The Rhodesia Regiment
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| Author | : Peter Baxter |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 614 |
| Release | : 2014-04-01 |
| Genre | : World War, 1914-1918 |
| ISBN | : 9781920143893 |
As the 19th century and Queen Victoria's long reign drew to a close, volunteer squadrons of the Rhodesia regiment, recruited by Colonel Baden-Powell, were positioned along the border with Bechuanaland, to defend Rhodesia against Boer aggression. In 1914 Rhodesians again rallied to the Crown with the formation of two battalions of the Rhodesia Regiment to counter the German presence in South West and East Africa. Shortly after, many volunteered to join the Allied forces on the Western Front. During the Second World War the indomitable combat prowess and leadership talents of Rhodesia Regiment volunteers were strongly evident in many theatres, including North Africa, Somaliland, the Middle East, Italy, the Adriatic, Western Europe and South East Asia. In 1947 the Crown bestowed the ultimate accolade, with the title 'Royal' prefixed to the regiment. Through the 1950s and '60s, the experiences of Rhodesians in successive areas of conflict-Malaya, Suez, Aden and Nyasaland-significantly enhanced aspects of Rhodesia's territorial army, particularly with regard to counter-insurgency warfare. Conscription ensured combat-readiness for the growing number of battalions and independent companies established throughout the country, providing a solid basis for the regiment to play a vital role in countering the ZANLA/ZIPRA guerrilla insurgencies of the 1960s and '70s.
| Author | : Alexandre Binda |
| Publisher | : Hodder Christian Books |
| Total Pages | : 464 |
| Release | : 2013-03-01 |
| Genre | : Zimbabwe |
| ISBN | : 9781919854526 |
The Rhodesia Regiment was formed in 1899 to fight for Queen Victoria during the Boer War. It was later disbanded after the war. Both 1st and 2nd Rhodesia Regiments were reformed in 1914, to fight in the conquest of German South West Africa and later on the Western Front. In World War II, many thousands of Rhodesian volunteers were posted to various British and South African units, the Royal Navy and particularly to the specially formed Rhodesia Squadrons of the RAF. From 1964 to 1979, the Rhodesia Regiment fought gallantly in the Bush War achieving marked successes against their terrorist enemies and inflicting heavy losses on them. This text tells the story of the regiment.
| Author | : Tony Ballinger |
| Publisher | : Helion and Company |
| Total Pages | : 365 |
| Release | : 2015-03-19 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1910777498 |
The experiences of a young soldier on the frontlines of the Rhodesian Bush War are vividly recounted in this personal memoir. In A Walk Against the Stream, Tony Ballinger tells of his eighteen months of compulsory service as a young national service officer in the Rhodesian army. Stationed in Victoria Falls, Rhodesia, he faced down enemy territory just across the Zambezi river in Zambia. Initially allocated to 4th platoon, 4 Independent company Rhodesia Regiment (RR) as a subaltern and later on as a 1st Lieutenant in support company 2RR, the story starts with the author’s training and deployment. The events that unfold contain interesting military encounters, including battles against the Zambian army and revolutionary guerillas. But Ballinger also explores the human side of his time in the service: his love of a country falling apart, the relationship he forms with a local woman; and how their love, hope and dreams are snatched away by unfolding events. This is a riveting personal tale, interspersed with dozens of the author’s personal photographs.
| Author | : Luise White |
| Publisher | : Duke University Press |
| Total Pages | : 179 |
| Release | : 2021-02-08 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1478021284 |
In Fighting and Writing Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, White finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods. In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.
| Author | : Chris Cocks |
| Publisher | : Lime Tree Press |
| Total Pages | : 341 |
| Release | : 2020-06-01 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : |
Fire Force is the account of Chris Cocks’s service in 3 Commando, The Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI), during Zimbabwe’s civil war of the 1970s—a war that came to be known, almost innocuously, as ‘the bush war’. Fire Force, a tactic of total airborne/airmobile envelopment, was developed by the RLI, and became the principal strike weapon of the beleaguered Rhodesian forces in their struggle against the tide of the communist-trained and -equipped ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas. “Like Reitz’s work, Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War, Fire Force, by first-time author Chris Cocks, is a personal account of close-quarter warfare. It is a unique, compelling, sometimes brutal account of a young conscript’s three years of service in the elite Rhodesian Light Infantry … Cocks’s work is one of the very few books which adequately describes the horrors of war in Africa … Fire Force is the best book on the Rhodesian War that I have read.” – Southern African Review of Books “Fire Force will be to the Rhodesian War what Remarque’s All Quiet on The Western Front was to World War I. A high claim indeed, but perhaps valid, for this moving book is a classic in any sense.” – The Star “The narrative is raw … it gives the book a veracity so complete that it will transport anyone involved in the ordeal back across the years with the force of a body blow … Rhodesia does at last have its own version of Michael Herr’s Vietnam experiences, Dispatches. A sense of regret is what really lingers, that the whole nightmare had to happen at all. The list of names of boys killed, or scarred physically and mentally, is moving beyond mere words.” – The Financial Mail
| Author | : Peter Baxter |
| Publisher | : Helion and Company |
| Total Pages | : 74 |
| Release | : 2014-07-19 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1909982377 |
It has been over three 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 counterinsurgency 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 fervor, 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
| Author | : Timothy Bax |
| Publisher | : Casemate Publishers |
| Total Pages | : 406 |
| Release | : 2013-08-19 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 190998244X |
The memoir of a special forces veteran of the Rhodesian War, with over a hundred photos included. Nothing terrorized Russian and Chinese-backed guerillas fighting Rhodesia’s bush war in the 1970s more than the famed Selous Scouts. The name of the unit struck fear in the hearts of even the most battle-hardened—rather than speak it, they referred to its soldiers simply as Skuzapu, or pickpockets. History has recorded the regiment as being one of the deadliest and most effective killing machines in modern counter-insurgency warfare. In this book, a veteran of the unit shares his stories of childhood in colonial Africa with his British family, documenting a world where Foreign Service employees gathered at “the club” to find company and alcohol, leopards prowled the night, and his mother knew how to use a gun. Eventually he would move to Canada, only to feel drawn back to the continent where he grew up. There he would be recruited into the Selous Scouts, comprised of specially selected black and white soldiers of the Rhodesian army, supplemented with hardcore terrorists captured on the battlefield. Posing as communist guerrillas, members of this elite Special Forces unit would slip silently into the night to seek out insurgents in a deadly game of hide-and-seek played out between gangs and counter-gangs in the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the African bush. By the mid-1970s, the Selous Scouts had begun to dominate Rhodesia’s battle space. Working in conjunction with the elite airborne assault troops of the Rhodesian Light Infantry, the Selous Scouts accounted for an extraordinarily high proportion of enemy casualties. Not content with restricting themselves to hunting guerrillas inside Rhodesia, they began conducting external vehicle-borne assaults against camps situated deep inside neighboring countries. Recounting his experiences while surviving in this cauldron of battle, while also relating with dry wit the day-to-day details and absurdities of the world that surrounded him, Timothy Bax provides a rare look at this time and place.
| Author | : Timothy J Stapleton |
| Publisher | : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press |
| Total Pages | : 200 |
| Release | : |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : 9781554585946 |
No Insignificant Part: The Rhodesia Native Regiment and the East Africa Campaign of the First World War is the first history of the only primarily African military unit from Zimbabwe to fight in the First World War. Recruited from the migrant labour network, most African soldiers in the RNR were originally miners or farm workers from what are now Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi. Like others across the world, they joined the army for a variety of reason, chief among them a desire to escape low pay and horrible working conditions. The RNR participated in some of the key engagements of the German East Africa campaign's later phase, subsisting on extremely meager rations and suffering from tropical diseases and exhaustion. Because they were commanded by a small group of European officers, most of whom were seconded from the Native Affairs Department and the British South Africa Police, the regiment was dominated by racism. It was not unusual for black soldiers, but never white ones, to be publicly flogged for alleged theft or insubordination. Although it remained in the field longer than all-white units and some of its members received some of Britain's highest decorations, the Rhodesia Native Regiment was quickly disbanded after the war and conveniently forgotten by the colonial establishment. Southern Rhodesias white settler minority, partly on the strength of its wartime sacrifice, was given political control of the territory through a racially exclusive form of self-government, but black RNR veterans received little support or recognition. No Insignificant Part takes a new look at an old campaign and will appeal to scholars of African or military history interested in the First World War.
| Author | : Alexandre Binda |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2015 |
| Genre | : Zimbabwe |
| ISBN | : 9781910294048 |
This all new work by accomplished military historian Alexandre Binda, former paymaster to the Grey's Scouts, tables the remarkable story of Rhodesia's mounted infantry, the Grey's Scouts. Working closely with the last commanding officer, squadron commanders and a whole host of regimental personalities, all of whom have given The Equus Men their unequivocal support Binda has enjoyed unparalleled access to thousands of pages of archival documents and many hundreds of previously unpublished photographs. Here, he has traced the Grey's from their early origins in the Matabele Rebellion of 1896, where an 'unassuming Englishman, the Honorable George Grey', found himself originating a body of horseman named the 'Bulawayo Field Force', through to the formation of the Animal Transport Unit (ATU) which went on to become the Mounted Infantry Unit (MIU). With the skill of a practiced narrator, Binda takes the reader through these early days to the establishment of the Grey's Scouts in the Rhodesian Army order of battle in 1976. Deployed to great effect during the bitter Rhodesian Bush War of the late 1960s - 1970s, the mounted operations conducted by the Grey's are succinctly and clearly detailed. Some of the contacts related make for astonishing reads and with the lively, vibrant, text one can almost feel the steaming sweat of rider and mount; sense the pounding adrenaline; hear the thundering hooves as a fearful enemy is pursued to battle's inevitable conclusion. Suffice to say, "The Equus Men" makes for an engaging read. Trained and utilized as mounted infantry as opposed to cavalry, the Grey's Scouts saw exceptional success in the field. Lightly equipped, they were able to cover great distances at speed, live off the veldt with minimal support and through 'shock action', quickly engage and destroy insurgent forces. Originally a regular formation, the Grey's Scouts were augmented by Territorial and National Service soldiers as the conflict progressed and by 1980, when hostilities ceased, the Regiment numbered some 600 soldiers, both men and women, black and white. With its informative text and rich profusion of photographs, "The Equus Men" is a stunning tribute to the equestrian and fighting prowess of the Grey's Scouts. It is a remarkable story and one that is ever more relevant, given recent mounted and pack horse operations conducted by British and US special forces in Afghanistan.
| Author | : Dick Gledhill |
| Publisher | : Covos Day |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2001 |
| Genre | : Zimbabwe |
| ISBN | : 9781919874357 |
The author's fictionalized account of his service in the elite parachute battalion, One Commando, the Rhodesian Light Infantry, during the height of the guerrilla war. This is an account of the bush war in Rhodesia that is sure to fascinate anyone interested in military history or the history of southern Africa. A cracker-jack story; action-packed, well-balanced and intriguing.
