The first Cuban combat troops began departing for Angola on 7 November, and were drawn from a special paramilitary battalion of the Cuban Ministry of Interior. These were followed closely by one mechanised and one artillery battalion of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, which set off by ship and would not reach Luanda until 27 November. They were kept supplied by a massive airlift carried out with Soviet aircraft. The Soviet Union also deployed a small naval contingent and about 400 military advisers to Luanda. Heavy weapons were flown and transported by sea directly from various Warsaw Pact member states to Angola for the arriving Cubans, including tanks, helicopters, armoured cars, and even 10 Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 fighter aircraft, which were assembled by Cuban and Soviet technicians in Luanda. By the end of the year there were 12,000 Cuban soldiers inside Angola, nearly the size of the entire SADF presence in South West Africa. The FNLA suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Quifangondo when it attempted to take Luanda on 10 November, and the capital remained in FAPLA hands by independence.