TCU
The TCU (Tracker Combat Unit) of the Army of Rhodesia was founded by Allan Savory in 1968, who commanded it until it was absorbed by the Selous Scouts in 1974.
The TCU had the mission of "tracking down and annihilating" the Native African insurgents who were fighting to free their homeland of Zimbabwe from the white supremacist settler-colonial state of Rhodesia. [1]
The formation of the TCU was preceded by at least three years of top secret Rhodesian army experimentation, led by Allan Savory who trained "tracking teams which could react to any incident or reported presence" of African freedom fighters. The original soldiers who made up the TCU were hand-picked and personally trained by Allan Savory, mostly recruited from the game-ranching company he ran.[2]
Contemporary Rhodesian apologists exalt Savory for taking "native tracking and turn(ing) it into a military discipline" and "a tactical science." They credit "much of the Rhodesian Army’s success against insurgents" to "Allan Savory's foresight and wisdom."[3]
Savory himself boasted of his innovative leadership of the TCU making "the Rhodesian Army... the first to train and use army trackers, rather than recruiting local native trackers."[4]
In 1974, the TCU was absorbed into a successor Rhodesian counter-insurgency unit called the Selous Scouts. A 2007 review by the Australian Army praised the Selous Scouts for its "exceptional results" in "achieving kill rates - accounting directly, or indirectly, for 68 per cent of all insurgents killed by 1978."[5]
Background
Prior to founding and commanding the TCU, Allan Savory was a career officer in the British Colonial Service in what was then the Northern Rhodesian Game Department.
By Savory's own recounting, his decision to apply for this position and begin his career in animal & land management was to prepare for guerilla warfare.
While in the Game Department, Savory says he "read everything I could about guerrilla campaigns around the world throughout history" and "pumped mercilessly for information" his colleagues with a military/counter-insurgency background for information on "tactics, strategies, political control or influence" to holistically "understand guerrilla warfare in depth and not merely from a military perspective."
As a result of his preparation, Savory was an early advocate of the need for the Rhodesian military to prepare for guerilla warfare. In 1960, he "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."
Savory received immense support for his counterinsurgency activities, receiving "an almost blank cheque to start more serious training of the regular army" even before he left the Game Department in 1964.
After presenting a paper to the Rhodesian Army HQ outlining his vision for training a guerilla warfare unit, Savory's proposal was approved and the new unit (GATU) was classified as "top secret."
A few years later, GATU was replaced by the TCU, building on GATU's model of counterinsurgency warfare with a new emphasis on "intelligence gathering and tracking of geurillas."[6]
Members
Scott-Donelan
From 1968-1974, Scott-Donelan fought for the white supremacist Rhodesian military under Allan Savory in its Tracker Combat Unit. In 1974 he was transferred to the Rhodesian Light Infantry after the TCU was dissolved.[7]
Following the collapse of Rhodesia, Scott-Donelan spent the next decade in other racist counterinsurgency wars waged across South Africa before settling the United States in 1989.[8]
He then became the Training Director of the Nevada based Tactical Tracking Operations School where he trains law enforcement, corrections officers, and military personnel in the same tracking techniques he honed defending white supremacy in Africa.[9]
Sources
- ↑ https://www.militaryimages.net/threads/rhodesian-war-debrief-lecture-by-mr-david-scott-donelan.9524/
- ↑ https://pitchstonewaters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Selous-Scout-story-Savory.pdf
- ↑ https://pdfcoffee.com/the-selous-scouts-pamwe-chete-pdf-free.html
- ↑ https://pitchstonewaters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Selous-Scout-story-Savory.pdf
- ↑ https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09574040701400601
- ↑ https://pitchstonewaters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Selous-Scout-story-Savory.pdf
- ↑ https://www.militaryimages.net/threads/rhodesian-war-debrief-lecture-by-mr-david-scott-donelan.9524/
- ↑ https://tacticaltrackertraining.com/about-us
- ↑ https://www.militaryimages.net/threads/rhodesian-war-debrief-lecture-by-mr-david-scott-donelan.9524/