Forgotten Wars (73 page)

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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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”’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’ 5th 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.
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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.
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The communists had held their liberated area for five days.

Once again, the leadership’s plans had been pre-empted from below. The large units had to break up, and many of the Perak units slipped back over the watershed to operate in Kinta, around Ipoh and Sungei Siput. Now that an orthodox strategy was denied it, at least for a time, the MCP changed tactics. For much of the rest of the year the characteristic operations were small scale, often led by the MCP’s ‘special mobile squads’ in urban and semi-urban areas. They were brutal affairs. The first attacks occurred in Ipoh: on 1 October a Kuomintang newspaper in Ipoh,
Kin Kwok Daily News
, was attacked with a grenade. It landed on a reporter’s table and killed him instantly. Most of the victims were Chinese contractors and businessmen. There were also attacks on the night trains from Kuala Lumpur and, increasingly, rubber estates were the targets of specialized industrial sabotage. Trees were slashed with knives to put them out of production. On the night of 18–19 November, in Tapah alone 30,000 trees were destroyed. Planters estimated that most would take up to seven years to recover. The cost was measured in tens of thousands of dollars.
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Another campaign was against national registration. The ‘bodystealing cards’, as they were called, hit the MCP hard, as they damaged their units’ ability to move freely. Slogans appeared in public places: ‘Photographers will be killed. Authenticators will suffer.’ Photographic shops were raided and negatives and prints stolen and destroyed. The purpose of the cards, the MCP announced, ‘is to tie
up people tightly, thus enabling them to burn, kill, drive out, rape and make fun of the people at their pleasure’. It instructed people to ‘Use your identity cards as joss paper.’
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