Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
JMA,

You cited:

In the late-1980's there was a Granada TV series 'End of Empire', with two episodes on Rhodesia (UDI & Lancaster House) and many years later the BBC had another. Dropping the bridges was mentioned IIRC in both and in one, cannot recall which now, a Mozambique government advisor to Samora Machel referred to the intense pressure applied to Mugabe to agree in London. Not sure of the dates, but that may explain why the switch of targets was made to Zambia.
Up until Nkomo's people shot down the two civilian aircraft (Viscounts) Smith was in talks with him with a view to an agreement to the exclusion of Mugabe. After that and with Nkomo laughing about it in international TV there was no chance of 'white' Rhodesia accepting an agreement with Nkomo. (In his memoirs, Story of My Life (1985), Nkomo expressed regret for the shooting down of both planes)

Yes it is understood that Machel virtually forced Mugabe to attend to Lancaster House conference and when Mugabe walked out at one point he received a message from Machel stating that if he left London he was not to return to Mozambique.

As far as the switch (of bridge targets from Mozambique to Zambia) was concerned it appears that the Brits realised that the only way to end the war was to hand the country to Mugabe. Nkomo/ZIPRA had maintained a conventional force and had an invasion plan (planned by the Russians) via Victoria Falls. There was still a chance that Nkomo/ZIPRA could use that force to invade after Mugabe won the election so the Brits arranged for the Rhodesians to drop the key bridges and thus put the ZIPRA conventional force out of the war.

To be truly astonished about how the events on the Brit side unfolded one just has to trace Maggie Thatcher's timeline where at one stage she refused to meet "the terrorist" Mugabe and promised to lift sanctions through to when Mugabe was awarded a knighthood and not a sound was made by Britain when Mugabe's North Korean trained 5th Brigade did their little genocide thing on 30,000 Ndebele (the ethnic group represented by Nkomo and ZIPRA) in the early years after independence.

The Brit excuse is that they had to try and show the white South Africans that it was indeed possible to have a peaceful and economically successful African state and news of the genocide would not help with the acceptance of the possibility of benign majority rule. So careful management and aid was supplied to Zimbabwe until South Africa was a done deal and then they cut Zimbabwe loose... the rest is history.