by Harper, Tim
For a colonial society still obsessed by prestige, there was the perennial problem of how to keep in line thousands of poor whites whose very presence transgressed the racial code. Handbooks of military Malay marked out the boundaries: ‘By a Malay, or by a Malay speaking Asian, the European male is addressed as “TOO-AN”… Master.’36 But the new arrivals discovered that few of the expatriates they were there to protect would have anything to do with them socially. The planters upcountry were more hospitable, but most of the clubs in Singapore were barred to men in uniform. A functional Britannia Club was built opposite the opulent Raffles Hotel, to keep soldiers out of trouble. But the native city had a compelling lure. Kuala Lumpur was invaded by serviceman as never before. Police lieutenants held wakes for fallen colleagues at Nanto’s on Batu Road; they would put up nearby at the Coliseum Hotel, which was, and still is, famous for its baked crab and steak. The bars and cafés thrived. As one Gurkha on military police detail remarked of British soldiers, ‘I had a lot of working to do to keep them apart on a Saturday night from their drunken fights and away from the brothels in Kuala Lumpur. I couldn’t understand why they were so worthless.’37
The soldiers lived at a remove from the locals. Leslie Thomas was later to recall that he did not once eat Chinese food during his tour of Malaya. Local businessmen catered to English tastes. The local stout, brewed by Carlsberg, was increasingly popular, and remains an enduring legacy of empire. For Alan Sillitoe, an RAF signaller, an evening out in George Town was ‘a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston café, then to see a film such as “Cato” or “Watch on the Rhine”, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights’.38 The cabarets were a rare opportunity to talk to local girls and to practise ‘bazaar’ Malay; the men paid 30 cents a ticket to dance with them for five minutes. The new sensation was the joget modern, a mixture of the samba, rumba and conga fused with the swaying local sound of the ronggeng. In Kuala Lumpur there were three joget ‘parties’, the ‘Sentosa’, the ‘Lucky’ and the ‘Chendramata Joget’ in Bukit Bintang amusement park. The star turns became famous; Rose Chan’s python dance was legendary. But the cabarets generated great moral unease. Girls as young as twelve were to be found working in them. Welfare officers campaigned to raise the minimum age to fifteen, in the hope that a girl would then be ‘quite robust to stand any strenuous job and is quite matured mentally to understand the tricks and traps laid out by a man in his attempt to spoil her morality’. It was at least, the argument went, an alternative to prostitution.39 The best-selling Malay novelist of the day, Ahmad Lufti, combined frank accounts of the fall of young women with a sharp moral and religious commentary. His novels were pornographic to some, but they portrayed an acute sense of the vulnerability of women who had since the war been forced to consort with soldiers, of ‘a courage stemmed from the torments of the devil’.40 Suicide was on the rise in Singapore, and an incidence of 31.2 per 1,000 was estimated in the entertainment industry, not least among dance hostesses.41
The war had now retreated from the towns, and the enemy was largely unseen. For British and Gurkha troops, the campaign was a succession of long, exhausting ‘jungle bashes’, broken by sudden, furious combat. In the dense undergrowth, adversaries might not spot each other until they were almost face to face. A Gurkha, Jasbahadur Limbu, described an encounter with a guerrilla: ‘We looked at each other. He did not have his weapon ready, but mine was. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. I then shot him dead…’42 But direct skirmishes constituted only 10 per cent of incidents in the early stages of the Emergency.43 The most deadly encounters were ambushes on the roads. An incident in Sungei Siput on 31 December 1948 was typical: a troop of A Squadron of the 4th Hussars, in three vehicles, was attacked by around seventy guerrillas. Of the nineteen British soldiers, seven were killed and nine wounded. In what was a chaotic firefight, the Hussars’ radio malfunctioned and they could not call for assistance. As the survivors tried to escape they saw the guerrillas firing lethal rounds into the wounded they had left behind.44 In 1949 the guerrillas killed 229 and wounded 247 security forces personnel. This sowed fear and dismay, but the communists failed to convert it into more substantial gains. On 1 February, in an attempt to claim patriotic legitimacy across all communities, the guerrilla force was renamed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).45 Its commanders still looked to create a ‘liberated area’ in the Pulai and Gua Musang region. Two fighting units around 200 strong, and one more 100 strong, were concentrated in the old resistance stronghold of the Cameron Highlands, where there were ready supplies from Chinese vegetable farmers who had colonized its elevated valleys. It was also Malaya’s most popular hill station; but now the roads up to it were designated ‘red routes’ and the few intrepid golfers needed military escorts to reach the fairways. At the same time the other large concentrations of guerrillas in Johore pressed northwards towards Tasek Bera in Pahang, a large inland lake that nestles at the southern end of the central range. This was the dead centre of the peninsula: a point from where the MNLA could launch diversionary attacks on the main north–south railway, and its northeastern branch line, while the northern force created a ‘little Yenan’ at the railhead at Gua Musang. In Party annals these treks would be known as ‘the little Long Marches’.
Both operations were aborted. Gurkha operations unsettled the Gua Musang area, and there was no repeat of the occupation of mid 1948. The tropical rainforest is sparse in natural provender and commanders faced acute difficulties in keeping large units together for more than a short period of time. The communists turned to the aborigines, the Orang Asli, for supplies, but they had little to give and the big battalions had to be broken up. The convergence on Tasek Bera failed for the same reason. Smaller bands of guerrillas were pushed deeper into the jungle interior and further from the villages. In the meantime Chin Peng had left the Cameron Highlands in December 1948 to fulfil his original objective of creating a Party military HQ in central Pahang. With a five-man bodyguard, he moved into the Kuala Lipis region, travelling about sixty miles as the crow flies towards Raub; but, finding his way blocked by the security forces, he then swung to the east and south to a place known as ‘Ten Milestone Village’, on the road just east of Mentekab. But such was the tortuous nature of forest communications that he arrived there only in May 1949. Half an hour’s trek from the road, a camp had been prepared for him, and he was reunited with his old friend and deputy, Yeung Kuo. The following month the full MCP Central Committee assembled for the first time since the declaration of the Emergency. A year had passed. The goal still remained a liberated area, but Party leaders now acknowledged that attacks on the British would have to be smaller in scale. The mood, however, was confident: ‘The more difficult or complicated the situation becomes’, Central’s new directive read, ‘the more our attacks should be positive and active in the sense of holding the initiative.’ And whilst Chin Peng was on the move, Chiang Kai Shek had fled to Taiwan and the armies of the Chinese Communist Party had entered Shanghai. The East was red.46
From February 1949 until the second half of the year there was a lull in the fighting, as the MCP began to build up its mass organization, the Min Yuen. Local units took on a multiplicity of forms, but their functions were similar. There were the unarmed ‘self-protection units’ – the collectors of food and subscriptions, the couriers and propagandists in the villages and towns; an armed ‘protection corps’ for industrial sabotage and small ambushes, and a spectrum of smaller Min Yuen committees or cells of sympathizers.47 Shopkeepers, kongsis and contractors would pay a cess to the Party; labourers would make subscriptions. A Min Yuen cadre was a higher grade position than that of a guerrilla fighter; a higher percentage of them were full Party members. This remained, in the words of a captured leader, ‘a highly coveted honour and not lightly bestowed’. They were more or less in the full-time service of the Party, and were a more regular presence in the villages than any government official. In the village of Semenyih in Selan
gor, for example, the man in charge of the area adopted various disguises, sometimes as a rubber tapper, sometimes as a coffee-shop worker, even dressing as a coolie woman.48 The British saw all rural Chinese as potential supporters of the MCP.
It was only by the early 1950s that the British began to collect detailed data on who the communists actually were. These surveys were based on intensive interrogations and were conducted for ‘psychological warfare’ purposes, rather than to gather social information. But there are few alternative sources on the background of the fighters. A study of internees at one of the largest rehabilitation camps, Taiping, in 1952 revealed that a high proportion of the Chinese – 36.5 per cent – were of the Hakka dialect group. This was a community of manual labourers, well known for their traditions of self-help and self-government and, throughout Chinese history, for making rebellion. But otherwise the sample was a fair cross-section of the Chinese population in Malaya.49 A survey of 104 surrendered communists in 1953 revealed that 85 per cent were workers, 61 per cent of them rubber tappers, who were a particularly rich source of recruits because their work gave good cover on the borders of the jungle. Forty per cent of those interviewed had aided the communists before joining up; but two-thirds said that fear of arrest or conscription was their primary motive for taking to the jungle. Not only the Emergency Regulations but the repeated arrests of MPAJA men since 1945 weighed heavily in their decision.50 A more in-depth interrogation of twenty-five surrendered guerrillas revealed that all but two had been born in Malaya, or had left China before they were sixteen. Most were too young to have served in the war. Their connections to the MCP came through the New Democratic Youth League or the trade unions, where they had been approached individually, and then drawn into performing tasks for the Party. The report concluded that they came from ‘a section of society that was very poorly structured’. The British writer was here thinking in terms of formal social institutions; there seemed to be little social life for the young beyond the village coffee shop or the workplace. He saw the recruits as disaffected with life, and the appeal of the Party in its ability to formulate their grievances for them and give them scope to act.51 A young American scholar, Lucien Pye, was also given access to sixty detainees. He saw them as upwardly mobile young people (their mean age was twenty-three) who were more educated than their peers. But in these uncertain times they saw their advancement in terms of aligning themselves to a group, in following opinion-makers and in each becoming ‘a party faction man’. They seemed desperate to align themselves to anyone who looked to possess power, and were hungry for any extra knowledge that might help them to anticipate how larger events might affect them. The mood of obsessive secrecy within the MCP suggested that it possessed a ‘secret doctrine’ to light the way forward. Pye saw the Emergency as a disorder of modernity, a rebellion of those who had been exposed to its upheavals, but ‘have not yet found their place in it’.52
The British, for the most part, saw the MCP’s hold on its supporters in terms of the ‘secret society complex’, and people’s motives for joining the rebellion as stemming from confusion or anomie. They tended to play down the ideological commitment of guerrillas, and this impression was reinforced by the fact that those captured tended to plead that they acted under compulsion of one kind or another. But as one woman fighter, Huang Xue Ying, was later to recall, the role of the cadres in rural communities was very wide-ranging, particularly among the young. These confident young men and women represented a dramatic broadening of horizons, in which the revolutionary mood of the times was transmitted through the villages. In the early days of the campaign the MCP placed great emphasis on political education. In peacetime this had taken the form of organized outings, night classes and public readings of newspapers and pamphlets. In Huang Xue Ying’s words:
At that time I hardly understood a word; so it was like playing music to the bull, so to speak. They taught us that women were the most oppressed class… they awakened our consciousness. They told us they wanted to improve our lives, we all had to work hard. Those with money must contribute money, those who had none, could contribute their labour… I joined the guerrillas because I knew they were good people. My family life was hard; I had no chance to study. The Communists taught me a lot. I felt that this was the path I should take to have a different future. These comrades were loving to us and very concerned about us.53
The British never really understood the village and small-town loyalties around which the MCP mobilized. Its recruits were not necessarily rejecting traditional family or community life. Often, they sought to strengthen it where it was under threat. Where families, communities and livelihoods were insecure, the tight networks of kinship and friendship in the villages and workplace took on a compelling significance, and the MCP’s cadres were able to enmesh themselves in this. The threat of coercion was never far away, but equally, by this time, two generations of squatters had identified themselves with the MCP’s resistance to the Japanese and to colonialism. This was sealed by a succession of personal tragedies as families became separated by killings, arrests and deportations.54 Now that the MCP was pushed out of the towns, and the trade unions decimated, all its hopes were placed in the squatters. The expectation was that, in the wake of guerrilla actions and government operations, production from mines and estates would begin to break down. The ranks of the squatters would swell, and so too would their support for the rebellion. Led by the MNLA, the people would then take over the industrial areas, and run them on a co-operative basis. The old practice of ‘self-tap, self-sell’ would become the powerhouse of the insurrection.55 The guerrillas believed that the first removals of squatters had played into their hands: ‘It allows the people to see how heartless government is. The bandits realise that government cannot remove all squatters.’56 This was a crucial assumption, and on this the success of the revolution rested.
The British army was determined to keep on the offensive, and continued to make big ‘sweeps’ in areas where the guerrillas were believed to operate. General Boucher had such scant information on the MNLA that he had little alternative. For example Operation Leo in October 1949 launched twenty-four platoons from a ‘start line’ into 74,000,000 square yards of jungle, with aircraft bombing and strafing ahead of them, in a systematic attempt to box guerrillas into a confined area. But there was no contact; the insurgents slipped easily between the government units.57 The ‘yo-yoing’ style of patrolling along ridges favoured by the army and the general low visibility were disorienting for troops; maps were notoriously inaccurate – they dated from around 1928 and did not always show crucial features like tributary rivers. The MNLA jungle camps were well camouflaged, even from the air; atap lean-to huts were hidden beneath the forest canopy, and scattered over an extended area so that no more than one building could be seen on the ground at a time. Chin Peng’s camp near Mentekab housed around 300 men and women; it was ringed by a mini-stockade, and was quickly evacuated when security forces attacked it by air and land. The trails to the camps were well guarded; paths were strewn with dried foliage that would snap underfoot, and British troops were soon observed and easily heard. They were soon smelt too, by their cooking fires and hair oil. Nor was large-scale bombing – by 1950 this involved Lincolns with 1,000lb pounds bombs – as effective in Malaya as it had once been against Iraqi villagers. Gullies provided natural cover, and many bombs exploded in the trees; the biggest danger was from falling branches. It did not break morale, which was its main purpose. Instead, it seems to have even raised a mood of defiance, not least when bombs hit civilians. In one incident in Johore in early 1950, five children were killed in their schoolhouse. Although the army could harry the guerrillas from place to place, it could not bring them to battle. The shooting war had reached stalemate.
The ulu remained a fearsome place for British soldiers, and the stories they swapped of the Burma campaign did not diminish its horrors. They were ill equipped: the much-vaunted jungle boots were said to last six days, and they l
et in sand and leeches. In the early days troops wore 1943-issue webbing, and the standard-issue Aertex underpants rode up and withered in the heat to create embarrassing rashes. Most of the campaign was conducted not in the primary rainforest, where the high canopy restricts the light and there is little undergrowth, but in disturbed, secondary jungle, belukar, which was often impassable – a dense mass of shrubs, bushes and spiky creepers. To move off a path meant hacking with ‘tree-basher’ machetes that soon blunted. The Gurkha units viewed 5,000 yards in one day as good going; often progress fell to a mere 2,000 yards.58 A patrol through the clean, regular lines of rubber trees was no less enervating in its way. Over time, commanders and their troops became grounded in jungle lore but the first interrogations of captured guerrillas made it clear that the British were not staying in the jungle long enough to worry the MNLA. The exceptions to this were the ‘Ferret Forces’, which were a vital sign of the presence of government in some areas. But even here contacts were few and far between. One unit, in twenty-four days of operations in Perak in September 1948, made sixty-nine day patrols and eleven night patrols; they met guerrillas on nine occasions, wounding two and capturing seven others. Ferret Force was dissolved in November 1948: it was unpopular with the regular army, and its skilled personnel were needed elsewhere. Tensions between the police and the army remained high. In the first year of the Emergency there was little co-operation in intelligence matters, and although the army was acting in support of the civil power, police were not always present on its operations. This was one reason some soldiers felt unconstrained by civil considerations in the screening of squatters. Under relentless pressure, Gurney insisted that martial law should not be declared. The irony of this was that soldiers were less restricted than they might have been under the law of war. ‘It is most important’, Gurney stressed, ‘that police and soldiers who are not saints, should not get the impression that every small mistake is going to be the subject of a public enquiry or that it is better to do nothing at all than to do the wrong thing quickly.’59