Chimurenga! The War In Rhodesia 1965-1980 0620062142, 9780620062145

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' THE WAHINRHOIIES 1865-1$5

CHIMURENGA is a Shona word which described the uprisings in the 1890s against the whites who had settled in Rhodesia. Literally the word means 'uprising' or 'resistance*. Because of its ernotive connotations and to emphasise the continuity of the opposition to white rule, the word was also used to describe the modern guerriHa war.

J. PIETERSE QEU.,: 082 838291 7

PRYS: R

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TI& % A R IN RHODESIA 1965 — 1980

A Military History

by

Paul L. Moorcraft and Peter McLaughlin

V

SYGMA/COLLINS

@ Paul L. Moorcraft

and Peter McLaughlin 1982 Published 1982 by Sygma Books (Pty) Ltd and Collins Vaal (Pty) Ltd P 0 Box 61342 Marsh alltown 21N

ISBN 0 620 06214 2 AH rights reserved

Design and ty~etting by Book Productions, Johannesburg Printed and bound by Blackshaws, Cape Town

To our parents

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

PAUL L MOORCRAFT, 34, is a graduate of the Universities of Swansea, Lancaster and Cardiff and is completing further degrees at the Univ'etsities of Zimbabwe and South Africa. A senior instructor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, then a lecturer in political science at the Universities of Rhodesia, Natal and Cape Town, lecturer in history at the University of Zimbabwe, and international relations at the University of the %itwatersrand. He has worked extensively as a journalist, includingTime magazine and as a political columnist in southern Africa. Recent books include AShort Thousand Years(1979), ContactI/(1981) and APica's Super Power (19$1), After editingCommerce, a Rhodesian business magazine, he was editor-in-chief of a Salisbury-based publishing company. Now a full-time writer, he hves in Johannesburg. PETER MCLAUGHLIN, 28, is a history graduate of the University of Rhodesia.His doctorate was astudy ofthe Rhodesian armed forces,B esides practical experience in the Rhodesian civil war as a police field reservist, he is the author of Ragtime Soldiers: the Rhodesian Experience in the Great War (1981).Awardeda post-doctoral Commonweahh Scholarship at the London School of Economics. He is now lecturing in history at the University of Zimbabwe.

Preface Prologue A: THE BEGINNINGS The Roots of Conflict, 1890 — 1965

2 The Opening Round, 1965-1972 3 R o und Two, 1972 — 1976

1 17 27

B: THE COMBATANTS 4 T h e Rhodesian Security Forces

5 The Guerrilla Armies 6 W e apons and Tactics

C: THE CLIMAX 7 I n t ernational Intrigues

158

8 TheSocial Impact of the War

171

190

9 T o w ards All-out War, 1977 — 1980 10 A f t e rmath

228

Epilogue

244

The Major Protagonists

Glossary Bibliography Index

247 256 257 260

PROLOGUE

'Making «ar on rebellion', T.E. Lawrence «tamed 'is slow and messy — bke eating soup with a knife.' Crushing Rhodesia's revolt took 14 years at a cost of more than 30 000 lives. The tiny white minority de6ed the world, its enemies and friends and, in the end, its inevitable fate: black rule. Rhodesia's prime concern, maintained Ian Smith's followers, was to prevent the spread of godless coaununism. But the war led to the triumph of a self-professed Marxist who came to power in a British-supervised democratic

election. Instead of preserving white privilege, the conflict hastened the destruction of many elements of European dominance; comfort was replaced by the sheer struggle for survival. The greatest paradox involved South Africa. Rhodesia broke away from Britain to avoid black rule and then, with the onset of

the guerrilla war, became completely dependent upon a South African regime which was even more determined than Britain to establish a black premier in Salisbury. A b ove all, Pretoria dreaded the possibihty of a victorious Marxist army marching through the streets of Salisbury and Bulawayo, a precedent which might be repeated in the Transvaal. For the major international issues raised by Rhodesia's revolt- the pace of Soviet advance in Africa, the role of the UN, and the future of race relations on this crowded planet — could explode with magnified intensity else-

where.

Rhodesia's diplomatic history is a long melodrama punctuated

by angry encounters on ships, foolish estimates and silly superlatives. It has been told and retold many times by those who have

sought to comprehend Rhodesia's courageously futile de6ance. But what does a military analysis at both the strategic and tactical levels reveal~ The fall of white Rhodesia added powerfully to the niystique of the guerrilla in the Third World. Vietnam had laid the groundwork for the thrall in w hich guerrilla warfare holds Western minds, even though the crucial phases of that war were conventional. The conflicts in Southern Africa appeared to demonstrate further the invincibility of the nationalist or communist guemlla.

First Portugal's colonial armies, their wiH and morale sapped by

more than a decade of guerriHa warfare, gave up the struggle against FRELIMO in Mo zambique, MPLA, FNLA and UNITA in Angola, and PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau. But this auld be explained away, like the American defeat in Vietnam, in terms of

metropolitan Portuguese conscripts refusing to fight any longer in dirty little wars in remote corners of the globe Rhodesia was often seen as a different case. The Zimbabwean nationalists called the whites 'settlers', but the Europeans thought of themselves as Rhodesians, a nation in themselves, or a white African tribe at least. South Africans watched Rhodesia carefully. Afrikaner racism extended to the Portuguese, who were seen as idle, incompetent and poorly disciplined. But in

Rhodesia white Anglo-Saxons were up against the waH. Would a conunitted white Rhodesian population allow itself to be defeat-

ed by black guerriHas? Rhodesia did fall to the guerriHas, Zimbabwe emerged, and the world drew its conclusions. White rule in Africa was certainly doomed; Rhodesia had been the 6nal test to prove the hypothe-

sis. The tide of black majority rule was irresistible. As the Zimbabwe radio trumpeted during the visit of Sam N leader of

uj orna,

the South West Africa People's Organisation, to Africa's newest black nation: 'Namibia shaH be free. Victory is certain!'

In surveying the history of the war in Rhodesia one question is predominant: Can Western men win guerrilla wars in the Third

World? The British experience in Malaya is held up by counterinsurgency experts as a model campaign. But in long-term pers-

pective it may have been a freak in time and place, and the price of 'success' was a further British retreat from a shrinking Empire anyway. Northern Ireland is perhaps a better measure of British

endeavour in guemlla warfare in 'foreign' lands. The American debacle in Vietnam showed how wide the cultural gap between soldiers of the developed world and those of the underdeveloped

countries could be. The rival armies fought completely different wars — the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army happened to fight the right one for Vietnam. In Rhodesia the technological gap between the Rhodesian soldier and the Zimbabwean guerrilla was not as great as that between a US Marine and a Viet Cong cadre. But could soldiers infused with a sense of racial superiority, who rode to battle in helicopters or fought from mine-proofed, ambush-proofed vehicles supported by jet fighter aircraft, hope to defeat guerriHas who

slogged everywhere on foot, who could live on a ball of cold maize porridge and tepid water, and who were, except for their ubiquitous AK-47s, often indistinguishable from the rest of the impov-

erished peasant population? The guerrillas believed they could not hope to win a head-on clash of arms and so adopted the weapon of the weak — guerrilla warfare.

PREFACE

Many books have been written on the pohtics of the UDI years, but this is the Grst military history. We recognise that it is a pathGnder exercise; the heavy guns wiii undoubtedly follow in the form of memoirs and of6cial histories. The Joint High Command of Zimbabwe has already probed this issue; it was suggested that ZIPRA, ZANLA and the security forces organise their own histories of the conflict. The three accounts would be locked away I' or Gve years; then they would be synthesised into the ofGcial history. We suspect, however, that this grand design will not materi-

alise. Already many records have been destroyed or lost and others spirited away to vaults in South Africa or Britain. And former combatants seem to be suffering from selective amnesia. We hope future historians will appreciate how dif6cult it was to write in the immediate aftermath of this often secret, undeclared war. Ctumurenga is a contribution to the general study of confhct. We believe it represents also a portent of the greater conGagration w hich is looming in Southern ~ c a .

Besides the general problems of piecing together a history from scattered information and trying to separate fact from Gction, there were other practical dif6culties, Material on the Rhodesian forces and their operations is more abundant. Although few great war photographs emerged from the conflict, the Rhodesians took more, and better, photographs than did the guerrillas. The Zimbabweans took few photographs and those that survive are often of poor quality. This amounts for an imbalance in pictorial content. In a fairly short general history of the 15-year conflict it is difGcult to convey the atmosphere of the war. There were no major battles; it was a conflict of short, sharp contacts and fleeting en-

counters. We have included the 'boxes' describing speciGc incidents and the Green Leader transcript to try to give the reader some idea of what the war was like from the soldier's point of We would like to thank Kay Sayce, Ted Hart and Paul Attwell

for helping with the general editing and Sally Cumming for typing

most of the script. Our thanks go to all those informants who asked to remain anonymous, but without whom we would not be confident that this is an accurate account. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Pam Wood of Collins Vml for her tough-minded support of contrary authors. A fmal word of thanks goes to Lauraine

McLaughlin for preparing the artwork, and for having the forbearance to live with yet another writing project. Paul L. Moorcraft and Peter McLaughlitt

Salisbury, Zimbabwe July, 1981.

THE ROOTS DF CONFLICT, 1890-1965 White Rhodesia was the deliberate creation of a man pursuing a complex dream of wealth and power, of a river of British red flow-

ing from Cape Point to the Nde delta, drawn by the magic attraction of gold. Cecil Rhodes's invasion of the lands north of the Limpopo, which legend depicted as the location of King Solomon's mines and of gold deposits which dwarfed those of the Rand, was the gamble of a megalomaniac with the wealth to indulge his fantasies. Rhodes secured by deceit a from Lobengula, the Ndebele king who claimed dominion over

minin gconcession

most of the temtory between the Limpopo and the Zambezi. He

used it as a legal basis to secure a Royal Charter from the British Crown, which empowered him to establish a settler state in Ma-

shonaland ruled by Rhodes's British South Africa Company. In 1890 several hundred men of the British South Africa Company's Pioneer Corps and Police, the kernel of the self-contained frontier society, de6ed Lobengula's threats to unleash the tens of

thousands of warriors in his re~cuts. He had belatedly realised his folly and forbidden the settlers' entry. But, outsmarted by

Rhodes's mulbnational corporation, Lobengula was also overawed by his own fearful perceptions of the white man's military technology. He had heard reports from the frontiers of South

Africa of the overwhelming 6repower of white armies. The Ndebele king allowed himself to be faced down and let the bristling columns of the Pioneers roll over the veld to establish the Com-

pany state in Mashonaland, Its tenuous links with the outside world were guarded by a string of tiny forts, but its greatest sec-

urity was Lobenguia's chronic and ultimately fatal vacillation. The settlers' dreams of 6nding an African eldorado were shattered in the lean years which followed the invasion, but there were stiU stories of gold deposits just beyond reach, within the

borders of the Ndebele heartland. In 1893 the Trojan horse reluctantly accepted by Lobengula into his domains — which he refused to destroy despite the demands of a hot-blooded Ndebele war party — ful6lled his worst fears. The Company cleverly engineered a war in which the Ndebele were marked as the aggres-

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aors. Columns of settler volunteers, tempted with promises of

farms and mining claitns, converged on Gubulawayo, the Ndebele capital, and on the way fought two encounter battles with

Kubengula's brave but outgunned rey'ments. Shortly before his capital was captured and sacked, the defeated king fled north and died in the bush beyond the grasp of pursuing settler patrols, '%e victors carved the defeated kingdom into farms and mines, seized and distributed the Ndebele national herd as war booty, andbuilt a new fronher town, Bulawayo, on the site of Lobengula's razed

capital. Rhodes's successes stoked the 6res of his megalomania. As

well as controlling vast 6nancial operations in Southern Africa, he was prime minister of the Cape Colony. He was concerned

about the grovt& of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa and sought to exploit the grievances of the English-speaking mining community in Johannesburg to engineer the overthrow of Paul Kruger's South African Republic. Rhodesia was to be used as a springboard for Rhodes's illegal conspiracy, which was planned in deep secrecy to prevent the intervention of the Imperial government. In late 1895, BSA Company forces struck south to precipitate a

coup against the Afrikaner republic in the Transvaal. But the Jameson Raid was a humihating 6asco for the Company and its soldiers. It also invited catastrophe in the colony. The Ndebele and Shona, chafing under the Company's regime of forced labour, cattle and land seizures, as well as its arrogant administration, and suffering from the natural auctions of cattle disease and locusts, rose against the settlers while the country was denuded of its armed forces. The Company had not completely shattered the Ndebele and Shona political systems, and these, aided by the religious organisations of the two peoples, organised countrywide insurrections which decimated the settler population. Ndebele warriors dug up

the rifles and assegais they had cached after the war of 1893. The Shona had never been disarmed. The resistance raged for 18 months. The settler forces, bolstered by contingents of British troops, were hampered by poor logistics and shortage of horses.

The insurgents made good use of their superior bushcraft and in-

The heroic view of Empire.British South Africa Company forces about to be overwhelmed by Adebele warriors in 1893.

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teHigence network, and avoided the sort of set-piece confronta-

tions which had bloodied Lobengula's regiments in IN3. The Company forces eventuaHy adopted scorched-earth tactics to starve out the rebels, who then retreated to hilltop strongholds and into caves from which they were systematically dynamited.

Rhodes's hubris cost hun the premiership of the Cape Colony, although his influence was strong enough to save him from gaol

for illegally launching the Jameson Raid. Only the British governtnent's reluctance to administer Rhodesia prevented the abrogation of the Royal Charter to punish the Company for its abuses of

power. As weH asleaving the Company's powers largely intact (though more closely supervised by Imperial officials), the events of the later 1890s bequeathed a legacy of bitu:mess to both racial groups. The settlers suffered from a 'risings psychosis', a morbid fear of another unexpected storm of violence. Africans were characterised as treacherous and barbaric, for in the fitst days of the

insurgency hundreds of near-defenceless homesteaders living on lonely farms were taken by surprise and brutally murdered. Afri-

cans saw their hopes of throwing off the yoke of Company rule disappear in the smoke of Maxim and Gatling guns and the blasts

of dynamite, and the death and destruction they suffered passed into their folklore.

Although Rhodesian forces fought alongside British and Imperial units against the white Afrikaners during the Boer War, the settlers retnained mesmerised by the spectre of an African rebellion. The defence system of the first decade of the twentieth century was geared solely towards securing the settlers against the vastly more nutnerous black population. Imperial supervision

forced the Company to develop more subtle ways of controlhng the Ahican masses. Forced labour was no longer possible, but in-

creasing taxation compeHed African men to seek work in the labour-hungry settler economy to meet their obligations to the taxman. Registration certificates and pass laws controlled the rnovements of Africans, and the boundaries of their reserves were strictly defined. African peasant farmers were moved off their land to make way for Europeans, and armed police patrols crisscrossed the territory to display the power of the Company and to nip thoughts of insurrection in the bud. Dr Jameson surrendering to the Boers (1896 ).

The white man's war of 1914-18 resurrected fears of an opportunistic African rising. Internal defence remained a top priority throughout the war against the Germans. Ironically, while the traditions of African tribal life were breaking down and lessening the likelihood of a rising, the Afrikaner rebellion of 1914 in South Africa had its echoes in Rhodesia. Embittered Boers took advantage of Britain's withdrawal of its garrisons to France to stage a rising aimed at regaining their independence. The settler armed

forces were alerted to the possibility of a sympathetic rising by Boer settlers in Rhodesia, and Afrikaner passive resistance to the British war effort and recruiting drives kept suspicions smouldering until the armistice, Ironically, while large numbers of white Afrikaner settlers refused to serve in the forces at war with Germany, several thousand Africans enlisted in an all-volunteer force, the Rhodesia Native Regiment. The unit saw action in German East Afric. The settlers swallowed their repugnance at the thought of arming and training the possible core of some future African insurrection, and of undermining the myth of white supremacy by putting Africans into the field against white Germans. The manpower shortage in the colony bred a pragmatism which evaporated with the unit's demobiTisation in 1919: the several thousand whites who had fought shoulder to shoulder with African troops in East Africa and with working class Tomrnies in France returned to the colony with their class and racial prejudices intact. The Twenties and the Depression years saw a widening of ra-

cial divisions in Rhodesia. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 formally divided the country's land between the races; the whites reserved to themselves the more fertile areas with higher rainfall and 'gave'Africans the poorer, more arid areas. These soon teetered on the brink of ecological disaster as a rapidly growing African population and its expanding herds of livestock crowded on to the overtaxed land. Labour, agricultural, industrial, educational and health legislation of the late Twenties and Thirties was aimed at creating a secure and prosperous society for the whites at the expense of blacks, and largely succeeded, despite the hard times of the De-

pression.

The Great war. Rhodesian artillery in German East Africa. The Nun was nicknamed 'May Jackson' after a Salisbury barmaid.

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