 [Warfare History Network] South Africa in the spring of 1978 was a country besieged. The apartheid state was increasingly unpopular with its neighbors and unable to control its own restive black population. In the view of the white minority in power, the nation was not only beset domestically but under attack internationally by the Kremlin-aligned governments of neighboring countries. Anticolonialist movements were sweeping the Belgians from the Congo, the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, white Rhodesians from Zimbabwe, and the South Africans from newly renamed Namibia. |