A HANDFUL OF HARD MEN – The SAS and the Battle for Rhodesia

By Hannes Wessels (Casegate, 2015 pp.277)

This new book by the Rhodesia-born writer Hannes Wessels will not win any prizes from South Africa’s politically correct lobby. It’s his third book about Africa and nostalgia rules. False memory, too. The author makes no pretence about where’s he’s coming from, or where his sympathies lie.

Born in 1956, he describes himself as a 14th generation African.

After leaving school in Rhodesia, he became a combat-soldier in the bush-war waged against the forces of Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA and Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA.

Married with two children, he lives in the Western Cape where he remembers and writes.

This book is a brave Rhodesian’s attempt to make sense of his past, as well as that of the “hard men” of the SAS who he so openly admires –even worships.

Wessels is still more than a little in love with the men he describes as being, in their days of Rhodesian military glory, covert urban operators, snipers, saboteurs and seek-and-strike experts, who engaged themselves so effectively in hot-pursuit- across-border raids into Angola, Mozambique and Zambia against guerrilla camps, and sometimes civilian targets, during a seven year war (1972-1979) that ended in Robert Mugabe emerging as prime minister of Zimbabwe in April 1980.

Wessels notes – with hardly hidden bitterness- that so many of the Rhodesia military men who egged the young and the naive towards the path of pain, death, isolation and sometimes penury, went on to serve the other side, the “commies, gooks and terrs” spoken about so often by soldiers in pubs in this book.

It was survival for some (the survival of the fattest?) who today live in rose-leafed cottages at the edge of medieval university towns, drawing fat British pensions in the process.

“A Handful of Hard Men” is a labour of love that will earn a place on the bookshelves of men and women who belong to another age, another country.

It will also be useful to a new generation of African historians who will either enjoy or be repulsed by the language of Rhodesian racists, the wit, the sheer indifference to black lives that dominated nearly all white soldiers during a war that cost at least 35,000 African lives and which left a country still unresolved by a racial confrontation that shook the Commonwealth and much of central and southern Africa.

Take away Wessel’s number one hero, Captain Darrell Watt and what we would have here is little more than Hamlet without the Prince. He writes:

“During the long war many heroes emerged but none more skilful and courageous than Captain Darrell Watt of the Rhodesian SAS who placed himself at the tip of the spear in the deadly battle to resist the forces of Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.

It is difficult to find another soldier’s story to equal Watt’s in terms of time spent on the field of battle and challenges faced. Even by the standards of the SAS and Special Forces, one has to look far to find anyone who can match his record of resilience and valour in the face of such daunting odds and with resources so paltry.”

But already this book, and one written by Keith Nell who is a former SAS member and trainer of Bishop Muzorewa’s sorry band of military misfits called Pfumo re Vanhu (formed by the Rhodesian white military in the last days of the war) has caused huge upset in the SAS community.

Controversy rages around Nell’s claims in a book called “Viscount Down” that he, Watt and several other SAS crack soldiers located and then slaughtered the five guerrillas who destroyed two Viscount planes flying over Rhodesia –the first in September 1978, the second in the following February.

Wessels has already publicly apologised for repeating stories put out by Nell concerning the dates of the encounters with the so-called Strela Group and for that reason alone, “A Handful of Hard Men” should come with a health warning.

Hopefully, all these problems about timing, dates and diaries (memories both genuine and false) will be cleared up in a second edition, if there is one.

Publishers please note –

* It was Zapu, not Zanu, who accompanied the SAANC into Rhodesia in 1967.

* At the time of Herbert Chitepo’s murder in Lusaka (March 18, 1975)

James Chikerema was president of FROLIZI, not a senior member of ZAPU.

In terms of background to the Ian Smith’s illegal declaration of independence on November 11, 1965 or to the escalation of the Rhodesian war in general, Hannes Wessels has little to say that’s new.

I find it surprising, (considering the time lapse) that the best book so far written on these two subjects is “The Struggle for Zimbabwe“ by David Martin and Phyllis Johnson (Faber & Faber, 1981). Odd that there’s no mention of this important book in Wessel’s bibliography.

Towards the end of “A Handful of Hard Men”, Wessels leads the reader to London and the Lancaster House Conference that turned Rhodesia.

Again, little here that’s new.

There’s much Wessels could have included. For example –

• In 2002 the British journalist Fergal Keane revealed in a TV documentary (BBC One) that the British government knew all about Mugabe’s worst crimes during the Gukuruhundi that saw the deaths of an estimated 25,000 people in Matabeleland and the Midlands between 1982-1987.

• In April 2008 Robin Renwick, one of the key advisers to Lord (Christopher)Soames when he was the last governor of Rhodesia, told BBC Scotland that he was aware Mugabe ordered ZANLA guerrillas to execute in public village headmen who did not support him during the election. “His forces would execute publicly any headman, or local person, who had the courage to oppose him,” Renwick said in an interview with BBC Scotland.

• On April 5, 2008 Peter Carrington – many say he was mastermind behind the settlement at Lancaster House – wrote an article for “The Times” headlined: “Did we help bring a tyrant to power?”

• Also in April that year, a report in Wilf Mbanga’s “The Zimbabwean” quoted Carrington saying that Julius Nyerere of Tanzania made it crystal clear that he would not accept the result of any post-settlement election unless Mugabe won it.

Surely these additions should have been included in a new work about the Rhodesian War and its aftermath. Echoing the words of Ian Smith has its moments but . . .

At the end of his short life, Cecil Rhodes (subject of so much controversy in South Africa) is supposed to have said – “So little done. So much to do.”

Writers about the Rhodesia war, please note.

The book can be purchased on Amazon Kindle – here.