by Harper, Tim
On 16 July a British police patrol located some suspects in an isolated hut two miles southeast of Kajang in Selangor. As they approached, a woman gave the alarm. Three men ran from the hut. The police opened fire and two of them were killed. One of them – shot in the forehead – was the military commander of the MPAJA, Liew Yao: he was thirty years old, a former schoolteacher, and just two years previously he had led the Malayan contingent at the Second World War victory parade in London. The police moved into the hut and arrested six women and tied them up outside, then set fire to the hut. Suddenly there was a counter-attack by a party of thirty to fifty guerrillas. Five of the bound women were killed in the crossfire: one of them was Liew Yao’s wife. Four more guerrillas died in the shoot-out. The attackers dispersed only when the police began to shout in Malay, ‘Here come the Gurkhas!’65 A number of papers were recovered, including a diary. It described the arrests on 20 June, and Liew Yao’s retreat into a rubber estate: ‘the first time sleeping in the open after Jap[anese] surrender. It gives thoughts for future policy, for improvements to the Vanguard newspaper and military training.’ On the night of 22 June the author reached an old haunt: ‘Met an old woman who was my neighbour. I saw her kind face in the moonlight: her presence always gives me fortitude and the feeling the people are always with us. Her eldest son was in the MPAJA and he died a heroic death. Her other sons have grown up, and the older of the two has joined up. She is the mother of the people.’ He met an armed section the next day, ‘enthusiastic and friendly youths more or less twenty years, and full of energy. They have a bright future!’ The next days were spent fining Kuomintang elements and recruiting school students. On 29 June he witnessed a British raid on a hamlet at Sungei Jelok. ‘Well! Treat it as a practice for retreat.’66
There was another diary, this written by a woman, Tung Lai Chong of Amoy Street in Singapore’s Chinatown. The entry for 6 July reads:
At about 2 p.m. I received a note from Wah requesting me to go up immediately. I am happy and only feel a bit uneasy when I think of mother. However, there is no time for me to hesitate now. Nothing can change my mind except to say sorry to mother as I must fulfil my promise to serve for the freedom of the people in Malaya. So, at about 4 p.m., after my meal, I bid goodbye to my house people. At five, I reach the paradise of liberty. Henceforth, I have to lead a camp life. It is a hard one, but I have confidence in it. I can endure the hardship. At night, we have to sleep in the open air.
There were three women with her. ‘We love each other’, she reported the next day, ‘and the boys do try their best to help us.’ On 8 July they heard that the area was ‘occupied by the enemy’, and they removed to the rubber estates. On 10 July three of the gang went out to ‘hit the “dogs”’; they struck one down. The group moved to a safer place. The last entry was for 13 July: ‘Many of our comrades say that I am losing weight. Yes, it is true. I think it is because of the effect of the kind of life I am leading now. I have no worry here, except at night, when we fear that the enemy might come and attack us.’ It is very probable that Tung Lai Chong perished with Liew Yao in the firefight on 16 July.67
The man who led the attack on Liew Yao, with his ‘killer squad’ of twenty Chinese detectives dressed in black, was Superintendent Bill Stafford, a former stoker with the Royal Navy in the Far East, who had turned policeman in Hong Kong, and had been parachuted behind the lines many times during the Burma war. His trademark was the revolver slung under each armpit, and he was photographed in Time Life, complete with bandoleer and Sten gun. He slept in a mirrored room with a handgun under his pillow. His maxim was ‘the only good communist is a dead communist’. To the Chinese he was Tin Sau-pah – ‘The Iron Broom’. He had found Liew Yao on a tip from his barber.68 Police methods were tough. There were reports of beatings and the settling of old scores. One member of the Singapore Special Branch, Ahmad Khan, described the interrogation of one of the first suspects to be pulled in, an Indian. He had been grilled for a month in Kuala Lumpur, then Ahmad Khan was sent for. After spending twenty-fours hours with him in Kuala Lumpur, he took him to the isolated hill town of Kuala Kubu Bahru to unnerve him and break him down. A successful interrogator, he maintained, found out all there was to know about a suspect: ‘his attachments, whether he loves his mother or father or wife… Whether he is a truly family man or is not interested in family life. Whether he is a drunkard. Whether he likes money. You have to find out first the weak points in him. Then you can later press him on his weak points.’ Then ‘mentally you overpower him…72 hours I worked without sleep, without proper food, without a wash, 72 hours continuously.’ The man broke and a series of offensive operations were mounted on the back of it.69 It was to become a curiously intimate war. The MCP lost a number of key leaders in this way, and, as in the time of Lai Teck, double agents were played back into the ranks of the guerrillas.
Operation Frustration was a catalyst to MCP recruitment. For ex-MPAJA members who fell into the hands of the police the likelihood of banishment to China was very strong. It was a widely held belief, supported by evidence from the newspapers, that those banished were immediately arrested and killed by the Kuomintang regime. Sympathizers reasoned that it was better to die fighting in Malaya. The mood of terror deepened as the British moved in on the squatter communities. When the British began to interrogate guerrillas in large numbers, they discovered that over 50 per cent of them had gone into the jungle through fear of arrest by the security forces.70 The fact of colonial suppression – ‘the criminal war created by the British Imperialists’ – lay at the heart of MCP justifications for violence. In the words of one of its first manifestos: ‘Only through such a war can democracy and freedom be achieved, the livelihood of the people be improved and the national economy developed… It is a national revolutionary, a progressive and sacred war.’71 At ‘Camp Malaya’ at the village of Lubuk Kawah in Pahang, the Malay leaders assembled there faced a stark choice. Shamsiah Fakeh argued that she went into the forest because there seemed no further opportunity for democratic and open politics through which to continue her struggle. It was a choice between the forest and a British jail: ‘all other roads were already closed’.72
The British had effectively removed an entire political generation from the scene. The arrests extended well beyond the MCP and its satellites. Ahmad Boestamam knew from the moment he heard the news of the Emergency that he would be taken in. He was working cutting scrub on a rubber holding in his home village in Perak when he was arrested on 1 July. His detention would last seven years. The arrest of the president of the Malay Nationalist Party, Ishak Haj Muhammad, became a new cause célèbre. As he wrote from jail, ‘I wish to say that since the Emergency started; I felt that I have been used and I am still being used as a scapegoat to instil fear and create prejudice towards the Malay Nationalist Party, and consequently to discourage thousands of Malays from trying to assert their rights in the land of their forefathers and thereby continue to be a mute and maltreated community.’73
Other voices were silenced: the leaders of the Hizbul Muslimin, including Ustaz Abu Bakar and Ustaz Abdul Rab Tamini, were also arrested, and some religious schools had to close because of a shortage of teachers. A further sweep in Krian the following year saw 107 more arrests of Malays. This distorted political life for many years. Many saw in this the hidden hand of Dato Onn. As Boestamam put it: ‘A vacuum naturally resulted in the Malayan political arena. This vacuum was quickly filled by UMNO, the one organization that remained legal at the time…’74 Years later there were those on the Malay left who argued that the communist Emergency was manufactured by the British to allow for a crackdown on the radical Malay nationalism that was perhaps a much more potent long-term threat to British interests.75
Some of the well-to-do radicals of the Malayan Democratic Union were forewarned of their arrest. Philip Hoalim was told by a Chinese legislative councillor in Kuala Lumpur to take a long cruise around the world. He now realized that some of his colleagues were deeply involved
with the communists. To protect its surviving members, the MDU was dissolved in late June. Two of its younger activists were boyhood friends from Johore, and students in the elite Raffles’ College. William Kuok Kock Ling came from a prosperous and well-connected family – his younger brother, Robert, would become the richest man in Southeast Asia – but he had been active in the Malayan Democratic Union from the outset. Dato Onn, a friend of his family, warned him that he was to be picked up, and advised him to leave the country. ‘This is my country,’ Kuok responded, and took to the forest. His friend James Puthucheary had an early and dramatic political awakening, as a middle-class volunteer in the Indian National Army. He fought at Imphal, and there witnessed the price of anti-colonial struggle: he was the only one of his platoon to survive. After the war he had hidden in Bose’s Calcutta home for several months and taken in the heady mood of liberation in the city. But when he returned to Malaya in 1948 he was faced with a three-way choice between exile, detention and the underground. His friends invited him to join them in the jungle. As he explained in a political testimony in 1957, written in a British jail: ‘One is always drawn by the desire to fight colonialism and the urge to join up with those who are fighting hardest is irresistible. It often appears that to refuse to join such allies is to be dishonest to one’s anti-colonial principles. But in such an alliance one is always tormented by the fundamental differences one has with one’s allies.’76 William Kuok was killed by the security forces in 1953–as Lim Hong Bee wrote many years later – ‘his body desecrated by men who could probably not tell the difference between Dostoevsky and a doughnut or an iambic from a tropical itch’.77 Some of those caught up in the white terror of 1948 and after would survive to play a part in national life. But many did not. The Emergency extorted a high toll in political talent. For this reason, many felt an enduring resentment at what the MCP had done. The Party, as much as the British, had refused to allow a free trade unionism to strengthen and mature. It had betrayed the political hopes of the Malayan Spring. In Hoalim’s words: ‘Now the precipitate action of the Communist Party to violence had brought to an end our effort for national unity and democracy for a new Malayan nation, as it was plain that the Emergency would not allow genuine democratic activity to continue until the Communists had been defeated. How long this would take was uncertain.’78
STEN GUNS AND STENGAHS
For some time the British remained unsure as to what exactly they were fighting in Malaya. The first written report to the cabinet on 1 July blamed ‘gangsters’ for the violence. ‘The trouble is almost certainly Communist-instigated,’ Creech Jones argued, ‘though direct connection between the gangsters and the Communist Party cannot always be traced.’ This remained the position when the cabinet first discussed the crisis on 13 July. It was not until 19 July that the Labour government, at Malcolm MacDonald’s urging, accepted that the MCP should be banned. On 23 July the MCP, the MPAJA Ex-Comrade’s Association, the New Democratic Youth League and PETA were all outlawed. But even at this stage Attlee personally amended the parliamentary statement to make it clear that the decision was taken on the basis of MacDonald’s personal assessment, in order to distance his ministers from it. Creech Jones believed that success in Malaya was ‘a vital step in the “Cold War” against communism in the East’ and MacDonald’s public statements spoke of the ‘hand of Moscow and the rule of gun and knife’. But the search for hard evidence of a Moscow-directed ‘plot’ dragged on for many years.79
The British were also unsure as to what to call the guerrillas. MacDonald caused panic by referring to them as ‘insurgents’ in a radio broadcast. This threatened the insurance cover for the estates and mines; they were protected against ‘riot and civil commotion’, but not ‘rebellion or insurrection’. Above all, officials were desperate to avoid any words ‘which might suggest a genuine popular uprising’.80 The Gurkhas in the front line called the guerrillas alternately ‘Congress’, or daku, dacoit.81 The British settled on ‘bandit’. This had a ‘fine minatory ring’, but it was also an ambiguous term. The Japanese had described the MPAJA as ‘bandits’ during the war. It conferred on the MCP the glamour of the people’s resistance and invoked the Robin Hood figures of Chinese folklore. The rhetoric of Cold War brushed aside these semantic niceties. By 1952 the guerrillas were termed ‘Communist terrorists’ – ‘CT’ in more clinical usage – and it was axiomatic that the Malayan Emergency was an arm of the global Soviet conspiracy. But the underlying anxiety persisted. In the words of a senior mandarin, Sir Thomas Lloyd: ‘The dividing line between the terrorist and the fighter for freedom is not always so clear in the minds of the outside world or the people of the terrorists’ own country.’82
In June 1948 Malaya was not well defended. The acting head of government, Sir Alex Newboult, an old Malayan hand, was chronically short of manpower. There were ten infantry battalions in Malaya, but the Gurkha units that had been shipped to Malaya in 1947 were under strength and not fully trained. There were very few British troops: a battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the 26th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery and 1 Battalion Seaforth Highlanders; with 1 Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment in Singapore. The commanding officer in Malaya, General Ashton Wade, saw that his forces were inadequate and petitioned the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Neil Ritchie, for two infantry divisions. Ritchie demurred: ‘I can’t possibly ask Monty [then Chief of the Imperial General Staff] for anything like that’, he told Wade. ‘He’s hard put enough as it is with events in Germany and elsewhere.’83 The entire British army was overstretched. With 400,000 men in arms there was difficulty in supplying a single brigade for Malaya, but such was the gravity of the situation that the elite Guards brigade was sent, troops who had been originally earmarked for Germany. This was the first time the Guards would see service in the empire in peacetime. However, the troops were not available for operations until early December. In the interim, MacDonald gently enquired about the possibility of troops from Australia. It was out of the question, he was told: the Australian trade unions who had so successfully blockaded supplies for the British intervention in Indonesia would never allow it.84
The police and planters formed the front line. Yet there were only around 12,000 police available in Malaya in mid 1948. Virtually none of them had received any training since the Japanese occupation, and they were sent on operations in peacetime khaki and heavy boots, with Lee Enfield rifles dating from around 1917. The force moved at a slow pace. Police headquarters still closed at six each evening and for the weekends. Rural police stations began to fortify themselves, but they had no wireless communications and a number were overrun in the first weeks of fighting. The telephone lines were immediately declared insecure, and planters’ wives were hurriedly trained to operate the exchanges. The British turned to the Malay community for more recruits. Within the first month of the Emergency 25,000 men came forward to join a special constabulary. This voluntary, uniformed force was overwhelmingly Malay, and it bore some of the heaviest casualties of the war: thirty-seven were killed in 1948, just eight fewer than died serving with the regular police. In addition to this, by October, there were 12,000 more auxiliary police, again mostly Malay ‘kampong guards’. In late 1951 the number had risen to nearly 100,000. Their level of training varied; most units were short of guns and few men had fired them. When the weapons were fired many failed to go off, not least because the ammunition, five rounds per man, was mostly stamped’34 or ’36. Most of these guards went to European estates; the government would not risk giving arms to the Chinese businesses.85 The Kuomintang office in Singapore urged young Chinese to join the police and in Kuala Lumpur Chinese towkays offered to form special police units. But it would be many months before the British agreed to harness the military resources of the Kuomintang to the anti-communist cause in Malaya.86 Meanwhile Malay political leaders demanded a return for their community for their commitment.
One of the first acts of the Labour government was to turn to veterans
of Britain’s other imperial emergency: Palestine. This was a controversial move. In his last days, Gent had opposed it: his local officers had been confident that they had enough police to meet the challenge. But a former commissioner of police in Palestine, Nicol Gray, was sent to inspect policing in Malaya and was persuaded to stay on as commissioner of police there. His appointment, and the over 500 Palestine police sergeants who came with him, added further divisions to a police force torn by the resentments of war and internment. There were resignations and retirements, including that of John Dalley. The new arrivals placed the local system of apostolic succession in promotions in jeopardy and challenged old methods. Nicol Gray’s paramilitary approach was deeply unpopular and the Palestinian sergeants acquired a brutish reputation. In the disdainful words of one senior Malay official, ‘They kept Chinese women as mistresses and spent most of their time drinking.’87 It was true that they broke many of the codes of pre-war empire and this exposed the class snobbery of colonial society. Once again, European clubs in Singapore excluded men in uniform. These tensions were later satirized in the tragicomic form of Nabby Adams in the 1959 novel Time for a Tiger. The Somerset Maugham epoch was giving way to the Anthony Burgess era. The new arrivals were welcomed by the planters, not least for their training of special constables. Many lost their lives. They were part of a broader influx of new blood into colonial society. Many new police recruits were recently demobbed national servicemen who had seen a glimpse of the colonial good life and were determined to enjoy it themselves. Others were adventurers who had not settled to peace and civilian life: ‘There were infantry officers, Air Force pilots, Royal Navy frogmen, Commandos, Paras and Force 136; all ranks from Lt/Col down…’88 Their conditions of life were a long way from what was promised; they were often cooped up in fenced compounds in remote areas, often without electricity or company, and the casualty rate was high. One of the basic rules of self-preservation was to ‘Go to the biggest village in your area and run up a large bill for food and grog with the largest Chinese shopkeeper, always keep your account in debit. He, the shopkeeper, might see you as an investment and do his best to keep you alive.’89