OT: Rhodesia

[Webstral]

As some of you may know, I’ve been studying up on Rhodesia over the past couple of years. More than ever, I feel like this war has a lot to teach the US that we’ll probably never stoop to learning. Having finished Dennis Croukamp’s The Bush War in Rhodesia recently, I have started on The Rhodesian War from the Stackpole Military Series. This last book, which was originally published in 1982 and revised in 2002 or 2006, is just what the doctor ordered. Having read Fire Force (Chris Cocks) and The Saints before Croukamp’s autobiographical work, I had a lot of questions knocking about in my head. The Rhodesian War contextualizes everything I have read so far beautifully. I just can’t write enough good things about this book.

[Raellus]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll have to see if I can pick up a copy at a reasonable price.

I read the Cox and Croukamp books while I was working on my T2K Kenya campaign history (Operation Proud Lion). I thought the former was decent and the latter pretty poor. I wrote a fairly harsh review for Croukamp's book on Amazon.com.

"I was really wanting to like this book more than I did. First off, it's a bit pricey for a paperback with a couple dozen small, black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout. Second, I bought this book to learn more about Selous Scouts operations and, after reading it, I really didn't feel any more knowledgable on the subject than I did before I started. The author seems to take for granted that the reader already knows combat tracking techniques, what pseudo-terrorist operations were, and what Fireforce was, among other things. As a result, he never really explains anything particularly well. Aside from those two main gripes, the book is not very well written. The author uses the same idioms again and again and it really gets to be tedious reading. He also jumps around quite a bit temporally, moving backwards and forwards through time during the largely chronological narrative. Too many awkward personal stories are recounted. The author starts to come across as a bit of a pervert (dating a 13 year old; sneaking into a married woman's bedroom at night, etc.). The author also included commentary on his draft written by a former commanding officer and sometimes rival. I found this rather odd. In the end, I was wishing I was reading the commenting officer's book instead (which, unfortunately, is out of print and very pricey to acquire new or used). Better maps would have helped, being as the author operated all over Rhodesia and beyond its borders. Overall, this was a mess of a book. Although some parts of the book are OK (the combat stories), I really don't think the sum of these parts was worth the $25 I spent on it. I probably won't be reading this book all the way through again.

As a soldier, Mr. Croukamp may have been one of the best of his generation, but as a writer, he leaves much to be desired."


Anyway, the Rhodesians had some interesting tactics for low-intensity counterinsurgency warfare. Ultimately, however, their strategy failed. Like the U.S. in Vietnam, they won many battles but still lost the war. Perhaps that's why the U.S. military has failed to draw any lessons from it. I believe that one can often learn more from the mistakes of others than from their successes.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Abandoned and ostracized by their allies (including, in the end, South Africa) who were more interested in being politically correct and supporting the "nationalists" and the access to the mineral wealth they believed that would give them, left in almost complete trade isolation from the rest of the world, it's no wonder they lost the war.

I can understand your frustration with Croukamp's book Raellus and while I am offering some kinder words this is still a criticism; I think he was writing for a very specific audience in mind -- and it didn't include anyone outside of Southern Africa. His book sounds more like a personal journal than an attempt to write an account of the war. Maybe it was an exercise in catharsis perhaps?

I think you should probably have a look at some of Peter Stiff's books, particularly "Selous Scouts - Top Secret War" as it was co-authored by the CO of the Scouts, Lt.Col. Ron Reid-Daly and also "See You in November".
I don't believe most of the prices on Amazon for Stiff's books can be justified but if you can find them at a library they're worth reading.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...=Peter%20Stiff

[Raellus]

You're probably right, SSC. I've read a ton of war memoirs, some of them vanity pieces, but this one was by far one of the most egregious. Perhaps I wouldn't have been so disappointed if the book had been billed differently, and cost less. It was presented as an insiders account of Selous Scouts operations and that's what I was looking for. Instead, I got a rambling, sometimes creepy, personal war story that just barely glossed over tactics.

And your points about Rhodesia's diplomatic and economic isolation are well taken. The small nation was fighting with at least one hand tied behind it's back.

On a side note, Rhodesia had an interesting relationship with foreign mercs. It seems like many of them slotted in nicely to Rhodesian SF units.

[RN7]

A geography teacher at my old school was a white Rhodesian. His name was "Mr White" and he was a very interesting man and a real old colonial type with an upper class British accent and a clipped moustache and was built like a tall rugby player. He used to talk about his adventures in Africa including driving across the Sahara Desert in a Landrover and of course the civil war in Rhodesia. He was in the military in the 70's although he never told us what part. But did say he was guarding a train that was shot up by black guerrillas and that he killed a few with his rifle.

He didn't have a very high opinion of black Africans. He once got into trouble at my old school when he described blacks in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe as lazy good for nothings, and one of the boys in his class asked him did he think that about all black people to which his reply was yes. The boy who asked him was the son of the President of Zambia and he had to promptly apologise to him. He went back to Zimbabwe in the mid 1980's and I don't know what ever happened to him. But I'm sure he had a smile on his face when he heard that the boy he once had to apologise to ended up as an officer in the Zambian Army who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a man having an affair with his wife and who ended up contracting aids in prison. Not a nice story I suppose but life can be a bit nasty.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Apparently a number of personnel who had served with the US and Australian forces in the Vietnam War found civilian life too constraining and moved to Rhodesia specifically to join the army. Some of them then went on to South Africa after the fall of Rhodesia and were welcomed in to the army there.

I knew a few Rhodesians in the 1980s-1990s who had immigrated to Australia before the end of the war and one story I was told claims that entire columns of Rhodesian military vehicles and equipment were driven to South Africa to prevent the rebels gaining control of them (with the South Africans apparently so interested in the mine-protected vehicles the Rhodies had built that they influenced South African designs -this has some element of truth and is supported by other sources).

Another story I was told was that one column of Rhodie military vehicles was denied entry to South Africa at the end of the war although the personnel could enter as refugees. Allegedly the Rhodesian troops drove all the vehicles into the Limpopo River rather than abandon them for the new nation of Zimbabwe to claim.

I know of another story that claims enemy air forces were held in very little regard particularly as on a number of occasions, Rhodesian transport and civilian aircraft had allegedly escaped enemy fighters simply by flying into the thickest clouds they could find and then rising above the cloud level. The enemy pilots had to rely on ground controlled intercept ( Soviet doctrine for the time) and apparently the radars or radar operators just weren't very good and most intercepts were done with the Mk.1 eyeball.

Treat the stories I was told with the required dose of skepticism but I would not be at all surprised if they are true.

[Webstral]

I agree that Croukamp's work isn't what it was billed to be. I, too, wondered about the details of anti-tracking and so forth.

I'm nearing the end of The Rhodesian War. A few ideas stick out. The first is that the white Rhodesians made their own mess. By the end of the war, the entire train was coming off the rails. Schools and medical facilities were closed throughout the countryside. Disease that had been under control in the 1960's was running rampant because the management infrastructure was systematically destroyed. The white population was fleeing in droves. The economy was in a tailspin. All of this came to pass because the white Rhodesian government refused to create the conditions for lasting peace, preferring to rely instead upon violence as a means of dealing with discontent. Had the white Rhodesians eased up on their racism and enabled a more meritorious approach to universal citizenship, support for ZANU might have been so minimal that the Maoist ZANLA guerillas might never had found any metaphorical water in which to swim.

One can claim with justification that the support of the USSR and China and the border states of Zambia and Mozambique (after 1975) gave ZAPU and ZANU, respectively, strength they might never have had. Fair enough. But Rhodesia wouldn't have gotten very far without South Africa and other outside support. Material support was secondary. The Rhodesians fought a very effective bush war with a fraction of the manpower and equipment available to the Americans in Vietnam. ZANLA suffered years of lopsided losses, and yet they kept coming back for more. Clearly, there was more to the matter than just the hardware.

The guerillas placed a heavy emphasis on political indoctrination. They knew what they were trying to achieve, and they saw themselves as having a place in history. The Rhodesians, on the other hand, didn't seem to see the need for a guiding philosophy. Their ideas were negative at worst and preservationist of a blatantly racist society at best. They didn't want things to change. They were opposed to communism. But what were they trying to accomplish, other than not have things be different? I'm not advocating for the communist guerillas. Far from it. Mugabe has turned out to be one of the world's foremost kleptocrats. But the guerillas were fighting for something. They wanted change that they perceived to be better for the majority of Rhodesians. The white Rhodesians, on the other hand, didn't have much to offer the black majority except more of the same. They didn't have much to offer themselves except preservation of their life style based on an openly unequal distribution of and access to resources and economic opportunity. If they had done a better job of co-opting the most motivated and capable of the black Rhodesians, then the white Rhodesians at least could have offered the idea that their was a meritocratic society in which upward mobility was possible for anyone. Of course, this would have meant opening the doors on political power to the black Rhodesians. Obviously, this was not acceptable option until the only choices were moderate reform or radical reform.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Yeah it's a really interesting socio-political situation - but only because it was such a mess!

For instance while many black Rhodesians wanted to work and many white Rhodesians had jobs to offer them, that's were it ended. There was little thought beyond that such as encouraging the black Rhodesians to become business owners and so on and not much thought as to pensions/retirement of black workers.
If the white government had spent a bit of time creating some level of equal opportunity for blacks, well, there might still be a Rhodesia today (but considering that the country is named for a notorious colonial exploiter, well then, maybe not - at it's most base form, the Rhodes Scholarship was also meant to encourage it's recipients into commerce where they could exploit business opportunities regardless of national borders and national considerations)

It was the same in the military, the vast majority of army personnel were black Rhodesians who wanted to serve (for various reasons) but they were rarely encouraged to make more of their military careers or advance up the officer ranks (some of them never had much chance to advance precisely because they hadn't had the education needed).

[Targan]

I know a number of Rhodesian families who moved to my city at the end of the war in their country.

[Rainbow Six]

I used to work with a Rhodesian guy who came to the UK with his family in the early 80's. He was a good bloke, solid, reliable...we had more than a few beers together. He was too young to have actually fought in the War but he had a few stories to tell about life in Rhodesia in general - I remember the time he told me about the Green Leader raid (AKA Operation Gatling) - apparently it had a huge effect on civilian morale, with Green Leader tee shirts and cassette recordings of the radio exchanges between the Rhodesian Air Force and Lusaka tower being commonplace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Rho...a_strikes_back