Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  The Cold War brought new violence to the end of empires as the local struggles in Southeast Asia were now seen as a part of a global chain of conflicts between the two power blocs. Reduced in political might and fearing the spread of communism, the waning colonial powers – Britain, France and the Netherlands – redeployed the weapons of the Second World War in the guise of counter-insurgency campaigns in those territories where they retained a fragile hold. As a result the hopes for liberal democracy that had sustained for decades colonial nationalists and European liberals alike were largely dashed. The advocates of social revolution were now fighting for their lives. The Malayan Emergency saw a retreat by the British government from a liberal, late colonialism towards a police state. By the end of the next decade soldiers and their associated ideologues were poised to take power in Burma, Indonesia and Pakistan. Even in India, the republic’s fragility in its early years resulted in a dangerous slowing down of radical political and economic change. National and social revolutions had either run into obstacles or been only partially accomplished. The old bureaucracies lived to fight another day.

  In the midst of this, Britain’s Asian empire survived. But, increasingly, the United States was taking over key strategic responsibilities in parts of Asia which for a century had fallen to the Pax Britannica. Not yet an empire itself, America was now the arbiter of others. American economic pressure on the Dutch forced them to withdraw from most of Indonesia. This was dictated by Cold War logic, to prevent the Indonesian revolution lurching to the left, and the same logic led to the United States’ commitment to support British colonial rule while it was containing communism in Malaya. A major review of Britain’s long-term policy in Southeast Asia for the cabinet in October 1949 continued to see a British role there as indispensable to world peace, but it also acknowledged that ‘no plans will, however, be really successful without American participation’.3 On these terms, the British imperial presence endured in Malaya until 1957, in Singapore for five years after this, and in Hong Kong for another forty years.

  But these were insular outposts and no longer a great territorial empire. By 1949 British Asia – the great crescent of land that four years earlier had linked Suez to Sydney in one overarching, cosmopolitan swathe – had collapsed. Its last great proconsul, Louis Mount-batten, had finally left the region. The old Indian Army was dismantled. The new sovereign nations of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (though not Burma) remained in the British Commonwealth of Nations. But this was a fragile, racially divided entity, and many more concrete linkages in the region were severed. The route from India to China, via the Burma Road, was closed, and these two emerging Asian superpowers squared up to each other along the line drawn in the Himalayas by the Victorian soldier Sir Henry McMahon. A world of travel and movement was finally stilled. After the last traumatic crossings in the wake of partition in south Asia and the revolutionary struggles in the southeast and east of the continent, most movements thereafter would be within borders. The ‘George Washington of the Overseas Chinese’, Tan Kah Kee, had returned to China and would die in Beijing in 1961. Never again would the Overseas Chinese act as a unified force. The new Indian republic still looked to play a role in the region, but this too was increasingly shaped by Cold War concerns. In 1950 Nehru again visited Singapore, bringing with him his daughter, Indira. More so than in 1946, the British welcomed his visit; he arrived in the wash of Anglo-Indian naval manoeuvres in the Bay of Bengal, and the British hoped he would voice support for their counter-insurgency. Nehru’s reception by the locals was warm, but it was a faint echo of the triumphant progress of 1946. His speeches signalled the changes: ‘Indians in Malaya’, he announced, ‘should not look to India for any help; neither is India in a position to render any because she has her own problems to solve and her own population to look after.’4 Nehru told a rally in Jalan Besar, where he had spoken in 1946: ‘We have seen plenty of killing and become rather callous but this method of terrorism is degrading to the whole human race and reduced men to the level of beasts.’ ‘In the present day’, he explained, ‘governments have to deal with all kinds of violence and force and inevitably they have to deal with that with force.’5

  FREEDOM, SLOWLY AND GENTLY

  The British war in Malaya would drag on until 1960 and eventually claim the lives of 6,697 CTs ‘communist terrorists’ (not all of whom were combatants), 1,865 members of the security forces, most of them Malay policeman, and 2,473 civilians, most of them Chinese.6 The fury of counter-terror did not abate. In the second year of the Emergency veterans of clandestine warfare or colonial police operations in the Middle East and Africa continued to gravitate to Malaya. On the recommendation of Field Marshal Slim, Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, who had been second-in-command to Orde Wingate in Burma, was sent in 1950 to review the situation. On an early foray into the forest he was welcomed by a grenade, lobbed at him with the pin still in. To it was attached the message: ‘How do you do, Mr Calvert’. The Emergency remained a very personal war. ‘I went to the brothels and picked up the gossip of the gutter’, he recalled, and after six months he delivered a tough-minded report. British troops, he concluded, lacked aggression. One Scots Guards officer was allegedly heard to say that it was not his job ‘just to chase bare-arsed niggers around South East Asia’. Calvert recommended the formation of a deep-jungle penetration force, which included Orang Asli.7 From this the Special Air Squadron was revived as ‘The Malayan Scouts (SAS Regiment)’. They adopted a Malay kris as their emblem, but the ethos and philosophy was that of the Chindits: informal, unorthodox and hard living. By September 1950 the Malayan Scouts camp at Dusun Tua was filled with ex-Chindits, volunteer national servicemen and unruly elements from other units of which their commanding officers were trying to rid themselves. It even attracted a group of French foreign legionnaires who had deserted en route to Indo-China. Still the foe was elusive; one eight-week training mission from October 1950 brought no contact with the insurgents, and the unit attracted press criticism and the hostility of other units over its lax discipline, wild parties and the wearing of beards. New drafts for the SAS from the United Kingdom were appalled, and Calvert was recalled.8 In late 1951 the force was reorganized by Lieutenant Colonel John Sloane and many of the locally recruited men were sent back to their units. But from this a highly specialized form of warfare evolved, fought by shock troops, in which guerrilla warfare was met with its own methods.9

  This was not a war which the British could win alone: in mid-November 1951, there were deployed in Malaya seven British infantry battalions, eight Gurkha battalions, three ‘colonial’ battalions and the Malayan Scouts, two Royal Armoured Corps regiments, one Royal Marine commando brigade, four battalions of the Malay Regiment, ten RAF squadrons, two Royal Australian Air Force squadrons and a small naval contingent. This reliance on imperial auxiliaries remained controversial and nearly collapsed when Nepalese communists campaigned to dissuade young men from joining the Gurkhas and Indian opposition parties in the Lok Sabha pressurized Nehru to end the use of the ‘sacred soil’ of India to recruit for the war in Malaya.10 The British looked further afield. Calvert had preferred Australian and Rhodesian recruits, in whom he felt the frontier spirit of empire still burned. He even travelled to apartheid South Africa to seek new drafts of men. But white troops were expensive. Instead, the first African units of the King’s African Rifles arrived in 1951 and would rotate in Malaya for the next few years. But for the Mau Mau rebellion, more of these askaris would have been sent. Most had joined for the improved pay and allowances, but they had a tough time in Malaya. It was fallaciously assumed that Africans were ‘natural’ jungle fighters, but the conditions were entirely new to them. So too was the diet. They were supplied from Australia with an ‘African’ maize meal, posho, which was often too roughly or finely ground for their taste. They were viewed with suspicion on all sides. In the field they were put to the task of ‘shamba bashing’ – the destruction of food crops in the jungle – and the communists put it abo
ut that they were cannibals. The askaris were poorly paid compared to the Gurkhas and Fijian soldiers, the latter mostly volunteers from the poor lesser islands. The Africans were given large bonuses to make up the difference, but they still chafed at their humiliating, inferior khaki uniforms: which had no collar, pockets, belt loops or fly. ‘They were insulting’, one veteran would recall, ‘… and brought us no respect’. When the Maasai education officer who led the protests against the uniforms was threatened with court martial his askaris promised him that they would ‘take care’ of any difficult officers on the next jungle patrol. The scragging of officers was not unheard of in the Burma campaign. Veterans of 3 King’s African Rifles were later to attribute their sympathy with the Mau Mau to their experience of the anti-colonial struggle in Asia.11

  Despite these reinforcements, there were times during the MNLA’s flurry of small-scale raids in 1950 and 1951 when the British felt that they were losing the war. There was little co-ordination between the army and police, the chief police officer and the director of intelligence were not on speaking terms, the morale of European civilians was breaking and the rural Chinese seemed entirely indifferent to the government. In 1950 there was an attempt on the life of the governor of Singapore, Sir Franklin Gimson, at Happy World amusement park, where he was adjudicating a boxing competition. The grenades failed to explode and he escaped with a bruised leg. But on 6 October 1951 the MNLA scored its most dramatic success. In the early afternoon a guerrilla unit ambushed a Rolls-Royce bearing a crown insignia and the Federation flag, driving behind a police Land Rover on the narrow winding ascent up to the colonial playground of Frazer’s Hill. It seems that the attack was unplanned and that the guerrillas did not know that they had stumbled on the most valuable prey of all, the high commissioner himself. Sir Henry Gurney faced the attack with courage and presence of mind, drawing fire away from his wife, who survived the attack by crouching in the car, which was riddled with thirty-five bullet holes. Gurney was shot in the head and the body and died almost instantly. His escort was stranded further down the road due to a mechanical fault. Gurney was the last colonial governor to be killed in office, and his death was another augury of the passing of liberal imperialism.12 The news broke in the middle of a general election campaign in Britain, and in December the new Conservative colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, toured Malaya to assess the situation for himself. When he visited Ipoh on 5 December to meet planters he was protected by 350 policemen and troops and driven from Ipoh airfield in a closed armoured car with an escort of six others. There a Chinese tin miner, Foo Yin Fong, told him that the Chinese villagers distrusted the police, who treated them with no respect, and that the resettlement officers ‘paid little attention to Chinese customs and feelings, and appeared not to regard them as human beings’.13 On his return Lyttelton delivered a stinging verdict on the failings of administration in Malaya. This was reinforced by a minute from Montgomery: ‘We must have a plan,’ he told Lyttelton. ‘Secondly, we must have a man.’14

  The man with the plan was General Sir Gerald Templer, a former director of military intelligence with experience of civil affairs on a large scale in crisis-ridden post-war Germany, during which he had famously sacked Konrad Adenauer as mayor of Cologne.15 He was not the first choice. Slim, for one, had ruled himself out as being ‘too old to go flipping around in an Auster aircraft in the trying climate of Malaya’. There were rumours that Montgomery himself had been asked to go. Malcolm MacDonald, in Singapore, was alarmed at the prospect of ‘military dictatorship’. Templer was, and remains, a controversial figure. In some accounts he is credited with a mastery of the crisis that has few parallels in British colonial history. The historian C. Northcote Parkinson saw in him a Shakespearean hero. His most savage critic was the architect of the Malayan Spring, Victor Purcell, who was also a history don, at Cambridge, who returned to Malaya in 1953 as an adviser to the Malayan Chinese Association. He wrote a series of articles and a polemical book, Malaya: communist or free?, in which he accused Templer of authoritarian, even quasi-fascist methods: ‘a terrifying mixture of crassness and voodoo’.16 Their feud was bitter and personal, although Purcell was merely articulating what many Chinese leaders such as Tan Cheng Lock thought but felt unable to say directly and publicly. From this Templer emerges perhaps more plausibly as a useful if limited man, favoured by fortune and riding the tide of achievement of his predecessors; in the words of one Malayan civil servant, ‘a facile princeps’.17 Templer embodied Britain’s counter-insurgency in a way that Gurney had been unable to do. In his hands – as both high commissioner and director of operations – was concentrated more power than had been possessed by any British general since Oliver Cromwell. He used it to create a new integrated system of command and a functioning intelligence system, to cut through red tape, official parochialism and jealousies and to facilitate new specialist initiatives. He was constantly in the field, where his presence was likened to the charismatic dynamism of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny in Indo-China, and he took strong stands against diehard employers and colonial prejudice.18 In a hallmark incident, he threatened to run the committee of the elite Kuala Lumpur Lake Club out of town when they barred the Sultan of Selangor, as an ‘Asiatic’, from attending a St George’s day function in his own realm.

  But Templer was a blunt instrument. One of his first actions following his arrival in March 1952 was to direct personally a draconian collective punishment operation against the town of Tanjong Malim, the scene of heavy guerrilla activity where recent government casualties had included a hero of ‘the wooden horse’ POWescapade, Lieutenant R. M. C. Codner. Templer would descend on truculent resettlement areas to parade and berate their inhabitants. In one famous incident he began, ‘You are all bastards.’ A Chinese interpreted: ‘His Excellency says that none of your parents were married.’ ‘Well’, continued Templer, ‘I can be a bastard too.’ ‘His Excellency says his parents were also unmarried.’19 But as he himself admitted, Templer was building on the foundations of the work of Gurney and others. The key component of the campaign – resettlement on a mass scale – had been begun in earnest in Gurney’s time by Sir Harold Briggs, who was pulled out of retirement after his campaigns in Burma to become the first director of operations. He developed a plan to ‘roll up’ Malaya from the south.20 This began in, as those responsible admitted, an experimental and ‘rough and ready’ fashion in June 1950 in Johore. As one European resident put it: ‘This fair land is now, it would appear, in danger of becoming infested with a series of untidy, shabby shanty towns: a succession of inferior Butlin’s camps but lacking the amenities.’21 The programme was largely completed by the end of 1952. What Templer achieved was co-ordination of Emergency work with the everyday business of government. He also possessed a stronger mandate from Whitehall, and a clearer appreciation of the impending advance of self-government. This added a new dynamism to local politics that had been paralysed by the Emergency. Again, there was little new in the letter of Templer’s statements on the transfer of power delivered on his installation in Kuala Lumpur; the commitment was already there. But Templer set about executing it with the briskness of a country solicitor winding up a heavily entailed estate.22

  The counter-insurgency regime created by the British in Malaya was perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of any colonial state. In the ‘New Villages’ – which became the new official euphemism – health services, sports halls and village councils were introduced; propaganda acquired a new relevance and the official vernacular embraced new terms such as ‘community development’ – a vague catch-all for a miscellany of initiatives in leadership training, by which, in the words of one official, the people were to be ‘suitably instructed towards their own emancipation’.23 A favoured keyword of Templer himself was ‘service’; it began with a scheme to make the police appear more friendly to the community, inspired, it was said, by the scene in The Wizard of Oz where a lion is made brave after receiving a medal for courage. Templer had been a keen Boy
Scout, from which experience he seems to have drawn many of his ideas; his wife, Peggy, lent her patronage to the Women’s Institutes, in which elite wives brought their home skills to the New Villages and kampongs. Purcell felt ‘service’ to be a particularly pernicious substitute for the development of democratic institutions. All this entailed a massive expansion of government outside the counter-insurgency campaign; from local government and town-and-country planning to the electricity grid and the road network. This resulted in an infrastructure that few countries in Asia could match. It also created a strong – and potentially overbearing – state: the number of its employees grew from 48,000 in 1948 to 140,000 in 1959. Equally, the ravages of war and occupation were repaired to a degree that Burma never experienced. But the idea that ‘winning hearts and minds’ was a carefully prepared strategy is a myth. The classic manual was written – by Robert Thompson, an ex-Chindit, Chinese affairs officer and later secretary for defence in Malaya – only after the Emergency had ended.24 At the time the strategy was an ‘agglomeration of trifles’, and it proceeded mainly by trial and error. Many of the ‘after-care’ measures, as they were termed, arrived in fits and starts some time after the worst effects of resettlement – the uprooting, banishments, loss of income, exposure to corruption and exploitation – had already been experienced by rural Chinese. As the novelist Han Suyin wrote of a New Village in Johore, where she set her novel And the Rain my Drink…: