86 The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
W
hen he wasback in civvy street, Mike Hoare was an accoun-
tant. It may have been a liking for neat columns on a page
that made him so insistent on a trim troop. As the man in charge of
5 Commando, he did not tolerate beards or swearing. The men’s
hair had to be as short as his own, barely showing below the black
beret—which, combined with his wiriness and hawkishness, gave
him a decent resemblance to Montgomery of Alamein. On Sun-
days, boots cleaned, they lined up for church parade.
They looked as good as any regular regiment. Yet they were sol-
diers for hire. The clue was on their flag and shoulder patches,
which showed a wild goose flying. They were his Wild Geese,
named after the fabled Irish mercenaries of the revolutionary
wars. (He was Irish himself, both parents, and all the more so when
he got sentimental.) Their job was to carry out operations ordinary
armies could not. In 1964 and 1965 he and 5 Commando, at the invi-
tation of Moise Tshombe and for up to $1,100 each a month, helped
rid Congo of communists after independence. They stabilised
breakaway Katanga province, defeated the Simba rebels and
mopped up resistance in the east; most strikingly they helped re-
take Stanleyville (later Kisangani), rescuing nearly 2,000 hostages,
most of them priests and nuns. These exploits made them, and
him, world-famous. He was “Mad Mike” to Fleet Street, and in 1978,
in “The Wild Geese”, Richard Burton played a mercenary heavily
based on him. All that certainly beat totting up sums every day.
His task, though, had not been simple. He had to find recruits
through small ads in the Johannesburg and Salisbury newspapers,
appealing for men who both loved combat and were “tremendous
romantics”—like himself. After wartime service in Burma and In-
dia he had married and settled in Durban, but stayed restless. He
did marathon walks, rode a motorbike from Cape Town to Cairo
and searched for the Lost City of the Kalahari. But none of this was
living dangerously enough. In his 40s, when the Congolese invita-tion came through a business contact, he was ready.
He had fought before, under orders. Now he could lead men.
Not ruffians, but hard men who could march 20 miles a day (noth-
ing finer than a good march) and not grumble. To have control over
their lives and deaths moved him in a strange way. Yet they were a
ragbag of misfits when they arrived. Some were German, ex-Nazis,
one still sporting his Iron Cross. All were white. Many, coming
from apartheid countries, were racists. (He himself described Afri-
can soldiers as realists whose main aim was to survive and, if or-
dered to go out and possibly get killed, would not do it; he was far
ruder about the foul-mouthed, swaggering Belgian mercenaries he
met.) Some recruits melted under fire. If that happened he might
set an ostentatiously cool example, such as opening out his maps
in the middle of an enemy ambush and calmly consulting them. If
they misbehaved, he disciplined them ruthlessly. When a mutiny
threatened, he plucked out the leader and pistol-whipped him.
That proved a watershed in his life, the moment when everything
stood or collapsed. Luckily for him, his authority stood.
He wanted his Wild Geese to look respectable. The word “mer-
cenaries” annoyed him; they were “volunteers”. Money was not the
point, or not for him. He was given a brick of gold once, when they
stumbled on an abandoned mine, but was relieved when someone
stole it. Glory was his purpose, not plunder. His men seized oppor-
tunities, as when they captured a United Nations helicopter, disas-
sembled it and sold it back to the unas spare parts. They took tro-
phies, decorating their trucks with the spears, shields and heads of
Simba warriors. After liberating Stanleyville they went on a ram-
page, draining hotel bars and dynamiting bank safes, while he
stood by. But this was not, he thought, a shooting matter. It was
their finest hour, having just released hostages so bruised and
beaten that some no longer resembled human beings.
Other rescues had been carried out up-country, on his own ini-
tiative. He often went beyond instructions. Hijacking boats, pilot-
ing them himself under heavy fire, was his speciality: a role that
pleased him, as his father had been a river pilot on the Hooghly in
Calcutta. A commando unit had that flexibility. Were there atroc-
ities? a reporter asked him once. Extremely few, he said; the sav-
agery of the tribal revenge-killings he had witnessed, when fight-
ing alongside the Congolese army, had been more than enough to
see. Executions? Only after courts martial. Wholesale butchery
happened only when Simba rebels, assured by their witch doctors
that bullets would turn to water, attacked them en masse.
In eastern Congo, where he sent the Simbas’ Cuban officers
packing, he dislodged Che Guevara too.That made him, he reck-
oned, the only man up till then to beat Che in a battle. It was one
more part of the romantic history he liked to weave around him. By
saving Congo he had helped save Africa, and hence the West, from
the greatest cancer, communism. He reckoned the Wild Geese had
killed 5,000-10,000 communists in 20 months of combat. But that
was not enough; so in 1981, though retired to The Old Vicarage in
Durban, he took up an invitation from the ex-president of the Sey-
chelles to remove by force the leftist who had usurped him.
Since the Wild Geese had long flown, he recruited 46 brawny
men to pose as ex-rugby players on a charity flight to the Seychelles
to take toys to children. Beneath the toys, in each kit-bag, were dis-
assembled ak47s. All went well until one of these was found at the
airport. A gun battle broke out, during which a Boeing 707 landed
to refuel; he and his men hijacked it to return to South Africa,
drinking champagne on board, only to be arrested on arrival. They
ended up in prison and, worse, ridiculed on every side. Most hurt-
fully, he was expelled from the Institute of Chartered Accountants.
His sentence was ten years. He served 33 months, memorising
Shakespeare from a volume he had smuggled in. Such immersion
suited him, since the man he had most wanted to be was Sir Francis
Drake: the intrepid voyager and terror of Spaniards whose outrages
were all forgotten when, on his return, he knelt before the queen
and, though a robber, was made a knight. 7“Mad Mike” Hoare, soldier of fortune, died on February 2nd,
aged 100Living dangerously
Obituary “Mad Mike” Hoare