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Crippled ex-soldiers roamed from feeding station to feeding station, begging scraps. An Irish nun recalled last week that "two of the poor lost souls dropped dead from hunger right where the children were finishing their one real meal of the week." Remembered Father Kevin Doheny of his parish at Okpala: "We'd get some kids back to what seemed like perfect health. They'd be playing around the parish grounds, then suddenly one of them would drop dead. Their hearts had been softened and weakened by starvation." Hunger on the ground was soon compounded by terror from the air as the Nigerians stepped up daylight attacks on markets and other civilian centers. "One of our nuns was killed in September," says Father Doheny. "A MIG fighter made two passes, strafing her as she walked along the road."
With pressure increasing on his weakened troops, Ojukwu might better have shifted to guerrilla warfare. But the Eaton Hall Officer Cadet School graduate did not choose to make the change. The general was a prisoner of classic British tactics. His outgunned, understrength soldiers were mowed down in pointless mass attacks. "If he had read Mao rather than General Sir Douglas Haig, he might have won," wrote Correspondent Wilde. "In fact, it was the code of Kipling that influenced the conduct of the war on both sides. Until the very end, Effiong looked like a British staff general—a polished Sam Browne belt, a sword for ceremonial occasions and a chauffeur-driven, khaki-colored English Humber car bearing a general's flag. His officers were similarly indoctrinated—mustaches, swagger sticks, batmen, officers' messes."
As the situation deteriorated, Biafra's "land of brave heroes" looked less and less desirable to its citizens. Many of them deserted through gaps in the battleline to take their chances with the Nigerians. By the end of the war, there were more Ibos living outside Biafra than inside. Many of them went to work for the central government, reinforcing Gowon's claim that the battle with Biafra was not a tribal war at all but one of jurisdiction. Ibos now preside over the Nigerian national railways, the electricity commission and the federal manpower commission. The most prominent Ibo is probably Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria's first President, who sided with Ojukwu at the beginning and then went over to Gowon because he thought the war had become futile. Azikiwe, who has been living in London, returned home last week to assure fellow
Ibos that "all is now well and safe." Gowon had promised a "final offensive" so frequently that it became a Biafran joke. But last October, with fresh shipments of Soviet arms, Nigeria's 1st, 2nd and 3rd divisions began to mount the attack that ended the war. Until this coordinated offensive, the three federal divisions had always struck one at a time, enabling Ojukwu to shift Biafran troops back and forth to meet them. In this campaign, 120,000 Nigerians attacked simultaneously for the first time in the war. Preceded by British armored cars that pushed aside feeble Biafran roadblocks, the Nigerians covered as much as eleven miles a day and threatened at last to split Biafra into pieces.