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In the first quarter of 1974 the advance of African independence that began in Ghana in 1956 had ground to a halt in southern Africa. It had come up against a seemingly impenetrable wall of white and colonial rule: the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, the UDI regime in Rhodesia, South African rule in South West Africa (Namibia), and the apartheid government in South Africa itself. And then, on April 25, 1974, the wall cracked. A coup d'etat overthrew Portugal's dictatorship. Portuguese defence against the guerrilla movements in their colonies collapsed. In the next nineteen months Angola and Mozambique fell into bloody anarchy from which emerged tottering new regimes struggling to survive their own civil wars. Rhodesia was suddenly naked to attack through Mozambique and South West Africa from Angola. Abruptly southern Africa became a Cold War hot zone involving South African and Cuban forces. But the future was clear: this was the beginning of the end for white rule. It came five years later in Rhodesia and fifteen in Namibia and South Africa. The trigger - the transition of the Portuguese colonies to self-rule - was captured in extraordinary detail by photographers of the Argus Africa news service, a small, highly professional South African agency. These have been compiled here by its then editor, Wilf Nussey, who wrote the accompanying text.

Using archival sources and private documents recently unearthed, Come Back to Portofino chronicles the journey taken by volunteers in the 6th South African Armoured Division. From training camps in Egypt through to the blissful summer of 1945 the ‘Div’ left its mark on towns and villages across Italy. From Monte Cassino to the outskirts of Venice and the River Po, the campaign lasted exactly twelve months. During the advance through Rome up to Florence, it was a case of constant movement and violent contact with the enemy. Experiences which left an enduring impression on returned soldiers included the periods of rest at Siena and Lucca as well as the four miserable winter months in the northern Apennines. Overall, the casualty rate was surprisingly low considering the ideal ambush country and mountain defences which had to be overcome. In the rifle companies however, the rate of attrition was high and replacements were few. Among the South Africans who are buried in Italy, there are those who died in vehicle accidents, from drowning and falling out of windows or from suicide. For the ordinary soldier the most important part of everyday life was contact with home or foraging for food and wine, and even enjoying the company of signorine when operations permitted. Nevertheless, it was not one long happy camping trip as was often portrayed in the press. The cast is made up of the famous regiments and ordinary South Africans who participated in these epic events. About the AuthorJames Bourhill is a property valuer but his passion has always been history and travel. Currently these two interests are combined in his research for a D.Phil in history.

Unapologetic, unassuming and forthright, the combat exploits of Executive Outcomes (EO) in Angola and Sierra Leone are recounted for the first time by a battlefield commander who was physically on the ground during all their major combat operations. From fighting UNITA for the critical oil installations and diamond fields of Angola to the offensive against the RUF in Sierra Leone to capture the Kono diamond fields and the palace coup which ousted Captain Valentine Strasser, van Heerden was at the forefront. He tells of the tragedy of child soldiers, illegal diamond mining and the curse of government soldiers who turn on their own people; he tells of RUF atrocities, the harrowing attempt to rescue a downed EO pilot and the poignant efforts to recover the remains of EO soldiers killed in action. Coupled with van Heerden's gripping expose, hitherto unpublished photographs, order of battle charts and battle maps offer unprecedented access to the major actions as they took place on the ground during the heydays of EO.

Join 'The terrible ones' on clandestine operations, in conventional warfare during the harsh bush war that raged through Southern Angola in the 1980's. The conflict ended with the last major battle of the Cold War, one of the largest battles of the latter part of the 20th century. This title presents an eyewitness account by a South African Defense Force (SADF) Signals officer, Marius Scheepers, who served in arguably the most formidable battle unit that ever existed in the history of the South African Defense Force: 32 Battalion. It describes how members lived and fought in the bush during 1983 under the most difficult conditions. Being the Signals officer of 32 battalion, Scheepers was privy to all major command decisions of the time. Although he focuses primarily on operations during the year 1983, including Operation Snoek en Dolfyn, he includes concise descriptions of all other major operations that took place inside Angola between 1966 and 1988. This includes Operation Askari (1983/4) and the decisive battle at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987/88. Extensive appendices include 32 Battalion sitreps, radio-code cards, SADF radio equipment used by 32 Battalion and details on SADF, SAAF and SWAPO.

A kaleidoscope of human-interest stories exposing long-kept secrets, mysteries and heroics for the first time. Wars always generate stories and everybody loves a story. Rob Milne has compiled this selection of Anglo-Boer War stories from all over South Africa and recounts them in a book that saddens, mystifies, but most of all entertains. There's the devotion of the English fiancee who for 60 years sent a sprig of heather to the Lake Chrissie Post Office for her beloved's grave, the tale of the lone Boer sniper who held off the entire Guards Brigade for more than a day after the battle of Bergendal, the sighting of UFOs near Pretoria at the beginning of the war and the story of how an unfortunate British soldier ended up being buried under a toilet on a railway station. Read about Sergeant Woodward's two graves in Heidelberg and the ghosts of the British officers that still haunt the Elands River Valley. During the past 12 years since the publication of the first edition, Milne has relentlessly followed up on his stories; but sometimes the stories have followed him ...with unexpected results!There's a photo of the ghosts of the Bergendal farm girl and her British soldier lover who appeared in broad daylight on the battlefield while Milne was investigating the story in 2011. There's the unnamed Welshman who found the long-lost British paymaster's gold 60 years after the military train was ambushed and looted near Greylingstad. Learn the truth of how Churchill and his fellow officers received the daily war news in Morse code while they were prisoners of war at the State Model School in Pretoria, why Prime Minister Botha was sued after the war for stealing the 'Kruger Millions' when entrusted to his care as Commandant-General during the retreat to the Mozambican border. And there's the love story, 'The Legend of the Flowers', about Martha, a Boer girl, and a British soldier, George, which unfolded in Ventersdorp and how Martha involved the author in her story from beyond the grave. A unique and delightfully refreshing read.

Based on the author's diaries, From Addis to the Aosta Valley is the account of Keith Ford's service in the Second World War from 1940-1945. As a gunner, he was deployed 'up north' to East Africa and experienced his first taste of action with the 1st South African Division during the invasion of Italian Somaliland; thereafter he was involved in the Abyssinian campaign and was with the victorious Allies when Addis Ababa was liberated. Then came North Africa and the dark days of the Desert campaign as a Gun Position Officer's Assistant on 25-pounders with the 1st South African Brigade: from Taieb el Essem, the defensive box south of Sidi Rezegh, to Bir el Gubi, Bardia, Tobruk and Gazala, and to the annihilation of his battery by German panzers at Agheila. Retrained as a Bofors anti-aircraft gunner, he was with the Eighth Army at El Alamein. On posting to Italy, his Light Anti-Aircraft Unit 1 became D Company Witwatersrand De la Rey Battalion and dug in on the 1944 Winter Line. He saw action during the assault and capture of Caprara, the advance to the river Po and finally, St Bernard's Pass in the Aosta valley. This is the story of an ordinary soldier, but one who has a keen eye for detail for the countryside and people around him. He brings a sense of immediacy and pathos to his writing through his relationships with his comrades and the civilians he encounters, particularly with the Italian women for whom he retains a special place in his heart.

The South African Air Force (SAAF), formed on 1 February 1920, is the second oldest air force in the Commonwealth. The air arm played a major role in securing victory for the Allies during the Second World War, in the 1948/49 Berlin Airlift, and in Korea in the 1950s. The SAAF assisted Rhodesia in the 1960s and '70s, made a major contribution to the 'Border' or 'Bush' war in South West Africa and Angola, participated in the transition to a new democracy in South Africa and continuously supports South African peace missions in Africa. It has also assisted in countless relief and rescue missions in southern Africa throughout this entire period. However, the SAAF is not just about aircraft and ordnance; it is made up of people and it is in this compilation that these people, airmen and ground crew alike, find their voice. These are their stories, all told in the first person by the actual participants as unvarnished, unabbreviated and intensely immediate and personal recollections. Through their stories of heroism, duty, adventure and tragedy, the reader will follow the history of the SAAF from 1939 to the present day. To complement the stories, the final chapter includes a collection of squadron pub songs from the Second World War, Korea and the Border War.

Jeremy Hall's childhood in the white-ruled apartheid South Africa of the 1950s and '60s was ostensibly idyllic: growing up in the farming areas of Natal, he had free rein to pander to his keen exploratory mind, yet niggling away was entrenched racism and interracial hatred. Closeted in the hallowed halls of an English-speaking high school, the revelation of the real world that followed - a world of township unrest, Afrikaner politicians issuing dire warnings of the red and black hordes massing on the borders - exploded into Hall's psyche with his national-service call-up into the South African Defence Force (SADF), where he encountered the institutionalized hatred of the Afrikaner hierarchy for the English-speaking recruits, the rowe, or 'scabs'. Disillusioned and unsettled, following his SADF conscription, Hall found himself in 1976 signing on for three years with 2 Commando The Rhodesian Light Infantry as the bush war in that country erupted from a simmering, lowkey insurgency into full-blown war. As a paratrooper with this crack airborne unit, he was to see continual combat on Fireforce operations and cross-border raids into Zambia and Mozambique, such as Operation Dingo, the 1977 Rhodesian attack on ZANLA's Chimoio base.

This is the true story of a young guerrilla commander brought up in a Christian family in Rhodesia, a former colony of Britain. Exposed to the excesses of a colonial regime where race and racism determined one's status in society, and influenced by the radical anti-racial views of his parents and later of fellow students and workmates, his character began to change. A chance encounter with a captured guerrilla fighter helped complete the metamorphic transformation of his rebel character, and was catalytic to his decision to cross into Mozambique to join the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), the military wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led by Robert Mugabe, which was waging a protracted revolutionary armed struggle to liberate Zimbabwe. Known by his nom de guerre, Dragon Patiripakashata, he led several armed guerrilla incursions into Rhodesia, before being promoted to the General staff and appointed an instructor. For the final eighteen months of the war, until 1980, he served as ZANU's Chief representative to socialist Ethiopia. Mutambara invites the reader to view the Rhodesian bush war through the eyes of a guerrilla commander, experience the trials and tribulations of a freedom fighter, the satisfaction of working among the masses, and the joyous celebration of achieving freedom and independence. He outlines the psyche of those who engage in revolutionary armed struggle and why, even when exposed to extreme hardship and continual assault by a superior military adversary, they remain committed to their cause. This book also takes a different view of Mugabe, reviled by most Western governments and yet who remains immensely popular among his people.

The 1969 republican constitution of the Rhodesia was intended to secure recognition for Ian Smith's 1965 UDI. Given the evasion by significant nations of the trade sanctions imposed by the UN, the gamble was that this de facto recognition would become de jure. But it was unlikely because the framers of the 1969 constitution rejected the aim of progress to majority rule through a qualified franchise. They offered the Africans only the goal of parity of racial representation. The common roll was replaced by a separate African roll and a 'European' one which included the Asian and coloured populations. The African ability to qualify for the vote was governed by the ratio of income tax they paid in comparison to the 'Europeans'. In 1970 Ian Smith welcomed an overture from Edward Heath's new conservative government to re-open the Anglo-Rhodesian negotiations. Lord Goodman succeeded in November 1972 to secure an agreed compromise, restoring the aim of eventual majority rule. The exiled nationalist insurgents' efforts to ignite an armed insurgency were petering out by the time of the settlement. It therefore fell to the nationalists in Rhodesia, bent on majority rule, to stymie these effort. They succeeded because the British insisted that any settlement had to be endorsed by the majority of the people of Rhodesia. A referendum would mean a loss of face for Ian Smith. Lord Pearce's judicial commission's assessment insisted on 'normal political activity' forcing Smith to release a significant number of nationalist activists from detention. The leisurely formation of the commission gave these activists time to organize a campaign of rejection, the result of which the Pearce commission could not, or chose not, to ignore.

"The aftermath...After the dust had settled, the smell of gun powder had dispersed, the crashing sound of mortars and RPG7s had faded away ... what ghosts returned with young South African soldiers of the border war generation who fought at the tip of the spear against the communist threat on South Africa's border?Young 'parabats', manufactured by the formidable factory of 1 Parachute Battalion, had been rushed to the forefront of the action in the Border War. Now in the same civilian clothes they had worn before, many returning troops found they were not the same young men as before. For many South African troepies from different military units and phases of the bush war, the dust and the smoke took years to settle; parts of their souls were forever connected to, and travelled back, to a time when birds erupted from trees in a smoke filled battle zone, like bats out of hell ... to the smell of the ambush, the head count after the contact, visions of the conventional battle fields of Angola, chasing hot spoor trails in Namibia. Forever standing guard over lost comrades, and even dead enemies. This is the aftermath, the beginning of a long personal battle ... but now there is no help from a platoon buddy or a watchful platoon sergeant. In this new battle, on this new journey, you walk alone.

An account which strives to place the war which South Africa fought in Angola in a historically meaningful perspective. Although the conflict initially centered on the opposing agendas of the SADF and People's Liberation Army of Namibia of SWAPO, it was to escalate and take on an international Cold War character as Angolan, Cuban, and Soviet protagonists appeared on the stage of the unfolding drama. Apart from the political resolution which was subsequently achieved in South Africa, the war represented the last African liberation struggle for independence from colonial rule. The aim of this book is to present a concise history of the Angolan Border War from 1966 to 1989. It supplements previous books which have covered periods of the war by breaking the entire duration of the conflict down into six distinctive phases and meticulously reconstructing twenty specific military operations in Angola which changed the course of the war. The perspective which the strategy affords should enable readers to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the individual phases of the war and the context which they provide for its final outcome. Two highly significant events of the war, the battles of Cuvelai (1983/84) and the battle at Indungo (1987), are subjected to particular scrutiny in the overall narrative. The battle at Indungo has been relatively neglected by writers and historians prior to the publication of this book. The information included in some six chapters of this book forms part of a dissertation for the degree M SocSci at the University of Pretoria which the author completed under the supervision of the acclaimed historian, Professor Fransjohan Pretorius, at the end of 2019. The study carries the title: The Battle at Indungo, 31 October 1987: An SADF military venture against SWAPO in the Angolan Border War.

This comprehensive military atlas covers every aspect of the Boer War in some 230 full-colour maps, diagrams and detailed ORBATs. Maps covering the conflict on a strategic, operational and tactical level guide the reader through each stage of the war, from Kruger’s invasions of Natal and Griqualand West, through the famous battles of the conventional period, to the vast ‘drives’ of the Guerrilla War phase which broke the back of the Bittereinders and brought the war to an end. By showing where every operation and battle fitted into the bigger picture, the reader is able to understand how and why any given action was fought, and how the war was ultimately won by Lord Kitchener’s men. Utilising standard NATO symbols to represent the various units involved, all the maps in this unique resource were drawn specially for the Atlas, and combine contemporary military maps with modern 1:50000 survey maps to ensure unprecedented levels of accuracy and detail. A detailed time line helps explain how the war unfolded, and the maps are organised into sections which cover the various fronts. The Atlas is also lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs and drawings, as well as modern-day photographs to show how the battlefields look today, and to illustrate some of the many monuments erected to commemorate the men who fought and died. Though some of the battles covered are well known, this work also provides detail on many others which – though major actions – are almost forgotten today. The operations and smaller battles of the long and bitter Guerrilla War are also exhaustively covered. Other maps depict the details of the vast lines of blockhouses which were constructed across hundreds of miles of South Africa, and the critical role these played in the latter stages of the conflict. Whether you are new to the war, or a well-read enthusiast, The Boer War Atlas is an indispensable guide to understanding how this highly mis-understood war was fought.

Faced with numerous challenges resultant from intelligence inertia, information overload, agenda-driven intelligence, and so forth, African military intelligence organisations must revisit the art of HUMINT. It remains a vital prerequisite to know and understand a challenger, an enemy, or a threat. Without intelligence, adjustments and corrections to strategies and operational designs cannot be made. Without it, the armed forces will be unable to discover the strategic or operational intent of the hostile forces. African military intelligence organisations currently face a deficit when it comes to the approaches to and collection of intelligence-information by human sources. These organisations must reassess how they are posited and become more forward-looking, pre-emptive, and action orientated and with a deeper operational reach. For defensive, offensive and containment reasons, the role of humans as collectors of intelligence-information must be more aggressively pursued. Covering topics such as understanding the role of military intelligence, HUMINT operations in Africa, intelligence tradecraft, and combat intelligence in support of Composite Warfare operations, this book is both a valuable contribution and guide to African military intelligence organisations and their trainers. It ought to be on every intelligence officer’s bookshelf

Conflict, Crime, Corruption and Foreign Interests’ is a hard-hitting account of the undeclared and invisible conflicts and wars that go almost unnoticed in the daily mainstream media. The impact of these economic, military, and political conflicts on the continent and its people is devastating. This book offers a personal, yet disturbing and behind-the-scenes glimpse of much of what has gone wrong, and of what is happening across the continent. It covers the personal experiences of the author over two decades, firstly as an individual, and later as the chairman of STTEP International Ltd. The author gives his personal views on the impact of fragile politics and policies, conflict, criminality, deceit, and lies that have, and still are, contributing to the on-going conflicts and wars the continent is waging against itself. Invariably, these problems are incentivised and motivated by nefarious foreign interests-especially in resource-rich countries. Having proven that Africans of all colours and creeds can indeed solve Africa’s problems, his concern that it has become another soundbyte in political double-speak is apparent. His fears at the direction the continent has taken are evident in this book, as well as in his other published books and academic papers. The background to the political and military conflicts the author was engaged in are discussed, and how poor and misleading advice often triumphs over verified intelligence. It is a story of deception and frustration, ignored advice, faulty projections, false accusations, fake news, and the erosion of a continent. This is the story of a continent at war with itself. Over the years since 1980 when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, much has been written and recorded about the various regiments that served the country of Rhodesia from the early pioneers in the 1890s, right through to the day that these fine units marched off their respective parade grounds for the last time and into the august annals of history. Much of this service for the older regiments, such as the Rhodesia Regiment, the British South Africa Police, the Rhodesia Native Regiment and the Rhodesian African Ries, was as a contribution to the British Empire’s war efforts during the South African War, both World Wars, and other regional conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s. This Book of Remembrance has been specically compiled as a lasting tribute to the men of the Rhodesia Native Regiment (RNR) and its successor the Rhodesian African Ries (RAR) who, during the proud and honourable life of these units, made the ultimate sacrifice. It is not a denitive history of these regiments, as this has been admirably done in books such as Masodja and Ragtime Soldiers. Accordingly, the book briefly looks at the history of each of the regiments and their battalions, with pictorial depictions of uniforms, badges, theatres of operation and colours. Chapters are also dedicated to those who received honours and awards for bravery and dedication to duty, with citations where it has been possible to source. Nominal rolls, some incomplete, of commanding officers, officers and senior non-commissioned officers add to the overall remembrance theme of the book. The main content is the various Rolls of Honour, covering all the major conflicts and areas of operation in which the two units saw active service.