[5] The Rhodesia Regiment was created in 1899 primarily from recruits from Matebeleland as a mounted infantry formation, with many coming from the Southern Rhodesian Volunteers.

Frederick Selous (after whom the Selous Scouts were named) was present at Kilimanjaro and other actions in Tanganyika and reported in letters to friends that the Rhodesia Regiment acquitted itself very well at Taveta, though, as with other white regiments from the Empire, malaria and dysentery accounted for a very high number of casualties.

4RR was quartered at Grand Reef aerodrome WSW of Umtali and was responsible for the Thrasher Sector stretching from Inyanga to Chipinga.

When there was a contact or a sighting anywhere in the sector, the RR trackers were dropped on the spoor by an Alouette helicopter and did the dangerous work of follow-up.

When or if they had run the enemy to ground, then the fireforce was called in to surround and eliminate them with superior numbers, firepower and air support.

The Sparrows on the other hand, usually three or four, armed with FNs and an MAG, covered in green 'jungle juice', would frequently run down and then face an enemy force which usually outnumbered and out-gunned them.

Many people in the Brigade HQ knew how busy they were kept with daily call-outs, and held them in very high regard.

[20] The Independent Companies were where conscripts ended up if they did not volunteer for more glamorous infantry or specialist units, consequently they tended to be the more conservative, long-suffering, persistent sloggers.

When there was trouble, as often as not, it was a Bedford lorry full of RR soldiers who were first on the scene of a massacre, a contact, or an attack.

The Regiment's effectiveness deteriorated in the last year and a half of the COIN war when it became manned by rapidly trained African volunteers and conscripts.

At the same time the experienced European members, many of them family men, were emigrating to South Africa as the end drew near, so that by December 1979 the Regiment was barely recognisable for what it had once been, all through its long association with the colony and republic of Rhodesia.

Morale was shattered and the Regiment, as happened to many others, disappeared when the British peacefully took over the executive powers of the country, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, in that month.

The slouch hat was worn from the unit's formation to end of the 1960s where it was replaced by a rifle green beret.

The khaki drill uniform, like that of most of the peace-time army, consisted of a heavily starched, short-sleeved light green drill shirt and similarly starched KD shorts (knee-long khaki drill short trousers), khaki woollen hose-tops and puttees, black ammo boots, a black webbing belt or regimental stable belt and a rifle green beret with the regimental badge underlain by a scarlet diamond-shaped flash.