None of the sixty-seven Pookies, built from 1976 to 1980, ever detonated a landmine. Twelve Pookies were lost and two drivers killed but only by electrically-detonated mines or by RPG7 rockets in ambushes ahead of their convoys. One driver was killed by a rocket hitting his windscreen, the other by a boosted command detonation mine. All the other drivers survived because the V-shaped armoured cab, 700 millimeters above the ground, deflected the blasts harmlessly.
The prototype was tested in the field in 1976 and promptly found twelve Soviet-made anti-tank mines on the notorious Mount Darwin-Mukumbura road in north-eastern Rhodesia. In the four years of their deployment, the Pookies found an assortment of over 550 anti-tank mines buried in the roads.
A world first and combat-tested, the Pookie remains the most effective mine-detecting vehicle available. Its Reutech (Barcom) detectors sweep a wide path. And soon its effectiveness will be doubled by the installation of the newest non-metallic (Ground Probing Radar) detecting system to combat the menace of the plastic mine. The Pookie is robust, fast and capable of all-weather and 24-hour operation on all roads and in open terrain. It is cost-effective, light on fuel, and, because it is based on the VW Kombi, spares, replacement engines, gearboxes and the like as well as mechanical expertise are available world-wide. When a mere 250,000 whites in the middle of Southern Africa are fighting with their lives they make a plan. Here is one of the little inventions we came up with in the 1970's. Take a look at a Pookie below:
The Pookie
When the landmines were taking a very heavy toll and we were in danger of losing, someone came up with a bright idea. Roads hundreds of kilometres long were mined. There just were not enough people nor enough time for people to walk on foot with mine detectors. So someone wondered if you could build a vehicle which could drive over a landmine without setting it off. Then you would mount a metal-detector on it. They needed a vehicle which was light and which could have its weight spread out over a wide area. They went and got hold of used Formula One racing car tyres and put it on a small vehicle powered by a VW engine. The result was a Pookie!!
Rhodesia was under a lot of strain and money was tight. The only source of Formula One racing tyres was the South African Grand Prix. Each year, army personnel from Rhodesia (dressed in plain clothes) would go to South Africa and buy up used racing car tyres. The South Africans couldn't understand what these crazy Rhodesians were up to!!
The first real live trial of the Pookie was on a long stretch of road known to be filled with landmines. The Pookie drove along and detected each mine. Upon detection the vehicle was stopped and the landmines were lifted. The Pookie was a roaring success. Only approximately five were ever built and they were Rhodesia's Secret Weapon against landmines. In a few hours the Pookies could detect and remove landmines which had been carried by humans for hundreds of miles and which had taken a long time to lay. Pookies were so important that their location was a military secret and nobody knew which roads they were going to sweep next. They could undo many weeks of labour by Marxist terrorists in a very short time.
Here is a Pookie from another angle. Note the metal detector hanging between the front & back wheels:-
The Pookie
The Pookie Troop
The Pookie at War! (Here we see a Pookie leading an army column across mine-infested terrain into Mozambique on a cross-border raid to hit the enemy in their camps. This is no different to what America did in Afghanistan after WTC. Note, behind the Pookie is a tank. Rhodesia could not afford to buy tanks. The few tanks they had were actually Russian tanks captured on cross-border raids... As you can see this Russian tank is now doing service in the Rhodesian Army!)
Funny Pookies! (Even in war there is time for a bit of fun. These Pookies were "dressed up" for the Jacaranda Festival and were humorously named "Jacaranda" & "Jill". Note: Those "pipes" sticking out at 45 degree angles are actually anti-ambush devices - a type of a shotgun).
When the Russians finally discovered that their entire landmine strategy was ineffective they went to work devising a new type of landmine which contained no metal. So they invented the plastic landmine. When the new mines were planted, the situation once more became critical.
Again the engineers thought and thought. Eventually somebody wondered: If you can't detect plastic, can you detect a hole dug in the hard soil? So, using early, primitive computer logic, they devised a "detector" which bounced sound waves into the ground and then analysed the reflection. The little computer then used its logic to determine when it thought there was a "hole". Note, the soil on the roads is tightly packed, but when you dig a hole for a landmine, no matter how tightly you pack it, it is not as dense as the rest of the road. The Pookies were never again as effective as they had been originally. Note, electrically detonated landmines were also used, but that is another story. Nevertheless, they did manage to get reasonable success - though with many more false alarms than before. So in the end, the Marxist Liberators were not able to defeat us using landmines alone.
Let me mention a few other things about the little Pookie. You will note it is very small because it only carried one person, the driver. The Pookies often drove in front of convoys. They drove quite far ahead because they needed a decent stopping distance in case they detected landmines. It was found, with practise, that a Pookie could travel along at 80 Km/Hr (48 mph) and still effectively detect mines! It would then stop and the convoy would also stop behind it. Due to this, the Pookie was thus always vulnerable to ambush. So it was armoured and the driver was protected with bullet-proof glass. The shape of his compartment was in a V just in case a landmine went off. The wheels were some distance from the base so that the blast effects would be some distance from the driver and so the wheel could fly off if need be. Nobody ever died in a Pookie.
Pookies were in demand all over Rhodesia. Then Robert Mugabe's "Liberators" took to planting landmines on airstrips.
This is what is left of a small plane from the African Development Fund which struck a landmine on an airstrip. The pilot and three passengers were killed. Again, people were killed who were actually trying to help the blacks!
It was not feasible to provide Pookies for the many landing strips and airfields in the bush. So they put metal detectors on a bicyle frame.
This bicyle-mounted mine-detector was named the FU-2. One can't help if there was some sort of message in the name! Note the car battery to power the detector.
It should be noted that Rhodesian mine-protected vehicles got a boost from some experiments which had been going on in South Africa. The South Africans were having landmine problems in South West Africa (Namibia). Their line of thinking was in the opposite direction to that of the Pookie. Rather than developing a vehicle to move over landmines without setting them off, they were trying to invent a vehicle to find them and to set them off! So they needed a vehicle which could survive landmine blasts.
A Prototype of the "Spinnekop" (Spider)
The "Spinnekop" (Spider) - the final product. (Note it has a mine-detector right at the front)