The conventional starting date of the Rhodesian Bush War is the 21st of December 1972, when a small ZANLA infiltration party attacked Altena Farm in the Centenary district of north-eastern Rhodesia, wounding the farm-owner's daughter and beginning what would become a seven-year asymmetric conflict. The conventional ending date is the 21st of December 1979, when the Lancaster House Agreement was signed in London, ending the war exactly seven years later. Between those two dates, by the most reliable casualty estimates, about 30,000 people died — perhaps a thousand of them white Rhodesian combatants, perhaps another thousand white civilians, and the great majority of the remainder Black Rhodesian combatants and civilians on both sides of the conflict. The war was small by twentieth-century standards. It was also one of the most operationally sophisticated counter-insurgency campaigns of its era, and it was decided not by the military balance — which never decisively favoured either side — but by external political and economic pressures.
The two armies
The Rhodesian armed forces in 1972 were small and professional. The Regular Army numbered about 4,500 men, supplemented by a Territorial Force (white males required to serve part-time from age 17 to 50, with annual call-ups) of about 10,000. The Air Force had about 1,200 personnel and about 100 combat aircraft (Hawker Hunters, Canberras, Vampires, Provosts, and from the mid-1970s helicopters including Alouette IIIs and South African-supplied UH-1H Hueys). The British South Africa Police was the country's gendarmerie, about 8,000 strong, of whom about 60% were Black. The specialised counter-insurgency units — the Rhodesian SAS (modelled on the British 22 SAS), the Selous Scouts (a "pseudo-insurgent" unit specialising in long-range reconnaissance and false-flag operations), and the Rhodesian Light Infantry's commando battalions — were small but extraordinarily capable. The Rhodesian armed forces operated on what they called Fireforce doctrine: a small infantry assault force (usually a section of four men) delivered by helicopter to engage guerrilla concentrations identified by ground patrols or aerial reconnaissance, supported by light close-air-support aircraft.
The two guerrilla forces operating against Rhodesia were ZANLA (the military wing of ZANU, mainly Shona, headquartered in Maputo and operating from Mozambique into eastern and central Rhodesia) and ZIPRA (the military wing of ZAPU, mainly Ndebele, headquartered in Lusaka and operating from Zambia into western Rhodesia). They had broadly similar capabilities and broadly similar political objectives, but their tactical doctrines and external sponsors differed. ZANLA was trained substantially by Chinese instructors in Tanzania, used Maoist political-military doctrine (long-running guerrilla campaigns aimed at gradual control of rural districts), and operated primarily as small infiltration parties (8 to 15 men) crossing into Rhodesia for two-to-three-month operational tours. ZIPRA was trained substantially by Soviet and East German instructors, used a more conventional Eastern Bloc doctrine (organising battalion-strength formations, with conventional artillery and armour, intended ultimately for a conventional invasion of Rhodesia), and operated both small infiltration parties and larger units. Both forces had access to AK-47s, SKS carbines, RPG-7s, RPD light machine-guns, and Soviet-supplied land mines.
How the war was fought
The war was fought across the entire country but concentrated in two main areas: the north-east (Mtoko, Mount Darwin, Centenary, the Zambezi escarpment) where ZANLA crossed from Mozambique, and the south-east and Operational Area Hurricane where ZANLA operated in greater density. The Rhodesian counter-insurgency strategy used three main techniques: Fireforce (the helicopter-borne reaction force described above), protected villages (the forced relocation of African rural populations into fortified compounds where they could be more easily separated from the guerrillas, a technique borrowed from the British in Malaya), and cross-border operations (large-scale Rhodesian SAS and RLI raids on guerrilla bases inside Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana, sometimes involving company-sized formations and air support).
The protected villages system was, by the mid-1970s, the most controversial element of Rhodesian counter-insurgency policy. About 750,000 Black rural Rhodesians were relocated into approximately 230 protected villages between 1974 and 1979 — about a fifth of the country's African population. The relocation was forced; the conditions inside the villages were often poor; the system substantially disrupted rural agriculture and family life; and it produced, on the political balance sheet, more support for the guerrillas than for the Rhodesian government. The Rhodesian government's intelligence chief Ken Flower would later acknowledge, in his 1987 memoirs, that the protected villages programme was a "strategic failure" that recruited more guerrillas than it neutralised.
The cross-border raids
From 1976 onward the Rhodesian armed forces conducted increasingly aggressive cross-border raids on guerrilla bases inside the front-line states. The Selous Scouts conducted Operation Eland against ZANLA's training camp at Nyadzonia in Mozambique in August 1976, killing — by their own estimate — about 1,000 guerrillas. The SAS and RLI conducted Operation Dingo against ZANLA's headquarters complex at Chimoio and Tembue in Mozambique in November 1977, killing several thousand more. ZIPRA's bases in Zambia were attacked repeatedly through 1978 and 1979, including the bombing of the ZIPRA headquarters at Westlands Farm outside Lusaka in October 1979 — a raid that came close to killing Joshua Nkomo himself.
The cross-border raids were tactically successful: they killed substantial numbers of guerrillas, captured large quantities of weapons, and forced the guerrilla command structures repeatedly to relocate. They were strategically counter-productive in two ways. First, they killed substantial numbers of refugees and civilians along with combatants (the raid on Nyadzonia, in particular, killed several hundred non-combatant refugees, although the Rhodesian command insisted at the time that the casualties were combatants); these casualties were heavily reported in the international press and accelerated the political delegitimation of the Rhodesian government. Second, they hardened the diplomatic position of the front-line states (Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana, Angola, Tanzania) against any negotiated settlement that did not deliver African majority rule.
The strategic turn — Mozambique 1975
The single most important strategic event of the bush war was not a Rhodesian military operation but the Portuguese revolution of April 1974 and the subsequent independence of Mozambique in June 1975 under the Marxist-Leninist FRELIMO government. The new Mozambican government — led by Samora Machel — offered ZANLA full operational sanctuary along Rhodesia's entire eastern border. The pre-1975 ZANLA infiltration routes had been forced through narrow river crossings in the north (around the Zambezi escarpment); after 1975 the entire 1,200-kilometre Mozambican border was potential infiltration territory. ZANLA's numerical and operational capacity expanded substantially: by 1978 it had roughly 12,000 combatants in the field at any given time, up from perhaps 1,500 in 1974.
Simultaneously, South Africa under John Vorster began, from 1974, a quiet reassessment of its support for Rhodesia. The South African government concluded that the Smith regime was unsustainable in the long term and that South African interests would be better served by a moderate African successor government in Salisbury that could be diplomatically acceptable. South African support for Rhodesia did not end — police units remained deployed, intelligence cooperation continued, fuel supplies continued — but the South African government no longer treated Rhodesian survival as a strategic priority. The Smith government, recognising this shift, began to look more seriously at a domestic political settlement that would forestall an externally imposed one.
The military balance, 1979
By mid-1979 the war had reached, in conventional terms, a stalemate. The Rhodesian armed forces could not be militarily defeated by the guerrillas — they retained operational superiority in every direct engagement, controlled the towns, the main roads, the railways, the airspace, and the borders. The guerrillas could not be militarily defeated by the Rhodesians either — they could replace casualties from refugee populations in Mozambique and Zambia faster than the Rhodesians could inflict them, they had effectively unlimited Eastern Bloc weapons supply, they were succeeding in interrupting the Rhodesian rural economy and the rural school system, and they were politically winning in every African village they sustained contact with. The decisive constraint on the Rhodesian armed forces was not military but financial: by 1979 the war was consuming about 40% of the Rhodesian government's annual budget, the economy was in serious recession, and the white male population available for Territorial Force call-ups was being run down by emigration faster than it could be replaced.
It is in this context that the internal settlement of 1978 and the Lancaster House negotiations of 1979 should be understood. Neither was a Rhodesian military defeat, but both were responses to a Rhodesian recognition that the existing war could not be sustained financially and demographically. The next chapter is the story of the internal settlement.
End of Chapter VI