Mercenary gave ‘his heart for an ideal’

‘‘Mad Mike’’ Hoare was perhaps the best-known mercenary since Xenophon. Like the ancient Greek general, he had a remarkable gift for leadership in trying circumstances, notably in the mid-1960s in what became known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where his ‘‘Wild Geese’’ saved thousands of lives during the Simba (Lion) rebellion.

Like Xenophon, he briefly elevated the reputation of the soldier of fortune and lost much of his reputation in a later misadventure – a failed coup in the Seychelles.

Hoare became involved in the DRC’s affairs soon after Belgium’s disastrously hasty decision to grant independence in 1960 to what was then known as the Belgian Congo. Much of the new nation’s wealth – in particular its copper mines – was concentrated in the province of

Katanga. Under

Moise Tshombe it seceded, provoking a counter-rebellion that Tshombe hired white mercenaries to crush in 1961.

Three years later Hoare was called back to play a far larger role, this time after Tshombe had become DRC’s prime minister. By then, a Maoist-inspired revolt in the north and east of the vast country, which is four times the size of France, had involved half the population in bloody carnage.

The violence centred on the city of Stanleyville (the ‘‘Inner Station’’ of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness). Tshombe asked Hoare to raise a force of 1000 men to suppress the uprising.

Hoare, never lacking in bravado, later recalled that he wanted the ‘‘adventure and fulfilment of command’’. Most of those who answered his recruitment notices proved to have little military training.

He whittled them down to about 300, but not all of those accepted his leadership. His plan to make a first attack by sailing up a blustery Lake Tanganyika provoked a near mutiny until Hoare stilled the ringleader with a pistol blow to the head.

‘‘It was a watershed in my life,’’ he wrote. ‘‘The leadership of mercenary troops by force of personality alone demands a hardness of character and a conviction in one’s own invincibility, which I did not possess. I was obliged to assume those qualities there and then.’’

He liked to compare his men to the 17thcentury Irish mercenaries known as the Wild Geese, who had roamed Europe and who, he fondly imagined, had ‘‘offered their hearts for an ideal’’. Nonetheless, he sometimes had to mete out savage justice. He sentenced a soldier and keen footballer who had committed rape to having his big toes shot off. Hoare carried out the punishment himself.

The exploit with which Hoare was most frequently credited was the relief in 1964 of Stanleyville, where 1700 Europeans were held hostage by the Simbas. However, as his not wholly reliable memoir Congo Mercenary makes clear, the city was in fact liberated by

Belgian paratroopers aided by US air support. Nonetheless, elsewhere his troops saved many locals as well as whites, for instance at Kindu, where they rescued 220 Europeans about to be slaughtered.

Spurred by the horrors they had seen, Hoare’s men proved effective throughout 1965, when they were given a free hand by Joseph Desire Mobutu, the army’s powerful chief of staff, in Orientale province, where the rebellion still smouldered. They closed the border with Uganda and the frontier with Sudan, across which aid was flowing to the Simbas.

Cold War politics had arrived in Africa, and Hoare, who was by turns charming, enigmatic, fearless, proper and yet piratical, acquired his nickname from an East German radio station, which called him ‘‘a mad bloodhound’’.

Thomas Michael Bernard Hoare was born in Calcutta, India, in 1919 on St Patrick’s Day – appropriate, given he was of Irish stock. His father was a ship’s master who became a river pilot on the Hooghly. Mike spent his first years in Bengal before being sent to Margate College in Kent, which he left at 16.

On the outbreak of World War II, Hoare joined the 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles. He was later commissioned and, in 1941, posted to the 2nd Reconnaissance Regiment. The next year he sailed for India, where he saw action in Kohima. He then served in Burma, rising to the rank of major.

Subsequently he qualified as a chartered accountant, and in 1948 emigrated to South Africa. He began to feel that life offered more if it were lived dangerously. He crossed the continent on motorbike, from the Cape to Cairo and from Mombasa to Lobito. By the late 1950s he was leading safaris in the Kalahari Desert and the Okavango Delta.

In 1945, in New Delhi, he had married Elizabeth Stott. They had three children. This marriage ended in 1960, and the next year Hoare married Phyllis Sims, an air hostess, in Durban. They had two sons.

During the 1970s he was an adviser to the film The Wild Geese (1978), which was inspired by his adventures.

Hoare had an ardent dislike of communism and believed African states found it hard to resist. It was this conviction that in 1981 caused him to organise what became known as ‘‘the package holiday coup’’ in the Seychelles. Its socialist regime led by FranceAlbert Rene, who had taken power by force, irked the governments of the US and South Africa, which sponsored Hoare’s undertaking.

Disguised as the Ancient Order of Froth Blowers, a group of charitable beer-drinking holidaymakers, Hoare and 50 mercenaries flew into the Seychelles’ airport from Swaziland. Weapons were concealed in the false bottoms of their luggage, filled with toys such as rugby balls for local children. However, a customs official found a Kalashnikov and was shot dead when he tried to raise the alarm.

In the ensuing fight it became clear the mercenaries were outgunned. Hoare hijacked an Air India jet, forcing the captain to fly his men to South Africa. One mercenary had been killed and others were left behind.

At his trial in Pietermaritzburg for air piracy, Hoare was described as ‘‘a man with a cavalier attitude to the truth’’. He was sentenced to 10 years, but served only three. On his release, he said it had ‘‘revitalised my soul, refreshed my liver and regulated my bowels’’.

He spent the next two decades in the south of France. ‘‘I make no apologies for being a mercenary soldier,’’ he reflected. ‘‘Quite the reverse . . . I am proud to have stood shoulder to shoulder with the toughest and bravest band of men it has ever been my honour to command. I am proud that they stood when all else failed.’’

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He sentenced a soldier and keen footballer who had committed rape to having his big toes shot off. Hoare carried out the punishment himself.