Katanga's war of independence

Katanga’s war of independence is the conflict that draws Guido Arrellio and Creasy from their post-Legion uncertainty into mercenary life. Recalled by Guido in conversation with a boy, it is presented both as a provincial attempt to break away from the Belgian Congo and as the opening campaign in a longer history of combat, displacement, and comradeship between the two men.

Background and Secession

Guido explains that Katanga was a province of the Belgian Congo, later called Shaba. When the Belgians withdrew in 1961, Katanga tried to secede. His account identifies two grounds for the province’s distinct position: its inhabitants belonged to a different tribe, and it possessed much of the region’s mineral wealth. The war therefore enters the story as a struggle over separation and resources, though the recollection does not detail its political leadership, the course of particular battles, or the claims made by either side.

The conflict is introduced through a question about what Guido and Creasy did after their service in the Legion. Guido says they stayed together: his police troubles left him wanted at home, while Creasy had nowhere to go. Their training had been military, and they searched for a war, finding one in Katanga. The decision makes the conflict a turning point in their lives as well as a historical episode. It offers the two men a destination for skills formed in military service, while beginning a pattern of movement from one armed campaign to another.

Mercenary Service

Guido and Creasy joined a French former paratrooper colonel, Trinquier, who knew them from Algeria and was pleased to recruit men with their experience. They became mercenaries. Guido describes the change from Legion service as limited in practical terms, but says they missed the Legion; that shared sense of loss drew them closer. Katanga thus marks a transition in their status without erasing the habits and attachments they had acquired in their earlier service.

Their effectiveness soon became widely remarked upon among the other mercenaries. Guido recalls that they seemed so attuned to one another that they moved and fought as a single unit without needing visible communication. Their partnership was not simply a matter of surviving the same campaign: their coordinated conduct became a defining feature of how others saw them. The narrative connects the demands of mercenary warfare to an unusually close bond, while stopping short of describing particular engagements in Katanga in which that coordination was used.

Fighting Methods and Reputation

The men were especially adept at clearing buildings in urban combat, a practice the account calls laundering buildings. They developed techniques for covering one another and moving from room to room, or from one building to another, in a precise rhythm. Other mercenaries would stop to watch them work. The recollection gives this skill a concrete form: their unity was visible not only in their instinctive coordination, but in the disciplined sequence by which one man protected the other as they advanced through enclosed spaces.

Guido also says they brought the use of grenades and submachine guns to a fine art. These details establish their reputation as combat specialists, but they do not supply a battle-by-battle account of the independence war. Their techniques and standing among the mercenaries are presented as outcomes of their shared military experience, rather than as evidence for a specific result on the Katanga battlefield.

Failure and Aftermath

Katanga’s secession failed. The account then follows the two men beyond that defeat: they joined other mercenaries in Yemen under Denard, and returned to the Congo when Tshombe came back from exile. Guido and Creasy fought through the subsequent, complicated war until Mobuto triumphed. The sequence places Katanga at the beginning of an extended mercenary career, while distinguishing its failed secession from the later campaigns that kept the pair together.

Their later retreat with hundreds of mercenaries to Bukavu and internment in Rwanda belong to this wider aftermath, not to the account of Katanga’s fighting itself. Nevertheless, the recollection’s structure makes the connection clear: Katanga is the first war the two men deliberately sought together, and its failure does not end their partnership or their movement between conflicts. Told years later by Guido, the episode explains how a provincial war became the first chapter in the history of a friendship shaped by combat, shared loss, and repeated displacement.