British Governor and Rhodesian military chiefs arrest Ian Smith during UDI

[Ricardolindo]

What do you think would have happened if Britain had decided to intervene en masse with military force?

The problem is that the British would have had to cross both Tanzania and Zambia in order to reach Rhodesia.

 

[Ricardolindo]

I've talked about this elsewhere, and I'll reemphasise it here: the great difficulty in avoiding autocracy in post-colonial Africa is a) the deliberate lack of developed democratic institutions and infrastructure on the one hand and b) active sabotage on the other. The RF did both of these things-I think it's hard the overstate the extent to which Smith was by the late 70s doing Downfall On The Veldt, controlling little outside the major cities, all while the security forces detained more and more people, tortured more and more innocents.

Every substantial military history I've read of the Bush War takes note of how little territory the Rhodesian regime actually controlled by the late 70s. And how more and more whites were either leaving or trying to leave each year.

Fools and racists will rant on about Fireforce and all that but utterly fail to recognise that all that tactical nuance was in service of impossible strategic/political ends.

It says something about Smith that even with all that in mind he still tried for a compromise political settlement. In 1979!

Wasn't most of Rhodesia under martial law?
BTW, why did Apartheid South Africa never recognize Rhodesia?

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I've talked about this elsewhere, and I'll reemphasise it here: the great difficulty in avoiding autocracy in post-colonial Africa is a) the deliberate lack of developed democratic institutions and infrastructure on the one hand and b) active sabotage on the other. The RF did both of these things-I think it's hard the overstate the extent to which Smith was by the late 70s doing Downfall On The Veldt, controlling little outside the major cities, all while the security forces detained more and more people, tortured more and more innocents.

The way I see it, Mugabe was an unlucky natural culmination of the Rhodesian regime’s policies of dismantling all of the less radical opposition groups, then escalating the conflict that led to the most canny and ruthless rebels winning and taking out the somewhat more moderate rebels. When everyone speaks the language of violence, that’s the threat that wins out.

Besides how Rhodesian iconography has become akin to a Lost Cause thing, they really do resemble the Confederates in being strategic dead-end boneheads.

BTW, why did Apartheid South Africa never recognize Rhodesia?

I read somewhere that SA was careful to toe the line to prevent being the next target of sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Thus they got away with policies that mirrored if not went further than Rhodesia’s. They played a careful game of not looking too rogue.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

On the flip side, I wonder if the Rhodesian Front and the National Party in SA were also the consequences of British colonial policy in any way. It’s radicals empowered by the marginalizing of moderates all of the way down.

And on the subject of moderate rebels, I am rather struck by how the Rhodies called their enemies “terrorists” (the “terr”), and I’m wondering if that was the first conflict that did that until 2001. Well, I suppose the Israelis probably do that too, and the ‘70s was a big decade for terrorism, but there’s an echo there.

Fools and racists will rant on about Fireforce and all that but utterly fail to recognise that all that tactical nuance was in service of impossible strategic/political ends.

The Rhodieboo stuff is particularly infuriating, it’s a lot of tacticool fetishizing over a race war. The Selous Scouts literally stooped to dabbling in weapons of mass destruction.

So I ended up subverting it somewhat in this character profile for a fanfic project based on Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, set in an alternate future where the colonial empires lasted longer. How’d I do with treating the subject?

 

[TheIO]

Every substantial military history I've read of the Bush War takes note of how little territory the Rhodesian regime actually controlled by the late 70s. And how more and more whites were either leaving or trying to leave each year.

How much of that loss of territory occured after 1975 and the Portuguese pull-out from Mozambique? Or was it more of just a steady decline over time?

 

[Warthog]

UDI was both long expected - discussed in the local (white) media in the run-up to the 1965 election, even more after Smith's victory - and meticulously prepared. For example within hours of the declaration, government censors arrived at the offices of the daily Herald and Chronicle and got to work. Smith would have had a good idea of the loyalty of every army unit, and most senior police and military officers.

Although two senior officers did approach Gibbs and offer to arrest Smith and Dupont, he turned them down, having a fair idea of where support in the rank and file was. Gibbs knew UDI was coming and had given it a fair amount of thought.

I've talked about this elsewhere, and I'll reemphasise it here: the great difficulty in avoiding autocracy in post-colonial Africa is a) the deliberate lack of developed democratic institutions and infrastructure on the one hand and b) active sabotage on the other.

This is part of the main thesis of Davidson's Black Man's Burden. Most institutions requires for a democratic system either didn't exist in colonies, or were set up and acculturated to be against democracy and for protecting the state from the people. Army, police, and intelligence obviously, but more subtly local government structures, state media etc

 

[Warthog]

How much of that loss of territory occured after 1975 and the Portuguese pull-out from Mozambique? Or was it more of just a steady decline over time?

Gradually over time, as the Rhodesian Military lost actual ground control over areas, with land between there and the cities under martial law. This started well before 1975, as once FRELIMO gained control of most or rural Tete Province, they offered bases and supply lines to the guerrilla movements, leading to ZANLAs rapidly growing operations in NE Zimbabwe

 

[Warthog]

What side does Ken Flower, opportunist spymaster extraordinare, take?

Thats obvious, the winning side

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Although two senior officers did approach Gibbs and offer to arrest Smith and Dupont, he turned them down, having a fair idea of where support in the rank and file was. Gibbs knew UDI was coming and had given it a fair amount of thought.

That's very true, and as I quoted in the OP, he seemed to not want to put those officers in the impossible position of having to decide between Queen and country, but I still think it's remarkable that they came to him first and offered, rather than the British approaching them to solicit help. Shows there was some sort of break between the traditional military leadership and the radical populist party, a pattern we see in all sorts of other historical scenarios.

Still, I'm curious what would have happened if they had acted upon it with Gibbs' blessing. I suppose at best these leaders undergo swift retirements quietly. I'm not sure how much support they would get, both in and outside of the military, with Smith being so popular.

Were there any white liberals in the population by the time of UDI? My fictional character has family that were, but that's also probably completely anachronistic.

And were there any like Rhodesian white communists or the like who joined the ZANU/ZAPU? I believe there were South African white Marxists who did support the ANC. But that's a larger, less homogeneous country.

Most institutions requires for a democratic system either didn't exist in colonies, or were set up and acculturated to be against democracy and for protecting the state from the people. Army, police, and intelligence obviously, but more subtly local government structures, state media etc

Man, feels like this happened in the Arab world and pretty much all over the formerly colonial world. The system was set up to fail.

I guess India pulled through for some reason, even if its a democracy that hosts both clean electoral transitions and sectarian violence.

 

[Warthog]

Were there any white liberals in the population by the time of UDI? My fictional character has family that were, but that's also probably completely anachronistic.

Plenty. For example, the Anglican Archbishop of Salisbury Matabeleland "Red" Ken Skelton denounced UDI on the day. The Catholic Bishop of Umtali, Donal Lamont who was jailed, stripped of his citizenship and deported.

Guy Clutton-Brock who is buried at heroes acre in Harare.

Academics such as Terence Ranger.

Liberal politicians such as Garfield Todd, Ahrn Palley, and Michael Auret.

Stuart Hargreaves of the (agricultural) veterinary services

And only 5 years before UDI Chief Justice Tredgold resigned rather than implement the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act.

And were there any like Rhodesian white communists or the like who joined the ZANU/ZAPU? I believe there were South African white Marxists who did support the ANC. But that's a larger, less homogeneous country.

Most prominently Jeremy Brickhill of ZIPRA.

Much less prominently, in Zambia, literally my parents

(Edited for stupid mistake)

 

[heraclius]

The 'what if the British military had acted in 1965 to arrest Ian Smith and stop UDI' issue has been dealt with , in a slightly different way of action after the UDI declaration, in the now forgotten alt hist novel by Peter Van Greenaway published in 1968, The Man Who Held the Queen To Ransom And Sent Parliament Packing (Weidenfeld and Nicolson publishers). I read this when I was about eleven and found it gripping; it has a 'What If' of a group of idealistic young left-wing but not specifically Marxist British military officers, with a mixture of admiration of Castro-style armed revolutionaries, black African junior officer coups, and the Levellers and Cromwell in the UK, staging a coup in Westminster in 1967 .

They march into Parliament to re-enact Cromwell's expulsion of the Rump Parliament in 1653 by throwing out the MPs and Speaker at gunpoint, seize the Queen and Royal Family at Buckingham Palace and hold them hostage at the Tower of London to keep the establishment and its forces at bay, denounce the US and CIA and call the Cold War a sham propagated by the military-industrial complex, and appeal to the 'anti-declinist' frustrations of the public after the end of Empire by blaming it all on the elite's greed and complacency in propaganda speeches and revelations of their shabby financial deals and feather-bedded incomes on the rebel-seized BBC, reading out confiscated documents and private letters in public. The rebels, a mixture of junior officers and civilian allies from the non-party left, are shown as being honest but naive - and they have a vague Kennedyesque 'Young Turk' reformist dislike of the 'Old Guard' 1950s elite influenced by US liberal writers and thinkers which includes anti-racism . The refusal of the devious supposedly left-wing but really power-hoarding and cynical Labour PM, a thinly disguised portrait of Harold Wilson the then PM (who is supposed to have faced coup threats for not doing more to reverse decline in 1968 OTL), to do anything about UDI in Rhodesia for fear of right wing army officers and racist soldiers refusing to fight their 'kith and kin' is the event that pushes them over the brink into revolt, and they send in a force of more disciplined elite paratroopers by air to Zambia in semi-secret under a news blackout to go on to Salisbury/ Harare and arrest Smith and his govt. The Conservatives are seen as a hopeless opposition, too scared of their own Right wing and the feral press (and with their own imperialists who regret African independence) to do anything -and a number of their senior figures despise the weak and timid Con leader (a version of OTL leader Ted Heath) and are crooked business tycoons who fleece the govt and the system for profit and are linked to belligerent anti-democratic MI5 'blimps' and Bond-style, US-allied right-wingers who admire Ian Smith.

There is little resistance to the landing in Rhodesia as it is a surprise to the Rhodesians who expected the British govt to be useless and the Brit army to refuse to fight them, and the forced announcement of quick elections and a black majority govt is greeted with cheers by the Southern African black nations and the Commonwealth as a whole - and restores Britain's battered image for democracy for all races not just whites. The riots and angry protests are in the UK, stirred up by the equivalent of Enoch Powell and funded by the furious CIA and Pres Johnson as the new UK govt is threatening to leave NATO so it is 'clearly a Soviet lackey' (which it isn't). The US backs and a secret cabal of MI5 right-wingers organises a counter-coup and the rescue of the Royals, and army units loyal to the affronted right wing senior generals surround and storm the rebels' HQ in Parliament; the arrested rebel leader is to be tried for 'high treason' in a show trial later on TV but the coup leaders fear he will reveal more of their secret documents' contents in court so they bribe a low-life racist gangster who's been sprung from prison to assassinate him on his way into court, Lee Harvey Oswald-style. The assassin has been promised to be secretly got out of prison in disguise and smuggled into exile with a new identity later - but the book ends with him being cynically shot moments after the assassination by M15 agents to keep him quiet.

The mixture of cynical Establishment manoevures and secret M15 and CIA control of the course of events and of the greedy politicians was a forerunner of the Chris Mullin novels on a similar theme, and very 'Watergate era' - but written years earlier. The monarchy is shown as a puppet providing entertainment and gossip to keep the 'bread and circuses' public quiet, and the senior civil servants as manipulating the feckless, constantly plotting, status-obsessed ministers who ignore all attempts at or calls for reform - with the police and MI5 lurking in the background obsessed with subversion. The comment of the chief of the pro-CIA civilian cabal on the intention of the counter-coup serves to sum up much about modern politics - they've put the electorate (who the rebels hoped to inspire to be more active) back where it belongs, caught between the left and the right of the political nutcracker.

 

[Coiler]

Fools and racists will rant on about Fireforce and all that but utterly fail to recognise that all that tactical nuance was in service of impossible strategic/political ends.

Even the Fireforce isn't really that impressive. It was a clever way of using extremely limited resources, but the Rhodesian gimmicks only worked as well as they did because of the severe weaknesses of their opponents. In terms of quantitative gear, a single Vietnamese infantry division was about as big as the entire Rhodesian army and better-equipped in many ways. (Trying to fly into battle in even early Vietnam with just a few OH-6 equivalents would be suicidal)

Talking about the qualitative skill gap is iffier both because every army varies internally and because there's an obvious and uncomfortable racial side to claiming the ineptitude of ZANLA and ZIPRA. But I have read evenhanded sources claiming them as lacking compared to other light infantry/irregular forces of the same time period (and that they were getting noticeably better by the war's end).

And of course, the Rhodesian security forces beyond the glamorous tip-of-the-spear types often had severe tactical issues of their own beyond just a very small and shrinking manpower pool.

 

[Warthog]

Talking about the qualitative skill gap is iffier both because every army varies internally and because there's an obvious and uncomfortable racial side to claiming the ineptitude of ZANLA and ZIPRA. But I have read evenhanded sources claiming them as lacking compared to other light infantry/irregular forces of the same time period (and that they were getting noticeably better by the war's end).

ZIPRA also developed conventional military capacity, with a few armored vehicles and military planes in 1979

 

[Doctor Sulemain]

UDI was both long expected - discussed in the local (white) media in the run-up to the 1965 election, even more after Smith's victory - and meticulously prepared. For example within hours of the declaration, government censors arrived at the offices of the daily Herald and Chronicle and got to work. Smith would have had a good idea of the loyalty of every army unit, and most senior police and military officers.

Although two senior officers did approach Gibbs and offer to arrest Smith and Dupont, he turned them down, having a fair idea of where support in the rank and file was. Gibbs knew UDI was coming and had given it a fair amount of thought.

See, all that domestic preparation is quite at odds with what I've read about the international preparation, which seems to have been effectively nill- the British government promptly confiscated half the Royal Rhodesian Air Force's jet engines which were being maintained in Britian at the time for example.

Also the bit about newspaper censorship was really the first hint about the ever growing security apparatus, wasn't it? It's something I've noticed about both Apartheid outh Africa and Rhodesia after UDI- how the security and military apparatus grew more powerful and more encompassing and more brutal.

Which really ties into how UDI was driven by white radicalisation, what Garfield Todd accurately described as the phernonemon of "we are in danger of becoming a race of fear-ridden neurotics". That is not to say that white fear, paranoia and hatred did not exist before, they obviously did. But it took on a new and sharper edge as decolonisation started.

 

[Coiler]

ZIPRA also developed conventional military capacity, with a few armored vehicles and military planes in 1979

The other big purely military WI that circles around the bush war besides "What if the British nipped UDI in the bud?" is "what if ZIPRA actually managed to gather and launch their desired big conventional invasion?" IOTL, it was politics and mostly successful preemptive strikes that prevented it.

From my very limited perspective, if the buildup progressed to the point where an invasion was launched, then IMO, the first such attempt would fail miserably and not even inflict that much damage on the Rhodesian security forces. After that, who knows?

 

[Warthog]

all that domestic preparation is quite at odds with what I've read about the international preparation, which seems to have been effectively nill- the British government promptly confiscated half the Royal Rhodesian Air Force's jet engines which were being maintained in Britian at the time for example.

True, although the international prep may have been more spotty given who were involved. Air Vice Marshall Hawkins' loyalties may have influenced the example you cite.

Also the bit about newspaper censorship was really the first hint about the ever growing security apparatus, wasn't it? It's something I've noticed about both Apartheid outh Africa and Rhodesia after UDI- how the security and military apparatus grew more powerful and more encompassing and more brutal

Indeed. In many ways National Joint Operations Centre* took more and more control from the Cabinet.

*broadly the heads of the various branches of the military, the police and the security services. It was replaced at independence by Joint Operations Command, which became increasingly prominent in Mugabes last years. He also added the Reserve Bank Governor to it for reasons

what if ZIPRA actually managed to gather and launch their desired big conventional invasion?" IOTL, it was politics and mostly successful preemptive

Will look out Brickhill's writings on this

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Plenty. For example, the Anglican Archbishop of Salisbury "Red" Ken Skelton denounced UDI on the day.

Was that a reference to the American comedian or was he really accused of being a Marxist? Or is it both in a Cockney rhyming slang sort of thing.

On the subject of clerics, the doctorate thesis in my OP (which I find to be a really good collection of sources), notes this:

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury put forward a case for military intervention. Shortly before UDI, Dr Michael Ramsay issued a message on behalf of the British Council of Churches, which assured the Government that many Christians would support the use of force if all other efforts to find a solution failed. A group of 35 MPs sent a message to the Archbishop, congratulating the Council of Churches on its courageous stand.

I guess my character's backstory is imaginable in that if the country had existed longer, the Bush War becomes a forever war, white radicalization continues, then there could've been mobs of hardcore Front members attacking white liberals. It's a sci-fi mishmash setting anyway.

Much less prominently, in Zambia, literally my parents

How were race relations in Zambia, anyway? That country and Botswana (and perhaps Malawi?) seem to have had a far more relaxed decolonization experience compared to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and South Africa. Guess money and land can't buy you stability.

Also were your parents like actual guerrillas because that's what I was going for

Even the Fireforce isn't really that impressive. It was a clever way of using extremely limited resources, but the Rhodesian gimmicks only worked as well as they did because of the severe weaknesses of their opponents.

Also, they lost! All of their bloody knives and their fancy karate gimmicks didn't amount to anything in the end!

 

[Doctor Sulemain]

Zambia never had anything like the level of white settlements its southern counterparts did, although what white settlers it did have continuously expressed their desire to have what was then Northern Rhodesia annexed by Southern Rhodesia under the latter's segregationist constitutional system. Roy Welensky, PM of the Central African Federation and champion of Northern white interests, exemplified this tradition.

Having said that, post-colonial democratic Zambia did end up with the first white head of state in Southern Africa post-Apartheid for a bit a few years ago.

 

[TheIO]

Also, they lost! All of their bloody knives and their fancy karate gimmicks didn't amount to anything in the end!

Well, when the white minority never gets to 10%, and suddenly a third of your border is wide open to insurgents because the minoritarian rule there collapsed almost overnight, it's a bit tricky to overcome a numbers disparity that large.

 

[Warthog]

How were race relations in Zambia, anyway? That country and Botswana (and perhaps Malawi?) seem to have had a far more relaxed decolonization experience compared to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and South Africa. Guess money and land can't buy you stability.

Both countries there was much less disposession and forced removals in the colonial period, and much less, in Botswana case negligible, white resistance to decolonisation.

Also were your parents like actual guerrillas because that's what I was going for

Rear echelon, safe house and some supply stuff.

Brickhill OTOH was an officer in ZIPRA, later a Commissar

Having said that, post-colonial democratic Zambia did end up with the first white head of state in Southern Africa post-Apartheid for a bit a few years ago.

Depending how you count Seychelles and Albert Rene