him famous around the world. Many of the hostages had been so badly treated as to barely resemble humans, which added to the fame of Hoare, who was presented in the Western press as a hero. He wrote about Stanleyville as occupied by the Simbas: "The mayor of Stanleyville, Sylvere Bondekwe, a greatly respected and powerful man, was forced to stand naked before a frenzied crowd of Simbas while one of them cut out his liver." About Operation Dragon Rouge, he wrote: "Taking Stanleyville was the greatest achievement of the Wild Geese. There is only so much 300 men can do, but here we were, part of a very big push and clearing the rebels out of Stan was a major victory for our side." Hoare did not stop his men from sacking Stanleyville as the 5 Commando blew open the vaults of every bank and confiscated the alcohol in every tavern in the city.
Hoare was later promoted to lieutenant-colonel in the ANC and 5 Commando expanded into a two-battalion force. Hoare commanded 5 Commando from July 1964 to November 1965. After completing his service, he told the media that he estimated that 5 Commando had killed between 5,000-10,000 Simbas. The Simbas had been advised by Cuban officers, and one of them was the Argentine Communist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, which caused Hoare to claim he was the first man to have defeated Che Guevara.
Speaking on the conflict, he said, "I had wanted nothing so much as to have 5 Commando known as an integral part of the ANC, a 5 Commando destined to strike a blow to rid the Congo of the greatest cancer the world has ever known—the creeping, insidious disease of communism".
Later, Hoare wrote his own account of 5 Commando's role in the 1960s Congo mercenary war, originally titled Congo Mercenary and much later repeatedly republished in paperback simply as Mercenary. The exploits of Hoare and 5 Commando in the Congo were much celebrated for decades afterward and helped contribute significantly to the glorification of the mercenary lifestyle by magazines such as Soldier of Fortune together with many pulp novels that featured heroes clearly modeled after Hoare. The popular image of mercenaries fighting in Africa from the 1960s to the present is that of a macho adventurers defiantly living life on their own terms together with much drinking and womanizing mixed with perilous adventures.
''The Wild Geese''
During the mid-1970s, Hoare was hired as technical adviser for the movie The Wild Geese, the fictional story of a group of mercenary soldiers hired to rescue a deposed African president who resembled Tshombe while the central African nation the story was set in resembled the Congo. The character "Colonel Allen Faulkner" was modelled on Hoare. At least one of the actors of the movie, Ian Yule, had been a mercenary commanded by Hoare, before which he had served in the British Parachute Regiment and Special Air Service. Of the actors playing mercenaries, four were born in Africa, two were former POWs, and most had received military training.In an interview, Hoare praised The Wild Geese as an authentic picture of the mercenary lifestyle in Africa saying: "In a good mercenary outfit, they're all there because they want to be. All right, the motive is probably the high money they earn, but they all want to do it. They're all volunteers". The movie's message that Africa needed pro-Western politicians like Tshombe and that mercenaries who fought for such politicians were heroes seemed to represent Hoare's influence.