Splinter

SPLINTER: Rhodesia's Lake War aims to fill a gap in the record of the 1970s Rhodesian Bush War. Related partly in participants' own words, it is the first written account of the history and operations of the waterborne units of the Rhodesian Corps of Engineers and the British South Africa Police. From the early days of the war, both these units patrolled the strategically important Zambezi River and Lake Kariba - the world's largest man-made lake by volume. But it was the establishment in 1977 of Operation Splinter, a separate operational area covering the lake and the immediate upstream portion of the Zambezi, along with the upgrade of the Engineers Boat Troop to Squadron status, which allowed the first fully coordinated defence of this part of the hostile border. As a result, for the last two years of the war, the entire length of Lake Kariba was completely sealed off from incursions by insurgents. SPLINTER describes how the Boat Squadron expanded from a purely defensive to an offensive role, and the part it played in support of certain external operations of the Rhodesian SAS.