by Boris Hembry
We were still a couple of miles short of Elphil, which lay astride the government road, when we saw heavy palls of black smoke rising ahead. This could only mean that the rubber drying sheds had been set alight. The police and the Gurkhas from Kamuning were already there. Verna was sitting in Reid’s car by the bungalow, Reid doing his best to console her. Jean joined them. Bill Powndell then told me that not only had Wally been murdered, but so too had John Allison and his assistant, Ian Christian, on nearby Phin Soon Estate. The labour force was beginning to collect on the estate padang, looking very shocked and some openly weeping.
These first few hours of the Emergency have been described by several authors, none of whom was there at the time, their descriptions vary considerably, and most could not possibly be less accurate. However, I was there, and for the rest of that day, and several afterwards, I was at the centre of events. As far as the civilians were concerned I was in charge, and was consulted by both police and army. As manager of the largest estate in the area, and vice-chairman of the Perak Planters Association, the leadership of the planting community naturally devolved on me.
Charles Ross arrived and I told him to take charge of Elphil and to get the daily work under way, as I was determined that the terrorists would not be successful in closing down the estate. I arranged with the Gurkha company commander for a platoon to be positioned on the estate, and asked Charles if he would stay the night. He bravely readily agreed and dashed back to Kamuning to collect an overnight bag.
The stories of these murders had been pieced together. Wally Walker was sitting in his office at about nine o’clock when three young Chinese cycled up, leaned their bikes against the building, and whilst one went to the office door and bade Wally good morning, the other two slipped round behind the office and shot him in the head, at point-blank range, through the open office window behind his chair. All three then remounted and rode off, leaving a terrified and horrified office clerk witness to the whole affair, too dumbstruck to do anything for several minutes.
Within half an hour, and less than three miles away, a gang of about a dozen terrorists surrounded the Phin Soon office in which John Allison and Ian Christian were sitting, burst in, bound them to their chairs, and shot them dead. They then set light to the drying sheds and rubber stores and departed.
Interrogations of surrendered terrorists, and captured documents subsequently revealed that Charles Ross and I were to have been the main targets, but because of faulty planning – Charles usually came later to the office on the days when Reid reported in – and my good fortune – on this occasion I had left the office almost immediately to return to the factory to inspect a new piece of machinery and so was away from my desk – they missed us. Later, one of the kranis did remember seeing a couple of young Chinese on bicycles hanging around the estate office earlier in the day, but had thought nothing of it at the time. Whether they were terrorists we shall never know. I have my doubts as, surely, if Charles and I had been considered so important there would have been more of them, especially if Perumal had been involved. But the Police were sure they were, and there certainly would have been time for them to have reached Elphil by nine o’clock, picking up the third accomplice on the way.
Fortunately for the rest of us European planters in the Sungei Siput area, Chin Peng’s plan, that there should be simultaneous assassinations of all European planters and miners in Perak, misfired. Some of the CTs jumped the gun, thus allowing us time to take protective measures.
When I saw that there was nothing more that I could do at Elphil, Jean and I returned to Kamuning with Verna, the poor girl naturally still in a deep state of shock. My next job was to locate John Haytor, our local padre. It was essential that the funerals were held before the end of the day. As luck would have it John was on his travels around his parish but I eventually tracked him down in Telok Anson. He would return directly to Batu Gajah.
By lunchtime there must have been 15 planters and their wives sitting on our verandah, looking ashen-faced and harassed. And very thirsty. Jean laid on tiffin for everyone. I busied myself in my office with telephone calls to Guthrie’s in KL, outlying estates, the police and the British Resident in Ipoh, and receiving incoming calls from the Governor, the Colonial Secretary in Singapore and other senior officials, and my old friend John Dalley of Special Branch. After a hurried lunch I sent Peter Madden off to find Eusoff, who was working out on the estate with his Malay labour gang, with instructions for him to report to me in my office straight away. Peter then went to Ipoh with orders to buy at least a dozen shotguns and a thousand cartridges.
I had quickly realised that the army and police could not indefinitely stand guard over us all, spread out as we were. Also, the sooner we took some kind of offensive, or at least the initiative, the better. When Eusoff turned up I asked him to select a dozen of his best young men to act as guards on the Kamuning bungalows. I would arm them all; the company would pay their wages and look after their families should they come to a sticky end. By nightfall we had 20 good Malays and true standing guard.
This was how HOBA – Hembry’s Own Bloody Army – was born. By the end of the month Eusoff had recruited further men and had taught them basic arms drill and fire discipline, so the factory and office could also be guarded. We had bought them khaki uniforms, and Jean had sewn on the HOBA shoulder flashes which she had hurriedly embroidered.
The scene at Elphil has been described by Noel Barber in his book The War of the Running Dogs. It gained much credence, almost to the extent of becoming the accepted record of the events of that day. However it, too, contained many inaccuracies, and when I wrote to him pointing them out he replied that he had depended on interviews with Donald Wise, whom he had got to know several years later in the Middle East, and with Bob Thompson, a Chinese protection officer based in Ipoh, who figures most prominently in the book. But Donald had been transferred to Port Dickson Lukut Estate three months previously and so was at least 200 miles away, and for the life of me I cannot remember seeing Bob Thompson there, and neither does Jean. There was no earthly reason why he should, or even could, have been there. He would have had no authority to do anything. It was, after all, a police and army matter, and they were already there, and I had assumed responsibility for the management of Elphil Estate. However, the future Sir Robert was to become prominent in the long struggle, and later served as special adviser to the Americans during their war in Vietnam.
Together with Colonel Lakri Woods, who had now arrived at Elphil, and Bill Powndell I arranged for a section of Gurkhas to be positioned on each estate around Sungei Siput, to protect the planters’ bungalows and to show the Indian workforces that armed assistance was at hand. We all had confidence in these little men from Nepal. It was at this meeting that Bill Powndell told me that the local communist top brass had met in Sungei Siput three weeks before, and that the police had known all about it beforehand and were furious that they had not been allowed to arrest everyone present.
The planters and their wives gradually drifted back to their respective estates and lonely homes during the afternoon. We at least were on the main road so did not feel as isolated and out on a limb as many of the others. That evening we drove down to Batu Gajah for the funerals of our friends. John Allison had not been an easy man to get on with. He always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder and rarely entered into the local social life, so it was ironic that as we pall-bearers lowered his coffin into the grave one end slipped and it dropped the last couple of feet, landing with a thud. Someone said, ‘Good old John, awkward bugger to the last,’ which raised a smile. The only one that day.
John Haytor suggested that Jean cable home to say that we were safe. He pointed out that the newspapers would report that three planters had been murdered in Sungei Siput, and as Kamuning was the only estate with three Europeans, the wrong conclusions might be drawn.
It was very late before Jean and I got to bed. I remember feeling terribly depressed. I could not see how we were g
oing to combat this menace. There was an acute shortage of armed forces, a wishy-washy socialist government at home, some members of which were known to be sympathetic to the communist cause, and many equally wishy-washy recent appointments to high places in Malaya. The enemy was the old MPAJA, armed and trained by us in the arts of subversion and guerrilla warfare. Added to which there was the age-old Chinese propensity for secret societies, now coupled with Mao Tse Tung’s brand of fanatical communism. I knew from my ISLD days that Chin Peng’s objective was the formation of a communist state in Malaya subservient to China.
In June 1948 the jungle-based ex-MPAJA was about 5,000 strong, but there were probably a good 100,000 sympathisers. Most of us would ‘sympathise’, would agree to collect money, provide food or hiding places, or report on the movements and routines of our employers, if our families were threatened. These sympathisers were the Min Yuen. The Chinese farmer was a sterling character, independent and very hardworking. He lived at the jungle edges, built himself an atap hut in which he and his family lived, bought a sow and a few hens, tilled the land, and sometimes worked on neighbouring rubber estates or tin mines. Ideal for Chin Peng’s purposes.
During the next four or five days murder, arson and other acts of violence were wholesale throughout much of Malaya, but particularly in Perak, Johore, Selangor and parts of Negri Sembilan, where there was a very large proportion of Chinese. Although no part of the country was to be free from terrorism, the states where Malays predominated, such as Kedah, Malacca and those on the east coast, were generally quieter. Particularly gruesome were the atrocities committed on those Chinese who had the courage to stand up to the CTs. Men were hacked to pieces in front of their families, usually with a changkol (a heavy spade-shaped hoe). Sometimes the victim’s intestines would be cut out, together with the liver, and the wife made to cook them. On other occasions the poor victim would be left to die in agony in front of his family and fellow villagers pour encourager les autres. Another method of persuasion was to crucify children. I know this from personal experience, having seen the awful remains of just such an obscenity on Kamuning. Everything, however vile and despicable and bestial, apparently could be justified in the name of Marxist Communism. Small wonder that many of us feel towards communism, and its fellow travellers, hatred beyond description.
The terrorists had their camps deep in the jungle, many of them maintained since 1945. In them a few hundred of the most dedicated ex-MPAJA communists had spent the intervening years planning and training for their insurrection, mapping the jungle paths, recovering and storing the arms and ammunition dropped in by Force 136, and recruiting the Min Yuen.
From Sungei Siput a road runs north-east for some 10 miles before it peters out at the River Plus. From here the jungle stretches out for hundreds of square miles over the main mountain range towards Kelantan to the east, Siam to the north, and Pahang to the south. In fact, it is continuous, mountainous jungle from Siam right down to Johore, so that the terrorists could travel, unmolested, by jungle paths from north of the border with Siam southwards to Johore, only a score of miles from Singapore. These were the tracks used by Bob Chrystal, Freddy Spencer Chapman, and others of Force 136 and ISLD.
A mile up the Plus road a secondary road branches off south-east for about five miles, before it too peters out near the Jalong and Korbu rivers. For the first mile or so the Jalong road passed Malay smallholdings and plantations, but thereafter it went through many hundreds of acres of jungle that had been cleared over the years by the Chinese farmers, in fact squatters, who were now in considerable numbers. It was the sons and daughters of these squatters who made up the greater part of the militants in our part of Perak, and, naturally, their parents would offer succour – food, shelter, information and alibis.
Police informers had told us that the bandits had come down from their jungle camps around Korbu Mountain and had been fed and sheltered by the squatters along the Jalong road, both before and after committing their atrocities at Elphil and Phin Soon. The police thought there could still be members of these gangs, or others of the same murderous persuasion, hiding there.
I was asked to chair a meeting of senior planters, police and military, at the Heawood Estate bungalow to discuss the security situation in the area. It was agreed by all to be totally inadequate, and that representations should be made to the British Resident to obtain more troops. I knew that this would be a forlorn hope in the short term, so suggested that we would all have to fall back on our own resources, to follow Kamuning’s example and recruit their own ‘home guards’, to fortify our bungalow compounds, factories and offices, and if necessary to bring our labour forces’ houses into defensive areas. I was surprised at the reaction of many of the planters and miners present: they complained about the cost.
But we did agree to mount an operation against the terrorists the following day. Before daybreak a company of Gurkhas, with planters to act as guides and interpreters, would drive hell-for-leather to the Jalong squatter area to endeavour to surprise any terrorists hiding there, to search the houses for illicit weapons, and generally to show the locals that the security forces were to be reckoned with.
At 0430 hours we assembled at the Kamuning Estate hospital where we climbed aboard the army three-tonners. We were about 60 strong. We had planned to be as quiet as church mice, intending to arrive in the squatter area undetected, to surprise any CTs still abed. Each lorry had a planter on board. The signal to move off was given in the traditional army manner – shouted words of command. The lorries revved up and moved off into the night with the maximum possible noise, warning everyone for miles around that the military were involved on an operation. Half an hour later we reached our destination, debussed, fell in, and moved off in half sections, again with shouted words of command, we planters in rubber-soled shoes, the soldiers in hobnailed boots, marching in step. The thunderous noise when we marched over plank bridges had me in hysterics, whether from laughter or frustrated anger I cannot now remember. It was a classic demonstration of how not to undertake such an operation, and I was disappointed that such an example should have been set by Gurkhas, of all people.
Of course, in a short period of time, the military, and particularly the Gurkhas ‘got their act together’, and became the best jungle fighters in the world. Who would have imagined, having seen the debacle of January and February 1942, that in only eight short years the British Army, composed to a great extent of two-year National Servicemen, would be operating silently in small patrols, in the deepest jungle, and winning the war against a highly motivated, experienced enemy, on its own ground? I do not believe that the nation has given nearly enough recognition to this fact.
Needless to say, we found absolutely nothing. But it was significant that the only inhabitants were the old and infirm. Of the young there was no sign. Those we interrogated denied all knowledge of the ‘Tiga Bintang’ – the three stars that uniformed bandits then wore on their caps.
But it was this farcical episode that gave me the germ of an idea that I was to put to Sir Henry Gurney, the high commissioner, not long afterwards when we met at the Ferguson bungalow. By then I was able to propound my theories concerning the squatters and cutting off food supplies from the terrorists in some detail.
We got back to Sungei Siput at about four in the afternoon. A postmortem was called for the following day and I was invited to attend. It was agreed that the previous day’s only value was to have shown the enemy that the security forces were responding and prepared to take the offensive deep into enemy territory for, make no mistake, it was enemy territory.
We planters and miners, at that stage of the ‘Emergency’ – in fact a very real war, but never called one so that the insurance companies, rather than the Government, would be responsible for war damage reparations – were the main targets, and we quickly realised the difficulty in spotting the enemy, for he could well be one of our own estate workers, tapping our trees during the day, tabeking (salaaming) when the tuan pa
ssed by, dressed in the normal blue blouse and baggy trousers by day, and after dark would be in jungle green uniform with tiga bintang cap, preparing to ambush one returning from Ipoh, slashing the rubber trees, crucifying a child on a neighbouring estate, or besieging a bungalow. Their plan was quite simply to murder as many planters and tin miners as possible, as quickly as possible, to terrorise the labour forces into submission, and bring the main industries of the country to a standstill. They planned to capture isolated police stations and army posts, and from these take over the control of thus ‘liberated’ areas. They in fact achieved this at the isolated town of Jerantut, and held it for a few days before being driven out.
I have felt for some time that the eventual outcome could well have been different if, in addition to terrorising the countryside, in the classic Maoist way, the Communists had also resorted to large-scale urban terrorism, as practised latterly by the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Ten days after the outbreak of hostilities Guthrie’s asked me to fly down to Kuala Lumpur to discuss the situation, so that they could compile a comprehensive report for Sir John Hay in London. Jean and I flew down by Malayan Airways DC3 and were met by Dan Wright who drove us back to his house on the outskirts of KL. I spent Saturday morning talking to Charles Thornton and Trevor Walker, respectively the Nos. 1 and 2 of Guthrie’s KL – Peter Taylor had by this time become managing director and had moved to Singapore.