COUNTERSTRIKE

COUNTERSTRIKE
Description:
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 practiced 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 DC-3 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.


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About The Authors:
DR. RICHARD WOOD, born in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, is a Commonwealth Scholar, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a graduate of Rhodes and Edinburgh universities. He has enjoyed sole access to the hitherto closed papers of Ian Smith to write this book. So Far and No Further! complements his definitive The Welensky Papers: A History of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: 1953-1963 and The War Diaries of André Dennison.



CHRIS COCKS was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia in 1957. He now lives in Johannesburg. He is a partner in the recently established South African publishing house, 30° South Publishers. He is the author of Fireforce (now in its fourth edition); Cyclone Blues; and is the editor and compiler of The Saints—The Rhodesian Light Infantry. He is currently writing the biography of his childhood, of growing up in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the subsequent adjustment to life in the rebel colony of Rhodesia

Beaver Shaw
I participated in the DVD and explained Fireforce from the Airforce view and went through what it was like to be a helicopter crewman during the Rhodesian Bush war.