It has been over four decades since the Union Jack was lowered on the
colony of Rhodesia, but the bitter and divisive civil war that preceded
it has continued to endure as a textbook counter-insurgency campaign
fought between a mobile, motivated and highly trained Rhodesian security
establishment and two constituted liberations movements motivated,
resourced and inspired by the ideals of communist revolution in the
third world.
A complicated historical process of occupation and colonization set the
tone as early as the late 1890s for what would at some point be an
inevitable struggle for domination of this small, landlocked nation set
in the southern tropics of Africa. The story of the Rhodesian War, or
the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle, is not only an epic of superb
military achievement, and revolutionary zeal and fervour, but is the
tale of the incompatibility of the races in southern Africa, a clash of
politics and ideals and, perhaps more importantly, the ongoing
ramifications of the past upon the present, and the social and political
scars that a war of such emotional underpinnings as the Rhodesian
conflict has had on the modern psyche of Zimbabwe.
The Rhodesian War was fought with finely tuned intelligence-gathering
and -analysis techniques combined with a fluid and mobile armed
response. The practitioners of both have justifiably been celebrated in
countless histories, memoirs and campaign analyses, but what has never
been attempted has been a concise, balanced and explanatory overview of
the war, the military mechanisms and the social and political
foundations that defined the crisis. This book does all of that. The
Rhodesian War is explained in digestible detail and in a manner that
will allow enthusiasts of the elements of that struggle - the iconic
exploits of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the SAS, the Selous Scouts,
the Rhodesian African Rifles, the Rhodesia Regiment, among other
well-known fighting units - to embrace the wider picture in order to
place the various episodes in context.
