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

by Burleigh, Michael

  In July 1952 Irene Lee and six other Special Branch officers sat in the FMS Bar in Ipoh, waiting for a team of local Special Branch officers who would conduct the arrest. Their goal was to crack open the cell structure the Communists relied on to commit terrorist attacks. Their target was Lee Meng, a twenty-four-year-old former teacher, the Communists’ top courier who had previously organized multiple grenade attacks in the Ipoh area. These included attacks on the offices of a KMT newspaper, another which killed five civilians watching a Chinese circus, and another on a cinema audience. She had also attempted to kill leading members of the Malayan Chinese Association, including its president, Ten Cheng Lock. After Irene Lee had entered her apartment, Lee Meng (who used a false identity) claimed to be employed in a tin mine, and stuck to her well-rehearsed story for over two hours. The pace of questioning picked up, and ceased to be friendly, after Lee Meng faltered over details about her earlier life in Singapore. She could not recall the name of the store opposite her home, or of a coffee shop near the street where she claimed to have lived. A thorough search of her room revealed Communist documents in a false drawer inside an old Chinese desk. Lee Meng was arrested under her real name and sent to Taiping prison.

  To conceal how she had been detected, Lee Meng was charged with possession of a hand grenade, an offence committed not in 1952 but some time between 1948 and 1951, for there was a photograph showing her holding one. Nine former terrorists testified that she was a guerrilla leader, responsible for grenade attacks. She was quickly dubbed ‘The Grenade Girl’ in the press. To prevent the intimidation of jurors, under the Emergency justice system two lay assessors sat with a British judge. The two non-European lay assessors found her not guilty, but the judge simply ordered a retrial, with a European acting as one of the assessors. Lee Meng was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The case attracted worldwide publicity and her appeal eventually went before the Privy Council in London. The Hungarian government intervened, offering to release a British businessman convicted of spying in return for Lee Meng’s life, and public pressure, in both Britain and Malaya, persuaded a reluctant Whitehall to authorize the swap, although it was technically the Sultan of Perak who reprieved her. She subsequently spent eleven years in jail before being deported to Communist China.50

  The interception of messages translated into invaluable intelligence for the security forces. They were often written in lemon juice or soluble aspirin, which revealed the text with the application of heat. The messages used crude codes, so that ‘the weather over here has been horrible for the past two months’ referred to ongoing harassment by the security forces. After discovering messages concealed in a toothpaste tube and an evil-smelling durian fruit, Special Branch discovered the identity of a Min Yuen member in touch with Liew Kon Kim, the notorious ‘Bearded Terror of Kajang’. Troops from the Suffolk Regiment surrounded a forest hut where Kim, his mistress and four comrades were snoozing after a hearty lunch. The Bearded Terror and his mistress were killed.

  Other terrorists succumbed to the considerable bounty on offer for leading Communist cadres. The rewards offered for the top echelon of terrorist leaders led to the death of twenty-nine-year-old Shorty Kuk after he made the mistake of bragging to his comrades about the $200,000 reward posted on his head. A few days later, the driver of an express train was forced to stop by two men and a woman beside the track, who appeared to be waving a severed head. This turned out to belong to Shorty Tuk, terminally abbreviated. The trio, who were surrendering, also brought along two rucksacks filled with Communist documents, including Chin Peng’s policy statements and military plans, and letters detailing tensions between the guerrillas and Min Yuen. Evidence of demoralization was confirmed when in the spring of 1953 Chin Peng decided to withdraw across the Thai border with eighty companions. This was dismal news after five years of fighting. Many of the remaining guerrilla groups were suffering from low morale, caused by an inadequate diet, jungle sores and bouts of malaria and dysentery. This was especially true of Communist Party intellectuals, whose previous existence had not prepared them for the leeches and massed insects of the jungle.

  In 1954 three terrorists used aboriginal intermediaries to indicate that Osman China, the Party’s chief propagandist, was ready to surrender with his group. With something like relief, Osman gave himself up to David Storrier, the Special Branch officer who went into the jungle to meet him. After the two men had established trust, Osman China offered to bring in his comrade Hor Leung, simply by writing to him. Hor Leung soon surrendered. The two top terrorists then agreed to bring in more of their comrades. After a fortnight eighteen men had surrendered and both men received large cash rewards.

  Aboriginal intermediaries were rewarded too, stocking up on such goods as refrigerators and radios, without realizing that they needed electricity to power them. After 1957 the insurgency lost its anti-colonial aura with the establishment of an independent Malayan government under Tunku (Prince) Abdul Rahman, and by the late 1950s CT activity was confined to Kedah and Perak near the Thai border. One of the final major operations concerned a Communist leader called Siu Mah, who had led the group that killed Sir Henry Gurney. He and his group had been holed up in caves in limestone cliffs, severely short of food. Two of Siu Mah’s three bodyguards sent to contact the Min Yuen for supplies instead surrendered to Special Branch, under a plan already hatched with a third bodyguard who remained with Siu Mah. A Chinese Special Branch officer, posing as a member of the Min Yuen, accompanied the two turncoats back to the caves. As they arrived they rang a bicycle bell twice, the signal for the remaining bodyguard to assassinate Siu Mah.

  Life in the jungle involved contracting horizons, so that the main preoccupations were food and somewhere warm to sleep. The wider world was represented, if at all, by crackling voices on a radio. Early CT camps were large, with the days and nights packed with an orderly round of activity. Iron discipline prevailed, and commanders awarded merits and demerits for bravery or dozing off while mounting an ambush. As the larger formations gave way to small bands, the rigid discipline seemed gratingly petty-minded. Worse, the delusion of being a cog in a huge machine (present whenever messages came from the South Johore Regional Committee or the Press and Propaganda Unit) gave way to the reality of being like animals on the run, pursued not just by the British, but by Dyak head-hunters, fierce black tribesmen from Nyasaland with arrow-shaped initiation scars on their faces, and beefy Fijians, incredibly fleet of foot and prone to singing as they killed people.51

  When Templer returned to Britain in 1954, he commented on a Time magazine report that ‘the jungle had been stabilized’ by saying, ‘I’ll shoot the bastard who says that.’ His powers were divided between a civilian high commissioner, Donald MacGillivray – Templer’s former deputy – and General Sir Geoffrey Bourne, who was firmly subordinated to the civilian leadership. Fears that Malaya had become a police state, as voiced in the House of Commons and by a pair of visiting academics from Oxford and Cambridge, proved groundless, though the two dons persisted in their accusations long after all the evidence had proved them false. In reality it was being turned into a democracy, as promises of independence drew nearer to being realized. The first task was to encourage elite Malays to co-operate with elite Chinese, which eventually gave birth to a multi-ethnic Alliance Party, led by the easy-going Tunku Abdul Rahman. From September 1953 onwards, members of the Alliance were encouraged to join the Executive Council to Malayanize responsibility for the conduct of the Emergency and to ready them for self-government. Chinese were also encouraged to join the Malay-dominated civil service, thereby discouraging their belief that they were a money-making class apart. In addition to co-opting elites, the British worked on the minds and hearts of Chinese farmers who felt ambivalent towards the Communist insurgents.

  Although the British had declared that Malaya would achieve independence in twenty years, the timetable was repeatedly stretched. This was partly because the ethnic Malays wished to get in
to power quickly before the Chinese were fully mobilized politically. Elections to a federal legislature were held in 1955, with the Alliance scooping fifty-one of the Federal Council’s fifty-two seats. Tunku Abdul Rahman became chief minister. That year the Tunku also had secret talks with Cheng Peng in the English School at Baling in an unsuccessful attempt to find a peace settlement. Peng’s pride would not permit him to recognize that the Tunku represented a genuine national movement that was achieving independence. Partly as a result, when Malaya reached independence a multi-ethnic identity had not been forged and the Emergency still had three years to run until its formal end in July 1960.

  When Britain and the Malaysian governments negotiated a new Malayan Federation between 1958 and 1962, some nationalists in both oil-rich Brunei and Sarawak preferred to take their bearings from Indonesia and the Philippines, which disputed the proposed extent of the Federation. The Royal Marines, Gurkhas and Green Jackets crushed the rebels in Brunei, which became an independent statelet of extraordinary wealth, while Sarawak eventually joined the Malaysian Federation. British policemen continued in a purely advisory capacity as the Malaysians themselves defeated the remaining Communist insurgents. In 1961 Chin Peng embarked on a life in exile in a special compound in Beijing, though he was eventually relocated to the southern Thai borderlands where he was still residing in 2012. He and the MCP only finally threw in the towel in 1989. In due course the 12,000 white planters and managers disappeared beneath successive waves of Malayanization.52

  Malaya was not the first (Palestine) nor the last (Aden) counter-insurgency campaign waged by the British, but it was the most outstandingly successful. In January 1957 an official in Cyprus suggested to his superiors in the Colonial Office that it might be useful to compare and contrast counter-insurgency campaigns. The Security and Intelligence Adviser concurred in terms that echo drearily through the years and are as true today as they were then:

  I think that in the past we have failed to make proper use of previous experience. When the emergency was declared in Kenya, that Government set about its problems of detention, propaganda, rehabilitation, etc., as if they were new and strange phenomenons [sic]. Cyprus in turn did much the same thing. I do not think that this was the fault of either Government. It was merely that the experience gained in Malaya was nowhere summarised in a form available for reference. Cyprus, in turn, suffered from a lack of any systematic collation of experience gained in Kenya.

  A couple of years later, a policeman who had served in Malaysia touched on a deeper problem: ‘This secrecy and a traditional British distrust of general principles has caused much unnecessary trouble in the past. Lessons painfully learned in one campaign are forgotten, so that they must be learned again, or rigidly enforced in a different situation, where they no longer apply.’53 The lesson, for our time, is that one should be careful to learn the lesson from the right phase of any earlier campaign, rather than imagining that what you prefer to do in the present worked like magic in the past. Was the Malayan Emergency really won through ‘hearts and minds’ and the herculean efforts of a charismatic general? Or did victory result from prior establishment of population and spatial dominance through military force, with hearts-and-minds warfare as a parenthesis before the democratic co-option of Chinese elites? Few of the basic conditions in Malaya were evident in Vietnam, whether under the French or later the US and its local ally, so its vaunted lessons were not really applicable. Not much of that ‘military learning experience’ seems replicable either in contemporary Afghanistan.54 But before we get to Indochina, we need to visit a counter-insurgency war, in the Philippines, which with a few deft strokes the US undoubtedly won.

  7. BY HUK OR BY CROOK: THE PHILIPPINES

  Peasant Rebels

  When the Philippine Socialists and Communists merged in 1938, the Vice Chairman of the combined Party made one thing clear:

  We have no intention of importing the Russian brand of Communism into this situation. Russian conditions are utterly different . . . In fact, I feel free to severely criticise the Soviets. Indeed, we would welcome . . . twentieth century capitalism in the Philippines. If our workers could approximate the living conditions, status, and rights that . . . American workers have obtained under modern capitalism, we would be satisfied.1

  That message was comprehensively forgotten when in 1950 a US Air Force colonel called Edward Lansdale landed in Manila to defeat what by then had become part of the global Communist threat to the Philippines. In fact he was about to become, on the basis of his work in the Philippines, America’s leading expert on counter-insurgency warfare. His story is so extraordinary and paradigmatic that he is almost a signature theme for much of this book. But why was he in the Philippines at all?

  Following the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in early 1942, Filipino ruling elites faced the unenviable choice of flight, resistance or collaboration. Most chose collaboration, while a tiny handful of resisters, 300 at most, fled outwards from the plain that dominates Central Luzon to the Candaba Swamp, Mount Arayat or the Sierra Madre and Zimbales mountain ranges. They formed a guerrilla movement called the Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or People’s Anti-Japanese Army. In the original Tagalog, the predominant language in a country with over a hundred local tongues, this was shortened (as we have seen) to Hukbalahap or Huks, pronounced ‘hooks’.

  The Huks had their roots in several pre-war grassroots organizations, formed to defend the traditional rights of peasant tenant farmers on the central plains of Luzon. They wanted ‘to get what was just if landlords were honourable and good men’. Like peasant movements throughout all periods of history almost everywhere, they were nostalgic for good old days when the bosses wore a familiar human face, or at least did not threaten to replace their labours with machines.2 Their demands were modest: landlords should not take 50 per cent of the rice harvest or charge extortionate interest for loans of rice or cash needed to tide their tenants over the bad times. Landlords were also using land registration to snatch land from peasants who often had insecure or non-existent titles. They got away with this because of their intimately corrupt involvements with the regime in Manila, which meant that they could use the courts and the brutal Philippines Constabulary to suppress any peasant protests.

  Many of the Huks were in their twenties and had witnessed Japanese brutality at first hand when their relatives were raped, tortured or shot. One in ten of them were women, although they normally acted as couriers, instructors and nurses rather than guerrilla fighters. Using weapons whose numbers increased with each hit on a Japanese post or patrol, and which they taught themselves to use, the Huks contested Japanese control of the countryside. It was a desperately cruel conflict. The Japanese used hooded informers to identify Huk sympathizers among the peasants; the Huks kidnapped, tried and shot local officials and policemen who collaborated with the occupiers.3

  There was considerable overlap between the Huks and the Philippines Communist Party, but the Huks were primarily motivated by a ‘Red Christ’ vision of social justice and a visceral hatred of the occupiers, whereas the Communist leaders were aloof theoreticians who despised their own lower ranks as much as any haciendero viewing his peasants. Marxism was far too sophisticated a creed for poorly educated peasant fighters, many of them devout Christians and pro-American.4 A putatively socialist Jesus meant more to them than Lenin or Stalin, let alone Mao Zedong.

  In late summer of 1943, senior Filipino politicians were summoned to Tokyo to be congratulated on their draft constitution for an independent Philippines republic, a document commissioned by the Japanese commanders in Manila. This striking concession reflected mounting Japanese awareness of the extent to which US material and military might had tipped the strategic balance against them. They would trump US promises of independence for the Philippines, but there was one catch: Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo required the new republic to declare war on the US. After much agonizing, the politicians decided that the future wra
th of the Americans was preferable to the immediate vengeance of the Japanese. While the elites grovelled, 10,000 Huks fought a hot war against the Japanese occupiers, observed rather than joined by a rival guerrilla force sponsored by the Americans, known as US Armed Forces Far East (USAFFE). While its watching brief was perfectly comprehensible, since it gathered valuable intelligence for MacArthur’s forces, such fighting as it did do tended to be with the rival Huks, who refused to submit to US command.

  Although powerful voices wanted to bypass the Philippines en route to Japan, MacArthur felt a debt of honour to a people he had been forced to abandon. Ignoring Japanese snipers and flanked by his media team, MacArthur waded through the surf in October 1944 as 160,000 US troops landed at Leyte. The Japanese under Tomoyuki Yamashita suffered colossal casualties in protracted battles to repel the invaders, as did the Filipinos, with 100,000 civilians slaughtered in the battle for Manila. The city was ruined, with 60 per cent of the housing destroyed by bombing, shelling and fire. According to Dwight Eisenhower, only Warsaw suffered more damage in the war. In the countryside, villages were burned, rice fields were maliciously flooded or sown with mines and unexploded ordnance, while the carcasses of carabao buffalo rotted.5

  The existence of a government that had collaborated with the Japanese posed delicate problems for the US. Since the number of educated Filipinos capable of governing the country was modest, MacArthur decided that even collaborators were indispensable to post-war reconstruction and identified one of them, the Nationalist Party’s Manuel Roxas, as a future president of the independent state the US had promised. Under this former army brigadier, Filipino judicial proceedings against collaborators were a desultory affair, with only 156 convictions in 5,000 cases before a general amnesty was issued three years after the war. This was pathetic, even by the general low standards of the times.