by Tim Newark
These three deaths were the opening shots in what became known as the Malayan Emergency – a 12-year guerrilla conflict that involved the British committing significant police and military forces to its suppression. It was never called a war, being viewed more as a major policing exercise, and at first the enemy combatants were simply termed ‘bandits’. For some, the murders of the three British estate managers were just a continuation of the brutal lawlessness that had been sparked by the revival of the Penang-based Triad gangs in the north of the country. But Chin Peng had been careful to make sure his killers announced that this was a different kind of conflict – one of ideology, not theft.
As for the Ang Bin Hoey, they had been contemptuous of the attempts by the Malayan communists to muscle in on their criminal business and had made clear their support of the Kuomintang. But events had altered significantly in mainland China in 1948 and the nationalists were no longer a force to be reckoned with. By the following year, Mao Tse-tung and his Red Army had decisively defeated the nationalists in their civil war and Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang followers had been forced to flee to the island of Taiwan.
With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, there was a new realism among the Ang Bin Hoey and their Triad cousins: although initially able to outgun the communists, they had lost the political patronage of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists. From now on, they would have to do business with the communists – and that included the MCP. Chin Peng’s followers tried to exploit the impetus created by Mao’s victory by telling the Ang Bin Hoey that they too had been persecuted under colonial rule and had no friends in the British. The ABH nodded in sympathy and smuggled arms to the communists – for a fee or a favour – but all the time the Triad gangsters watched the unfolding conflict with guarded interest.
‘Some [Triad] members have, in fact, assisted the authorities individually during the Emergency,’ noted the Federation of Malay Police, ‘by joining the Auxiliary Police and Home Guards and have given information against the Malayan Communist Party. This may be a long-term policy to find favour with the authorities, which they think may pay dividends when the Emergency is ended.’
This may well have been true. The communists might have had the momentum of the age with them, but the Triads knew that the British Empire was far from finished and that their colonial police could prove to be a formidable foe.
11
THE SMART COMMISSIONER YOUNG
‘The Malayan Police were a proud and touchy lot of people,’ noted Jack Morton, Director of Intelligence at the Malayan Special Branch. ‘They did not like being criticised or advised by outsiders.’ It was bad news, then, when 45-year-old Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police of the City of London, was seconded to head the Malayan police in 1952 at the height of the Emergency. Another Special Branch officer recalled his arrival on the scene with a detailed description of his crisp appearance.
Young was tall and burly and there was something about his style and his manner that reminded us of a typical London ‘bobby’. He had only recently arrived from London and was dressed in a khaki drill short-sleeved police bush shirt worn in jacket form, starched shorts, khaki drill coloured stockings with dark blue tops, and dark blue shoulder epaulettes with the silver insignia of commissioner of police. He carried a swagger stick under his arm.
Almost immediately, the smartly dressed Young ran into controversy by giving his straight-talking opinions to a local journalist.
‘Malaya’s tall intelligent new Commissioner of Police intends to do some ruthless house cleaning of the Malayan Police Force,’ ran the front-page article in the Singapore Standard. ‘One of his big assignments is to introduce a substantial contingent of Malayan Chinese policemen. He feels that he should depend on developing local talent instead of perpetually depending on importing outsiders.’
Young was referring to the white colonial ex-Palestinian police force officers who made up a key part of the ranks.
‘He feels that he will be helped in his job by the fact that he is only staying a year,’ continued the report, ‘and therefore does not have to worry too much upon whose toes he is treading in weeding out the inefficient.’
The commissioner’s candid comments did not go down at all well with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who demanded an explanation. The secretary was especially concerned about the reaction of police officers who had previously served under difficult circumstances in Palestine. Young batted this criticism back by denying ever having given such an interview to the local press. He recollected ‘a casual conversation on a social occasion with a person who described himself as a correspondent’, but said he ‘expressed no opinions of the kind reported’ and ‘the account, of course, completely misrepresents my views’. Well, that wasn’t completely true either. But Young remained unapologetic about his comments. His view was that he had been brought in to shake things up and that’s what he would do, regardless of local sensitivities.
Young arrived at a tricky time for the colony. Communist guerrillas, led by the highly effective Chin Peng, had gained the initiative in the opening phase of the Emergency. The Chinese veterans of the war against the Japanese struck at isolated rubber plantations and tin mines and slaughtered their white owners and anyone who helped them. Using intimidation to get the support of local villagers, they hoped to transform the countryside into an alien territory for the British before advancing into the towns. Their only problem was that the British had extensive experience in dealing with colonial insurgencies and were ruthless in its application.
Learning from their bitter struggle in the Boer War, the British authorities chose to deny the communists any local support by resettling many Malay Chinese in fortified government camps. Although initially unpopular, this process of establishing some 500 new villages, guarded and supplied with food by the British, proved to be a success, as the living standards inside the camps were an improvement on the impoverished squatter settlements.
On top of this, the Malayan police was rapidly expanded to a 24,000-strong armed force. The entire emphasis of the British response was to avoid a state of war, hence the choice of ‘Emergency’ as the title for the conflict. It has also been claimed that this term was chosen because many British businessmen feared that their insurance companies would not pay out on losses incurred during a state of war.
Frustrated by this robust policing strategy, Chin Peng got lucky when Sir Henry Gurney, High Commissioner of Malaya, drove by chance into a communist guerrilla ambush. On the morning of 6 October 1951, Gurney set off for a break in the cool mountain resort of Fraser’s Hill, 60 miles north of Kuala Lumpur. The commissioner sat next to his wife in the back of their official government Rolls-Royce, as it wound its way up a mountain road through the jungle. It was escorted in front by a police Land Rover, carrying six officers armed with rifles and carbines, and behind by an armoured police scout car. Unfortunately, the steep muddy road proved too much for the armoured car, which was left trailing far behind.
About halfway up the mountainside, the two vehicles were hit by a communist ambush, comprising 30 to 40 guerrillas. Automatic fire from Bren and Sten guns riddled the Land Rover, bringing it to a halt and blocking the path of the Roll-Royce. All the policemen were wounded. Some returned fire, but by then the majority of the guerrillas had moved on to direct their guns at the Rolls-Royce. In order to draw the shooting away from his wife, Gurney opened the door of the car and stepped out towards his attackers. In that he succeeded, because although the High Commissioner was immediately shot dead, his wife miraculously survived the ambush.
The assassination gained Chin Peng the international headlines he craved, but in the long run it proved to be a mistake, as it pushed the British into appointing a new High Commissioner. General Sir Gerald Templer brought with him a ferocious efficiency to the counter-insurgency campaign and won the nickname the ‘Tiger of Malaya’.
‘With the arrival of General Templer, an electric change came over the situat
ion,’ recalled Jack Morton of the Malayan Special Branch. ‘An integrated, streamlined machine was rapidly produced. At the summit there was set up a Department of Operations Committee presided over by the High Commissioner himself and drawing together the armed services, the civil authorities, Intelligence and the police in a united effort. The necessary staff organisations, both Operations and Intelligence, were established and this machine ensured that no resources, military, administrative, economic or scientific, were left untapped. The Operations Committee was a policy-making body directing and co-ordinating fully integrated committees in the States and Settlements. It was the job of these subordinate committees to conduct the war against communism in their areas and to mount the joint operations.’
Part of this new machinery was the appointment of Commissioner Arthur Young. Despite his bluff attitude, Young was a highly talented career policeman. Joining the Portsmouth Borough police at the age of 16 straight from school, he worked his way up through the ranks, embracing new technology and successfully promoting whichever department he headed. He devised ‘police pillars’ containing a twoway microphone handset, so members of the public could call for assistance. At 31, he became one of the youngest-ever chief constables. In 1941, he was senior assistant chief constable of the Birmingham City police, then the second-largest police force in the UK.
During the war, Young was tasked with setting up a training school for police to administer liberated Axis territory. Given the rank of colonel, he stepped ashore in Sicily in July 1943 as Senior British Police Officer in the Mediterranean Theatre. He ensured that London ‘bobbies’ patrolled the mean streets of Palermo, countering the resurgent actions of the Mafia. He also restored the carabinieri to full force, knowing that they would be the best weapon in fighting organised crime, as it filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the Fascist state.
Increasingly, Young saw his role as a high-concept thinker and, in 1946, he wrote: ‘I hold the view that the police organisation is not a police force but a police service.’ It was a view he would take to Malaya.
More promotion followed, as Young became an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and then, in 1950, Comissioner of the Police of the City of London. As always, he worked hard to improve the pay and conditions of his officers and was rewarded with a high degree of popularity within the ranks. His dedication to improving the quality and performance of police officers meant that he was parachuted into various short-term posts abroad, as Britain dealt with the realities of its declining post-war status. In 1950, he established a blueprint for the police in the Gold Coast, the first British territory in Africa to be granted independence. Then came Malaya.
Regardless of fumbling his first days in Singapore, Young had a great talent for self-publicity and it was his desire to improve the public profile of the police in Malaya that informed much of his strategy for the Emergency. He laid out this vision straight away at a meeting in Johore Bharu early in 1952 and an officer present recorded the reaction of his comrades:
The main gist of what he said was that he wanted to bring about a change in the outlook of the police and that the police should present themselves as ‘friends of the people’ in the same way as the police did in Britain. Many of us thought that while this might be suitable for London and we would have a go to support him, the situation we faced in Malaya was quite different from Britain’s.
To begin with, the police were being shot at by communist guerrillas – not an everyday occurrence in Piccadilly Circus. The officers present at the meeting considered themselves more in the position of front-line soldiers, and the crimes they faced were politically motivated. ‘The overall impression he gave us,’ said one Special Branch officer, ‘was that he intended to attach importance to restoring police discipline, place more emphasis on conventional police work and change the public image of the police from that of a “force” to a “service”.’ The same words he had used six years earlier. After delivering a speech lasting 15 minutes, Young left the meeting without inviting any questions. He didn’t want any.
Young’s approach was to normalise the relationship between the police and civilians. In the early years of the Emergency, the police force had swollen to seven times its normal size and become mainly a paramilitary force, engendering fear in the civilian population. Young split the front-line force into two, with fighting units deployed to combat the guerrillas in villages and jungle, while the rest reverted to peacetime duties. In Operation Service, beginning in December 1952, the Malayan police re-branded themselves as friends of the people. The title ‘Force’ was dropped, replaced by ‘Service’; police officers wore cap badges showing two hands clasped in friendship; and they no longer carried rifles or automatic weapons in city streets, but holstered pistols. Even police headquarters were called ‘stations’, rather than the traditional ‘handcuff houses’.
In reality, Young’s public-relations exercise could not and would not change strongly held prejudices among the Malayan Chinese, but it did herald a new efficiency. Behind the scenes, significant changes were made in the police intelligence-gathering departments. Special Branch was separated from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), giving it an enhanced status and allowing it to pursue political and security matters in its own way, separate from investigating non-Emergency crime.
‘It was important that the status and duties of Special Branch as the national Security and Intelligence Organisation should be made crystal clear to all concerned,’ said Jack Morton, its Director of Intelligence. ‘This was done by giving it a Charter which was promulgated by Director of Operations Instruction to all Heads of Departments and Services. It was laid down that none but the Special Branch should run Secret Agents and that Security Intelligence from any source should be channelled to Special Branch at the appropriate level. Special Branch was also designated the authority for the administration and exploitation of defectors and prisoners.’
Even military intelligence officers were seconded into Special Branch and worked alongside police investigators on operations to subvert the will of the communist guerrillas. One excellent example of this ensnared Kim Soong, a guerrilla commander and committee member of the Communist Party. He had a price on his head and had wanted, for some time, to surrender, but he dared not indicate his change of mind. Always accompanied by two bodyguards, he would have to give them the slip, otherwise they would happily execute him as an imperialist agent.
Kim Soong’s opportunity to escape came when he set out with his bodyguards to establish contact with another guerrilla camp. British security forces had put pressure on his food supplies and his followers faced starvation. With good reason, he marched off into the jungle to get help from other communist comrades, accompanied by his bodyguards. At some point, isolated in the midst of the thick undergrowth, Kim turned on his guards and killed them. He then made his way to a British base to give himself up.
‘Thanks to an alert Field Intelligence Officer with the local military unit, and good briefing by Special Branch, Kim Soong was immediately identified,’ recalled Morton, ‘and the importance of his position properly assessed. It being established by the recovery of the corpses of his bodyguard that his camp must still be in ignorance of his defection, authority was immediately given to attack it. Kim Soong showed the way and every man in that camp was duly liquidated.’
By expert use of police intelligence, Kim Soong was turned into a key asset and sent back into the jungle to make contact with other guerrilla camps. ‘He was suitably briefed with a good cover story and contact arrangements were made to enable him to furnish secret intelligence,’ said Morton. ‘He proved very valuable indeed until the time came to bring him out. He later proved to be a first-class interrogator at the Special Interrogation Centre at Special Branch Headquarters.’
It was, however, a constant game of cat and mouse, and not all undercover agents survived to tell the tale. A Special Branch report described the fate of one officer caught on the streets of S
ingapore:
MCP terrorists shot and killed a male Hylam [‘houseboy’] at 8.45am in one of the busiest roads in the City – Kallang Road – and left pamphlets on his body denouncing him by name as a traitor. This is the first occasion in Singapore upon which such denunciation documents have been used. They were cyclostyled [stencil copied] in large characters.
A few days later, a Chinese detective serving with CID was shot and seriously wounded in Singapore. As he lay on the ground, his handcuffs and revolver were stolen from him. At first, it was thought he might have been punished for his involvement with a Triad gang, but cartridge cases recovered at the scene identified his assailants’ guns as the same as those used in the previous murder.
The communists were adept at placing their own agents among the civilian population and one intelligence report described a warning system inside government resettlement camps in Johore:
MCP supporters inside the camps arrange signals which will warn the bandits of the presence of Security Forces. By day the signal is the display of a red blanket, and the beating of latex buckets. By night the signal is the display of three lighted joss sticks near the perimeter wire. When the Security Forces have moved away, and the bandits can approach, five joss sticks are displayed.