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Brown Water of Africa: Portuguese Riverine Warfare 1961-1974.

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Brown Water of Africa: Portuguese Riverine Warfare 1961-1974. John P. Cann. St. Petersburg, FL: Hailer Publishing, 2007. 248 pp.

Brown Waters of Africa is the second volume in John P. Cann's planned trilogy of works that examine the Portuguese counterinsurgency in its former African colonies. This book explores the role of the navy in these campaigns from approximately the late 1950s until the end of hostilities in 1974-75. Cann closely examines the naval anticipation of and response to the largely overlapping insurrections in colonial Angola, Mozambique and Guinea in order to highlight the importance of the naval effort, which to date has been historiographically overshadowed by the ground campaigns. The author skillfully reconstructs the Portuguese navy's creative efforts to overcome a general state of unpreparedness, a lack of trained personnel, decades of statutory neglect, a "blue water" (deep sea) focus and acutely limited resources and transform itself into an effective, primarily riverine, or "brown water," counterinsurgency...

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