When reading about the end of white rule in Southern Africa, one takes a huge risk of wading through whole sermons of preachy nonsense about the evils of white rule there. These sermons seem especially grating in that Southern Africa has shifted from being food exporters and respectable industrial centers to dysfunctional states whose political leaders are woefully inept, bald-faced crooks, and whose population is unable to maintain their colonial inheritance with their limited skills.
No country in Africa represents this dismal fate more than Zimbabwe. It was once a prosperous country called Rhodesia and the descendents of its British Pioneer founders fought a long, bitter insurgency to keep it from such darkness.
This book explains the military campaign in detail. In the 1950's, Rhodesia was very much an arm of the British Military and they were organized to support thermo-nuclear warfare against the Soviet Union. For example, Rhodesian air force squadrons routinely trained with their British Counterparts even to the point of conducting carrier operations with the Royal Navy. By the end of the 1950's however, the Rhodesian government started to fear a black insurgency and started to shift focus.
The Rhodesians had successfully put down uprisings at the end of the 19th Century, but this time the Rhodesians were not to be supported by the British, the United Nations, or nearly any other Western Country save Portugal and South Africa, and their support proved to be ephemeral.
As a result, the threadbare Rhodesian Military adapted to the insurgency and held it off year after year, at one point the insurgents were estimated to be fewer than 200 active persons, wholly disorganized. This book describes the situation with stunning clarity. However, changing world circumstances spelled doom for the Rhodesians. The final breaking of Rhodesian resistance came when the South Africans decided to stop supporting Rhodesia as part of their ultimately ill-advised détente policy with black Africa while resistance fighters were fully supported by Soviet and Maoist forces.
The two most remarkable passages are the Rhodesian bombing campaigns of refugee and insurgent camps in border countries by obsolete Canberra bombers. The Rhodesian pilots even contact local air traffic controllers to ensure there are no mid-air mishaps.
The second passage is on the Rhodesian Military's singular lack of intellectualism and philosophical/metapolitical justification for the war. This reviewer perused some Rhodesian publications and found this to be wholly true (many Rhodesian publications are archived online in PDF.) One article-written in the middle of the bush war is a boast about a fighter pilot that easily hit a trash can during strafing training! Nothing was about close air support to defeat insurgents or more complex "effects based operations."
However, the Rhodesian Military was not charged to carry out intellectual exercises. The Rhodesian Military was in up to their eyeballs fighting the conflict. It is up to others-philosophers, religious leaders, writers, and academics to come up with justification and by 1950, such thinkers had created an overarching story of blacks being oppressed by whites. The intellectual tide had wholly shifted on the Rhodesians. No beer swilling fighter pilot boasting in the pilot's mess could counter such an overwhelming current of thought.
An outstanding overarching view of the conflict which crystallizes the complex ideas into easy understood paragraphs.
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- Kindle CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 27, 2021
A very informative and educational read, indeed
