Simba rebellion erupted and the entire eastern half of the Congo was taken by the Simba rebels while the Armée Nationale Congolaise disintegrated. Believing that he needed the support of the West, the army commander, General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu persuaded President Joseph Kasa-Vubu to appoint Tshombe premier on 9 July 1964. Tshombe, who used had mercenaries extensively as the leader of Katanga brought back the same mercenaries that he had used to fight against the Congo to now fight for the Congo. Schramme was one of the mercenaries whom Tshombe recruited to fight for the Congo, crossing over from the Portuguese colony of Angola. Schramme commanded the Batabwa group, which operated independently of the Lunda group commanded by another mercenary, Ferdinand Tshipola, a sitatuion of affairs that owned to personal rivalries between Schramme and Tshipola than ethnic rivalries between the Batabaw and Lunda peoples. The Revolt of the Mercenaries In 1965, General Mobutu became president and from then on Belgium started protecting his regime against rebellion. Mobutu immediately began to arrest the former government ministers of Congo. Mobutu had long disliked the white mercenaries in his country as reflecting an adverse comment upon his military competence, and over the course of 1966 and the first half of 1967 steadily reduced the number of mercenaries. From December 1966 to July 1967,the number of mercenaries in the Congo had been reduced from about 650 down to 189 as Mobutu paid the last of their wages and then send them home. In June 1967, the French mercenary Bob Denard warned Schramme that Mobutu was planning to dissolve the last of mercenary units, which provided the impetus for a plan to restore Tshombe. On 30 June 1967 president Moise Tshombe's jet aircraft was hijacked en route to Algiers, before he could return to Congo after his exile in Spain. He was imprisoned in Algeria and two years later he died in suspicious circumstances. For Schramme, this was a sign that he was fighting the wrong enemy and on 3 July 1967 he began to lead an uprising in the Tshopo province against Mobutu along with fellow mercenaries Denard and Jerry Puren. According to Puren the uprising was part of a plan to restore Tshombe to power but derailed by the hijacking: the mercenaries planned to move south and link up with Katangan exiles crossing from Angola. This was known as the Mercenaries Revolt. Jack Malloch,