Notable Operations
While on Operation Prawn inside of Mozambique, the objective of which was sabotaging the railways of FRELIMO, they had difficulties at first setting the charges. So they decided to kill a guerrilla and dress him up as a Rhodesian security force member and then throw bogus documents everywhere. The FRELIMO patrol took the bait and left the scene, and then the charges were placed and detonated and the operation was a success.
Apart from their internal security of Rhodesia, some notable operations outside of Rhodesia’s borders struck fear into the enemy. A particular mission took place was first thought to be a flop in Francistown, Botswana. Numerous suitcase bombs were planted by the Selous Scouts in order to liquidate ZIPRA command; the ones that did go off, went off too late and one failed to explode outside of a house. The Botswana authorities thought that ZIPRA’s explosion was due to their improper handling and care of the bombs. As a result, Botswana banned the importation of suitcase bombs within the country supplied by the Russians to ZIPRA, which undoubtedly saved the lives of Rhodesians.
Nyadzonya was an operation that took place in August 1976. It involved ten trucks and four armoured cars disguised as FRELIMO vehicles with 84 Selous Scouts. They first cut the telephone lines to the town and drove on to the guerrilla base. They opened fire on the guerrillas killing between 1,028 and 1,184. The scouts did not sustain a single fatality. Captured ZANLA documents revealed that many of those killed in the raid were either trained guerrillas or were undergoing guerrilla instruction.
As a result of their pseudo-operations, ZANLA were getting into firefights with other members of their guerrilla organization who assumed that they were the Selous Scouts. This invoked fear within the enemy and led to their command and communication structure being disrupted. Additionally, this meant that groups entering Rhodesia for the first time found difficulty linking up with the other members of the group; this led to a demoralisation effect since each guerrilla had to be extremely cautious about whomever he met.
Read more about this topic: Selous Scouts
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