SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  He took the latter course and, misleading himself that the colonial peoples yearned to throw off their yoke and join Indonesia, opened his campaign by setting up subversive cells in Malaya and Singapore and interfering with their fishermen. He does not seem to have appreciated in the early stages that British Borneo offered him a better chance; perhaps it was too small beer for one who aspired to change the world, and contemporary sources agree that the Brunei Revolt in December 1962 took him as much by surprise as it did everyone else.

  Brunei was the original native name for the whole island, though the Europeans of course knew better and called it Borneo. Comprising mountains, rivers, swamps and universal forest, it is the third largest island in the world and proved too big for the corrupt and ineffective rule of successive Sultans, great pieces being sliced off until in 1890 the map appeared as it remains today. Two-thirds, first Dutch and now Indonesian, is called Kalimantan. The rest was British, acquired absentmindedly in the nineteenth century by different means; Sarawak (second syllable pronounced V and accented) to the southwest, where the first Rajah Brooke was entreated by the locals to free them from the Sultan; Sabah (pronounced Sarber) to the northeast, where there had been virtually no government until it was settled by the British North Borneo Company. Both were now colonies, and between them two tiny enclaves were all that remained of Brunei; she was still a hereditary sultanate, now a protectorate, and her affairs had taken a turn for the better since fortune had presented her with the only oilfield on the British part of the coast.

  The Revolt was quickly suppressed by British troops flown in from Malaya in a very efficient little operation with few casualties. Since the SAS were not involved and the issues were mainly domestic, there is no need to master its oriental complexities except in one regard. Its leader had strong leanings towards Indonesia, where many of the unfortunate rebel ‘soldiers’ had been ‘trained’ and, after the event, Soekarno’s propaganda supported the uprising bombastically. It was, therefore, only prudent to assume that Indonesia was the instigator as part of her anti-Malaysia campaign. The British force was ordered to remain and be ready for whatever might happen next, not only in Brunei but in the whole of British Borneo.

  Major-General Walter Walker was appointed Director of Operations and rarely can a general have been so absolutely right for a task and been given it. He was a fighting general who won his battles, fierce and aggressive like his Gurkha soldiers with most of his active experience having been in the jungles of Burma and Malaya. Walker was also a soldier’s general, that high accolade which meant, in his case, that he drove his men hard but himself harder and that they mattered to him and knew it. With those at the head of affairs such as governors, administrators, police chiefs of the three territories he could be embarrassingly terse when they failed to see things his way. Yet he was also essentially an English gentleman: polite, interested in others’ opinions and capable of inspiring that cooperation among his colleagues which was vital in the circumstances. Even with the armed forces his position could be difficult. Exercising the new doctrine of Unified Command over all three services, he was responsible only to the commander-in-chief in Singapore and not to their individual commanders on whom he relied to support him but who did not always like being left out.

  As Walker took charge in Borneo, Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodhouse waited in Hereford for a call to join in what seemed a promising affray. The SAS do not wait long in such tantalizing circumstances, so Woodhouse called at the War Office to find, as he fully expected but which shocked him too, that the Regiment had not even been considered, despite its readiness for instant deployment and its outstanding jungle experience. He therefore importuned, as all SAS commanders must learn to do, and succeeding at least in having it included in a list of units available to General Walker should he want them, went home to the Dorset downs for Christmas. On Boxing Day the hardest winter for many years took a grip on the south of England, so that when the summons at last came, the first leg of his journey to the steaming jungle was made on foot through a blizzard and banked-up snowdrifts.

  Walker was convinced that trouble must be expected from Soekarno, though most opinion held that Borneo would soon settle down once the revolt had been tidied up. Some even said, and there are always such, that Walker thoroughly enjoyed his grand command and wanted to develop it; but once peace has been disturbed, violence tends to persist, and although there was little positive Intelligence of Indonesian activity, Soekarno would surely deduce that if one group of people was prepared to rebel there might be others whom he could use. British Borneo could thus become a more attainable target than Malaya, and attractive in that success would emasculate the hateful concept of Malaysia.

  There was indeed such a group, a very large one known as the Clandestine Communist Organization (CCO). Predominantly Chinese and mainly in the towns of Sarawak, quietly it built up its strength and influence with total dedication and harsh discipline in readiness for the day of action, whenever that should come. Soekarno was not a communist, but they wanted to frustrate Malaysia just as he did. The dilemma, which Walker clearly saw, was that his security forces would be hard pressed either to contain a large-scale internal uprising, in which case the Indonesian Army would be free to march in, or to hold the frontier and thus allow the CCO a free run behind it; but they must be ready to do both and never must the two enemies be allowed to meet.

  Walker’s initial directive laid emphasis on a first class Intelligence organization and included the remarkable imperative, ‘Dominate the jungle’. What, the whole of the nine hundred mile frontier with the equivalent of six infantry battalions and local forces? Not everywhere at once, perhaps, but wherever it mattered, and success would depend on knowing where that was through Intelligence in all its forms. The SAS could help in that function, but Walker had sent for Woodhouse with something quite different in mind. Some of the larger jungle villages had airstrips that were vulnerable to Indonesian airborne assault, in which event he would want soldiers who could parachute into trees to restore the position. Could the SAS do it? He had not worked closely with them before, despite both having fought simultaneously in Malaya; few had, for when the SAS were on the job they tended to vanish and it was usual for their capabilities not to be fully understood. But Woodhouse did not argue; much more important was to impress the General with enthusiasm and get a Squadron to Borneo for whatever initial purpose. So yes, of course the SAS could do the airstrip job, especially as it seemed they were the only available unit trained to do so; though perhaps General Walker would also like to consider using them on the frontier itself, where they could stay for long periods, get to know the locals and find out what; the Indonesians were doing.

  A signal winged homewards as fast as light. Almost as fast, ‘A’ Squadron skimmed down on their skis from the Welsh mountains where they had seized the opportunity to train in arctic warfare while rescuing snow-trapped sheep. Within hours, two in the case of those furthest away, bergens were packed with tropical shirts and slacks, jungle hats and boots, long jungle knives called ‘parangs’ mess tins with hexamine for cooking, insect repellent, sardines and other necessaries, and the men were gone, ready to march into the jungle even as they stepped out of their aircraft. They had no time to kiss goodbye, and could not have told their loved ones that they were going, far less where, even if they had; but they did not mind, they liked it, and would have done so even had they known that nobody really wanted them in Borneo and that it was their own Colonel who had put them, to the trouble. That attitude is perhaps not quite ordinary, even a little special.

  Commanding ‘A’ Squadron, Major John Edwardes was surely the archetypal SAS officer, and yet not quite because the rest describe him as wholly mad, which implies a difference of degree in an outfit where all are necessarily mad to some extent. His wife says he knows no fear, which may be madness because it ought to be dangerous, yet he has survived one adventure after another to which he is inexorably propelled by that irresistible urge
that is indeed typical of the SAS. Take, for example, the one when he was a London policeman and hurled himself on top of a stolen Jaguar with nothing to hold onto but the radio aerial while the driver accelerated and swerved wildly. Surely that was mad, yet it was but the beginning, for he then smashed the windscreen with his truncheon which should logically have caused the instant deaths of the pair of them. But no; they hit a low wall, the malefactor popped out through the hole into a garden and Edwardes, always a jump ahead, intoned, ‘Anything you say will be taken down …’. He was awarded the George Medal ‘because it attracted a certain amount of attention in Kensington.’ Well yes, idle people will indeed stop to stare at almost anything rather than go about their business.

  Similarly in Malaya when his Gurkha patrol was ambushed and his reaction was so fast, fierce and fearless that five terrorists were killed, they having started with all the advantages. Snakes were his fascination, picking them up and putting them in his bergen as he went along so that there was never any bunching in his patrols, a fault common with soldiers new to the jungle. He took them home, and once found himself blinded by a spitting cobra that he had taken from a roomful of those engaging creatures, holding it in one hand while his wife – ‘who did not really like snakes’ – guided him with the other where to throw it back preparatory to shutting the door. Then there was the capture of ‘Georgie Girl’, a 25-foot python, in unarmed combat at dead of night, again assisted by his wife who illuminated the hissing, cursing, writhing mass with candlelight. ‘Candles!’ she says. ‘Can you imagine?’ There was only one species of snake that Edwardes never caught, the King Cobra or Hamadryad, which can grow to twenty feet and kill in as many minutes. ‘You really need a stick for them.’

  The Squadron was held up at Singapore and told to acclimatize. It was a very necessary precaution for most troops, but the SAS took a pride in not needing to and were irked. Then more inactivity awaited them at General Walker’s headquarters on Labuan Island where they were kept as an emergency parachute force; but the pause enabled Woodhouse to advise the General on how they might best be employed, very tactfully because a Gurkha officer does not easily acknowledge that anyone can do anything better than Gurkhas.

  The immensely long border needed watching, but how? The problem had never arisen before as it had always been friendly, and indeed of no great significance because nobody had any cause to go there except the local tribes to whom it meant little anyway. There were even parts that were thought never to have been visited at all. On a small-scale map it was easy enough to see where it ran, but the larger the scale the greater the areas with nothing marked but what was visible from the air: mountain peaks and ridges, rivers wide enough to divide the canopy, and trees, trees, trees. Where it was mountainous the frontier usually followed the watershed between the Kalimantan and British river systems, thus recognizing the jungle way of life in which rivers are the arteries of trade and communications and all communities live near them; but elsewhere the line tended to be drawn with a ruler on the map though not on the ground, neither did British and Dutch maps always agree.

  In a few instances rivers crossed the border and could be negotiated by boat. Elsewhere, one had to walk, but there was no particular hardship in that apart from climbing to the dividing ridge if there was one. Tracks could be classified like roads: six-foot wide trade-routes with carefully maintained bridges and convenient handrails, single tracks with just logs, and ways barely discernible to the foreigner and only occasionally used by hunters and foragers. Animal tracks abounded and were useful, but movement was by no means limited to tracks, especially in primary jungle where shade inhibited undergrowth and walking could even be pleasant. Swamp and secondary jungle, however, were another matter and there were some such areas along the border itself.

  Thus the Indonesians could come across almost anywhere, concealed from but a few yards on the ground and completely from above so that modern technology would be powerless to detect them before they reached their objectives. The needle/haystack ratio was so extreme that if all the British soldiers had been posted on the frontier they would have been 400 yards apart. There was thus no alternative to keeping them in the rear, poised to react once the enemy had shown his hand. That would be bad for the people’s morale because some might get hurt before help arrived, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the British were powerless to protect them. Some form of early warning would therefore be priceless, and Woodhouse offered it; the border tribes themselves, guided by the SAS, must act as eyes and ears.

  The plan followed directly from the Regiment’s success with the aborigines in Malaya. A jungle dweller was a finely tuned sensor of all that happened in his minutely familiar area; even the behaviour of some individual animals and birds was observed, so that a strange human or group of them trying to pass was a conspicuous and noteworthy event. The information would be doubly valuable because the tribes were just as much at home in the Kalimantan border villages where they traded and intermarried, but it would only be passed on if they liked the soldiers and trusted them to prevent possible reprisals.

  The SAS had trained themselves to go and stay in far off places for long periods, whether to fight or make friends or both, living off the country if possible, but otherwise needing little resupply. Their various skills matched this requirement; there being no point in going had they not been sure of being able to report what they found, their high frequency radios were specially chosen for long range, lightness and reliability; their medical attainments were high and many of them spoke Malay, the lingua franca of the tribes. Over and above soldiering in all its forms, these three skills were specialities and everybody had to master one, though many had more. It would now have become clear to the! General that no infantry regiment possessed them to anything like SAS standard, far less would it have been able to split itself into three- or four-man patrols and include them all in each one. Whether he was convinced, or merely hoped that they might do some good, he kept to himself, but he let them go. ‘A’ Squadron hoisted its bergens, stepped into the unknown and found Arcadia.

  John Edwardes set about establishing his patrols, assisted by his Squadron Sergeant-Major, Lawrence Smith, who in the absence of an officer as second in command doubled in that role too. He was one of those who felt that the fewer officers there were the better, unless, like Edwardes, they measured up to his own standards of vitality and competence, being more than prepared to take on any of their tasks himself. He liked being a Sergeant-Major in the SAS because the conventional duties of square-bashing, gingering people up and putting them on charges just did not arise, and his high position would enable him to take the most interesting patrols.

  Also helping were two civilians who knew the borders and their tribes better than most: John Warne, a police officer in Sabah, and Tom Harrisson, the world-famous anthropologist. Both had parachuted into Japanese-occupied Borneo in the Second World War and persuaded the people to resume their ancient though latterly discouraged practice of taking heads; ten bob a nob, but only if Japanese. They did not need much persuasion for it used to be an essential part of their religion in which there was now a gap. If one asked how much headhunting went on, the quick, official answer was ‘none’. The slow answer was ‘hardly any’, at least that ever came to light, but how could one tell? One way of telling was by tiny but revealing tattoo marks on the forefinger, and there were such. Was there then danger in going among them? If you were British, none whatever. A more charming and hospitable people could hardly be imagined, and every longhouse, even some thought never to have been visited by white men before, displayed a prized picture of the Queen, garlanded though it might be by their other trophies – skulls; Japanese, of course.

  Edwardes spaced his patrols at intervals, which varied with the potential threat in different areas but were never less than twenty miles. Accompanied by Warne or Harrisson he would usually take them in personally, introductions would be made and then the patrol stayed for three months to become in
many cases more knowledgeable about the area than anyone else. District Officers with vast regions, outstandingly dedicated though they were, could but come and go and not necessarily everywhere; but the SAS made it their home, earned the people’s trust and set them to gathering information about the Indonesians.

  They added many essential details to their blank maps: watercourses showing limits of boat navigation, tracks classified into main, secondary and hunting with distances in both yards and hours marching, contours and accessibility of individual areas, primary jungle, areas under cultivation (‘ladang’) and secondary jungle previously cleared but now reverting with thick undergrowth (‘belukar’). They wrote a Domesday Book of the population, describing their races, habits, customs, what they ate, their state of health and whether they had enough salt (so essential in hot climates), what shotguns, boats, buffalo, pigs and chickens they possessed, and who among them were influential for good or ill. In particular, they noted ambush positions, border crossing-points, and places for parachute dropping and helicopter landing, some of which they cleared.

  Edwardes worked methodically along the border, starting at the eastern coast of Sabah. Here lay Tawau, an important town by Borneo standards of 15,000 people and the centre and port for a considerable area of enterprise such as rubber, timber and hemp, employing many Indonesians, which was worrying. It was also very close to the border, which first runs through islands, actually bisecting one, and then across the combined estuaries of several rivers on both sides where the land is flat and swampy for 25 miles until hills start to rise and soon become mountains; patrols were clearly needed here, in part waterborne.