Mad Mike Hoare

Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare (17 March 1919 – 2 February 2020) was an Irish military officer and mercenary who fought during the Simba rebellion and was involved in carrying out the 1981 Seychelles coup d'état attempt.

Hoare was born on Saint Patrick's Day in India in Calcutta to Irish parents.

His father was a river pilot.

At the age of eight he was sent to school in England to Margate College and then commenced training for accountancy and, as he was not able to attend Sandhurst, he joined the Territorial Army.

Hoare's childhood hero was Sir Francis Drake.

Aged 20 he joined the London Irish Rifles at the beginning of the Second World War, later he then joined the 2nd Reconnaissance Regiment of the Royal Armoured Corps as a 2nd lieutenant and fought in the Arakan Campaign in Burma and at the Battle of Kohima in India.

He was promoted to the rank of major.

In 1945, he married Elizabeth Stott in New Delhi, with whom he had three children.

A short man, Hoare was described by those who knew him as "dapper" and "charming".

After the war, he completed his training as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1948.

Hoare found life in London boring and decided to move to South Africa.

He subsequently emigrated to Durban, Natal Province in the Union of South Africa where he later managed safaris and became a soldier-for-hire in various African countries.

In Durban, Hoare was restless and sought adventures by marathon walking, riding a motorcycle from Cape Town to Cairo and seeking the rumoured Lost City of the Kalahari in the Kalahari desert.

By the early 1960s, Hoare was extremely bored with his life as an accountant, and yearned to return to the life of a soldier, resulting in his interest in becoming a mercenary.

Hoare commanded two separate mercenary groups during the Congo Crisis.

Hoare's first mercenary action was in 1961 in Katanga, a province trying to rebel from the newly independent Republic of the Congo.

His unit was named "4 Commando".

Hoare relished the macho camaraderie of war, telling one journalist "you can't win a war with choirboys".

During this time he married Phyllis Sims, an airline stewardess.

In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employer in Katanga, hired Hoare to command a military unit named 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise 5 Commando (later commanded by John Peters; not to be confused with No.5 Commando, the British Second World War commando force) composed of about 300 men, most of whom were from South Africa.

His second-in-command was a fellow ex-British Army officer, Commandant Alistair Wicks.

The unit's mission was to fight a revolt known as the Simba rebellion.

Tshombe distrusted General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the commander of the Armée Nationale Congolaise who had already commanded two coups, and preferred to keep the Congolese Army weak even during the Simba rebellion.

Hence, Tshombe used mercenaries who had already fought for him in Katanga to provide a professional military force.

To recruit his force, Hoare placed newspaper advertisements in Johannesburg and Salisbury (modern Harare, Zimbabwe) for physically fit white men capable of marching 20 miles per day who were fond of combat and were "tremendous romantics" to join 5 Commando.

The moniker Mad Mike which was given to him by the British press suggested a "wildman" type of commander, but in fact Hoare was very strict and insisted the men of 5 Commando always be clean-shaven, keep their hair cut short, never swear and attend church services every Sunday.

The men of 5 Commando were entirely white and consisted of a "ragbag of misfits" upon whom he imposed stern discipline.

5 Commando was a mixture of South Africans, Rhodesians, British, Belgians, Irish and Germans, the last of whom were mostly Second World War veterans who had arrived in the Congo wearing Iron Crosses.

Racist views towards blacks were very common in 5 Commando, but in press interviews, Hoare denied allegations of atrocities against the Congolese.

To the press, Hoare insisted that the 5 Commando were not mercenaries, but rather "volunteers" who were waging an idealistic struggle against Communism in the Congo.

Tshombe paid the men of 5 Commando a sum of money equal to $1,100 U.S dollars per month.

Hoare always argued that he was a "romantic" who was fighting in the Congo for martial "glory", and insisted that for him the money was irrelevant.

Whatever may have been Hoare's motivation, his men showed rapacious greed in the Congo, being noted for their looting and a tendency to steal equipment from the United Nations forces in the Congo.

Due to his pride in his Irish heritage, Hoare adopted a flying goose as the symbol of 5 Commando and called his men the Wild Geese after the famous Irish soldiers who fought for the Stuarts in exile during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Hoare was known for coolness and courage under fire as he believed that the best way to inspire his men, some of whom wilted under fire, was to command from the front.

He crushed a mutiny among his commandoes by pistol-whipping the commander of the mutiny.

Hoare brought his men south and then turned north in a swiftly moving offensive, assisted with aircraft flown by Cuban emigres.

A particular specialty for Hoare was hijacking boats to take up the river Congo as he began rescuing hostages from the Simbas.

The Simbas were badly disciplined, poorly trained, and often not armed with modern weapons, and for all these reasons, the well-armed, -trained, and -disciplined 5 Commando had a great effect on the Simba rebellion.

The British journalist A.J. Venter who covered the Congo crisis wrote as Hoare advanced, "the fighting grew progressively more brutal" with few prisoners taken.