Counter-Strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All-Arms Fireforce in the War in the Bush 1974-1980
J.R.T Wood, Chris Cocks - Counter-Strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All-Arms Fireforce in the War in the Bush 1974-1980
30° South Publishers | 2009 | ISBN: 1920143335 | English | 316 pages | PDF | 140.69 MB
30° South Publishers | 2009 | ISBN: 1920143335 | English | 316 pages | PDF | 140.69 MB
Fireforce as a military concept dates from 1974 when the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF) acquired the French MG151 20mm cannon from the Portuguese. Coupled with this, the traditional counter-insurgency tactics (against Mugabe’s ZANLA and Nkomo’s ZIPRA) of follow-ups, tracking and ambushing simply weren’t producing satisfactory results. Visionary RhAF and Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI) officers thus expanded on the idea of a ‘vertical envelopment’ of the enemy (first practised by SAS paratroopers in Mozambique in 1973), with the 20mm cannon being the principle weapon of attack, mounted in an Alouette III K-Car (‘Killer car’), flown by the air force commander, with the army commander on board directing his ground troops deployed from G-Cars (Alouette III troop-carrying gunships and latterly Bell ‘Hueys’ in 1979) and parachuted from C-47 Dakotas. In support would be a propeller-driven ground-attack aircraft armed with front guns, pods of napalm, white phosphorus rockets and a variety of Rhodesian-designed bombs; on call would be Canberra bombers, Hawker Hunter and Vampire jets.