by Harper, Tim
Colonial society armed itself. Most planters were veterans of at least one war, and some had special forces experience. Managers purchased large stocks of war materials on the open market and created elaborate defences of trenches, barbed wire, floodlights and traps of broken glass. One cook took the Emergency so seriously that he served only military rations of bully beef and tea. The wealthier estates hired small private armies. American miners played a leading role in armament. At Kampar in the Kinta valley, Ira Phelps, a Mormon employee of Pacific Tin, made armour from the remains of Japanese tanks on local battlefields to create Dodge weapons carriers. There were plenty of carbines available to the police, but precious little ammunition for them. Most of what existed had been acquired from the communists themselves. Pacific Tin offered to make clip magazines for the police in return for the arming of its British and US engineers. The chairman of Anglo-Oriental flew in guns from Sydney and Bangkok on Pan-Am. This gave a boost to the underground arms trade with Indonesia.90 The unvarying routine of estate life became more disciplined than ever, although individual managers had to constantly vary their movements to reduce the risk of ambush on the dangerous estate roads. Many believed that a popular manager would not be shot, but often popular men were killed by gangs passing through. By 1949, 745 planters and miners had honorary police rank. This gave them unprecedented powers over their workforce. One planter in Pahang later recounted firing in the dark at a moving light to enforce a curfew: ‘The next day, to my horror, we found that an elderly estate labourer had been seriously wounded. He had been breaking the curfew to collect some stored samsu [distilled toddy] from a cache in preparation for his daughter’s wedding celebrations the following day.’91 The upcountry clubs were a strange vista of Sten guns and stengahs, the staple whisky and soda.92 ‘Those were the days is heard frequently in up-country clubs’, reported The Times, ‘as the pistol-belt is buckled around the expansiveness of middle age, and the sten gun is disentangled from handbags and children’s toys’. Some of the older planters disliked it, ‘as much as they did the carrying of parcels in the streets of pre-war London’.93 But it became an indelible image of the war, especially as glamorized by Jack Hawkins and a rather over-dressed Claudette Colbert in the 1952 movie The Planter’s Wife.
The European business lobby capitalized on this attention to argue for more men and stronger measures for Malaya. Morale was soon strained by MCP attacks on Europeans. In Selangor, in July, there were ambushes of planters’ families as they evacuated, in which a child died. This may well have been a reprisal for the five Chinese women who were killed with Liew Yao earlier in the same week. In one incident, on 7 August at Telok Sangat in southeast Johore, the European manager, H. M. Rice, was shot in front of his wife and daughter while watching a cinema show on his estate. His body was burned in the cinema hall. His special constables were unable to resist up to sixty armed fighters. The Malay workforce was paraded and told by the guerrillas that they need not be afraid of Europeans any more. Rice’s wife and daughter fled into the jungle; six constables and estate workers were injured. The isolation was enervating. Although Telok Sangat was a mere eight miles from Changi on Singapore island as the crow flew, the nearest town in Johore, Kota Tinggi, was two hours away by river.94 Other attacks occurred on estates very close to Kuala Lumpur. Planters in the old FMS Bar in Ipoh ran a sweepstake on who would be next. Planters were departing on home leave with no intention of returning, the industry warned that production would break down, and that all control over their labour forces would be lost. Thirteen European planters were killed between May and October 1948, but only five between November and April 1949, and none in the six months following that. In early August 1948 forty KMT members were killed by the MCP. Chinese businessmen asked the British if they could arm themselves, as did the Europeans, but to no avail. As one later remarked, ‘I too could have been a hero with such protection.’95 Throughout the Emergency it was Malayans who, least well-defended, suffered most of the casualties.
To restore its authority and to boost public confidence, the government’s first response to the Sungei Siput murders was to arm itself with draconian powers. The Emergency Regulations allowed for detention without trial for up to one year, later extended to two. All but capital offences were to be tried in camera. The death penalty was reinstated for possession of arms, including possession of fireworks, which guerrillas might turn into explosives. The police were given powers to impose curfews and controls on movement and food. All newspapers had to obtain a government permit. Even cinema was restricted: gangster films were withdrawn on the grounds that they glamorized violence, and also, it was reported, A Tale ofTwo Cities, because it portrayed a revolution.96 These actions marked the final end of the Malayan Spring. Over fifty years later many of the measures still remained on the statute book. One of the most far-reaching initiatives was the registration of the population. For many it was a first direct contact with government – literally so, in the taking of fingerprints. But also it gave citizens individual identities: for the first time it recorded the names and numerous aliases customarily adopted by the Malayan Chinese. The task was accomplished surprisingly quickly; by the end of the year a twenty-mile belt along the Thai frontier was registered – significantly it was Chinese only who were registered first – and the entire island of Penang.97 Less than three years after its virtual collapse, the state was taking on unprecedented new functions.
These were dangerous powers and in the early days of the Emergency they were wielded with uncompromising ferocity. As J. B. Williams in the Colonial Office warned in mid August, there was a real danger of ‘allowing our regime to become purely one of repression. This was, after all, the final tragedy of our rule in Palestine.’98 But it was again to Palestine that London looked for leadership in Malaya. Even before Gent’s departure there had been a good deal of discussion of his successor in private. Among the names canvassed was the recent chief secretary in Palestine, Sir Henry ‘Jimmy’ Gurney. When consulted by Creech Jones, MacDonald had not been impressed. He felt that local opinion would demand an old Malaya hand or a major public figure; certainly this was the view of the planting community (‘Give us Monty’). But Gurney had proved his ability to work with the military and was respected for his even-handed approach to communal issues. This was precisely the problem for Malay leaders when the news was broken to them: the constant analogy with Palestine troubled them deeply and they feared Gurney would treat the Chinese as a kind of Jewish Agency. Creech Jones prevailed, but Gurney did not arrive until 1 October. A slight man of fifty, he had more panache than his predecessor – even at the height of the Palestine crisis, he was a contributor to Punch magazine – but possessed a mandarin manner which alienated many people. He was overshadowed by the vivacity of MacDonald, who had no direct responsibility for fighting the communists, and the martial drive of his successor, General Gerald Templer, who was given far more powers than Gurney. But two lessons of the Middle East shaped Gurney’s approach in Malaya: a need to prevent the deterioration of the ethnic situation that could create ‘another Palestine’ and the need to keep the war in Malaya a civilian conflict. He resisted firmly calls for martial law.99 A religious man who understood the power of communism, Gurney’s first months in Malaya were overshadowed by the heavy hand of oppression.
The army chiefs were confident that the threat could easily and quickly be countered. Even MacDonald forecast that the Emergency might be over by September. The new military commander, a Gurkha officer from India, Major General Charles Boucher, was ebullient. ‘I can tell you’, he announced, ‘this is by far the easiest problem I have ever tackled. In spite of the appalling country, and ease with which he can hide, the enemy is far weaker in technique and courage than either the Greek or Indian reds.’100 He fought communism as if it were a set of skirmishes on the North West Frontier. In particular large ‘sweeps’ were set in train to dislodge guerrillas, followed through with air-force raids to break morale and to flush the enemy into the
open. These were unsuccessful. Commanders were later to learn that it needed a thousand hours of patrolling to eliminate one guerrilla.101 The British did, however, begin to experiment with specialist private armies. Veterans of Force 136–many of whom had returned to Malaya as district officers, policemen and planters – formed themselves into what were called ‘Ferret Forces’. The leading figures were John Davis and Richard Broome, the ‘Dum’ and ‘Dee’ who during the war had liaised with Chin Peng, a man who was, Davis remarked, ‘my greatest ally and who has always, I believe, remained a good friend’.102 These kinds of forces had the merit of being easy to dissolve should they become controversial. The use of Dyak trackers from Sarawak caused a press sensation; the reaction of the Daily Worker was hysterical: ‘The Labour Government policy requires for successful operation the participation of man-eating, primitive savages…’ Eventually in Malaya, as Broome later put it, ‘the whole army became “ferretized”’.103 The objective was to bring the guerrillas out of the jungle and to a fixed battle. In 1954 this strategy would also be pursued by the French against the Viet Minh, and culminate in defeat at Dien Bien Phu, but the communists in Malaya were never put to this test.
Men like Davis and Broome drew upon their deep knowledge of the MPAJA but, in general, British understanding of Chinese society in Malaya was either very rudimentary or very out-of-date, and distorted by racial prejudice. A stock view was that the Chinese were a busy and conspiratorial people, more interested in money than in politics, and responsive chiefly to intimidation and force. As a specialist of the old Chinese Protectorate put it: the heart of Chinese society was ‘the secret society complex’.104 These sage saws were drawn upon by the new high commissioner, Henry Gurney, and shaped his approach to countering terrorism. In one of his first despatches to Creech Jones, Gurney wrote that ‘it is universally agreed here that the support which [the communists] get is almost wholly through intimidation and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as “popular”… The truth is the Chinese are accustomed to acquiesce to pressure.’105 The British continually played down the political roots of the rebellion. This encouraged the view, prevalent in mid 1948, that a show of force against ‘bad hats’ would be enough to restore the situation. The cannier officials were aware that the government had no understanding of what the ordinary Chinese men and women were thinking. Many lamented the demise of the Protectorate and the local knowledge that had been lost in the war. Eighteen months into the Emergency, of the 256 Malayan Civil Service officers, only 23 had passed the Chinese-language exams and 16 were learning it. The main consequence of this, a group of Chinese specialists in Singapore argued, was that the Chinese were still almost wholly disconnected from government and possessed a deep-rooted aversion to authority and avoided it when they could. ‘They are bewildered and because the British have failed once they are afraid that they may fail again.’106
This had tragic consequences. Under the terms of the Emergency Regulations, aversion or evasion implied guilt. Few military operations took Chinese interpreters with them. In November the rules were amended to allow a chief police officer to declare ‘special areas’ in which anyone called to stop and be searched, and who failed to do so, might be shot.107 The designation of the war as an ‘anti-bandit campaign’ did not help understanding. In the lexicon of empire, ‘banditry’ was a catch-all word for evil; it criminalized the communists, and the Chinese community as a whole, and this did not encourage officials, soldiers or policeman to reflect on the social and political issues that were at stake, or to make distinctions between degrees of guilt and innocence.108 It encouraged in professional soldiers contempt for the adversary, and a tendency to underestimate his tenacity and intelligence. For the conscript, it was a recipe for fear and perplexity. As one recalled: ‘No one appeared to be quite sure of the size of the problem or where the danger was coming from. Many of us couldn’t tell the difference between Malays and Chinese and it was all very confusing.’109 This was the first time British regular forces had engaged in jungle fighting in the Malayan terrain. (The war of 1941–2 had not been a forest campaign.) It was, for many, a nightmarish experience. The British soldiers in the front line were often ill trained and inexperienced, and they were up against hardened, bloodied veterans. Chin Peng described his first close encounter with British troops, at Ayer Kuning in Perak in July. His own men had been strafed from the air and, with a Dakota circling above, the troops were searching and burning the long grass to draw out the communists. ‘They were’, he remarked, ‘very white and very young.’ They never discovered Chin Peng, who slipped by them during a cloudburst.110
THE ROAD TO BATANG KALI
Chin Peng was in Ayer Kuning to pick up an escort to take him to safety. He had spent the first days of the Emergency holed up in a house in Ipoh. Hidden in the back of a biscuit delivery van, he moved to a village in the Sungei Manik area of Perak to meet with Perak units to discuss the situation. The communist high command was non-existent. His deputy, Yeung Kuo, was in Selangor and plans for a Central Committee meeting had to be set aside. The MCP’s military objectives were, as Chin Peng admitted, very vague at this stage. The immediate goal was to create a command post in Pahang as a prelude to the creation of two ‘base areas’, one in the north and one in the south. But while he was with the Perak commanders, word came by courier from the other senior Party leaders that they now recommended concentrating resources in a fully ‘liberated area’ in the north. This was a classic Maoist strategy based on the fabled Yenan liberated area in China. As a result, Chin Peng’s party, including eighty Malays and twenty Indians, moved out of the area to Bidor and then into the Cameron Highlands. He was back in the neutral jungle of his Force 136 days.
MCP units had mobilized on a state-by-state basis, as planned, but, lacking common objectives, many now launched operations on their own initiative. The most dramatic was a dawn attack by five groups of guerrillas on Batu Arang colliery on 13 July. Five men – including three Kuomintang figures – were identified and killed, the Kuala Lumpur train was held up and its passengers robbed. Demolition parties damaged excavation equipment and generators. Around fifty fighters were involved and the whole incident lasted less than a hour. The government was deeply alarmed when the mine demanded compensation.111 This set the pattern for the first weeks: labour contractors and others were executed and there were arson attacks on industrial buildings. There were also assaults on remote police stations. One incident at Langkap in Perak involved around 100 fighters. It was the most intense firefight of the Emergency, in which the guerrillas loosed over 2,000 rounds of ammunition.112 Although there were incidents in most states, Kajang in Selangor, the area where Liew Yao had been killed, was a centre of activity. These attacks gave a sense of an impressive underground organization, but made overall co-ordination of the campaign difficult.
But at a key crossroads of the central range there took place an incident that would prove to be a decisive military encounter of the Emergency. Ulu Kelantan was an isolated area of Chinese settlement high upriver in the northeastern state of Kelantan, one of the oldest Chinese settlements in Malaya. During the war it had been a battleground for rival Kuomintang and MPAJA forces. The area was a plausible site for a liberated area for the MCP. It backed onto the Thai frontier, and there was a profitable cross-border traffic to be taxed. It was not easily accessed by the British: the east-coast railway had gone out of action in the war and services had not been reestablished. Yet, with the jungle communication network the Party had constructed during the war, it had the potential to be a command centre for the various units working in the different states.113 The guerrilla commanders began to focus their thoughts on the small town of Gua Musang, and it began to seem like an insurgent’s El Dorado. It was the railhead of the old east-coast line, but to reach it from the state capital, Kota Bahru, was forty-four miles by road, and then eight to ten hours by river. A major operation was planned. The main forces were to come from battalions from the ‘model’ 5t
h Perak Regiment of the MPAJA, now renamed the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-British Army. A large party of guerrillas moved across the watershed in north Pahang to create a 12th Regiment in west Kelantan. And with other units from Perak, there were around 600–700 guerrillas concentrated in Kelantan, including men who were to become the MPABA’s chief commanders.114 Such a large concentration of men could not be kept together for long; the problems of supplying it were immense.
But they had anyway arrived too late. The Battle of Gua Musang had already between fought and lost. Local MCP men in the nearby Party stronghold of Pulai had seen the opportunity. In Gua Musang itself there was a garrison of only fourteen men in a reinforced police post and they had no radio contact with the outside world. A village headman in Pulai had been given a bicycle by the government to get a message quickly to Gua Musang in the event of trouble with communists in the Pulai area, but when the attack came, in early July, many villagers from Pulai joined it, including the headman himself. They had been told that Kuala Lumpur had fallen to the communists and that this was merely a mopping-up operation. They first captured the police inspector, but he managed to escape to the police post to rally its defenders. He was persuaded to surrender when it was suggested to him by his sergeant that grenades could be lobbed into the post from a huge limestone outcrop that towered over the town. The defenders were then each given $20 and a cup of coffee by the victorious guerrillas. The first British army relief party was pushed back, but the second forced the guerrillas to retire into the jungle, together with villagers. The final attack was supported by RAF Spitfires. The villagers believed that they were from liberating Chinese armies, until they were strafed by them.115 The communists had held their liberated area for five days.