In addition, the paramilitary British South Africa Police or BSAP played a seminal role throughout the war, usually working in close conjunction with the military. Its Special Branch invariably came up trumps with intelligence gathered while working close to the ground in the interior.

The war was restricted not only to Rhodesian soil. Both the Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian SAS (many of whose members ended up serving in Hereford in the UK after the war) took the conflict well beyond the country’s borders.

Apart from routine strikes in Botswana (where insurgent leaders became fair game for small Special Forces strike groups), Colonel Reid-Daly would send his men deep into Mozambique to strike at that country’s road and rail infrastructure. One such attack involved a clandestine unit successfully destroying a substantial section of Mozambique’s largest oil terminal at Beira, one of the biggest ports along that stretch of the Indian Ocean.

Prior to that, a combined operation involving South African Special Forces – with SAAF Puma choppers, this time in Rhodesian livery – blew up bridges on the main railway line out of Maputo. Because it was the principal insurgent supply line, it set the revolution back about a year.

Then came the cross-border ‘Green Leader’ strike into Zambia that involved Rhodesian Air Force Canberra jet bombers and choppers, the RLI as well as elements of the SAS and the Selous Scouts. It was launched in an attempt to neutralize ZIPRA’s regional command structure near Lusaka. That operation failed, in part because British intelligence agents had infiltrated Milton House where much of the military planning originated. In turn, London tipped-off ZIPRA leader Joshua Nkomo in Zambia and he wasn’t home when the Rhodesian Army called.

Another time, the Scouts blew up bridges along the Tanzam Railway in Tanzania more than a thousand miles north of the border. The line ran from Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam – the biggest single staging port for supplies needed by the revolutionary armies – to Zambia. Routinely, Selous Scouts ‘sticks’ would range deep into all these countries, sometimes staying ‘external’ for a month or two at a time.

Meanwhile, the Rhodesians proved remarkably adept at improvising with their extremely limited resources. They were able to develop the first of many mine-protected vehicles, which saved lives in the war. Subsequent variants of these vehicles eventually saw service in South Africa’s border war in Angola and South-West Africa. In the Honde Valley, immediately adjacent to the Mozambique frontier, several times we went operational in the ‘Pookie’, a mine detector built by a local engineer. It was constructed from Volkswagen parts and used ultra-wide Formula One racing tyres to achieve minimal ground pressure. That was followed by a bicycle-mounted version that, for a while, was deployed to clear bush airstrips in the interior.

For their domestic and external air strikes, the Rhodesians designed and built a wide range of weapons including flechete bombs and napalm-wielding ‘Frantans’. At a more mundane level, the country’s technicians also developed the ‘Road Runner’, a transistor radio that emitted a signal only when it was switched off. That allowed the air force to drop their bombs accurately.

This was the same device which, decades later, allowed SAS troops to home in on rebels in Sierra Leone who were holding 11 British soldiers hostage. Calling themselves the West Side Boys, their leader was offered one of these radios as a gesture of goodwill during preliminary meetings to discuss the fate of the hostages.

The gift was accepted with alacrity and two days later the British attacked and managed to rescue all their countrymen.

In the end, it was the distinct paucity of troops on the ground that proved to be the undoing of the Rhodesian military effort. The economy too, was in trouble, as might have been expected when some business, industrial and factory personnel were spending four – and sometimes six months of the year – in the bush.

The RLI’s Fire Force could strike at as many targets as it wished. It could notch up incredible numbers of kills, which it did. However, if the country’s security forces didn’t have the manpower to follow up and maintain a presence in those same disputed areas, the guerrillas would just move right back in again. Which they did…

Prime Minister Ian Smith also suffered severely from a UN-imposed arms ban. Whatever sophisticated material his forces needed had to be bought in surreptitiously, usually at much-inflated prices. South Africa’s apartheid regime helped where it could of course, but Pretoria had to tread a very careful path. More than once Washington warned the South African government that if it continued to support the ‘Rebel Smith regime’, the country would face sanctions.

One of the threats included withholding spares for that country’s civilian Boeing passenger jet fleet. Another might have been the refusal to allow South Africans entry to the United States. None of this was ignored, which was one of the reasons why, in a bid to force Ian Smith to the negotiating table, Pretoria at one stage threatened to cut off Salisbury’s oil supplies.

It was one of several killer ultimatums. Cumulatively, in the end, this sort of pressure had the required effect. It has led to the position Zimbabwe finds itself in today with a psychopath as Head of State and an economy in freefall.