Jungle of Snakes

by James R. Arnold

  Boucher’s conventional formulation received favorable local press coverage—“Boucher Promises More Toughness” was a typical headline—but it was not a practical solution to the insurgency. It worked only as long as the guerrillas stood and fought, which was not long at all. Thereafter, security forces conducted large-scale, multibattalion sweeps through the jungle that proved futile. The guerrillas’ bases were invisible from the air and almost impossible to find by ground search. A British patrol entering the overgrown jungle fringe could easily consume four hours to trek one mile. Soldiers passed within five yards of a concealed guerrilla without seeing him. Likewise, searchers could be within fifty yards of a 100-man guerrilla camp and never know that they were so close to their elusive objective. As early as the fall of 1948 an operational analysis suggested that elaborate sweeps were of dubious value. Later analysis would show that it took about 1,000 man-hours of patrolling to eliminate one guerrilla.

  Undeterred, conventionally minded officers persisted. In spite of their code names evoking historic heroism, Operations Ramillies, Blenheim, Spitfire, and the like failed. It was more the pity because at the war’s start the British held a priceless opportunity to defeat rapidly an insurgency unexpectedly deprived of its most able military commander.

  Paths Not Taken

  When Lau Yew perceived that acts of terror had failed so far to drive off the British or to create Liberated Areas where the guerrilla force could expand and gain strength, he ordered increased attacks. Isolated police stations were a special target. Lau Yew thought that a massed force of several hundred guerrillas could easily overrun a station defended by a sergeant and his ten constables. Most of these attacks were humiliating repulses. With hindsight it could be seen that Lau Yew was guilty of strategic impatience. He had thought that the insurrection would achieve decisive results by the end of August 1948, but in fact the Communists had come nowhere close.

  In mid-July 1948 an informer told a British police superintendent, the legendary Bill “Two-Gun” Stafford—a veteran of fifteen parachute jumps behind Japanese lines in Burma who earned his moniker by always carrying a revolver under each armpit—when and where some important Communist officials were to attend a jungle meeting. Stafford and some of his loyal Chinese detectives surrounded the meeting place. During the ensuing firefight Stafford shot and killed an armed insurgent who turned out to be Lau Yew. Lau Yew’s death threw the insurgency into disarray and left its military operations in the hands of inexperienced and not particularly able leaders. Here was opportunity for the British if they had the wit to perceive it.

  One officer who possessed the combination of experience and insight was Lieutenant Colonel Walter Walker. Like Two-Gun Stafford, Walker had fought in the Burmese jungle against the Japanese. The unique skill set required to survive in jungle combat informed his decision to create a “Ferret Force” in July 1948. It consisted of small teams each composed of twelve British Empire volunteers, soldiers from the Malay Regiment, a signals detachment, highly skilled Dyak trackers recruited in Borneo, and a Chinese liaison officer. A British volunteer with local knowledge led each Ferret Force group. The Ferret Forces were thus perfectly tailored for the task of hunting insurgents in their jungle bases. Unfortunately they disbanded within five months, a casualty of bureaucratic infighting over policy, administration, and methods. Still, the abortive experiment demonstrated the value of its innovative core concept, namely, small patrols guided by native trackers and accompanied by interpreters and local troops.

  Walker was also convinced that many hard-learned lessons in World War II–era jungle warfare had been forgotten because of the army’s focus on conventional warfare. This amnesia was particularly apparent when regular army units conducted large-scale sweeps. They called it “jungle bashing” and in Walker’s mind this connoted exactly what was wrong. An officer described a jungle-bashing operation: “We had now been in the jungle for five continuous weeks, taking part in one of those big operations . . . During the whole period we had neither seen nor heard any sign of the enemy.”3 To help rectify this problem Walker established a training center dedicated to “studying, teaching and perfecting methods of jungle fighting.”4 This Jungle Warfare Training Centre contributed useful tactical innovations but in the absence of a coherent strategic plan to defeat the insurgents such innovations were not enough.

  Instead Boucher continued with his map-perfect search-and-destroy missions that were heavy on the searching but did little useful destroying. Typical was the experience of a newly arrived regular British infantry regiment, the Green Howards. The Green Howards arrived in Malaya early in the conflict at a time when the guerrillas still operated in large units of 100 men or more. The battalion zealously searched the jungle over a four-month period, saw guerrillas just five times, and killed one of them. The regiment’s altogether typical experience amply revealed Boucher’s strategy to be a virtual guarantee that the fight against the insurgents would be a long, drawn-out affair.

  THE SENIOR BRITISH official on the ground when the Emergency began was Sir Edward Gent. His brief time in command suggests that Gent would have been unequal to the challenge. Before such a judgment could be conclusively made, Gent died in an airplane accident. In September 1948 Whitehall appointed his successor, Sir Henry Gurney. If central casting had selected a man to play a British proconsul, Gurney would have received first call. An Oxford graduate, avid sportsman, and immaculate dresser—he insisted on wearing a tie, jacket, and felt hat in spite of Malaya’s heat and humidity—Gurney’s celebrated panache achieved legendary status during his tenure as chief secretary in Palestine. There he had insisted on his daily round of golf regardless of the disruptions around him, finishing his last round the day before he ended British administration and theatrically departed Palestine on the last plane out of the country.

  However, beneath this image was a man of unusual perception who made two key contributions to the fight against the Malayan Communists. Gurney asserted that the conflict was a competition between political ideologies. If the military was left to follow its instincts, the result would be an escalation that would inevitably use all available military might. Civilian casualties would ensue, which would turn more people to the Communist side. Instead, Gurney insisted that in this war of ideas, the army should provide military support for a political war rather than the civil administration providing political cover for a purely military effort. Over the objections of the military—it was ridiculous that “a bunch of coppers should start telling the generals what to do,” complained General Boucher—Gurney insisted on civilian control of the counterinsurgency.5

  Robert Thompson, now installed in the government secretariat in Kuala Lumpur, where he coordinated intelligence reports, enthusiastically endorsed Gurney’s philosophy. A single misguided bomb created countless enemies. Even if accurately delivered, all the bombs and shells in the world would not touch a Communist cell operating in a high school where it produced new recruits for the insurgency.

  Gurney’s second insight was to understand the insurgents’ dependency on the Chinese squatters. His solution was breathtaking: to relocate them into villages where they would be isolated from the guerrillas and protected from insurgent terror. No one expected the squatters to uproot their lives willingly. The incentive was land grants. Gurney reasoned that by becoming legal stakeholders, the squatters would possess a strong motive to support the government. Relocating one tenth of the country’s population was an expensive and challenging logistical feat. Moreover, the Malay sultans who owned the land had to be persuaded to cede it to the squatters. Gurney reckoned it would take eighteen months to get the program well and truly launched. Meanwhile, the Malayan Communist Party strengthened its hold on the squatter population.

  The irreducible minimum of logistical support the guerrillas required was rice, weapons, and ammunition. The jungle provided none of these. Consequently, the guerrillas operated from jungle bases no more than a few hours away from populated areas and
relied on the Chinese squatters who lived along the jungle edge for money, food, medicine, clothes, intelligence, and recruits. Most jungle bases had only one access trail. This path typically extended up from a jungle valley past a small lean-to. This shed served as a supply point to where carrying parties deposited their forty-pound rice sacks and the guerrillas picked them up. The guerrillas hauled the rice up a rugged, nearly perpendicular ascent overlooked by the first of at least two well-concealed guard posts. The camp itself lay on cleared ground but the upper story of primary-growth jungle was always left undisturbed to conceal the camp from aerial observation. Likewise, the camp’s approach was always screened from the trail so that “no part of it could be seen from more than five yards away.”6 Every camp had a secure escape route in case security forces found it.

  Because of this meticulous attention to camouflage and concealment, military patrols seldom found a guerrilla camp unless they had a defector willing to guide them to it. When the security forces did approach a camp, the guards usually delayed them long enough for the camp inhabitants to flee. A British officer described accompanying his patrol toward a camp and encountering a single rifle shot. What to do? He could not accurately judge from where the shot came. Should he move his men to the left or right or simply charge blindly straight forward? Meanwhile, the guard had accomplished his task. His warning shot alerted his comrades. The fleeing insurgents always outpaced their pursuers since the latter did not know the terrain and had to fear ambush and booby trap.

  So it was that the contest against the insurgents featured all the usual frustrations of guerrilla warfare: the absence of fixed lines, the lack of decisive geographical objectives, the illusion that there might be a decisive battle, and the inability to separate enemy fighters from the civilian population.

  The Rise of General Briggs

  In Great Britain, war in Malaya began at a time when a new Labor government headed by Clement Attlee was in control. Attlee believed that eventually Malaya should achieve independence, but he and his party also thought that the British government should never negotiate while terrorists had guns pointed at British heads. Attlee’s government signaled its determination to defeat the insurgency by sending reinforcements to Malaya in the summer of 1948, including the Second Guards Brigade. This marked the first time in British history that any soldiers serving in the Household Brigade had ever been deployed outside of the British Isles during what was notionally a time of peace. In spite of the fact that the British people had not yet recovered from the tremendous effort spent in World War II, a vast majority supported the fight in Malaya. Over time, the confidence of the British government and the British people in victory rose and fell according to progress and setbacks. However, their basic determination ultimately to win would prove to be a hallmark of the Malayan Emergency.

  However, by 1950 there was a growing disconnect between perceptions of progress and the reality on the ground. Slowly the realization that the situation was getting worse gained ascendancy among British leaders and politicians. Simultaneously, Communist successes on the mainland of China emboldened the insurgents. They were better armed and organized than ever before. They held the initiative and were conducting regular ambushes along roads and railways and attacking police stations to obtain arms and reassert control of the villages. Each month the guerrillas killed or abducted scores of civilians. The police had lost confidence and appeared powerless to stop the terror.

  After two ineffectual years of counterinsurgency, Attlee’s government summoned from retirement Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs to coordinate all antiterrorist activities conducted by the security forces. Briggs was a World War II veteran who had commanded with distinction the Fifth Indian Division in Burma. His experience in jungle warfare was the prime reason the government chose him. Briggs wanted to decline the appointment but his former chief, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, overcame his reluctance. Briggs’s task in Malaya was daunting: he was a former soldier acting in a civilian capacity as director of operations, in charge of military operations in support of a civil government.

  Briggs arrived in Kuala Lumpur during the first week of April 1950. On the basis of his prior briefings and quick in-country tour, he reported his impressions to High Commissioner Gurney. Insurgent morale and strength were increasing. They drew support from the country’s Chinese population, particularly the squatters. Active propaganda and terror squads were embedded in the Chinese population and those cells were “undetected and unscathed” because of lack of useful intelligence. Government counterinsurgency efforts were badly hampered by the lack of Chinese-speaking officials. In a startling departure from his predecessor, Briggs concluded that military successes against the “bandits” had little capacity to degrade the insurgency. Instead he agreed with Gurney that the proper focus was to win over the Chinese population. Only then could the initiative be wrested from the insurgents.”7

  However, Briggs related that the Chinese population lacked confidence in the government’s ability to protect them against Communist terrorists and particularly the Traitor Killing Squads. The Malayan Chinese Association, a government-promoted effort to offer Chinese civilians an alternative to Communism, remained inert due to fear of Communist reprisal. Briggs recognized that this could not be changed everywhere all at once and thus avoided the temptation to operate simultaneously throughout the country. Instead, he proposed a gradual program, methodically securing the country in phases from south to north. The ultimate objective was the elimination of the whole Communist Organization in Malaya.

  Briggs began by recasting the tools needed to carry out his strategic intentions. He created the Federal Joint Intelligence Advisory Committee in May 1950. Prior to this time, intelligence came from the military, civil government, or police. With each entity pulling in a different direction, there was redundancy and omission. The new committee coordinated the collection, analysis, and distribution of all intelligence. Its success inspired the formation of the Federal War Council to coordinate all military, civil, and police counterinsurgency efforts. With Briggs serving as chairman, this small group was designed to be a flexible tool to devise policy and allocate resources. Meanwhile, the Special Branch continued as the sole internal security department in charge of dealing with internal subversion and counterespionage.

  Having forged the necessary tools, Briggs addressed strategy. Heretofore few planners had understood the political dimensions of the conflict and the salient role played by the local people. The Malays already appreciated that however much they wanted in dependence from Britain as a long-term goal, they did not want to live in a nation where the Chinese merely replaced the British as overlords. Briggs clearly saw that the people who mattered were the Chinese. He resolved to implement programs to convince the Chinese, particularly the rural squatters, that an in dependent Malaya offered them a more attractive future than a Malaya dominated by Communist Chinese rulers. Toward this goal Briggs wanted to avoid indiscriminate punitive measures and focus on providing security for the squatters against the terrorists.

  Because of the ongoing Korean War and a host of other imperial commitments, Briggs could not request a large military presence. To compensate for the manpower shortage, he proposed to recruit Chinese into an Auxiliary Police so they could participate in defending their homes against the insurgents. This provocative idea contained the obvious risk that a recruit could be disloyal to the government. He could desert to the Communists, provide them with inside information about military operations, or even lead a British patrol into an ambush. Accordingly, Briggs was willing to move slowly on this initiative to give time for the new recruits to prove their reliability. But overall, in Briggs’s view, the potential gain outweighed the risk. Quite simply, without the cooperation of the rural Chinese the British could not defeat the insurgents.

  New Villages

  The centerpiece of what became known as the Briggs Plan was whole-hearted implementation of Gurney’s population-resettlement program
. Gurney’s original program had been “conceived in uncertainty, carried [out] in indifference and born in haste . . . bitterness, recrimination and hostility.”8 Under General Briggs the program operated much more efficiently. The government designed dormitory villages for the rubber and tin wage earners and agricultural villages for rural farmers. A well-protected truck convoy appeared at dawn in the old village, British soldiers helped the inhabitants load their possessions, and the trucks whisked the people away to a new life. Each relocated family received building materials to erect a house and a $100 cash payment. The impressive logistical feat impressed Gurney: “The machine now works so quickly that a piece of virgin jungle becomes a settlement of 200 houses complete with roads, water and police posts and fencing in ten days.”9