Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Gray was a tall Scot who had been chief instructor at a Royal Marines training base before leading commando operations after D-Day.24 He recruited hundreds of his former subordinates, in particular sergeants accustomed to using boots and rifle butts on Arabs and Jews. The journalist Harry Miller was an eyewitness to ‘a British sergeant encouraging a heavy-booted policeman to treat a suspect like a football. The young Chinese was kicked all round the room until a threat to report this treatment to headquarters brought the game to a stop.’25 Promoted to the rank of lieutenant, these ‘Palestinians’ were resented by the already rancorous British police in Malaya, but they played an important role in training over 40,000 special constables for static guard duties on isolated plantations. Gray was not popular among his subordinates, not least because he ordered them to take greater risks, including driving out on lonely roads in unarmoured trucks, daring the Communists to ambush them. On its first trial run this resulted in the loss of sixteen police dead and nine wounded. Others were sent out on patrol in what his critics called ‘jungle-bashing’, which brought him into conflict with Boucher until the General was recalled.

  The second key appointment was Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Briggs, at the age of fifty-five already a couple of years into retirement after a distinguished wartime career in the Indian Army that had culminated in his appointment as commander-in-chief Burma. Briggs was persuaded to come to Malaya for eighteen months as director of operations. The aim of his appointment was that he should co-ordinate army and police counter-insurgency operations, although Briggs had no executive control over either service. His Directive Number 1 established a Federal War Council, replicated at state, settlement and district levels. These co-ordinated all branches of government, police and military activity.26 Some twenty months into the insurgency the government also established a Malaya Committee in London. Briggs – together with Thompson, who was transferred to his staff – had the job of converting Gurney’s views on how to win this war into a plan of operations, which they delivered in June 1950. Its full title was ‘Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organisation and Armed Forces in Malaya’. Based on what the British had earlier essayed in Burma in the 1930s, the gist was to concentrate and control the rural Chinese to force their armed comrades to seek supplies in British killing grounds. The army were divided into small units assigned to local areas, with a larger strike force to take on main Communist units.

  Chinese who had recently immigrated and who were suspected of Communist sympathies could be despatched to China under Regulation 17C of November 1948. Around 12,000 of them were deported. 17D permitted the collective removal and detention of all inhabitants of a proscribed area, while 17E and F licensed compulsory eviction and forced resettlement of entire villages, which were then burned down. A series of Emergency Regulations issued in July 1950 greatly extended the powers of the police, who became the main instrument for applying pressure on the Communist insurgency. The death penalty was imposed on anyone convicted of terrorism or aiding and abetting it, suspects could be detained without trial for up to two years and searches required no warrants. The Malayan Security Service had proved a broken reed, its end accelerated after it was reported to the visiting head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, who had started his career as a Glasgow policeman, that the head of the MSS had referred to him as ‘a Glasgow corner boy’. After the MSS had been abolished, the onus of combating the insurgency devolved on Special Branch, which in 1952 was separated from the CID. Old-fashioned Special Branch officers with their intuitive ‘nose’ for villainy are the real but unsung heroes of every war the British have fought with insurgents and terrorists, not least in Northern Ireland and in the present against Islamists.

  One of their prime tasks was to identify the enemy’s order of battle and the relationships between the Communist Party, the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army and the civilian Min Yuen support network. Getting an overall picture was very difficult since the Communists relied upon self-contained cells. All of this data was combined with known kills and plotted with the aid of coloured pins on large maps to make sense of a bewildering kaleidoscope of events. One major source was intercepted messages written in minute Chinese characters on rolled rice paper, carried either by couriers or left in jungle dead drops, interpreted and collated in the Special Branch headquarters situated on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Another key location was a complex of buildings known as the Holding Centre (or White House), where captured or surrendered terrorists were taken for interrogation in rooms equipped with listening devices and two-way mirrors. Since few British Special Branch officers spoke China’s Mandarin lingua franca and even fewer the Cantonese or Hokkien dialects, the questions were posed by Chinese policemen, or terrorists who had already been turned. There was less brutality and more emphasis on psychologically overwhelming a detainee with information about his or her own life. A system of financial rewards was designed to induce people to betray the whereabouts of CTs, with up to M$250,000 (£29,000) offered for Chin Peng himself, the reward halved if the terrorist was brought in dead. CT informers were paid only half the rewards in a carefully calibrated system of inducements designed to avoid seeming to rewarding the enemy. A nationwide identity-card scheme was introduced, based on a model pioneered by the Japanese, involving photographs and thumbprints, so effective that the CTs assassinated eleven Chinese commercial photographers.27

  The guerrillas depended on ordinary villagers to provide them with food and intelligence, which was either freely given or extorted by acts of exemplary brutality such as hacking off a child’s arms. The Chinese squatters were the most vulnerable to this extortion, although the Chinese business community also sullenly paid the equivalent of protection money. The principal aim of the Briggs Plan was to protect the population in a fashion which isolated the insurgents, forcing them into deep jungle camps where they would compel the aboriginals to grow food. Briggs moved 600,000 Chinese squatters into a network of resettlement areas on agricultural land provided by the Malay sultans. The army established headquarters in towns and villages in areas plagued by guerrillas, with smaller outposts on the fringes of the jungle. The resettlement areas were heavily fortified, with rings of barbed wire and searchlights, but also with electricity and fresh water from standpipes. A single entrance facilitated close monitoring of the population’s movements. Each family would receive an 800-square-yard plot within the perimeter on which to build a house, together with a two-acre field cleared from the jungle beyond. Cash payments and food would tide them over the five or six months before their own crops could be harvested. Every village was supposed to have a police post, health clinic and school, all supervised by ‘European’ camp officers, many of them young idealists drawn from Australia and New Zealand.

  British soldiers had the delicate task of transferring complete village populations from their existing homes to these new locations. The entire operation was carried out swiftly, and by mid-1951 a total of 423,000 Chinese had been placed in 410 resettlements. Although there were a few model settlements, exploited for propaganda purposes, many of them were wretched and squalid. A Chinese doctor married to a Special Branch policeman wrote, ‘The dirt road was a red gash across the jungle. There at the fetid edge of a mangrove swamp, the barbed wire manned by a police post, was the “new village”, spreading itself into the swamp. Four hundred beings, including children, foot-deep in brackish mud . . . there was no clean water anywhere.’28 Life within these villages was so monotonous that at least one captured female terrorist said that ‘I saw my life stretching out interminably, a drab and dreary existence, until I became too old to work and had to depend on others to look after me. I hated the thought of it.’29 While the British remained in overall charge, new village councils were elected with the power to levy modest local taxes. A conspicuously mishandled part of this programme involved the parallel resettlement of many of the aboriginal mountain peoples who had acted as guides and trackers for the MPAJA during
the war. Moving them to the plains and denying them their customary forest diet proved disastrous, and 8,000 of them succumbed to disease or lost the will to live. When the MPC retreated to deep jungle, they found the residual aboriginals more than willing to act as scouts.30

  Resettlement was part of a wider effort to thwart Mao’s dictum that the guerrilla fish should swim in the popular sea, forcing them to come looking for supplies in areas where the security forces had an advantage. A restricted-goods policy ensured that there had to be precise records of each purchase and sale of rice, or such goods as the paper and printing materials the CTs needed for their own propaganda. Other measures included hampering the circulation of uncooked or tinned foods by dispensing only punctured tins and rice that had already been boiled. In the case of those new villages which functioned as dormitories for plantation workforces, tappers had to return for communal meals rather than taking ingredients for lunch out amid the rubber trees. This ‘food-denial operation’ forced the guerrillas to cultivate their own food crops, which were vulnerable to herbicides sprayed by the RAF, until the Communists learned how to deceive through irregular planting patterns. Police and troops became adept at spotting how food was smuggled, dismantling bicycles that might have rice concealed in the frame or handlebars, and searching those whose bulky clothing might conceal bags of food.

  The British also sought to divide the Communists by exploiting internal ideological and strategic fissures and by encouraging defectors. When Malacca political commissar Shao Liu criticized the leadership for embarking on revolutionary violence without having secured the support of Malaya’s three major races, he was called to account for ‘deviationism’ and put under surveillance. When he continued to criticize the leadership, Chin Peng ordered his execution along with his wife and three closest supporters. Lam Swee, a trade unionist who had joined the insurgents as a political commissar in the state of Johore, was angered by the disparity between the rigours and risks facing fighters in jungle encampments and the high life enjoyed by members of the Communist Politburo, who had three square meals a day and kept mistresses at their base near Mentakab. After a gruelling six-week trek to what was supposed to be a new base, Lam Swee and forty men were refused food and money by the local political commissar, who Lam Swee knew possessed M$2,000 in cash. After the Politburo learned of a meeting between Lam Swee and his platoon leaders at which the Central Committee was heavily criticized, one platoon commander was shot and Lam Swee was stripped of his rank and weapons and arrested. Fearing that he was about to be shot, he fled and surrendered himself at a police station. His capture was a major triumph for the British.

  Such individual stories of dissent, hypocrisy and betrayal were grist to the men running British psychological warfare operations, who got Lam Swee to write a tract called My Accusation, copies of which were air-dropped into the jungle. One key player was C. C. Too, a thirty-year-old Malayan Chinese. He grasped that, since the object was to encourage CT defection, depicting them as hateful adversaries was counter-productive. Instead he exploited the personal animosities within CT ranks, in particular those arising from sexual frustration. During the Emergency the British dropped 500 million leaflets into the jungle, all written in the languages of the insurgents, or using comic-style graphics for the illiterate. About 10,000 were showered down on each square on a map. Some of them contained images of insurgents who had been killed by the British, posing the question whether anyone wished to share this grisly fate. But others had photographs of the mistresses of the Communist leadership, which was especially effective since the soldiers in the camps were supposed to abjure sexual relations with female comrades on pain of death. Lam Swee ghosted a letter, allegedly for an illiterate surrendered terrorist, which read: ‘Comrades, I surrendered after my commanding officer had stolen my girl friend. The officer was not only well fed but he had girl friends whenever he wanted. Have you any girl friend? The upper ranks can make love in their huts, but if you want to find a lady friend then you have to wait until there is one left over from the upper ranks.’31 The issue demoralized many CTs, with married comrades surrendering to be reunited with their wives and children, or young men fleeing to experience a normal sex life. Most of the printed propaganda material involved photos of surrendered terrorists in rude health, or copies of personal letters in which a former comrade, parent or spouse urged surrender. Some leaflets mentioned a named individual fighter, blinded in battle, with a commissar poised behind him ready to finish off the unfortunate with a knife. One leaflet, depicting a happy baby, was targeted at a pregnant Communist fighter, Lim Yook Lee, with the wording ‘How safe and comfortable is this baby in a government maternity hospital.’32 Starting in late 1949, there were also safe-conduct passes for defectors, signed by the High Commissioner, which carefully avoided the word ‘surrender’ in favour of the more anodyne ‘coming out’ to diminish the loss of face involved.

  Terrorists who surrendered found themselves housed alongside captured Min Yuen operatives in the Academy of Peace and Tranquillity at Taiping racecourse. This was run by George Rotheray, a Malay Civil Service official. The Hok Uens or ‘students’ could learn a trade, play sports or cultivate allotments. The prototypes for this experiment were Wilton Park, where captured German officers had been comfortably interned amid concealed microphones to capture their every word, and Macronissos in Greece where captured Communists were prepared for service in the Greek army. The guiding philosophy was that the devil made work for idle hands, a principle evident in contemporary efforts at rehabilitating Islamist extremists in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The apparent freedom enjoyed by the inmates was designed to prevent the dominance that hard-core activists exert inside regular detention facilities and prisons. The Taiping Academy resembled a modern open jail, with minimal security arrangements and opportunities for the inmates to learn a useful trade and to work outside under daily licence at such trades as hairdresser or mechanic. Inside there were such recreational facilities as a cinema (American Westerns were popular), a radio which could be tuned to Beijing and opportunities to play badminton and basketball.33

  These measures were combined with military operations that sought to drive the Communist leadership over the border with Thailand. Although in the long run these combined policies would succeed, in 1951 the outlook for the British looked bleak. By then 3,000 men, women and children had been killed, the death toll including a planter’s wife and their two-year-old child. The CTs also killed Sir Henry Gurney, ironically after he had tendered his resignation from frustration at the pace of the counter-insurgency. One weekend in October, Gurney and his wife Florence set off towards the hill resort of Fraser’s Hill in a three-vehicle convoy, but did so in the official Rolls-Royce flying the Union Jack. As they slowly negotiated a climbing S-bend, they were ambushed by thirty-eight guerrillas lying in wait for a troop convoy. The lead jeep and the Rolls were hit by small-arms fire and Gurney decided to get out of his car to draw fire away from his wife. He was mortally wounded almost immediately. The Rolls was hit by thirty-five bullets, but Lady Gurney and Sir Henry’s secretary survived by crouching down on the floor.

  Gurney had made a significant contribution to the future success of counter-insurgency operations, not just with the new villages, but with a Malayan Chinese Association, which co-opted wealthy businessmen to the government side, and a Provident Fund for employees of all races. He had also forced the Communists to divert fighters into helping grow food deep in the jungle, while their combatant forces carried out a more selective range of attacks. All of this was evident from the October 1951 Resolutions in which the Communists acknowledged the effects of British activity. Insurgent attacks declined from 506 a month in 1951 to 295 in July 1952 and 198 in September.34 Gurney’s chief failure was not to put Briggs in overall command of military and police operations, something Briggs recommended to the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill before he himself retired to Britain with broken health.

  The Tiger Yearsr />
  The idea of fusing civil and military functions appealed to both Churchill and his new Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, who on a flying visit to Malaya rapidly decided to dispense with the police chief, Nicol Gray, and William Jenkin, the head of Special Branch, who by this stage were no longer on speaking terms and had indicated a wish to retire. In London, Churchill and Lyttelton tried to find a general who would combine civil and military power as the next high commissioner. They consulted Field Marshal Montgomery, who sent Lyttelton a terse note:

  Dear Lyttelton,

  Malaya

  We must have a plan.

  Secondly we must have a man.

  When we have a plan and a man, we shall succeed; not otherwise.

  Yours sincerely

  Montgomery (F.M.)

  Lyttelton commented, ‘I may, perhaps without undue conceit, say that this had occurred to me.’35

  They tried Brian Robertson in Suez, who declined a further overseas post so late in his career, and then Field Marshal Slim, who said he was too old, before alighting on fifty-four-year-old General Sir Gerald Templer. Templer was of Northern Irish ancestry, with a background in staff work and intelligence. His back had been broken in Italy by debris from a truck that left the road to avoid a collision with his jeep and ran over a mine. He was an energetic martinet, with a habit of poking interlocutors in the chest or stomach with his cane. His colourful language was translated with care by his Chinese interpreters. Thus ‘You bastards’ became ‘His Excellency informs you that he knows that none of your fathers and mothers were married when you were born.’ He came to be known as the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, a title previously enjoyed by Japan’s General Yamashita, who had inflicted the greatest ever defeat on the British when he conquered Malaya and Singapore in 1942.