TRACKING IN THE RHODESIAN ARMY

Captain Allan Savory, TCU (TF)

Any book about the Scouts would be incomplete without some reference to its earliest
origins and how the Rhodesian Army became the first army we knew of to train army
trackers as opposed to employing native or indigenous trackers, as the British did in
Malaya and Borneo, with the Senoi Praaq and the Sarawak Rangers. To understand how
the Rhodesian Army became the first to train and use army trackers, rather than recruiting
local native trackers, I need to go back to explaining why my thinking was so different
from that of my fellow officers. I grew up during the Second World War, fiercely proud
of the role of Rhodesians in various theatres and could think of little but joining the army
at the first opportunity. I could foresee at least twenty years of peace ahead of us and I
did not want to be a peacetime soldier. Vaguely I could foresee a different kind of
warfare emerging after that – guerilla warfare.

I therefore opted for a career in the Colonial Service in the then Northern Rhodesian
Game Department. Over the following years I read everything I could about guerrilla
campaigns around the world throughout history. In the Game Department I had close
friends who had served with Peacock Force, a unit of XIV Army behind the Japanese
lines - Major W.E. Poles, MC and Captain Frank Ansell - and I befriended an agricultural
officer, Bill Verboom, who had fought with the Border Scouts in Borneo against Sukarno.
These friends were pumped mercilessly for information - tactics, strategies, political
control or influence and more - as I was determined to understand guerrilla warfare in
depth and not merely from a military perspective.

In the bush doing my Game Department job catching poachers and hunting problem
elephants, hippo and lion, I began perfecting my own bush skills. Earlier I had trained
myself to track and took to it like a duck to water. But it was here, having to hunt many
man-eating lions that I found I needed to become really proficient because native trackers
did not share my enthusiasm for closing with our opponents in dense bush. I noted that as
fear increased with proximity to the lion, trackers would find tracks harder to see and
then, mysteriously, we all too often lost the spoor. Thus, after endless circling till we had
obliterated any tracks, we would trudge back to camp while yet another person got eaten.

After a few such episodes I realised I simply had to become a better tracker myself.
Being fanatical, as so many of us are at that age, I spent endless hours simply determined
to be the best I could in all aspects of bush craft and certainly to match any native tracker.
During this time I learned that there is far more to tracking than following signs on the
ground. It is essential to get into the mind of your quarry - animal or man; to know why
they are doing what they are doing and what they are thinking and likely to do next. This
mental picture is steadily built while following the tracks and confirming, or changing,
the picture being formed. Constant interpretation combined with the signs read from soil,
plants, litter, insect and other creature tracks, spiderwebs, wind, dew, sun angle as well as
surrounding noises, and more, builds a picture in the tracker’s mind essential to success.

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Years later, our first successful tracking to contact with army trackers was a classic case
of mind-reading rather than simply following signs. A group of guerillas had shot up a
South African Police camp near the Zambezi and made good their escape. At the time I
commanded the Tracker Combat Unit (TCU) and assigned a tracker team to follow them.
However, I also decided to accompany the team, as we needed a success after a series of
setbacks. From the anti-tracking measures the gang was taking I recognised above-
average skill. Their skill and the difficult nature of the escarpment we were following
them in, made me decide to take over the tracking.

After a couple of hours of difficult tracking the gang made its way down a rocky bit of
ground toward the Zambezi as though to escape across the river. However, while tracking
them I had worked out that they were more likely to simply shake us off in the difficult
country and remain in the area. With this picture in mind, I held back when they went
down a rocky incline in the direction of the river where no sign would be apparent for
some distance. Looking around, I noticed off to one side a single dry grass stem bent at a
right angle to their path onto the rocks. After reflecting on the significance of that one
bent dry stem, I changed our direction and within ten minutes we heard low muffled
voices and had them located. That one carelessly bent stem and a good feel for how they
were moving to shake us off spelled their doom.

I whispered instructions to Lieutenant Paul Coetzee, giving him five minutes to get
around them undetected in case they made a run for it. I stalked in close to assure myself
that it was in fact the gang and not a group of civilian poachers before opening fire. No
weapons were obvious and four men in civilian clothes were huddled together, talking
softly. Because of their civilian dress I went in closer till at a few yards I was able to see
the collar of a camouflage jacket under the coat of the man closest to me. Having the
confirmation needed, I opened fire. Tracker Duckworth who was a little way behind me
fired at a second man while the others immediately grabbed their weapons but it was all
over in seconds. To me it was a classical track, stalk and identification situation that I
wished we could duplicate over and over but life and war are not like that.

Over the years of tracking I came to understand that although we could train many men to
track well in that they could follow a difficult spoor, it was only a few exceptional people
who would think like their quarry. We constantly strived for this ideal and we did achieve
it with a few men, both black and white.

Like most young Rhodesians, I was a Territorial posted after training at Llewellyn
Barracks to 2nd Battalion Royal Rhodesia Regiment in Northern Rhodesia. However,
when the Nyasaland Emergency occurred in 1959 I bluffed my way into the 1stBattalion,
using the pretext of speaking Chinyanja. I said I was a sergeant but they had no record of
me in the Battalion. I accused the army of sloppiness in losing my file and was in
Nyasaland when they exposed my crime but gave me the rank for initiative. While
serving in Nyasaland I learned that although our troops were of excellent quality with an
amazing array of skills, coming as they did from all walks of life, their bush craft left
much to be desired. They were also arrogant, which is not conducive to learning. So one

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night after I had posted eight men as guards around a school, I stripped and quietly
visited them all. Four of the eight had a bayonet in their ribs before they even knew I was
there. After that there was less arrogance and it was very hard to approach any of them
undetected.

When we returned from Nyasaland where half of my platoon was involved in the Nkata
Bay tragedy under Hugh van Oppen (later a mercenary killed in the Congo), I began in
earnest to try to get the army to train seriously for the warfare that it was now obvious we
would face.

I had by this time transferred to the Southern Rhodesian Game Department and had also
been commissioned in the newly formed 4th Battalion RRR. We seemed to be on almost
constant call-up trying to prevent black-on-black violence as the African nationalist
parties vied for power. We white Rhodesians were seldom the targets of the violence at
that stage. In 1960 I wrote a memorandum to Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the
Federation, urging that we train our Federal Army for guerilla warfare, including training
army trackers. Years later he was to become a close friend and advisor when I led the
Rhodesia Party in opposition to the Rhodesian Front of Ian Smith. One day I asked Sir
Roy why he had turned down my request and he told me he had been advised to disregard
it by the army, which was an understandable reaction from regular officers.

Tragically, resistance remained strong among regular officers. I well recall General Jock
Anderson visiting our mess and deliberately talking loudly in my hearing about ‘f.... ing
young officers who wanted to form private armies’.

Realising the degree of opposition, I decided that I would have to penetrate army thinking
step by acceptable step if I was to succeed, starting with survival, going on to tracking
and hopefully to full acceptance of the need for the army to understand guerrilla warfare.
When the Federal Army began expanding, C Squadron SAS was duly formed and
stationed in Ndola. Not all regulars were hostile to my ideas and I was invited by the SAS
to lecture on survival. Building on the acceptance of these talks, I found officers
sympathetic to the idea of short survival courses in Dombashawa. While resistant to
learning about guerrilla warfare, the army readily accepted that men might benefit from
greater survival skills when lost in the bush.

Finally, after much frustration came the lucky break that was to change everything and
clear the way for more serious training. The 4th Battalion, breaking the routine of riot
drill, was now training at least for anti-terrorist warfare and we held an exercise in the
Puckle Hills near Nkomo. We officers were briefed that four gangs of ‘bandits’ (kindly
provided by the RLI) were known to have entered the area of many square miles of
rugged country and it was our Battalion’s task to hunt them down over the next few days.
At the end of the briefing the Colonel asked if we had any questions. I did and asked,
‘Why are we committing a Battalion to this task and thus playing right into the hands of
the enemy?’. The Colonel asked what I thought was needed and I replied, ‘A section or,
at most, a platoon’. The Colonel and my fellow officers had a field day shooting me
down in ridicule and flame.

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Later that evening in the mess I approached the Colonel and said that although he had
enjoyed poking fun at me, I was serious enough to challenge him. He showed interest, so
I proposed a competition between the Battalion and me. If he would release me to operate
on my own, I would give him five pounds for every bandit leader the Battalion caught if
he would do the same for me. On this we shook hands and off I went with the code name
‘Sapphire' (she had the evening before put on a strip act for the Battalion). To cut a long
story short the Battalion never did catch all bandit groups but by the end of the second
day I had caught all of the bandits and the Colonel sportingly paid up. What clinched
matters was the openness of one person, Digger Essex Clark, our regular training Major.
Digger was gracious enough to say he had never seen or heard of anything quite like it:
where one man could outperform an entire battalion. From then on I got what I had been
pleading for: an almost blank cheque to start more serious training of the regular army,
although still not on guerrilla warfare as I desired.

I was fairly quickly able to get approval to use the Zambezi Valley as a training ground
and the SAS, which was showing great interest, arranged for me to begin longer courses.
I notched these up from survival to what I called aggressive bush craft, where I could
take the step from tracking to tactics in such warfare. Aggressive bush craft was
acceptable because it implied a more positive mindset than mere survival.

In 1964 I left the Game Department because my scientific work was meeting with even
stronger opposition from official quarters than my military thinking. This work involved
new ideas to address land degradation, a major underlying cause of social breakdown,
poverty and violence for centuries. I went farming and game ranching to support myself
while doing all I could to keep working with the SAS. Political clouds were darkening
and, following the granting of independence to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Ian
Smith made his all too well-known Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Tragically,
the Rhodesian Front (RF) interfered with the command structure of the security forces
and General Sam Putterill and Air Vice-Marshall Hawkins, who were opposed to UDI,
were replaced with politically compliant officers, which led to the security forces backing
the RF’s illegal action instead of standing by our oath as officers to defend our nation and
constitution.

To me civil war was now inevitable and emotions were fanning the flames. One evening
shortly after UDI in the 4th Battalion mess the Colonel had all officers stand and snap the
crowns off our Royal Rhodesia Regiment badges as we were now going to go it alone. As
I had two badges I did so but kept the other which to this day is still on my bush hat in
my study as I write.

Following UDI the training I had done with C Squadron ended with all the officers I
knew leaving the army rather than throwing in their lot with the illegal government of
Rhodesia.

Knowing that the war could only expand, I put my heart and soul into at least doing all I
could from my very junior position to enable the army to hold the situation till there was

4
some political solution. It was time now to go deeper than aggressive bush craft training
and to train seriously for guerilla warfare if I could get approval. Accordingly, I presented
a paper to Army HQ asking to be allowed to train what I called Guerrilla Anti-Terrorist
Units (GATU) to be made up of mixed race teams from the SAS, Special Branch and the
CID. After some discussion this was agreed, as was the fact that GATU would remain top
secret. I was to deal with General Andy Rawlins and Crabtree at Special Branch. No
others were to know of our activities.

The first of our GATU candidates were selected by the re-forming SAS, as well as
Special Branch and the CID. In due course, in 1965 if I recall, a couple of Sabre Land
Rovers arrived outside my home in Bulawayo and out stepped Lieutenants Brian
Robinson and another, two of the new SAS officers, with some of their men. Brian was to
become a lifelong comrade-in-arms and friend. We then traveled to a very remote area,
picking up the police contingent as we went. So began the GATU training, which I chose
to do in the lower Sabi River area which was not populated and which I knew well,
having lived there in 1959. We were given our own codes for radio communication that
only SAS signalers could decipher and we went underground.

My idea was to train mixed race groups to be able to operate either in the country or
across the border as pseudo-gangs, like in Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency. On
operations we whites were blackened with special dye produced for us. We used enemy
weapons and equipment. I was still trying to give our army a deeper understanding of
guerrilla warfare and hoped to take the next step through GATU to go deeper than the
thinking behind Kenya's use of pseudo-gangs. However, although the army had, by our
officers not upholding our oaths to constitution and country, become a party political tool,
I found regulars would not discuss politics and I never did succeed. The furthest I could
go was to train GATU to operate as guerilla gangs so that they would be better equipped
to deal with guerilla gangs. We could, in my view, only deal with the symptom but not
the cause and so were still doomed to defeat. The initial training and selection of each
group of recruits took place over a month without a day off. Days were broken into
tracking, anti-tracking, survival and tactics. From each intake I rejected some while
selecting the best that I could to use as instructors to assist me with the next intake.

We ended each month with a four-day exercise splitting the new GATU members into
four-man gangs. Each gang was given a map with some marked spots that they had to
visit at certain times. Each gang's RVs were different and unknown to other groups but
ensured gangs would cross one another’s tracks at some point. I deliberately selected a
large, dry area of the wildest bush. Each man was allowed only a knife as a weapon. One
gang was given a silenced .22 rifle but no ammunition. Other gangs were given
ammunition but no rifle. Each man started with an empty waterbottle and no food,
matches or any comforts. No compasses or other aids to navigation were permitted as the
men were trained not to get lost. The rules were simple – just win. That meant live, do
not be ambushed and end up ‘killing’ the other gangs and taking what you wanted from
them.

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I also stipulated that a team had to get to all its RVs no matter what tragedy hit them. If
anyone could not make it, ditch him. If anyone got lost, leave him. Visit each position on
time, track down any gangs leaving any signs and take whatever you like including any
food, water or clothing the captured team had. Leave them naked to carry on. They knew
I would be in the area also living the same way, but unseen by them and watching and
tracking the teams down to learn what they were up to. I really wanted to know how
aggressive and determined the men were and think that in many ways this process sorted
out weaklings perhaps better than the SAS selection.

There was still a major problem for me and that was the reluctance of any regulars, police
or SAS, to talk politics in any way while we were fighting an unwinnable political war.
One evening in camp when the regular army and police officers were discussing the war
and the enemy, I tested the water by saying I was not sure who the enemy was: Smith or
Mugabe. That went down like a lead balloon and subsequently I kept to the military side
of operations while with the regular army. Some years later I was to get confirmation that
the black police members of the teams were not as apolitical as whites thought. So that
we could not be given away, we did not want officers saluted or treated in any different
way and therefore had all men regardless of rank use native nicknames. The black team
members came up with the names for each white member. Africans are well known for
giving nicknames that are very apt and descriptive of either a white man’s features or his
behaviour. I was given the name Chimurenga which, as people now know, was the name
for the various wars against whites in the country’s history. When I asked why they had
chosen that name, the reply was telling. They said, ‘You are constantly teaching us how
to wage guerilla warfare for peaceful ends, but no man can know so much about war
unless he is himself warlike’.

Some years later, while I was working across the border to try to bring an end to the war
and salvage what I could of our army, I first met Mugabe and General Tongogara on
neutral ground. Initially they were extremely hostile. They refused to shake hands and
asked to question me. I found they were aware of my role and my GATU name and they
blamed me for most of the casualties they had suffered at the hands of both the Selous
Scouts and SAS. While they clearly exaggerated my role, it did indicate that black
members of our GATUs must have been informing them because that name was never
known or used other than in GATU.

As was bound to happen, difficulties arose in the GATU concept with the close working
relationship it required between army and police, and so GATU was disbanded. Our first
GATU operation was fortunately also our last. I say this as we were operating in the
rough hilly country south of Kariba and Army HQ had attached a new regular officer
who had served with pseudo-gangs in Kenya. For me it was awkward as he outranked me
and as a TF captain my position was by no means clear. It was not long before this officer
raised the subject of handling accidental discovery. He asked for us to agree that, if
accidentally discovered by a civilian, black or white, we should kill whoever discovered
us, disguising the murder as an atrocity by the other side. He pointed out the obvious: that
we would be on our own with government and army denial of any involvement or
protection. Rather than have a showdown with a regular officer over something totally

6
unacceptable to me, I let it pass but resolved that I would prevent it should we be
discovered, which thankfully we never were. Apparently, the lesson learnt from the brutal
handling of civilians by the Nazi SS behind the Wehrmacht lines when Russia was
invaded had not penetrated army thinking.

Later we were to engage in further such stupidity in this form of warfare with the use of
minefields and enclosed settlements that amounted to concentration camps. Tragically, I
was to expose the first atrocity by security forces when two South African Policemen
operating in Rhodesia cut the throat of a baby when the mother could not, or would not,
answer their questions. To my dismay, the whole affair was being hushed up by both the
South African and Smith governments so I arranged for it to be raised in Parliament by
the African members to give the Minister of Defense an opportunity to clear the good
name of Rhodesian forces, which he chose not to do.

With the dissolution of GATU the police went on to form PATU (Police Anti-Terrorist
Units) that served well but bore little relation to the original ideal. The SAS went it alone
but kept up training trackers through the formation of the Tracking Wing of the School of
Infantry at Kariba. I believed we were still missing out on some of the best bush men in
the Territorials as I employed a number of them in my game-ranching business and in
fact had taken some, like Daryl Watt who served so well in the SAS, straight from school
and employed them as hunters. With the dissolution of GATU, I requested permission to
recruit Territorials and to form a TF Tracker Combat Unit. Permission was granted and I
was given recruiting priority throughout the TF battalions. Shortly thereafter the TCU
became reality.

The role I foresaw for the TCU was internal intelligence gathering and tracking of
guerillas crossing into Rhodesia, while the SAS would handle external operations across
our borders. The original members of the TCU were mostly men I recruited from the
game-ranching company I ran, where I employed them as hunters, or from the Game
Department. The first task was to make trackers of these men who had always used native
trackers, and then to teach them tactics and strategy.

Trackers worked in four-man teams with each man being a competent tracker. The
tracker was followed by the controller of the entire team who also had the radio. The
other two men, known as flankers, usually stayed well out to the sides and well ahead of
the tracker. While the tracker kept on the tracks, his flankers had two tasks: to detect
ambushes and to pick up the tracks if they deviated to either side. If a flanker picked up
the track deviating, he signaled and immediately became the tracker while the former
tracker swung out to replace that flanker. Only in extremely dense bush, where noise
made by flankers would outweigh the advantage of their positions, would one or both
temporally pull in behind the controller.

Flankers had another role in a new way I devised to quickly pick up lost tracks. On losing
the tracks the tracker, who had been taught not to overshoot the last sign (the most
common mistake), signaled that he had lost the track. The controller immediately became
the centre of a large circle and stood still as a marker. The flankers also stood while the

7
tracker, thinking like those he was following, checked out the most likely places he (and
thus they) would have gone. If he did not immediately pick up the tracks, he would signal
and continue searching likely spots, but the flankers would begin a circle with the
controller as the centre of the search circle. Flankers then looked for the ‘line’ of signs
that would be at right angles to them. The controller maintained his central position to
ensure a full circle in case of our opponents doubling back as so often happened.
Commonly, native trackers would simply start circling in front of the last signs, which is
fine when tracking game but not elusive humans.

I decided against the use of dogs in tracker teams, as used in Kenya. I had used dogs in
my Game Department days and was using highly trained dogs in my game ranching
operations and had found they presented problems. They required more water and food,
were noisy in dense bush and, being bred for scenting power rather than hardiness, their
feet were too sensitive for the extremely hot ground. Commonly they simply moved from
shade or litter-covered soil to the next cool place. In addition, they tended to obliterate
tracks, making tracking harder on difficult ground.

As total silence was our greatest security and element of surprise, I was ruthless about
anything that made any noise. Even if a slight noise could not be heard by the enemy, it
could be heard by the tracker and flankers and was thus distracting. To achieve silence I
would not allow any covering of our legs. No items of webbing were permitted to
protrude to the side of a man's body. There were to be no rattles of any sort. To
communicate we used a combination of hand signals and silent dog whistles because
skilled opponents would be expecting us to use bird or animal noises. Each team tuned
these whistles to the hearing of the man with the lowest tonal range. The combination of
silent whistles and hand signs was usually all we needed. One other rule I applied
ruthlessly was that no man could have a half-full water bottle. Only empty or full bottles
were allowed. My reasons were twofold. Firstly, a half-full bottle made a constant noise.
Secondly, as we were often thirsty and short of water, it was demoralising to hear water
sloshing and took the tracker's mind off the job.

The TCU was soon identified by the bandoliers across our chests. These we designed to
carry our food because the army webbing was too noisy in thorny brush. In each pouch
the men could put whatever food suited them most and one bandolier could last for a
week, supplemented by bush foods. This led to my making a fool of myself on one
occasion when I was operating with the SAS across the border. I did not have my
bandoliers and so decided to rely on newly produced test rations produced by the South
Africans for testing in Rhodesia. We called these Tarzan bars as each bar was supposed
to be a fully balanced and filling meal. I packed them into my pouches and took no other
food, as normally this amount would have been adequate. I had not banked on the
mixture being inedible after hours in the sun. I literally could not hold them down and
wanted to throw up when I smelled or saw them. For some days I had a prisoner attached
to me with a piece of para cord and shared everything I had with him, as he was famished.
After half a bar he also spat the rest out, apparently preferring to die. I ended up having
little option to keep my prisoner and myself alive but to scrounge from the SAS troopies,
which did not endear me to them.

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Strict silence was our best guarantee of locating ambushes before we were seen.
Although we usually had support troops following us, we had to keep them some way
back because they were so noisy and to forbid them to use radios till we called. Having
the comfort of support troops, whose noise caused us to be ambushed was not useful to us.
I preferred to avoid being ambushed. I reasoned that our most likely losses of trackers
would be due to mines or ambushes. As we could only be mined or ambushed where we
were expected, we trained at all times never to go where we could be expected. Thus I
would make no camps to return to, allow no man who left equipment to return and
discouraged movement on paths. Should any man ever be captured and forced to lead his
captors to us, we would be warned as the moving party always had to reveal his presence
first. Should he be compromised, he would have his weapon in his left hand.

I had also to train the trackers to be aware of bush sounds and their meaning. Thus they
had to recognise the first chirp of a honey guide, no matter what they were preoccupied
with at the time, and to take note as soon as beetles, frogs and birds went silent. To
ensure silence, I had the teams constantly tracking another team which had gone ahead as
the ‘enemy’ and would at some point be lying in ambush. It was the tracker team's task
to detect the ambush first at all times, or be shot at. Initially, we used live rounds fired
close to the tracker's feet but I found they eventually ignored live rounds knowing they
would not be shot. So I replaced live rounds with powerful catapults shooting the trackers
with the full intent of hurting them. The stones came hard and fast and would shatter on
the magazine of a rifle. That kept trackers alert for hours no matter how hot or tired.

Getting lost in the bush is always a danger. To overcome this fear with the trackers who
often came from city backgrounds, I used to have them memorise the major drainage
pattern of any area they operated in. Thereafter, if they were ever lost, they simply
walked downhill, which would always lead to a rivercourse and eventually some human
presence or road. I also used to test the men to determine who had natural instincts for
direction as this varies a great deal between people. We tested by blindfolding each man
and leading him all over the place on an overcast day in dense bush. Then after removing
the blindfold, we would ask him to point out the direction of various places we had been
to over the previous days. Some pointed all over the place while a few were amazingly
consistent and accurate.

Trackers were also taught anti-tracking which meant being able to cover the ground,
leaving no signs. We had the army produce special canvas hockey boots for the trackers
with soles that left almost no sign and a lot less than a barefoot man. These soles I
designed using ideas from elephant feet that leave remarkably little sign for their size and
the weight of the animal.

With experience, the men would finally realise that if you do need to shake people off it
is not only a matter of not leaving easy-to-follow tracks, but also of going faster than
your trackers can. Most inexperienced men would waste time trying to avoid leaving
tracks. The hardest to track was an experienced tracker keeping to ground that he knew
was difficult tracking and moving fast, preferably in daylight. Night movement always

9
left more sign. For this reason when we had to steal water from a waterpoint dominated
by an enemy camp, I would sneak in at midday and not at night.

Apart from being skilled and silent trackers we needed to be above average at fast
shooting in dense bush. Toward this end I trained the men to shoot with both eyes open
and to point and shoot to sight or sound. I had learned the trick of training men to fire
accurately at sound from my Dutch friend mentioned earlier who fought in Borneo.

We did a lot of jungle range-work to perfect rapid accurate shooting and arranged for a
number of invisible targets with a rattle behind them forcing men to identify the source of
sound quickly and hit it. To help men learn to shoot with two eyes open, I provided a
silenced .22 with unlimited ammunition but the sights blocked off between the foresight
and the muzzle. In this manner one eye could line up the sights but not see the target
while the other could only see the target. The rifle was at a convenient spot with small
swinging targets and anyone relaxing was encouraged to shoot and compete.

I did not believe in using sentries for several reasons. It prevented men from getting
enough sleep if a small team had to post sentries. For any sentry to remain alert for a long
time is also incredibly difficult. So in our teams we simply gathered as though to camp
and as soon as it was dark we scattered with a pre-arranged RV for next morning. We
usually slept hidden in the bush in pairs to try to avoid snoring giving us away. On one
occasion I found our enemy were doing the same because, after doing a recce of one of
their camps and finding it empty, I walked into one of them in pitch-darkness sleeping in
the bush.

Shortly after forming the TCU the RF had illegally introduced a new constitution
preventing any black Rhodesian from ever casting a vote for or against the government (a
limited number could vote for meaningless ‘side seats’ in Parliament from which the
government would never be drawn). This effectively disenfranchised even black serving
soldiers and policemen and made escalating war and our defeat inevitable. This
worsening situation, combined with the RF’s illegal and unconstitutional takeover of the
Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation (RBC) and Rhodesian Television (RTV) as well as
their introduction of D notices (secret censorship used previously by Churchill during the
Second World War), meant that even white Rhodesians were now denied any semblance
of democratic elections even if they wanted to change the government.

From my years of specialising in guerilla warfare I was all too aware that guerilla war is
but an extension of politics. Witnessing the change in our army as we launched into such
stupidities as assassinations, the use of minefields, concentration camps and other
measures that could only alienate the bulk of our people, I resolved to try to influence the
government in the only way left to any Rhodesians of different thinking. Accordingly, I
penetrated the RF Party and within a month was a Member of Parliament through a by-
election. I had hoped I could work constructively from within but this hope was soon
shattered as I served on a number of caucus committees, including defense, and learned
just how racist the government was and to what levels it would go to suppress all
intelligent discussion even in caucus, secret as those meetings were.

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With the TCU being all Territorials, I encouraged political discussion and frequently
talked about the principles of guerrilla warfare in a manner I had not been free to do with
the regulars. In particular at their level I stressed the importance of working with the
people and not indulging in any arrogance or brutality. To handle any prisoner or villager
roughly was totally forbidden in the TCU and would result in immediately being RTU’d.

My insistence on respectful and friendly behaviour led to some amusing incidents. At

At the end of training the second batch of recruits to the TCU we had a visit from
Minister of Defence Jack Howman and General Keith Coster. By that stage I had
sufficient confidence in all of the trackers to be able to offer General Coster $100 if he
could shake off any tracker. Having just accompanied a team, he declined to take on the
challenge. Later we held our first and only quiet and private passing-out parade when
new trackers were given their Tracker Combat Flashes – the only distinguishing badge
we ever had and one the men were proud to have earned.

Earlier I mentioned talking politics and deeper issues of guerrilla warfare more freely in
the TCU. Later several of its members were to join me in the Rhodesia Party as we tried
to bring the war to an end. I was also joined by some of the original police from GATU
days. Police Special Branch very cautiously began providing me with information from a
high level. I long suspected that some of this was coming from Ken Flower himself who
was anti-RF and had barely survived the purge of Putterill and Hawkins. His
posthumously published memoirs seem to confirm that he was the source of some of my
information. Clearly there were men who did understand at a deeper level just how
rapidly and foolishly the RF and conventional military thinking were losing the war.

By the early 1970s I was convinced we were bringing about our own defeat in part
because of the very success and proficiency of our small army. Our success led to
arrogance and thus unwillingness on the part of government to see the other man’s point
of view, so necessary to bringing any guerrilla war to an end without destroying the
economy, army, police and other vital elements of a stable nation. On one occasion Smith
had singled me out in caucus for praise because of the successes of the TCU – very
unusual and the only time any unit was ever mentioned in these secret meetings. This
concerned me deeply and led to me start to seek an issue on which I could part company
with him and the RF where I had been playing a false role with great difficulty.

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Surprising most of my RF fellow-MPs, I chose one day in caucus to announce to the
Prime Minister that I would be crossing the floor, as I had no confidence in him. I then,
together with others, reformed the Rhodesia Party, which had previously been led by Sir
Roy Welensky and had been effectively destroyed as a white opposition party. In my
civilian role as a Member of Parliament I was appealing publicly for us to use the term
guerrilla rather than terrorist. This I did because guerrilla forces need to spread terror and
thus undermine the economy and confidence in the government, amongst other objectives,
and guerrilla is a less emotional word. The name terrorist when used by any government
simply plays into enemy hands by spreading terror, a lesson that Bush and Blair
governments have still not learned. Following the events of 11 September, the
announcement by President Bush of his ‘war against terrorism’ rather than announcing
that America would bring the perpetrators to justice and lead a ‘war against poverty and
injustice’ is an example a low level of political and military understanding of such wars.

I was also appealing to the RF, which had taken illegal control of the RBC and RTV, to
report military successes which are always immediately known to the enemy but not to
our civilian population; and not to report acts of terror which are also always known to
the enemy but not to the population at large. Maintaining secrecy about our military
successes while broadcasting acts of terror by ‘terrorists’, as Smith and General Walls
were by this time doing, meant our government-controlled media were being used more
to keep the RF in power than do what was right for our nation. For this reason I began to
say in speeches that Smith and Walls were wining the war for Mugabe. Unfortunately,
through my failure to get an understanding of guerilla warfare into our army, we were
now paying the full price and RF broadcasting continued to undermine us till the war's
end with full compliance by our generals.

To my mind we were daily accelerating our defeat as our military successes grew. Where
our successes should have bought time for political compromise to end the war with
dignity for both sides, they were instead resulting in increased RF boasting, arrogance
and intransigence. Perhaps more than any other factor the misuse of national media was
accelerating the end and reducing our chances of maintaining any form of stable
government structure or of keeping the security forces intact. The great lesson for me was
that all would have been very different if, at the time of UDI, all officers had stood firm
to the oaths we made when commissioned. Our greatest single mistake was senior
officers transferring allegiance from the nation to a political party.

We had now reached a point in the war where I realised the best thing I could do for my
country and my comrades-in-arms (the army was almost my life) was to try to preserve
the army intact after our defeat. Not only that but I could foresee the slaughter of our
minority tribe, the Ndebele, following our collapse, as we now had three party political
armies in the field. I knew this would be a lone battle with even friends not understanding
my actions but it was necessary. The British whom I warned were cynical and said that at
least further bloodshed would not be on their hands. The Americans whom I also warned
were naïve and said they were sure I was wrong and no more killing would take place if
we ended the war.

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By this time I had crossed the floor in Parliament and re-formed the defunct Rhodesia
Party. Because I intended to publicly criticise the generals as well as Ian Smith's handling
of the war, I decided the honourable thing was to ask General Walls to relieve me of my
command. It would have been awkward for him to have me at unit commander’s
conferences and other meetings while publicly being critical of his handling of the war.

Immediately and understandably I was excluded from all further planning and
discussions. I was merely informed that the decision had been made to disband the TCU
in favour of forming a new mixed-race unit to be named the Selous Scouts under the
command of a regular officer, Ron Reid Daly. A slight hitch occurred when my officers
and men indicated they would leave rather than serve under a regular officer. I held my
one and only meeting with Ron to talk about his plans and to offer my support. I
undertook to try to persuade the officers and men of the TCU to accept that the unit
would be absorbed in the newly forming Selous Scouts. My success was limited in that
while some officers and men joined the Scouts others simply left.

From here on I became persona non grata within the army. I was awarded an MFC (Non
Operational), the lowest decoration in the Rhodesian Army, which I declined to accept
and my last night in the SAS mess we drank a toast to My F….ing Contribution (MFC) in
recognition of this insult.

For me it had been twenty long years from the first shots I saw fired in anger in
Nyasaland. How long it had been was brought home to me by a young SAS troopie who
sat all day with me ambushing a path in Mozambique. At one point I whispered to him
asking him if he remembered an earlier incident. He shocked me by whispering back,
‘Don’t be stupid, Sir. I wasn’t even born!’

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