Storied Irish soldier of fortune
Mike Hoare, an Irish soldier of fortune who led white mercenary forces in civil wars in Congo in the 1960s and a ragtag band of commandos in a farcical aborted coup in the Seychelles in 1981, died on Sunday in Durban, South Africa. He was 100.
His son Chris confirmed the death, in a nursing home.
Hoare crossed seas on a sailboat and Africa (south to north) on a motorcycle. He searched for the fabled lost city of the Kalahari and retraced the steps of Victorian explorers to the sources of the Nile. He fought the Japanese in Burma in World War II, rescued hostages from rebel forces in Congo, found nuns and priests hacked to death in the bush and was imprisoned in South Africa for hijacking an airliner.
The exploits of Hoare, who was called “Mad Mike” for his recklessness under fire, were recounted in books by him and others, in a film starring Richard Burton, and in sheaves of foreign correspondents’ dispatches, now faded yellow in old newspaper morgues with datelines from far-off places.
Tiring of life as an explorer and safari guide, Hoare first hired out as a mercenary in 1960-61, leading a European force fighting for Moise Tshombe, whose Katanga province was trying to break away from the newly independent Republic of Congo.
His mercenaries, while paid to fight, were largely motivated by anti-communism and lust for adventure, crushing larger, less well -armed Congolese forces and sometimes saving civilians from massacres.
But news correspondents covering the mercenaries said some were racists who killed with gusto. Indeed, these soldiers of fortune were largely undisciplined, sometimes looting towns and killing indiscriminately — clearly war crimes, the correspondents said.
By his account, Hoare did not condone such atrocities, but, vastly outnumbered by his out-of-control forces, he had been powerless to stop the carnage, though he claimed to have once shot off the big toes of a man as he was assaulting a woman.
In soldiering, one volunteer is worth 10 draftees, Hoare liked to say. “In a good mercenary outfit they’re all there because they want to be,” he told David Balfour for a “Frontline” documentary on PBS. “The motive may be the high money they earn, but they all want to do it. And the fact that they’re all volunteers means you can train and motivate them at tremendous speed.”