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

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.⁹⁷Less 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