Gurney did not see that the speed of the resettlement came at the sacrifice of careful preparation. Some of the new agricultural villages were on unproductive soils and had been chosen merely because no one else wanted the land. The village infrastructure was often poorly built with contaminated water and sewage systems that spread disease. Regardless, from a British standpoint the mandate was to move the squatters as fast as possible behind barbed wire in order to isolate them from the insurgents. By the end of 1951 authorities could report the mission almost accomplished, with the relocation plan 80 percent complete: about 400,000 squatters had been moved into more than 400 “New Villages.”
Formerly, the inhabitants of the New Villages had lived in self-sufficient isolation. They were unaccustomed to community life. The role of the Chinese-speaking British resettlement officer was crucial for their adaptation. Finding willing and capable candidates to serve as resettlement officers was difficult. While many British spoke Malay, few spoke Chinese. Briggs scoured the corners of his administration to locate suitable resettlement officers. He insisted that all government departments release their most able Chinese-speaking officials for this duty. From outside came more recruits including former missionaries who had fled China in the face of Communist pressure. By dint of language skills, hard work, and tactful cultural sensitivity, the resettlement officers eased the transition from rural squatter to village dweller.
However, there were not enough to go around. Consequently, after a resettlement officer established a New Village’s basic administrative structure, he moved on to create the next village. He left behind a Malayan Chinese administrator who assumed resettlement duties. These brave men had to live in the New Village, where they were prime targets for assassination. In addition, they faced tremendous temptation in the form of bribes from families seeking special favors or kickbacks from merchants dealing with scarce goods. Although some died at the hands of the Traitor Killing Squads and some succumbed to corruption, the remarkable fact is that most performed an exceedingly difficult job with courage and integrity.
They could not have survived in the absence of the village police post. A typical police post numbered ten or a dozen men, all Malays, who found themselves trying to secure a village that was home for 500 to 2,000 Chinese. They received no help from the inhabitants and were commonly betrayed. Every hour a phone call came from district headquarters. If a policeman failed to answer, headquarters had standing orders to dispatch immediately a patrol to assist the isolated post, which presumably was under attack. Because the guerrillas had great difficulty with command and control due to the inability of their detachments to communicate quickly with one another, they usually fled when the reaction team arrived. A determined police post could defend itself against most attacks even in the face of surprising odds. Nonetheless, as long as the Communists had the capacity to form combat teams of 100 men or more, every police post was under deadly threat.
Death of a High Commissioner
The Briggs Plan, with its notable emphasis on winning popular support over killing insurgents, eventually produced decisive long-term results. However, this was not immediately apparent. In April 1950 the commander in chief of the Far East land forces, General Sir John Harding, declared, “Our greatest weakness is the lack of early and accurate information of the enemy’s strength, dispositions and intentions.”10 Harding well understood the reluctance of rural Chinese to denounce the Communists: “The Chinese population is generally content to get on with its business even if it entails subsidizing the Communists; nor is it willing generally to give any information to the Police Force for fear of reprisals until it is given full and continuous security by our Forces.”11
More than a year later, in June 1951, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, and Briggs issued a combined assessment of the situation. For public dissemination they confidently claimed that the campaign had reached a turning point. They knew that the reality was something else. A police report in September 1951 stated, “Thousands of Chinese of all walks of life are now living behind barbed wire and are expected to be policed by a handful of untrained men who are tied down by gate and perimeter patrol duties. Proper police work is well nigh impossible and duties in resettlement areas result in corruption, boredom and ill discipline.”12 In addition, many squatters remained outside the New Villages, where they were subjected to insurgent coercion.
In October 1951 Gurney complained that after three years of British efforts to protect the rural Chinese by organizing a massive population shift into the New Villages, Chinese Communists had infiltrated these villages, were active in schools and labor unions, and were not being denounced by the Chinese inhabitants of the New Villages. Gurney bleakly concluded that if things continued on their present course the Chinese rural population would soon fall under Communist control.
Two days after this gloomy prediction Gurney and his wife departed the capital to spend a weekend at a rural resort. While his Rolls-Royce climbed a steep, narrow road, a guerrilla platoon opened fire with Bren guns and rifles from concealed positions in the jungle undergrowth. Thirty-five bullets riddled Gurney’s Rolls and flattened its tires. Gurney managed to open the door and stagger to a roadside ditch, where he died, having apparently sacrificed his life to draw fire so that his wife, who remained crouching on the floor of the Rolls, could live. The high commissioner’s escort vehicle arrived on the scene and engaged the guerrillas with Bren gun fire. A bugle call from the jungle overlooking the road sounded the retreat and the shooting stopped as the guerrillas withdrew along a previously cleared line of retreat.
The guerrillas had no idea whom they had killed. Rather, they had set their ambush on a portion of road frequented by security force traffic and waited to see who drove by. British intelligence did not know that Gurney’s death came from a band of opportunistic guerrillas shooting at a careless target. They suspected that the Communists had deeply infiltrated the security forces. A desperate frenzy of military action ensued. Royal Air Force bombers dropped tons of ordnance onto possible jungle escape routes. Twenty-five-pound medium batteries of the Royal Artillery bombarded the jungle. Infantry units near and far bashed through the undergrowth looking for the men who had killed the high commissioner. When these efforts proved futile the British resorted to removing the entire population of the nearest Chinese town and leveling it. However satisfying the revenge, it could not hide the fact that the autumn of 1951 marked the nadir of British efforts to counter the insurgents. Three weeks after Gurney’s death, another ambush in the same area killed sixteen and wounded seventeen. During the ensuing month, security forces suffered their heaviest weekly casualties ever.
The rise in combat casualties suggested to the public that Great Britain was involved in a never-ending conflict with victory nowhere in sight. Public confidence both in Malaya and in the United Kingdom waned. The public was skeptical about official pronouncements having heard ever since 1949 frequent predictions that the Emergency would soon be over. The response was reminiscent of the experience when the American public had wondered why it took more men to keep the Philippines “pacified” than to win the war in the first place. Malay politicians began to question openly the wisdom of British strategy.
The Malay majority wavered. They resented how the British government directed resources and granted privileges to the Chinese, almost as if it was rewarding the lack of Chinese commitment to the government. One Malay politician suggested that the country was approaching chaos because of the slow progress in defeating the insurgents and the likelihood that worse fighting lay ahead. In overly polite and understated language he warned, “The number of [Commonwealth] troops pouring into this country has been creating a feeling of suspicion on the part of the masses.” The Malay public worried that an even more “bloodthirsty war” was about to begin.”13
In December the brilliant Briggs fell ill with what proved a fatal sickness and retired. Efforts to name his successor stumbled when several prominent candid
ates declined the appointment, thus causing civilian morale to plummet further. The British commissioner of police proved unequal to his task and was relieved. Racial antagonism between Malay and Chinese intensified. Government policy makers appeared to have lost all direction, and defeat loomed.
THIRTEEN
A Modern Cromwell
A Plan and a Man
BY OCTOBER 1951, THE MALAYAN Communist Party Central Executive Committee met to review the war to date. Over the past year guerrillas had staged some 6,100 incidents while inflicting the highest record of losses on civilians and security forces. The Central Executive Committee did not have precise figures. What they did know was that they had massed their fighters to the greatest possible extent in an effort to obtain important results. Company-sized units of 100 to 300 men had attacked remote police stations, European business offices, and mining installations. The goal was to overpower the regular and irregular police guards, capture weapons and ammunition, and demoralize the native constabulary. These assaults had been costly and seldom succeeded. The Central Executive Committee did not realize that its fighters had become demoralized, with many shying away from contact with the British.
The second major Communist objective was the New Villages. Communist agents had infiltrated squatter communities to persuade the people to resist relocation. Guerrillas ambushed truck convoys conveying the squatters to the New Villages. They fired into newly settled villages in hopes of stampeding the inhabitants. In spite of making the strongest possible effort, the Communists had failed to prevent the expansion of the New Villages.
During its October 1951 review, the leadership concluded that while it could foment terror, depredations against the people—slashing rubber trees, burning workers’ huts, sabotaging public utilities, ambushing Red Cross convoys, derailing trains, shooting up New Villages, killing for identity cards—merely increased the general population’s misery. The committee decided that these tactics had been a mistake since they alienated the very people they most needed to support the insurgency. The MCP leadership decreed that henceforth the masses were to be courted. The sole legitimate targets for terrorist operations were the British and their “running dogs.”
The Executive Committee resolved that in order to wage a protracted struggle, the formed guerrilla units had to break contact with the security forces and withdraw deeper into the jungle to rest and refit. Couriers set out on foot to disseminate this decision to all guerrilla units. The jungle was no longer a completely safe haven. Fear of ambush and the need to dodge British patrols caused the couriers to move cautiously from one jungle post office to the next. Consequently, months passed before many guerrilla leaders received the new orders.
At the time no one realized the enormous significance of the committee’s decision. The British had no knowledge of this strategic shift for almost a year. Only then were intelligence officers able to link prisoner interrogations with captured documents to discover that there had been a fundamental shift and that the insurgents had lost their revolutionary momentum. The shift most dramatically changed the status of the village police posts. For the previous three and a half years, policemen had confronted a mortal threat of massed attack by overwhelming numbers. Henceforth, attacks came from small bands of twenty to thirty and were typically only nuisance raids. Relieved of their fear of annihilation, the village police could focus on providing security and restoring law and order.
Yet it was the inherent nature of a counterinsurgency that the British were unable to assess accurately its progress until after the fact. The British did not perceive that the tide was turning. They did not know Communist strength had declined to perhaps 500 hard-core guerrillas supported by another 4,000 fighters of indifferent morale. They did not know that the year 1951 would prove the high-water mark of the insurgency.
The Return of Winston Churchill
Great Britain’s October election of 1951 brought a new Conservative government led by a revived Winston Churchill. Churchill returned to office to find his country still struggling from its exertions during World War II. Food stocks were as depleted as they had been at the height of the U-boat menace in 1941. Strict food rationing remained in place. Prosperity seemed a distant mirage. The Malayan Emergency was costing the nation’s pinched economy half a million dollars per day. In Asia, some 800,000 United Nations soldiers including a Commonwealth Division were challenging Communism in Korea. More than 100,000 French troops were fighting the Viet Minh in Indochina. Although Churchill supported both fights, he believed that the fate of the entire Far East truly depended on Malaya. The prime minister requested a complete report on Malaya, and its contents depressed him. Committees charged with winning the war were spending most of their time bickering. The police force was riven with factions. Worst of all, in Churchill’s view, no one seemed to sense the urgency of the problem. He issued orders to Secretary of State Oliver Lyttelton—“The rot has got to be stopped”—and sent him to Singapore.1
Lyttelton arrived in Malaya before Christmas 1951. His initial survey convinced him that the British were on the verge of losing Malaya. On his last night at King’s House he found the regular staff absent, replaced by police officers. They sheepishly reported that the Chinese butler who heretofore had served the secretary his after-dinner coffee had been removed from his position because he was a Communist agent.
Lyttelton described the essential conundrum facing a counterinsurgency: “You cannot win the war without the help of the population, and you cannot get the support of the population without at least beginning to win the war.”2 The antagonism between the Malay majority and the Chinese minority seemed overwhelming. A Malay political delegation met with Lyttelton to propose a compromise solution: accept the existing situation and let Malaya be granted in dependence forthwith under British administration.
This proposal was immensely attractive. It addressed the prime Malay concern about power sharing with the Malayan Chinese by acknowledging that the Malays would remain politically dominant. If the British accepted it would motivate Malays to put forth far more effort in the war. It meant the war would come to an end soon and Commonwealth troops could escape what appeared to be a jungle quagmire. But in the minds of Lyttelton and Churchill the proposal violated basic British values, not the least of which was the preservation of a disintegrating empire, and smacked of declaring victory and going home. Consequently they rejected it.
Instead Lyttelton recommended a colossal Organizational change: the installation of a supreme warlord in charge of both military and civil affairs. As Lyttelton pondered candidates he briefly considered Britain’s most famous warrior, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. He correctly suspected that the immensely proud Montgomery would not want to risk his reputation in Malaya’s jungles. However, Montgomery did send a Lyttelton a brief note of advice: “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.” If the field marshal’s advice was rather obvious—Lyttelton later wrote with British understatement that “this had occurred to me”—it still made the solid point that heretofore British efforts had yet to marry leadership and strategic execution.3 That was about to change.
The Rise of Sir Gerald Templer
Lyttelton’s choice for warlord was General Sir Gerald Templer. Templer arrived in Malaya in February 1952 to assume an exceptional posting as both the high commissioner and operational commander of the military. Not since Oliver Cromwell had Britain invested a soldier with this combination of military and political power. But Templer was an exceptional man. He had served in the trenches of France during World War I, competed on the 1924 British Olympic hurdles team, won the army’s bayonet fighting championship, earned the prestigious Distinguished Service Order in Palestine, and risen to corps command during World War II’s Anzio campaign. During the Allied occupation of Germany he was director of military government and later became the director of intelligence at the War Office. His combination
of combat and civil leadership coupled with an intelligence background well prepared Templer to meet a novel challenge.
Templer coined the phrase “winning hearts and minds” to describe the foundation of a counterinsurgency strategy.4 He tackled the difficult problem of constructing a political system that would unite Malaya’s many ethnic groups into a stable structure. He was very much a man of action, disdaining all theoretical constructs. He saw that the existing bureaucracy, with its numerous committees and duplication of authority on the state and district levels, was failing because the civilians, policemen, and soldiers could not agree. He told one such committee, “My advice is for you to thrash out your problems over a bottle of whiskey in the evenings. If you can’t agree I don’t want to know why. I’ll sack the lot of you and bring in three new chaps.”5
Templer’s political goal was a united nation of Malaya with “a common form of citizenship for all who regard the Federation or any part of it as their real home and the object of their loyalty.”6 With Templer’s encouragement, in January 1952 the United Malay National Organization and the Malayan Chinese Association cooperated to form the Alliance Party. The Alliance Party contested the capital’s municipal elections and won nine of eleven seats, thereby vaulting itself into national prominence. Templer pledged that legislative elections would be the first step toward independence.
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