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The Biafrans made the first important moves of the war. Boiling out of their enclave, they captured Benin, capital of the neighboring Midwest. By early 1968, however, the difference in troop strength began to be felt. Federal forces won one of the most important battles of the war by taking the key shipping center of Calabar and Port Harcourt, with its airport, harbor and oil installations. For the remainder of the fight, Biafra was a landlocked island. Apart from radios, its sole contact with the world was a 75-ft.-wide strip of highway at Uli that had been converted into an airstrip with the code name Annabelle.
"Genocide" at Uli
Cut off from the sea, Ojukwu faced an overwhelming problem: how to feed a nation of 7,000,000 by air. A consortium of Catholic and Protestant relief agencies organized an air force of lumbering four-engine propeller airplanes to supply Biafra despite protests from Gowon that they were prolonging the war and violating Nigerian airspace.
The well-paid Western pilots who flew into Uli for relief agencies did so at night to avoid marauding MIG-17s and Ilyushin-28 bombers, supplied to Nigeria by the Russians and flown by Egyptian pilots. Food planes from the Portuguese island of Sao Tome, Red Cross flights and gunrunners from Libreville in Gabon circled over the airstrip only briefly, then dropped swiftly through the African darkness for bumpy landings during the ten seconds in which the runway lights were flipped on by a camouflaged control tower. A Nigerian night fighter nicknamed "Genocide" tried to pick them off as they landed; occasionally he was successful. All told, ten cargo planes were shot down or crashed during the 31 months of the war and 25 crewmen were killed. Many are buried in a neat churchyard near Uli.
The planes that ducked into Uli carried either food or ammunition; anything else that Biafrans needed was put together from supplies on hand. A resourceful government agency known as the Research and Production Directorate was staffed with Ph.D.s educated in U.S. and British universities. They dreamed up portable oil refineries, homemade antitank rockets, drugs and a highly effective land mine made from cooking utensils and christened "the Ojukwu kettle." Nothing went to waste. One visitor to the hungry country grimly realized that he had seen neither a rat nor a dog anywhere.
Last year, with fresh troops and new supplies, Ojukwu briefly went over to the offensive. By August, seven-eighths of Biafra's former territory had been recovered, including Owerri, where 1,900 Nigerian troops were killed. But the optimism created by such military feats was soon dimmed by the specter of renewed starvation. In parts of Biafra's enclave two-thirds of the population suffered from malnutrition. As many as 1,000 children died in a single day; they were buried at night by lamplight in mass graves.
The Code of Kipling