Attack on a Village

In the kind of action that typifies the civil war, a detachment of Biafran troops last week attacked a Nigerian-held village named Umuneke. TIME Correspondent James Wilde accompanied the Biafrans and sent this report:

IT was midafternoon, the hottest part of the day, and the world seemed made of glaring dust and prickly sweat. The men of the Biafran 55th Battalion were a motley group, mostly barefoot, lacking uniforms, and so short of weapons that a single bolt-action rifle served two or even three men. They had taken up positions around Umuneke in the thick, bone-dry bush. A blocking party had infiltrated the rear of the village and set up the homemade electrically detonated mines the soldiers call Ojukwu's kettles. The strategy was simplicity itself: drive the Nigerians back onto the mines and detonate them.

At four o'clock the brigade commander, Lieut. Colonel Lambert Ihenacho, drove up in a camouflaged Land Rover with ammunition. The cartridges were counted out like gold nuggets, the .30-cal. machine gun ammunition belts handled like so many rare Grecian urns. Ihenacho, at 25 the youngest brigade commander in the Biafran army, supervised the process, his hands on the grip of a captured submachine gun. Then Ihenacho led the way up the trail leading to the village. The path was lined with civilians, young and old. "They help carry out the wounded," the colonel explained as he politely murmured greetings. "They are all volunteers."

Birds chattered and giggled overhead. A long-tailed black lizard bobbed its head in the heat. Then the first line of the 55th went in, and the lizard was suddenly gone. The bush erupted with sharp bursts of automatic fire. An incoming mortar round decapitated a palm tree and left three men writhing and mangled. The periodic silences between bursts were broken by frightened screaming birds. Wounded men straggled back. Their black faces shaded gray by shock, they handed weapons and ammunition to their replacements. There was the unmistakable whistle of a 105-mm. howitzer. "Don't worry," said the colonel. "It's ours. We brought it up this morning." The gun fired six rounds, and the Nigerian lines began to crumble.

Nevertheless, Nigerian mortar bombs and small-arms fire continued to splash about aimlessly, killing here, falling sterile there. A soldier crawling through the bush was hit between the eyes. He stumbled to his feet when he must have been already dead and jerked about in a reflexive dance of death. Then he collapsed, the puppet strings finally cut. A group of wounded who should rightly have been in catatonic shock stumbled down a path under a squall of incoming fire, their intestines peeking pinkly between their fingers. The colonel walked through it all with quiet confidence. He questioned a second lieutenant walking back alongside a stretcher: "Where are you going?" The lieutenant replied that the wounded man was his brother. "Aren't those other men up there your brothers too?" the colonel said. "Get back up."

The battle ended at dusk. "We have driven them out of the village. But they have bypassed the mines. Still, we are lucky. Our ammunition lasted until dark. Tomorrow they will counterattack and then we will counterattack, and so it will go on," said Ihenacho. The colonel was asked what supplies he needed most. "Small arms, ammunition and food. We need more bolt-action rifles. They conserve our ammunition." Could Biafra really win? "Yes, of course," Ihenacho replied. "We know what we are fighting for. They don't."

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