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The military equipment of Rhodesia included a diverse range of small arms, armoured fighting vehicles, towed artillery, air defence equipment, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. Most of this hardware was second-hand and donated by the United Kingdom prior to 1965; following Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), South Africa largely succeeded the UK as the country's primary supplier of arms.[1] In the immediate post-UDI period a reorganised Rhodesian Security Forces made several belated attempts to obtain new heavy combat equipment and devote more attention to the logistics of maintaining a conventional military capability.[2] An intensifying bush war also led to some major procedural reforms in an attempt to centralise logistics and military engineering efforts. For example, Rhodesia's defence-related industries were brought under the umbrella of an Arms Manufacturing Corporation modeled after the South African ARMSCOR.[3]

Limited production of small arms and ammunition was carried out locally[4] because the arms embargo compelled Rhodesia to develop the means to reproduce armament no longer available from overseas; however, the programme remained hamstrung by shortages of raw material and tooling equipment.[3] Some foreign equipment, such as the Thyssen Henschel UR-416 and the Sa vz. 23, were reverse engineered and produced in unlicenced variants.[4][5] During the late 1970s, the Rhodesian government became increasingly dependent on what arms it could acquire on the black market, often at considerable cost and in inadequate quantities. Examples of Rhodesian equipment imported from underground sources included fourteen SIAI-Marchetti SF.260 trainer aircraft, eleven Bell 205 helicopters, and up to twelve Ordnance QF 25-pounder howitzers.[1][6] Some Soviet equipment, including ten ZPU-4 anti-aircraft guns, were also captured from the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) and the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and pressed into service due to the general equipment shortage.[7]

History

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Rhodesian T17E1 armored cars on patrol near the Congolese border, 1959.

Excluding the British South Africa Police, the Rhodesian Security Forces were largely raised from the Southern Rhodesian component of the Armed Forces of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which was dissolved in 1963.[8] In 1966 Rhodesia's military maintained an official strength of 11,000 (from a total population of 4,325,000).[2] It was organised into two brigades, each of four infantry battalions, two unattached infantry battalions, and an artillery regiment.[2] Equipment included ten Daimler Ferret[9] and five serviceable T17E1 Staghound[10] armoured cars and an artillery battery of sixteen Ordnance QF 25-pounder howitzers.[2] A small number of Hawker Hunter fighters and light Aérospatiale Alouette III helicopters formed the nucleus of Rhodesia's fledgling air force, together with ten Douglas C-47 Dakota transport aircraft.[7]

Measures to block the transfer of conventional arms to Rhodesia were discussed in the United Nations as early as September 1963.[3] One such proposal was vetoed by the United Kingdom on the grounds that Rhodesia's security forces then posed no threat to regional peace or stability, and that the British government would exercise full control on any deployment of their equipment outside the colony's borders.[11] Nevertheless, UDI made this unenforceable, and in November 1965 a unanimously adopted Security Council resolution requested all member states refrain from providing the "illegal [Rhodesian] regime" with "arms, equipment, and military material".[12] Further efforts to bolster sanctions resulted in a second resolution the following year which noted that the arms embargo would now be mandatory.[12]

Throughout the Rhodesian Bush War, Rhodesian military equipment was often well-worn and antiquated, inasmuch as the embargo limited the country's ability to replace vehicles, aircraft, and heavy weapons that were either obsolete or approaching obsolescence.[4] Procuring quantities of spare parts was also problematic.[13] Rhodesia did attempt to compensate for its loss of access to overseas markets by acquiring spares and upgrade kits on the black market, largely from sympathetic governments and international arms merchants willing to defy the embargo.[4] An underground "sanctions busting" network was erected with hidden foreign reserves and funding obtained by smuggling Rhodesian beef and tobacco products.[14] It was through this network that Rhodesia also acquired falsified end user certificates, especially from the Comoros[14] and Portugal,[6] which it used to purchase more arms. Sanctions also lost some of their effect when other African states such as Gabon agreed to act as conduits for smuggled European goods, including arms, in exchange for Rhodesian beef.[14] The first country to openly assist Rhodesia with military equipment was Portugal, beginning in December 1965.[6] Defence contractors in other European countries, such as Italy, followed somewhat later with a shipment of light Aermacchi AL-60 aircraft and Mod 56 howitzers.[1] Rhodesia obtained at least one shipment of aircraft parts, one shipment of small arms, two shipments of artillery, some additional Browning HB heavy machine guns, and two shipments of armoured cars between 1965 and 1971.[6][1] Despite these successes, the security forces remained plagued by chronic shortages of ammunition and materiel.[15] Sanctions barred Rhodesia from purchasing vast amounts of weapons, equipment, spare parts, and ammunition at a time, which would risk arousing suspicion among overseas contractors, governments, and the UN.[15] Weapons procured on the black market were also expensive; for instance, FN FALs imported in violation of the embargo were costing the Rhodesian government over three times the normal market price per rifle.[16]

Rhodesian Eland-90 armoured car and T-55A tank parked at Inkomo Barracks, 1979 or 1980.

In terms of conventional firepower, the Rhodesian Army did not initially possess enough support weaponry to counter a major external threat. Only four of the ten infantry battalions were equipped with mortars, and none had man-portable anti-tank weapons with a range of over one hundred metres.[2] Rhodesian orders for armoured cars, mortars, recoilless rifles, and anti-tank rockets were placed through a Portuguese intermediary at some point during the late 1960s; most of this equipment was understood to be of British origin to avoid the expense of converting to foreign weapons and equipment, and indeed a British defence contractor was solicited.[6] The deal fell through when the supplier became suspicious.[15] South Africa began to transfer some of the specified hardware to Rhodesia at a later date, including M40 recoilless rifles[17] and small quantities of its fairly modern Eland armoured cars.[1] The Elands were neither as heavily armed or heavily armoured as tanks, but were still favoured by the Rhodesian Security Forces because they required less maintenance and were much cheaper.[18] During the late 1970s Rhodesia received eight Polish-built T-55 tanks from a shipment of Libyan arms South Africa had seized, but these were rarely deployed.[19] Rhodesia's shortage of tanks obliged the security forces to depend on their armoured cars and recoilless rifles[20] for defence against potential incursions by Zambia or Mozambique, two hostile neighbouring states which had amassed large armoured and mechanised forces by 1980.[1]

At the time of the dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1963, the Rhodesian Air Force was considered one of the most sophisticated air forces in Africa.[21] Nevertheless, it was the hardest hit of the Rhodesian Security Forces by the impact of sanctions, struggling to maintain its inventory of British-manufactured aircraft.[13] Rhodesia's aerial strike capacity was provided by its single squadron of multirole Hawker Hunter fighters, which flew in support of internal ground operations and raids on Rhodesian insurgent camps in Zambia and Mozambique.[19] These were only kept functioning through excessive maintenance and a relatively dry climate which helped minimise damage to the airframes by corrosion and abrasion.[22] Rhodesia clandestinely acquired two separate shipments of new Rolls-Royce Avon 207 engines to keep its Hunters in airworthy condition; one of ten around December 1965 and a second of forty-two in May 1967.[23][6] An exceptionally old fleet of de Havilland Vampire and Percival Provost trainers were flown in ground attack missions during the earliest phase of the Rhodesian Bush War, but remained largely relegated to reserve purposes by the 1970s.[19] The Rhodesian Air Force initially sought to replace them with Atlas Impalas, a South African variant of the Aermacchi MB-326; however, it lacked the funds to purchase or arm the new aircraft and was forced to refurbish the existing Vampire and Provost airframes instead.[24] Ten English Electric Canberra bombers, also inherited from the pre-1963 federal air force,[25] were flown in long-range strike missions as far afield as Angola.[19] The airframes reached the end of their service life in 1970 and probably suffered from metal fatigue;[24] by 1980 only one was still operational.[26] Canberras of the South African Air Force were occasionally loaned to bolster Rhodesia's dwindling bomber fleet.[19]

One of the Augusta-Bell 205 airframes smuggled to Rhodesia in 1978. This example was shot down, then recovered and cannibalised for parts.

The Rhodesian Security Forces were heavily dependent on helicopters, as they were pivotal to conveying ground troops rapidly in the local terrain.[27] Helicopters also had the heaviest attrition rate of any aircraft in the air force.[27] At UDI Rhodesia had eight Aérospatiale Alouette III helicopters of French origin; these had been ordered for the defunct Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland's air force and delivered somewhat belatedly as the Federation was dissolving.[25] The Rhodesian Air Force had favoured the purchase of much larger and heavier Aérospatiale SA 330 Pumas as a replacement, but were preempted by the imposition of the mandatory UN arms embargo.[28] Throughout the Rhodesian Bush War, the security forces suffered from a desperate shortage of helicopters.[29] It was a direct consequence of the shortage of Alouette IIIs that forced Rhodesia to retrain all its regular infantry units as paratroops, so some could be dropped from C-47 Dakota transport aircraft and supplement the comparatively limited numbers landing by helicopter.[29] In 1975, forty Alouette IIIs were loaned to the Rhodesian Air Force by South Africa,[1] along with the South African crewmen and technicians to fly and maintain them.[28] The South African Air Force also donated six Aérospatiale Alouette II light utility helicopters in 1974,[1] and loaned an additional squadron of the type in 1979.[26] Rhodesian Alouette IIs were utilised primarily for urban surveillance and riot control.[26] In 1978, Rhodesia was able to smuggle eleven ex-Israeli Air Force Augusta-Bell 205s in varying states of disrepair.[30] These helicopters were later restored[28] and organised into a new squadron.[31]

Local military development

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From the mid to late 1970s Rhodesia made a concerted effort to improve its domestic military production capabilities, largely in response to the civilian population's increasing demand for small arms and ammunition, and the scarcity of imported weapons available to the general public.[3] The first Rhodesian-manufactured weapons to appear on the market were semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, in 1977.[3] Local production of the Uzi for the security forces may have commenced as early as 1976.[3] These were carried by the SWAT teams in the British South Africa Police.[32] This was followed by the Cobra, a semi-automatic variant of the MAC-10, and the Scorpion, a pistol derived from the same design.[33] Another semi-automatic pistol, the Mamba, was designed in Rhodesia for a lucrative military contract.[34]

The Rhodesian arms industry also displayed a degree of resourcefulness by modifying several hundred commercial vehicles to serve as mine-resistant trucks and makeshift armoured personnel carriers.[35] Unconventional armour designed to deflect land mine explosions proved to be considerably successful. Rhodesian MRAP-type vehicles detonated an estimated 927 mines during the Rhodesian Bush War; of those 927 separate incidents a little over 98% of passengers survived the initial blast.[36] The security forces improvised a number of armoured personnel carriers on the chassis of Nissan or Isuzu 5 tonne trucks, such as the Crocodile.[37] At some point they fabricated unlicenced copies of the Thyssen Henschel UR-416, which came to form the base for another armoured car, the Mine Protected Combat Vehicle.[5] Mercedes-Benz 7 tonne trucks were also converted into armoured vehicles by Rhodesian engineers and designated MAP-75 Pumas.[38]

Some of the Rhodesian weaponry developed between 1965 and 1980 include:

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