South African Artillery in the Eighties

Abstract

Emerging from the Second World War armed with the then completely adequate 25 pounder and BL 5.5" guns, the South African Field Artillery continued to use the same guns operationally over thirty years later.

When the armed forces of South Africa were thrown into a conventional conflict during the Angolan Civil War in 1975, the gunners found their equipment to be woefully inadequate. Soviet made artillery systems in the hands of the Russian-backed forces possessed ranges far in excess of the Second World War vintage South African systems and brought home in a very real way the need for drastic modernisation of the artillery branch of the South African Army.