After the first civilian aircraft was shot down came the response...
After the shooting down of the first civilian Viscount passenger aircraft near Kariba talks broke down between the Rhodesian government and Joshua Nkomo of ZAPU who had laughed and bragged about the atrocity on internationally broadcast TV.
The attack on ZIPRA camps at Westlands Farm, Mkushi and CGT-2 were in retaliation for the downing of the Viscount
The Westlands Farm attack was an air force only affair with the SAS doing Mkushi and the RLI doing CGT-2.
At Westlands Farm the Hawker Hunter jets lead with Golf bombs and Frantan (50 gallon naplam) followed by Green Section (Camberras) with Alpha bombs and followed up by four Alouette III with 20mmm cannon. Later ZAPU itself announced that that attacks cost them 396 killed and 719 were seriously wounded and 192 missing. (missing normally relates to no identifiable body parts found or those who took to the hills deciding that the freedom struggle was not worth the risk)
These attacks are well remembered through the release of the cockpit voice recording made by the pilot of Green Leader - Squadron Learder Chris Dixon of the bombing run itself and his instructions issued to Lusaka (the capital of Zambia) Tower with a message to the Zambian Air Force.
The Green Leader Tape
Notes:
Golf Bombs were a Rhodesia invention and are described as follows:
"The 450kg Golf Bomb employed double steel plating to sandwich thousands of pieces of chopped 10mm steel rod. The double skin and chopped rod driven by the high-volume gas generating explosive, Anfo (Amatol), when added to shredded vegetation proved Golf Bomb to be a truly devastating weapon. A pair of these bombs gave a bush flattening-pattern 90 metres wide by 135 metres in the line of attack with lethal effects extending beyond."
Alpha Bombs were a Rhodesia invention and are described as follows:
A circular shaped anti-personnel (cluster) bomb that, when dropped by the Canberra from level flight, gave a natural dispersion pattern. The bomb would strike the surface activating the fusing mechanism and then bounce into the air to detonate about four metres above ground.
Due to the sphere shape, when released they spread apart both laterally and vertically because air pressure builds up between them and pushes them away from each other. The Alpha is a hallow sphere(155mm external diameter.) pressed out of 3mm plate with two halves welded together. Inside the outer casing is a smaller sphere of 8mm steel. Between the two spheres is packed 240 hard black rubber "bouncing" balls of 15mm diameter. (Similar to those glow in the dark type bouncing balls kids have.) When dropped from low and fast aircraft, they hit the ground at less than 17 degrees from the horizontal. On impact most of the rubber balls compressed against the outer wall, thus creating forward bounce for about 60ft in the direction of the aircraft and rising no higher than 12ft. The inner sphere is similar to a grenade and on impact with the ground the fuze fired a cap with a 7 sec delay. The bomb exploded between 6 - 12 ft above the ground dispersing on average one lethal fragment per square yard with a radius of 15 yards from explosion. The Canberra carried 300 Alpha bombs in groups of 50 inside six hoppers fitted to the bomb bay and was operated electrically. They could be dropped in salvo or in ripples. Delivered at 400ft at 300 knots the effective coverage was 1,100m long x 120m wide.
Obituary Lt. Gen. G.P. Walls
Lieutenant-General G. Peter Walls GLM, DCD, MBE
Served as Commanding Officer of 1RLI from 1 December 1964 to 18 June 1967
Peter Walls was born and educated in Rhodesia. He first served in the military with the Black Watch at the end of World War Two. He returned to Rhodesia after the war and served in the Staff Corps, before being commissioned into the Northern Rhodesia Regiment (NRR). In 1951, he was selected to take an all-white unit, The Malayan Scouts, to Malaya to assist with that Emergency. He was promoted to captain as 2IC of the unit with an experienced British officer as OC. On reaching Malaya it was decided that, as it was an all-Rhodesian unit, it should be commanded by a Rhodesian - he was thus promoted to major and became OC. The unit stayed in Malaya for two years, becoming C (Rhodesia) Squadron SAS.
On return to Rhodesia in March 1953 the unit was disbanded. For his services in Malaya he was awarded an MBE. After various staff appointments he attended Staff College at Camberley in the UK, before assuming command of RLI in 1964 and transforming the battalion into a commando unit.
He was responsible for introducing the regiment’s green beret, which subsequently distinguished it from all other regiments on parade. On relinquishing command he became Commander 2 Brigade. He later became Chief of Staff as a major-general, before becoming Army Commander in 1972.
He was appointed Commander of Combined Operations (ComOps) in 1977, an appointment he held until he retired to South Africa in late 1980 after Zimbabwean independence.
General GP (Peter) Walls and Eunice were about to board an aircraft yesterday morning (20 July 2010) bound from George to Johannesburg. The General succumbed to a heart attack prior to boarding the aircraft.
He was a man of great integrity and grit and led the armed forces of Rhodesia well in the toughest of wartimes.
General Walls will be sadly missed by all the members of the 1RLIRA and we extend our deepest sympathies to Mrs. Eunice Walls, the family and Peter’s friends.
"How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest!
By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.
God and a soldier all people adore
In time of war, but not before;
And when war is over and all things are righted,
God is neglected and an old soldier slighted.
Enough of merit has each honoured name
To shine untarnished on the rolls of fame,
And add new lustre to the historic page."
Chairman
1RLIRA-SA
(1 Rhodesian Light Infantry Regimental Association - South Africa)
Peter Walls, General in Zimbabwe, Dies at 83
Peter Walls, General in Zimbabwe, Dies at 83
New York Times
By ALAN COWELL
Published: July 22, 2010
PARIS — Lt. Gen. Peter Walls, the last commander of white Rhodesian forces in what is now Zimbabwe, who played a central and sometimes ambiguous role in the first days of his country’s transition to majority rule only to fall out bitterly with its first black leader, died on Tuesday in South Africa, where he lived in exile. He was 83.
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A son-in-law, Patrick Armstrong, said Wednesday that General Walls had collapsed at an airport in George, on the Indian Ocean coastline. The cause of death was not immediately known.
As the overall commander of Rhodesian forces from 1977 onward, General Walls oversaw an ultimately doomed campaign to halt a shifting bush war conducted by guerrillas loyal to Joshua Nkomo, a nationalist patriarch, and Robert Mugabe, who went on to become the increasingly autocratic president of Zimbabwe after the country achieved independence in 1980.
As the fighting unfolded, Rhodesia, named for the British archcolonialist Cecil John Rhodes, was an international pariah, shunned by most countries with the exception of apartheid-ruled South Africa, its neighbor.
The Rhodesian forces were far superior to the sometimes ill-equipped guerrillas, displaying their military might with cross-border strikes against insurgent rear bases in Mozambique and Zambia, even as General Walls spoke of winning the “hearts and minds” of the black majority inside the country.
By 1980 the options open to Rhodesia’s white minority had narrowed, whittled away by international economic sanctions, the withdrawal of unconditional South African support and the growing recognition that a deal with the guerrilla leaders was inevitable.
The prospect of black rule sent tremors of concern through many whites, and as elections — brokered by Britain, the former colonial power — approached in early 1980, the country seemed on a knife edge, balanced between the expectations of the black majority and fears that white soldiers under General Walls might resist the new order and even stage a coup.
In a memoir published in 1987, Ken Flower, the intelligence chief of both the last white government and the first black one, said General Walls himself had helped deepen fears of a coup among the British officials overseeing the transition to majority rule. But, Mr. Flower said, the idea of a coup was never seriously debated by the military and security elite.
White apprehensions sharpened on March 4, 1980, when the election results were announced and the clear victor was Mr. Mugabe, seen by many whites as a Marxist rabble-rouser who would hound them out of the country.
But instead of staging a coup, General Walls publicly appealed to the white minority “for calm, for peace,” Mr. Flower recalled.
Mr. Mugabe also went out of his way to assure whites. In what seemed a political masterstroke, he appointed General Walls to oversee the planned fusion of the former white-led army with the two guerrilla armies.
Deep down, though, profound mistrusts lingered from the war years, and Mr. Mugabe began to pay heed to reports circulating at the time that General Walls had indeed plotted against him.
In one widely reported exchange after several attempts on his life, Mr. Mugabe was said to have asked why the general’s soldiers were trying to kill him. General Walls reportedly replied that if his men had been involved in the attempts, Mr. Mugabe would be dead.
General Walls also acknowledged in a BBC interview that he had asked Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time, to annul the results of the election that brought Mr. Mugabe to power because vast numbers of voters had been intimidated. Mrs. Thatcher refused, British officials said.
Increasingly estranged from Mr. Mugabe, General Walls offered his resignation within months of independence and later moved to South Africa’s Eastern Cape region, where he lived for many years in relative obscurity.
Born in Rhodesia in 1927, General Walls had a long military career, training at the British military academy in Sandhurst and the staff college at Camberley. As a commander of a special forces unit, he also fought insurgents in colonial-era Malaysia.
He is survived by his wife, Eunice, three daughters and a son, said Mr. Armstrong, his son-in-law.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
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Correction: July 23, 2010
An obituary on Thursday about Lt. Gen. Peter Walls, the last commander of white Rhodesian forces in what is now Zimbabwe, erroneously credited the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, with a distinction. Mr. Mugabe is the second — not the only — president since the country achieved independence in 1980. (The Rev. Canaan Banana was president and Mr. Mugabe was prime minister from 1980 to 1987.)
General Peter Walls obituary