The insurgents received a psychological boost from the victory of Communism in China, whose regime was recognized by London in January 1950. The Viet Minh concurrently inflicted severe defeats on the French in Indochina. The advent of a Communist regime in China meant that it was no longer possible for the British to deport suspected Communists there, while it also encouraged Chinese millionaires (who in Malaya were more numerous than British) to hedge their bets, in case their extended families were subjected to intimidation. The British received support from Australia and New Zealand, while the US Consul in Kuala Lumpur and the CIA’s Singapore station kept a watchful eye on events.
The outbreak of the Korean War helped the British in two ways. Firstly, it brought increased demand for Malayan rubber and tin, which meant that counter-insurgency efforts were virtually self-financing. In 1949 the Malayan colonial government had received $28.1 million in duty on rubber and $31.1 million on tin. A year later, the rubber duties were $89.3 million, and those on tin $50.9 million, and by 1951 the figures were $214.1 million and $76.2 million.7 The cost of fighting the insurgency rose from $82 million in 1948 to $296 million in 1953, virtually all of it defrayed from tax receipts on these two commodities. Secondly, what the Americans might otherwise have regarded as a sordid little colonial war designed to benefit British commercial interests could be depicted as part of a wider crusade against Communism, mirrored by eager British participation in the UN coalition fighting Communism in Korea.8
The Malay Chinese were hardworking and entrepreneurial, including the 600,000 so-called squatters among their number. That was largely why the Malays resented their community, whose businessmen towkays dominated Kuala Lumpur and other towns. Yet the Chinese community was very complex and fractured, not least into supporters of the Communists and the Kuomintang and by membership of rival societies, while there were those who still yearned for China and others who saw their future in Malaya.9 The Chinese squatters had fled the murderous racial violence of the Japanese to eke out a living cultivating small plots of land etched from densely forested hillsides with no formal legal title. Officials claimed they were damaging valuable stocks of timber, while planters resented the relative independence such plots gave to people they wanted as a low-paid workforce on rubber plantations. Both labour and planters organized for confrontation, with Communist-infiltrated labour unions calling for strikes and the Incorporated Society of Planters demanding dismissals, evictions, floggings and the like. In 1947, some 700,000 working days were lost in 300 major strikes, which sent ripples far beyond the peninsula. In 1948 the US imported 371,000 tons of rubber and 155,000 tons of tin, worth some $170 million at a time when the sterling area owed $1,800 million. The bonanza gave the labour unions greatly increased leverage and there was a superabundance of combustible materials before the Malayan Communist Party decided to strike a match, without any known direction or interference from Moscow.10
Chin Peng had become Communist secretary-general in 1947 after the Party’s much respected leader, an Annamite migrant called Lai Teck, had fallen under a cloud of suspicion. Lai Teck’s dogged advocacy of moderation began to be read by his comrades in the sinister retrospective light of how he had survived arrest by the Japanese unscathed in 1941, or why he alone had not attended a September 1942 conference of Party members that was wiped out in a Japanese ambush. Sensing that the noose was tightening, Lai Teck fled to Singapore, taking with him the bulk of Party funds. It transpired that he had been a British agent, inherited by Singapore Special Branch after his cover had been blown while spying for the French in Indochina. His former comrades subsequently assassinated him in Bangkok. Apart from Peng, other Force 136 veterans included Ah ‘Shorty’ Kuk and Lau Yew, an experienced jungle fighter who had led the Malay contingent to London’s VJ parade. The only Muslim Malay veteran of Force 136 was Che Dat bin Abdullah, always known as Abdullah CD, who would command Communist operations in Pehang, Malaya’s largest state. The British owed most of these men wartime pensions.
At their jungle meeting they decided to rename their organization the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army and to divide it into a small strike force of full-time paid guerrillas, operating from hidden bases and organized as eight regiments, together with a larger pool of active supporters who would provide funding, food and intelligence gathering. The guerrilla regiments varied in strength from 300 to 800 fighters, of whom around 10 per cent were women. A bizarre component consisted of a hundred Japanese soldiers, unreconciled to the outcome of the Second World War. The Communists wore rudimentary uniforms, with three stars on their caps called tiga bintang to symbolize the major ethnic groups in Malaya. In practice 90 per cent of Communists were ethnic Chinese.
The civilian supporters’ network was called the Min Yuen or Masses Movement, and included people well placed to gather intelligence such as clerks and waiters working in offices or clubs used by the habitually indiscreet British. The Communist Central Executive controlled the entire structure through a network of political commissars and political cells. Chin Peng agreed an overall strategy which would begin with attacks on British managers and ‘collaborating’ local overseers on isolated mines and plantations, as well as against government and police outposts in small towns and villages. The idea was to reveal the nullity of government power by exposing its inability to offer protection. It would also force the British to vacate the countryside in favour of the larger towns. Under Phase Two, in rural areas liberated from the British, the Min Yuen would be co-opted into the guerrilla force and prepared for Phase Three, an all-out assault on communications links and the major towns to force the British out of Malaya completely.
Until subsequent events in southern Iraq disabused them of the conceit, the British liked to congratulate themselves on their expertise in a softly-softly, hearts-and-minds approach to counter-insurgency warfare, and were inclined to sneer at the more robust ‘cowboy’ approach of the Americans.11 Although part of the deeper class illusion of the British as Greeks to American Romans, this attitude was born of the success of the Malayan counter-insurgency and persisted into the early 2000s. The lessons of Malaya have been incorporated into current US and British counter-insurgency warfare doctrine, by among others generals David Petraeus and Rupert Smith, but this may only involve selectively raiding the past to justify the prescriptions of the present. Modern armies are obsessed with the military learning cycle, of learning from past ‘best practice’ and mistakes. The problem is which part of the past provides the lessons, something to be explored below.12 Much hard fighting and coerced population transfers had to have occurred before hearts-and-minds warfare could ever be implemented. Moreover, there is a large silence over who the British may have learned from themselves, for the Boer War was a very long time ago, even in the late 1940s. Fortified villages, the key element of British counter-insurgency tactics, had been pioneered by the Japanese occupiers, something the British never acknowledged – except, that is, for a district officer called Howe. ‘The Japs put barbed wire around Titi and Pertang, garrisoned these towns with troops and made all Chinese of the locality live within the defended areas,’ he observed. ‘Could we not try the same idea?’13
On 14 June 1948 the head of the Malayan Security Service (MSS) reported to London: ‘There is no immediate threat to internal security in Malaya although the position is constantly changing and is potentially dangerous.’14 Seldom has an official assessment been proved wrong so swiftly. The tin-mining town of Sungei Siput in the state of Perak lay to the west of Malaya’s central mountains. Twenty miles east of Sungei Siput was an isolated rubber plantation called the Elphil Estate, run by a British manager called Arthur Walker. For Walker, 16 June 1948 was a special day since he and his wife, who had been in Malaya for twenty years, were going on leave to England. Mrs Walker had already left for Sungei Siput to do some last-minute shopping, while Walker was busy with paperwork in the estate office. At around 8.30 a.m. three Chinese men rode up on bicycles, walked into
the office saying ‘Tabek, Tuan!’ or ‘Greetings, Sir!’, shot Walker dead and then left the office, ignoring a large sum of money in the open safe. A terrified Indian clerk looked at one of the men who stared back and then contemptuously spat on the ground before cycling away. Ten miles east, twelve armed Chinese burst into the offices of Sungei Siput estate and tied up two British managers, one a twenty-one-year-old trainee called Christian. Both men were murdered, the first of ninety-nine planters killed in the Emergency.15 One of the Chinese reassured a Malay clerk, ‘Don’t be afraid. We’re only out for the Europeans and the running dogs,’ a Maoist term covering collaborators of all kinds.16 Ambushes on roads and railways rounded out what was to be the modus operandi of the ‘bandits’, the term the British initially alighted upon to delegitimize their opponents.
These events gave thirty-two-year-old Chinese Affairs Officer Robert Thompson a welcome escape from daily routine in Ipoh. Thompson set off for the Elphil Estate where Walker had been murdered, arriving just as a company of Gurkhas drove in. He then went on to the Sungei Siput Estate, where he ate Christian’s food, but could not bring himself to sleep in the murdered man’s bed. While he drove home, more atrocities were occurring. At the Voules Estate in Johore, Communist terrorists (CTs) identified the Chinese headman, Ah Fung, demanding that he furnish them with fifty cents a week from every tapper on the estate. When Ah Fung refused he was tied to a tree and in full view of his wife and daughter had both his arms hacked off. A note reading ‘Death to the Running Dogs’ was pinned to his chest. Atrocities were not entirely one-sided. In December 1948 Scots Guards massacred at least twenty-four Chinese prisoners at Batang Kali, all allegedly shot while trying to escape in a miracle of marksmanship.17
Many of the planters blamed the outbreak on High Commissioner Sir Edward Gent, a liberal Whitehall mandarin who had not concealed his disdain for them. He had certainly been remiss in not believing their warnings, and the over-optimistic MSS assessment undoubtedly reflected his wishful thinking. The planters were so nervous that in Perak they began a sweepstake based on when, where and against whom the CTs would strike next within a given forty-eight-hour window.18 Faced with an editorial in the influential Straits Times that told him ‘Govern or Get Out’, Gent declared a ‘State of Emergency’, the choice of words dictated by planters whose London-based insurers would not pay out in the case of civil wars, but who would cover losses due to civil disorders and riots. The insurance companies had withdrawn cover in Palestine from 1945 to 1948 and by 1949 were threatening to do the same in Malaya. The British were also loath to introduce martial law and relied instead on the March 1939 Emergency Powers (Colonial Defence) Order-in-Council, which granted governors extensive arbitrary powers to preserve public safety and order.
Police leave was cancelled and guns were handed out to the planters. The European population of around 12,000 soon bristled with weapons, which they had to deposit on entering the bar of the ‘Spotted Dog’, the nickname for the Selangor Club.19 On paper it seemed an uneven contest between about 8,000 Communist guerrillas and over 10,000 full-time police, ultimately backed by 11,000 regular troops including Gurkhas, Seaforth Highlanders and the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. In reality, more than half these were support troops, and there were only about 4,000 combat effectives available for fighting in the jungle. The main burden of the conflict was carried by the police force, which swelled to around 70,000 men, the vast majority of them Malay special constables.
The British were a fractious bunch, plagued by animosities old and new. The planters believed that Gent’s shortcomings were an expression of policy emanating from the despised ‘Socialist regime’ in London. In fact the Labour government’s Commissioner-General for South-east Asia, Malcolm MacDonald, urged London to recall Gent, who died on 4 July when the plane bearing him home suffered a mid-air collision as it landed at Northolt airport outside London.20 It took three months for his successor to arrive. This was Sir Henry Gurney, an experienced colonial official who had served in Africa and Palestine, his practical understanding of terrorism there perhaps outweighing his ignorance of Malaya. Not the least of his problems was that the security forces were bitterly divided between officers who had fled the Japanese occupation and those who had stayed and had been interned under terrible circumstances. There were tensions between the Police Commissioner, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the tiny Special Branch, which functioned as an intelligence-gathering agency. London-based MI5 also had a local presence.
Although the Communists launched raids on isolated police stations, their preferred targets were the planters who ran rubber estates, which ranged from vast 14,000-acre enterprises, owned by London-based firms, down to more humble affairs consisting of a thousand acres owned by absentee Chinese. American mining operators were left alone, not least because they were formidably well armed. The rubber planters and their families lived in bungalows at the heart of their estates, places sometimes so isolated that three-week-old copies of the London Times were prized. They were a tough lot, many of them having survived internment by the Japanese before reverting to their lonely lives where the nearest neighbour was five or ten miles away. Whether they deserved the contempt visited on them in the stories of Somerset Maugham is debatable, but bridge, golf and whisky sodas (stengahs) played a major part in their lives, as did the amahs, boys, syces and tukan ayers who catered to their families’ needs.21 Their women, ‘mems’, who went by nicknames like Billy or Tommy, were often as adept with a Bren gun or grenades as their husbands. Planters learned to vary their routine as they ventured out to inspect the native men and women harvesting white sap oozing from spiral cuts in the trees, or when and where they sat down to lunch, lest a grenade fly through the window. Their sleep was periodically interrupted by bursts of gunfire from the pitch-black jungle beyond their homes.
As a former RAF officer attached to Orde Wingate’s Chindits, Robert Thompson was fertile in schemes to protect the planters. Bachelors were under special stress, so Thompson organized ‘sleep with planters parties’, whereby three or four male companions would drive out to the estates at dusk to provide additional firepower through the night.22 Major-General Charles Boucher, GOC Malaya, asked Thompson to organize an irregular ‘Ferret Force’, in which he and two others led company-strength patrols into the jungle to fight the CTs on their own turf. Dyak tribesmen from Borneo and Ibans from Sarawak were brought in to assist as trackers, with the black tattoos on the thumbs of the older Dyaks indicating success as head-hunters. The Ferret Force had some limited successes against the enemy, certainly more than the easily evaded large-scale military sweeps organized by the army.
Luck played its part in the early death of Lau Yew, Chin Peng’s right-hand man. Former navy stoker Police Superintendent Bill ‘Two-Gun’ Stafford, so called because he carried a revolver under each armpit, learned from his barber-informant in Kuala Lumpur that the Communists were to hold a meeting in a village south of the capital. Stafford and a team of Chinese detectives lay in wait, but were spotted by three men who exited a hut firing wildly. Two of them were shot dead and the third mortally wounded. After identifying the body of Lau Yew, Stafford and his men handcuffed five women, including Lau Yew’s wife. Attacked in turn by a large number of insurgents, Stafford earned his Chinese nickname ‘Iron Broom’ by charging the attackers shouting ‘Here come the Gurkhas!’ The Communists fled rather than confront the deadly little Nepalese, who were not in fact present. Stafford was also responsible for a huge haul of Communist weapons, acting on a tip-off from an informer eager for the reward posted for every gun or bullet. The two men met in the back row of a dingy cinema showing a Tarzan movie. The next night Stafford and four men went to a lonely spot near the village of Karang, where after strenuous digging they unearthed a cache which included dozens of machine guns, 237 rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The informer was due M$100,000 for this haul, but eventually settled for M$60,000. Stafford stoutly refused an offer o
f a share in the proceeds.
Gurney and Briggs
Army sweeps through the jungle commonly failed to find the enemy, and when they did the CTs normally evaded attempts to surround them. Some of the most withering criticism of the role of the British army came from Brigadier ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert of the newly re-formed SAS, which the Labour government had disbanded in October 1945. After a five-month inspection of Malaya in 1950 he wrote that the army was ‘making a lot of noise, but achieving very little’. His efforts to inject small British and Rhodesian SAS units into the conflict collapsed when he suffered a major nervous breakdown in June 1951 and was sent home. Using the RAF to bomb suspect villages simply increased local support for the Communists. In any case, since the RAF was prohibited from bombing rubber plantations because of compensation claims, the guerrillas found them to be a useful hiding place. Thompson, who had been seconded to co-ordinate intelligence gathering in Kuala Lumpur, argued that ‘the very size of an army foments political instability because political power inevitably rests with control of the army’.
The arrival of Gurney led to the adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy in which the military were subordinated to police work and politics. When Gurney and Boucher lobbied Whitehall for their respective strategies to defeat the insurgency, Gurney’s approach won – although Boucher continued to act as though he were in overall command until recalled by Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal ‘Bill’ Slim. Apart from relying on Thompson, Gurney made further key personnel changes which were important to the outcome of the Emergency long before Gerald Templer arrived on the scene as dynamic wonderworker.23 The ineffectual Police Commissioner, Harold Langworthy, was replaced by Colonel Nicol Gray, former head of the Palestine Police. Among the established practices Gray encountered on arrival in Malaya was a police communications system which shut down every night after 6.30 p.m. until the next morning, and which closed from lunchtime on Saturday until Monday morning.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 20