Jungle of Snakes

by James R. Arnold

  As part of their counterinsurgency philosophy that emphasized acting within legal boundaries, the British worked hard to improve the police. Great Britain had considerable experience in handing over colonial authority to the native people. Part of this process was to train the police. To help in Malaya, the British summoned experienced trainers from around the Empire including hundreds of former police sergeants who had served in Palestine. In January 1952 Colonel Arthur Long, commissioner of the City of London Police, came to Malaya to reorganize the Federation Police and Special Constables. Within a year the Federation Police had compiled comprehensive lists of Malayan Races Liberation Army personnel and documented the local areas where they operated. Armed with this specific and precise intelligence, small hunter-killer platoons went after the guerrillas.

  In contrast to the regular army units who had bashed through the jungle, the hunter-killer platoons were well-trained units composed of soldiers who had learned how to operate in the jungle. They were superbly fit in order to operate in the enervating environment, and first-class marksmen. Their sharpshooting skill was important because shoulder-fired weapons remained the weapon that inflicted almost all casualties on the enemy. The combination of jungle stamina, fire discipline, knowledge of the country, and high morale made the men of the hunter-killer platoons implacable foes of the guerrillas. Yet even when nourished with good intelligence, these platoons still spent hundreds of hours of fruitless searching in order to locate the insurgents. Then, when contact came, it was fleeting, and “bags” seldom exceeded two or three guerrillas killed.

  Another tool in the war for intelligence was a national registration program. Introduced early in the Emergency, it required every person over the age of twelve to register at the police station to obtain an identity card complete with photo and thumbprint. Thereafter, they always had to carry this card with them while the police retained a copy. To make the system work the government had to provide a strong incentive. It chose coercion. People needed to show their cards to obtain a food ration, to build a home in a resettlement village, to expand their garden plot, and for a host of other daily activities tied to economic survival. Naturally the civilian population resented all of this but they quickly appreciated that life was easier with rather than without their cards.

  From a security viewpoint, the program was a great success. Registration hampered all Communist movement and activity. But it was particularly effective in the New Villages, where it helped separate the insurgents from the local populace. In the New Villages, police established cordons early each morning to screen people as they embarked on their daily routines. The police detained anyone without a card or whose card showed that they were not local. People who did not appear for work that day immediately attracted police attention and became the subjects of closer investigation.

  Chin Peng and the Communist leadership correctly saw that the registration program was a serious threat and ordered the Traitor Killing Squads into action. They assassinated the village photographers and registration officials who worked in the program. The also targeted the rural rubber tappers and rice farmers. Guerrillas seized their registration cards and threatened to kill them if they reregistered. The police responded with a simple policy change. Each morning they collected workers’ cards and issued tallies when they left the village. Upon returning, workers exchanged the tallies for the cards. If the guerrillas had stolen the tally, the worker merely had to reregister. Guerrilla leaders eventually concluded that their efforts to disrupt the program were counterproductive and abandoned this campaign as part of their strategic reappraisal conducted in October 1951.

  Early in the conflict, the British had also begun a reward program whereby they paid set sums for weapons and munitions surrendered to the security forces and offered a higher inducement for leading a patrol to a guerrilla base. Under Templer’s leadership the British raised the bounty for killing or capturing Communist insurgents. The largest bounty was placed on the head of Chin Ping: 250,000 Malayan dollars (£30,000, approximately $83,700) if delivered alive, half that amount if killed. Either sum was a staggering figure for Malaya. At the time the offer of oversized rewards caused some criticism. Police and government officials wondered about the justice system’s essential fairness whereby a known murderer, a man who had targeted policemen and rural administrators, could receive a sum for a few minutes of work betraying his comrades that far exceeded what a loyal man could ever earn during a lifetime of faithful service.

  The commander of the Malayan Races Liberation Army in southern Malaya, Ah Koek, known as “Shorty,” had a price tag of 150,000 Malayan dollars if taken alive or 75,000 if killed. In October 1952 his bodyguard murdered him and delivered his head to obtain the reward. A newspaper reporter gleefully observed that since Ah Koek was only four feet nine inches tall, this came to almost $3,000 an inch, probably the most expensive “head price” ever paid. The elimination of a well-known insurgent leader boosted British morale but had little collateral benefit since most of these men could be readily replaced. More useful than the bounty was the reward system for actionable intelligence.

  Security force officers were constantly surprised at the willingness of Communist turncoats to guide them to their old positions to kill or capture their former comrades. In part this was a monetary calculation on the turncoat’s part: he received a bounty to surrender and could collect more by leading productive raids. In part it was a calculus of survival: a turncoat had to fear the notorious Traitor Killing Squads, which would target the turncoat’s family if they could not eliminate the betrayer himself. The turncoat judged the best way to preempt retaliation was to kill his comrades before they could pass on information to these death squads.

  End Game In late spring 1954 Templer left Malaya. In his mind much remained to accomplish. As he departed he famously warned against complacency, saying, “I’ll shoot the bastard who says that this Emergency is over.”5 Then and thereafter, Templer was a controversial figure. His brusque, even rude personality did not win him many friends. Detractors claimed that he merely happened to be the man in charge when the tide turned. Indeed, he did benefit greatly from decisions made by his predecessors. Still, by any objective measure his success had been extraordinary. In 1951, the year prior to his arrival, insurgents had staged 2,333 major incidents while inflicting more than 1,000 casualties among the security forces and another 1,000 against civilians. In 1954 there were 293 major incidents causing 241 security force and 185 civilian casualties. Guerrilla strength had declined by two thirds from its peak.

  Templer had also promoted the expansion of the popular militia called the Home Guard. It was an ambitious effort fraught with risk, the fruits of which were not apparent until after Templer had left Malaya. Trained by British and Commonwealth officers, the Home Guard grew from 79,000 in July 1951 to 250,000 by the end of 1953, at which time they defended seventy-two New Villages. A typical village had thirty-five Home Guards. Assignments rotated among them on a daily basis, so on any one night only five were on guard duty. At nightfall, the guards drew weapons from the police armory and patrolled the perimeter wire. Their tasks were threefold: to detect and resist guerrilla attack, to thwart the internal activity of the Traitor Killing Squads, and to prevent the villagers from smuggling food outside the wire. Although subjected to terrorist intimidation and murder, the Home Guard maintained a surprising resilience. By the end of 1954 they had received 89,000 weapons and lost only 103. In 1955 they lost 138 weapons out of a holding of 15,000. Still, even this record was unsatisfactory to some Europeans in Malaya who loudly demanded the Home Guard be disbanded.

  Authorities ignored the complaints. It became clear that the degree of loyalty to the government exhibited by the Home Guard mirrored the attitudes of the villagers. If Communist terror had cowed the villagers, the Home Guard was passive for fear of Communist reprisal against themselves and their families. When later there was a major guerrilla attack against two New Villages in Johore in 1956, the Home
Guard defended the villages tenaciously—in spite of the fact that many villagers had assisted the guerrillas—and repulsed the attacks. This was enormously heartening for both the Home Guards and their advocates.

  TEMPLER’S DEPARTURE MARKED the end of the Cromwell-like era of one man having both civil and military powers. Templer’s deputy high commissioner ascended to take over state finances and high policy. Lieutenant General Sir Geoffrey Bourne took command of the soldiers and police. Under their leadership, the next three years witnessed tremendous progress on both the political and military fronts.

  By the end of 1955, British intelligence estimated that Communist strength had shrunk from a peak of 8,000 armed guerrillas to around 3,000. Every metric indicated that the food denial policy was working. The local population was increasingly cooperating with security forces. Their assistance led to the elimination of virtually all Communist forces in South Selango. Likewise, in the state of Pahang security forces eliminated an estimated 80 percent of enemy forces, thereby creating the largest White Area in the country. The trend toward victory continued. In 1956 the security forces lost forty-seven killed. By the next year this total fell to eleven; the year after, ten. In 1959 and 1960 only one policeman died due to insurgent activity.

  While losses among the security forces declined, the army and police continued to whittle away at the remaining insurgents. During 1957 the rate of guerrilla elimination averaged one per day. During the last years of the Emergency this steady rate of attrition reduced insurgent numbers to some 500 hard-core guerrillas operating in small groups of five to twenty men. They lived like hunted animals, incapable of meaningful military operations, intent only on survival. They had entirely lost the initiative. Only two hopes for insurgent victory remained: popular discontent with the Emergency regulations, particularly the food denial policies, would spawn some kind of popular rebellion, or the government would make a new, colossal blunder.

  Back in 1953, a large-scale British sweep to locate the MCP Politburo had failed. Nonetheless, Chin Peng and the senior Communist leadership made the decision to follow Mao’s dictate to retreat when the enemy pressed too hard. They slipped over the Thai border. This border described a very irregular line some 370 miles long. Most of it ran through thick jungle. A substantial Chinese population lived along the Thai side of the border and provided succor for the MCP Politburo for the remainder of the war. However, from this remote sanctuary they could not coordinate strategy with the armed detachments to the south. Thereafter insurgent remnants trekked north to join the headquarters inside the Thai sanctuary, and security forces found it almost impossible to locate them.

  A break came when the third-ranking member of the politburo, Hor Lung, decided that further resistance was futile and surrendered at a remote police post. The British head of the provincial Special Branch took Hor Lung and his two bodyguards to a secure place while the British pondered how to proceed. The temptation to trumpet this important capture was almost irresistible. Instead, with the defector’s consent, the Special Branch returned Hor Lung to the jungle with instructions to persuade his comrades to surrender. To avoid the real possibility that security forces might encounter and kill him, the military considered suspending local operations. Upon further reflection they decided this would arouse suspicions, so instead they deliberately routed patrols to adjacent areas near enough to preserve the appearance of normality but not so close as to threaten Hor Lung. Most impressively, the British managed to keep the entire thing a secret. The reward for this restrained, well-conceived effort came over the next four months as 160 Communists surrendered, including 28 whom the government ranked as “hard-core.”

  By the end of 1958 only four known guerrillas remained in all of Johore and just two in Negri Sambilan. Major guerrilla actions averaged a mere one per month. By October 1959 the British estimated total insurgent strength at 700, most of whom were in Thailand. The handful of holdouts still in Malaya lived in the most inaccessible parts of the jungle, where they found conditions changed and survival even harder because the jungle-dwelling aborigines had concluded that there was no future in supporting the guerrillas. In the last two years of the Emergency, one 300-man aboriginal force killed more guerrillas than all the other security forces combined, apparently using their traditional blowpipes to deadly effect.

  On July 31, 1960, the government declared an end to the twelve-yearlong State of Emergency.

  Why the British Won

  The final human reckoning showed that the security forces lost 519 soldiers and 1,346 police killed. Official government statistics showed that the Communist terrorists murdered 2,473 civilians and abducted another 810 during the Emergency. The insurgents lost 6,711 killed, 1,289 captured, and 2,704 surrendered. In other words, during the entire Emergency, security forces killed or captured about six guerrillas for every soldier or policeman lost. As had been the case during the Philippine Insurrection, the security forces enjoyed a tremendous tactical edge whenever combat occurred. The problem in Malaya, as in the Philippines, was finding the insurgents so they could be engaged.

  Certain special circumstances contributed immensely to the British victory. The Malaya Communist Party almost exclusively comprised ethnic Chinese who were alien in creed and race to the majority Malay population. Historically, the Chinese and Malays had been at odds with one another. Had the Communists been able to use the rallying cry of nationalism they might have partially overcome this divide. However, the British explicitly promised independence and could point to the examples of India, Pakistan, and Burma as proof of their ability to fulfill their promise.

  Party leaders proved inept strategists. They ignored basic precepts of revolutionary warfare by failing to mobilize the masses and neglecting to establish secure base areas. Instead of relying on patient propaganda efforts and sympathetic treatment to persuade the people to conform to their goals, the impatient insurgent leaders took shortcuts. They notably failed to heed Mao’s cautionary dictum that indiscriminate terror against the masses was counterproductive.

  The British, on the other hand, did many things right. Although the military’s initial emphasis on conventional operations was misguided, the government’s first set of political decisions had enormous, positive influence on the war’s outcome. Crucially, at no time did the government concede its authority to the insurgents by abandoning inhabited areas. Consequently, the insurgents were unable to rest, refit, and build inside Malaya.

  The decision to maintain a civil government presence in the face of terror derived from the insight of a handful of enlightened British officials who understood that political stability was a major component of victory. The symbol of this stability was the presence of a normal, workaday government that both performed its routine tasks and, of critical importance, was seen by the public to be doing this. Thus, the government urged its officials, the police, and the Europe an elite to remain steadfast and continue with their routines even in their isolated outposts. Not only was there no mass exodus of panic-stricken people fleeing from the terror, but local government officials, virtually 100 percent Malay outside of the New Villages, maintained routine administration in spite of Communist terror. They recorded births, deaths, and marriages, and this atmosphere of apparent normality informed people that the government had the will to endure.

  The government was able to function throughout the country because of the security provided by local police posts. The police, in turn, survived because British military forces compelled the Malayan Communists to abandon large-unit operations. This meant they lacked the strength to overrun the police posts.

  THE BRITISH RESISTED the temptation to respond to acts of terror by extralegal means. Instead, the government functioned within the boundaries of the law. It enacted some very tough laws including the imposition of strict curfews, a mandatory death sentence for carrying arms, and life imprisonment for those caught supporting the terrorists. But legislators passed these laws in a transparent, legal manner, and they wer
e subject to the concurrence of the courts and applied even-handedly to all citizens. For example, the police could detain a suspect for up to two years without trial. However, the suspect enjoyed a right of review by a High Court judge and a panel of local assessors. This helped mitigate the impact of holding some 10,000 suspects in detention. There was very little local protest. Undoubtedly the efforts to maintain legal and fair administrative approaches contributed to the muted response. However, it must be noted that the Malay majority thoroughly approved the mass roundup of Chinese.

  The British appreciated and benefitted from the antipathy most Malays felt toward the Chinese. It would have been easy for the British to ram through what ever measures the high commissioner and his staff desired. It would also have been strictly legal, since the treaties between the Malay sultans and the British Crown stipulated that British advice had to be accepted. Instead, the British used persuasion. They treated the Malay sultans as equal partners in the struggle against the insurgents. Because of this treatment, they enjoyed excellent cooperation both during the Emergency and afterward.

  The British also benefitted from a robust demand for tin and natural rubber created by the Korean War. This demand both created jobs and filled government coffers, allowing the British to pay for social programs that ameliorated the impact of Emergency regulations. A daily reality of full employment at a decent wage looked more appealing than the Communist promise of struggle leading to a better life at some indefinite future time.

  The leadership of some very able officers, most notably Briggs and Tem-pler, contributed to victory. The British counterinsurgency expert Robert Thompson called the adroit Templer “the last of the great British proconsuls,” and he lived up to this claim.6 Within one year of arriving in country, Templer reached a crucial insight that influenced all that came after: “the shooting side of the business is only twenty-five percent of the trouble and the other seventy-five percent lies in getting the people of this country behind us.”7 Regardless of the ebb and flow on the battlefield, the British successfully convinced the people of Malaya that they intended to remain until they won. Next they provided security from the terrorists. Then they provided social and economic benefits that gave all the people regardless of race a promise of future progress and prosperity. Templer particularly showed a keen appreciation of the need for racial reconciliation. He encouraged the formation of the Alliance Party and promised early elections leading to independence.