Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  The military’s wish was granted. But de Gaulle did not turn out to be the diehard advocate of Algérie française that they had expected. The pragmatic president realized that permanently pacifying Algeria against the wishes of most of its populace would be too costly to contemplate. The war was already eroding valuable diplomatic capital at a time when France was struggling to emerge from its wartime devastation to become once again an important independent player on the international scene. Algerian independence was growing more popular at the United Nations and even in the United States, where in 1957 Senator John F. Kennedy called for an end to French rule. The French government tried to sell the war effort by hiring Madison Avenue public-relations firms, but the FLN proved more adept at the propaganda war. Its worldly envoys succeeded in winning international recognition despite their fighters’ lack of success on the ground—a feat that would inspire the African National Congress, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and other “national liberation” movements that were to substitute public-relations prowess for traditional measures of military effectiveness.120 The war was also losing support at home. The French public was appalled by the actions taken in their name. The army, in turn, was becoming dangerously politicized by its identification with the pied noir cause.

  Under those circumstances, de Gaulle calculated that getting out of Algeria would enhance France’s grandeur—the lodestar of his life. In 1959, as le général later wrote in his inimitable style, “France, through me, announced her intentions to place Algeria’s destiny in the hands of the Algerians.”121

  “Ultras” among the army and pieds noirs fought desperately to avert the inevitable. In 1960 enraged Europeans took to the barricades in Algiers, slaughtering gendarmes who stood in their way. The uprising lasted only a week because it was not actively supported by the army. The following year a coterie of generals, including two former commanders in Algeria, Generals Raoul Salan and Maurice Challe, attempted a coup of their own. They briefly took control of Algiers, but the uprising unraveled when de Gaulle appealed over their heads to their soldiers, imploring them in a radio address to stay loyal.

  Although they had lost the “battle of the transistors,” some of the putschists were determined to continue the struggle. They formed the Secret Army Organization (OAS) and waged a vicious terrorist campaign that included several unsuccessful attempts to assassinate de Gaulle—the inspiration for the novel and movie The Day of the Jackal. Other foiled plots on the mainland included attempts to blow up the Eiffel Tower and Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment. But the OAS’s main focus was in Algeria, where, ironically, it copied many of the FLN’s organizational trademarks.

  The OAS citadel was Bab-el-Oued, a neighborhood of poor Europeans in Algiers next to the Casbah. The OAS strike arm was the Delta Commandos, several hundred merciless gunmen led by Roger Degueldre, a “harsh” and “hard” former Foreign Legion officer who had been wounded at Dien Bien Phu. “The Deltas were intoxicated, it has been said, with Algérie française propaganda and anisette,” a French journalist wrote, and they had no compunctions about committing murder. By 1962 Algiers was averaging thirty to forty killings a day—far more than during the earlier battle against the FLN and comparable to Baghdad during the early years of the Iraq War. “They kill in cars, on motorbikes, with grenades, automatic weapons, and knives . . . ,” wrote a leading Muslim novelist before he too was slain by the OAS. “Terror reigns in Algiers.”

  The French army was finally provoked into a full-scale assault on Bab-el-Oued employing 20,000 troops supported by tanks, artillery, and air strikes. At the same time, using informers and brutal interrogations of detainees, the authorities systematically tracked down OAS leaders. Degueldre was arrested on April 7, 1962, and executed two months later. General Salan was arrested the same month and sent to prison. By the end of 1962 the OAS was finished. In some ways it resembled the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan, another white-supremacist terrorist group, but with a decisive difference: the KKK had the tacit support of the majority of the Southern population (59 percent white), whereas the OAS acted on behalf of a European minority outnumbered almost nine to one.122

  By the time Algeria officially became independent on July 3, 1962, most Europeans had either left or were about to do so. The FLN exacted a vicious revenge on Muslims who had fought for the colonialists. At least 30,000 harkis were killed, often after being tortured along with their families. This was a reminder that just as in Kenya, where the Mau Mau killed far more Africans than Europeans (1,800 vs. 32),123 the war in Algeria was also a civil war pitting pro- and anti-French Muslims against each other. The war as a whole was said to have cost French forces 17,456 dead, 64,985 wounded, and 1,000 missing. European civilians suffered 10,000 casualties. There is no good figure of Muslim war dead; estimates range from 300,000 to one million.124 Notwithstanding the terrible cost of independence, the FLN’s success would inspire countless liberation movements across Africa that within a few years would put an end to the last remaining bastions of European colonial control.

  IT IS HARD to exaggerate the bitterness felt within the French army after this defeat. The soldiers’ attitude was captured in two novels written by the ex-paratrooper Jean Lartéguy: The Centurions (1962) and The Praetorians (1963). Indochina was bad enough: “the French Army,” one of Lartéguy’s paras says, “has been beaten by a handful of little yellow dwarfs because of the stupidity and inertia of its leaders.” Now in Algeria, “enough’s enough, we can’t afford any more defeats.” Yet that is just what happened. “Colonel Raspeguy,” modeled on Bigeard, thinks bitterly, “A victor smells good even if he stinks of blood and sweat; the vanquished can drench himself in eau-de-Cologne from Dior, he’ll still leave a smell of shit behind him.”

  Soldiers naturally blamed far-off superiors for this smelly surrender; they “felt hatred and disgust welling up against the people back in Paris . . . the highly-placed officials, untrustworthy generals, and shady politicians.”125 What few would acknowledge was that their own tactics had contributed to this disastrous outcome. The use of torture was not new; it had been widespread in Indochina. What was new was the level of public scrutiny such practices received when employed in Algiers, the most European of Algerian cities, with a substantial foreign press corps. The army was not prepared to cope with the resulting backlash. Roger Trinquier had expressed a common view in the ranks when he said prior to the Battle of Algiers, “I care little for the opinions of Americans or the press.”126 He should have cared more.

  The Algerian War was the most dramatic example since the Greek Revolution in the 1820s of how a guerrilla organization defeated on the battlefield could nevertheless prevail by winning “the battle of the narrative.” (The IRA and the American revolutionaries also made good use of public opinion, but they had not been militarily defeated like the Algerians and Greeks.) A similar outcome had barely been averted in the Boer War and the Philippine War. From now on Western soldiers would have to pay increasing attention to an aspect of warfare—information operations—that had not unduly troubled their predecessors who had fought colonial conflicts in centuries past. The growing glare of media scrutiny would necessitate a kinder, gentler style of counterinsurgency—one that would be exemplified by the British strategy in Malaya.

  47.

  A MAN AND A PLAN

  Briggs, Templer, and the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960

  ON A TYPICALLY torrid tropical afternoon on February 7, 1952, a “pale, wiry, and intense”127 man stepped off a Royal Air Force aircraft onto the tarmac of Kuala Lumpur’s primitive airport. General Sir Gerald Templer was dressed in a debonair tropical suit, a large handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket. With his thin mustache and slicked-back hair, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the actor David Niven, a fellow Sandhurst graduate and World War II veteran. But although Niven had left Hollywood to compile a distinguished wartime record, his military achievements paled by comparison with those of the older man, who had also fought in World War
I. Templer had seen action from the Somme to Dunkirk and Anzio. In the interwar years he had competed in the Olympics as a hurdler and won a competition as the British army’s top bayonet fighter.

  His career had almost ended, along with his life, in 1944 when he was a division commander in Italy. While driving in a jeep, Templer passed an army truck at the precise moment when it hit a landmine. It was later said that he had nearly been killed by a flying piano that had been in the back of the truck. He survived but his back was broken. “Only general ever wounded by a piano,” he joked, although the culprit actually appears to have been one of the truck’s wheels.

  That terrible accident turned out to be a stroke of fortune in disguise, for it meant that Templer had to give up battlefield command. He wound up working first at SOE in London, then as director of civil affairs and military government in the British zone of occupation in Germany, where he became famous, or more rightly infamous, for sacking Konrad Adenauer, future chancellor of West Germany, as mayor of Cologne. (He thought Adenauer too old and indolent.) This was followed by a stint as director of military intelligence in London.

  These experiences in subversion, intelligence, and civil administration—along with his interwar stint in Palestine fighting the Arab Revolt, which taught him “the mind and method of the guerrilla”—turned out to be better preparation than a normal army career for the assignment he had now been given. Templer had been appointed high commissioner and director of operations in Malaya, combining the highest civil and military offices, as Lyautey had done in Morocco. Those extraordinary powers had been granted him by Prime Minister Winston Churchill because of the dire situation in Malaya.128

  As in other countries that had been occupied by Japan, Malaya had fielded a guerrilla army with covert Allied support, in this case from the SOE’s Force 136. After the war the Communist-dominated Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army was reborn as the Malayan Races Liberation Army. It turned to fighting the returning British, in many cases using the same jungle camps and the same weapons they had employed against the Japanese. In 1948, following the murder of three British planters, the government declared a state of emergency that suspended civil laws and gave the police and army wide-ranging powers of search, arrest, and detention. (Suspects could be detained for up to two years without trial.)129

  In spite of increasing pressure, the guerrillas appeared to be gaining strength under the leadership of Chin Peng, the twenty-six-year-old son of a Chinese bicycle-shop owner who had taken over the MRLA after the preceding secretary general, an informer for both the Japanese and the British, had absconded with the party treasury in 1947. Chin Peng was a “quiet character with incisive brain and unusual ability,”130 in the opinion of one SOE officer who had worked with him—the self-contained antithesis of such outgoing, larger-than-life guerrilla chiefs as Michael Collins or Giuseppe Garibaldi. He had learned guerrilla warfare from the British themselves, and for his wartime work he had been awarded an Order of the British Empire. Like most Asian communists, he had also made a careful study of Mao Zedong’s works, although in practice he proved to be hardly Mao’s equal as a strategist.

  The Communist Terrorists, as the British liked to label them, soon numbered more than 5,000 fighters aided by a larger number of part-time helpers in the Min Yuen (“People’s Organization”). The insurgents drew much of their strength from Malaya’s 2 million Chinese residents; they had few backers among the rest of the population of 5.1 million, composed of 2.5 million Malays, 500,000 Indians, and 10,000 Europeans.131 Much as the Communist insurgents in Vietnam would target French plantations as well as French security forces, so too Malaya’s insurgents would emerge from the jungle to carry out a reign of terror not only against British security forces but also against the economic underpinning of the country—rubber plantations and tin mines, which were managed by Europeans and worked by Chinese and Indians. British planters got used to having their bungalows fired on every night. Trains were derailed, rubber trees slashed, factories set afire. This reign of terror was designed to drive the Europeans out of the country, leaving the insurgents a free hand. By 1952 the Communists had killed 3,000 people and tied down 30,000 Commonwealth troops and 60,000 police officers.132

  Their greatest triumph came on October 5, 1951, when thirty-six guerrillas set up an ambush along a steep roadway sixty miles north of Kuala Lumpur. At 1:15 p.m., they spotted a Land Rover carrying half a dozen policemen followed by a Rolls-Royce limousine flying the Union Jack. The Communists let loose a volley of rifle and machine-gun fire that hit almost every occupant of the Land Rover and wounded the driver of the Rolls. The back door of the limousine opened and an Englishman got out. He was cut down within a few yards. Thus did the guerrillas unwittingly kill Sir Henry Gurney, the senior representative of Her Majesty’s Government in Malaya.133

  It would later become clear that this was the high-water mark of the insurgency and that it was already beginning to subside. But this was not at all obvious to Gerald Templer on his arrival four months later as he drove from the airport to King’s House, the official residence of the high commissioner, in a car still scarred with the bullet holes from the ambush that had killed his predecessor. The mood in Kuala Lumpur was grim. “We were on the way to losing control of the country, and soon,” wrote the British colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, while a British adviser spoke of a “general feeling of hopelessness.”134 The loss of Malaya, they knew, would be not only an economic blow to Britain (Malaya was the world’s biggest exporter of natural rubber) but also a psychological blow—it would be seen as a victory for international communism and a defeat for the Free World.

  FIELD MARSHAL BERNARD Law Montgomery, Templer’s mentor and a fellow Ulsterman, had penned a pithy note to Lyttelton advising that victory in Malaya required two things: “We must have a plan. Secondly we must have a man. When we have a plan and a man, we shall succeed: not otherwise.” (“I may, perhaps without undue conceit, say that this had occurred to me,” Lyttelton noted drily.) After his first choice withdrew from consideration, Monty pushed Templer as the man who could “deliver the goods.”135 What he did not seem to realize was that the plan that Malaya needed was already in existence.

  Its author was Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs, a career Indian Army officer who had distinguished himself in the Burma campaign during World War II—a source of jungle-fighting experience for the British that was to prove invaluable in Malaya, which was four-fifths jungle.136 Briggs had been called out of retirement in 1950 to become director of operations coordinating military and police activity in Malaya. In that capacity he produced what became known as the Briggs Plan: the subsequent blueprint of victory. It included multiple steps, from hiring more Special Branch inspectors and better coordinating police-military operations to clearing roads in isolated areas and deporting captured insurgents to China. Its centerpiece was the resettlement of Chinese squatters, an updated version of the “reconcentration” policies that had been employed in conflicts as varied as the American Indian Wars, the Cuban and Filipino insurrections, and the Boer War—and that was also to be employed in the decade ahead in Kenya, Algeria, and South Vietnam.

  Between 400,000 and 600,000 squatters (there was no accurate count)137 lived in shanty towns on the edge of the jungle, scraping out a meager living with farming and other jobs. They did not enjoy title to their lands, and they were alienated from the mainstream of Malay society. This made them a prime breeding ground for the insurgency. The Briggs Plan began the process of building five hundred New Villages where, protected by armed guards, perimeter lighting, and barbed wire, the squatters could be separated from the guerrillas.138 Security was to be provided in the first instance by 50,000 Chinese Home Guards.139 Nobody could enter or leave a New Village without an identity card, and curfew was strictly enforced. Workers were searched leaving the village for work in the morning to ensure that they were not smuggling out any rice to feed the Communists. The Briggs Plan instituted draconian penalties for a
nyone helping the guerrillas, “making the death penalty mandatory for convicted bandit food agents and money collectors.”140

  The resettlement plan actually proved popular in the end because the Chinese were provided title to their lands, electricity, clean drinking water, schools, and clinics. This stood in stark contrast to ill-fated French attempts to implement a similar policy in Algeria. By 1959 over a million Muslim villagers had been moved into fortified “regroupment camps,” which, like the British concentration camps in South Africa six decades earlier, lacked basic amenities, including food, sanitation facilities, and medicine, and therefore became breeding grounds of disease and discontentment.141 The New Villages were better run, but their inhabitants were hardly there by choice—they were kept inside at gunpoint.

  With his focus on resettlement, Briggs deemphasized the sort of fruitless “jungle bashing” on which the army had wasted valuable resources in the war’s early years. Too many brigade commanders newly arrived from Europe and, in the words of one officer, “nostalgic for World War II”142 would send their troops thrashing through the dense vegetation only to discover nothing but empty guerrilla camps. “You can’t deal with a plague of mosquitoes by swatting each individual insect,” Briggs said. “You find and disinfect their breeding grounds. Then the mosquitoes are finished.”143

  There would still be operations to rout guerrillas in their jungle redoubts undertaken primarily by units such as the Special Air Service, commanded by the Chindit veteran “Mad Mike” Calvert, which were specially trained for long-range penetration and assisted by Dyak headhunters imported from Borneo to serve as trackers. Briggs, however, switched the bulk of his resources to “breaking the popular support for the rising,”144 the foundation of any successful counterinsurgency strategy. As Robert Thompson, a Malayan civil servant and another veteran of the Chindits, put it, “The chief emphasis . . . must be on ‘clear-and-hold’ operations as opposed to ‘search-and-clear’ operations (or sweeps).”145