On September 3, 1978, guerrillas from the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army shot down a Rhodesian civilian airliner en route to Salisbury (now Harare). The guerrillas gathered the handful of survivors on the ground, mostly women and children, and machine-gunned them all — including two small girls of eleven and four. Only a few wounded survivors lived to tell the tale. The guerrillas were based in Zambia, just across the Zambezi to the north of Rhodesia. Their main camp was at Westland Farm, north of the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and hundreds of miles away from the border. For the Rhodesians to strike back would mean taking wholesale control of Zambian airspace, and ferrying aircraft and soldiers deep into a hostile country. Needless to say, neither the guerrillas nor the Zambians expected them to do it.

On October 19, 1978, the Rhodesians did it. Led by a man known only as “Green Leader,” aloft in a Rhodesian Canberra, an aerial task force appeared over Lusaka and informed the Zambians that Rhodesia now owned their airspace, and would continue to do so until the Rhodesian assault on the guerrilla camp at Westland Farm was through. The ultimatum delivered by Green Leader to the Lusaka tower is a classic, as is the exchange between the supine, shocked Zambians and the Rhodesian commander.

Audio transcript from Rhodesian Air Force Canberra bomber cockpit tape, Operation Gatling, 18 October 1978.