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

by Max Boot

  This was to prove an immensely effective strategy, but Briggs left Malaya at the end of 1951 sick, bitter, and disillusioned after eighteen months’ service. He had been frustrated that he had been limited to a coordinator’s role with limited authority over the security forces and the civilian officials who worked with the native rulers of the nine states that made up the Federation of Malaya.

  TEMPLER WAS TO get the powers that Briggs lacked, and he was to make full use of them. He had a mischievous, fun-loving side, but normally it was well hidden. Mostly he came across as imperious, demanding, driven—not someone who suffered fools gladly. During the desperate fighting of the 1944 Battle of Anzio, where he was a division commander, he had been nicknamed the Scalded Cat. He brought the same “electrifying” impact to Malaya, where he was appalled by the indolent attitude of many bureaucrats and planters—“chairbound . . . dunderheads,” one correspondent called them, while the colonial secretary acerbically noted that many were “varnished with port and pickled with gin.”146

  When called upon to deliver a speech at an exclusive Kuala Lumpur club, Templer berated his privileged listeners, telling them that Communists “seldom go to the races. They seldom go to dinner parties or cocktail parties. And they don’t play golf!” He threatened to close down another club until it admitted “natives.”147

  Templer’s “brusque” directives, criticisms, and questions, delivered in a “clipped harsh voice,” offended some; he was not afraid to tell an official who had earned his ire that he was a “stinker” or “no bloody good.” But most were impressed by his “dynamic and sometimes abrasive personality.” One district officer came away from a meeting “feeling like an electric torch which has just been filled with new batteries.”148

  As he explained in a letter to the colonial secretary, Templer did his best to drive bureaucrats “out of their offices and make them talk about the Emergency with the people on the ground, in whose head ultimately lies the solution.”149 Taking his own advice, he made a habit of roaming the country in an armored car, giving scant advance notice of his arrival to military units or villages, so they could not tidy up things. When he saw things that needed correcting, as he frequently did, he issued memoranda typed in red with a deadline for action. These “red minutes” delivered by dispatch riders were an echo of Winston Churchill’s wartime memos marked “Action this day”—and just as effective in galvanizing a hidebound bureaucracy.

  Templer secured his place in counterinsurgency history with his emphasis on political, rather than kinetic, warfare. “The shooting side of the business is only 25% of the trouble,” he often said, “and the other 75% lies in getting the people of this country behind us.”150 Even more famously, he declared, “The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people.”151 This phrase echoed, no doubt inadvertently, lines written in 1776 by the British general Sir Henry Clinton (“gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America”) and by John Adams in 1818 (“The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people”).152 Not until Templer used it, however, did “hearts and minds” turn into a byword and later a cliché. (That “nauseating phrase,” as Templer called it in 1968, was to become a particular favorite of Lyndon Johnson’s.)153

  It is an injunction that has often been misunderstood to mean focusing purely on social, political, and economic efforts to win over the populace. Like Hubert Lyautey, William Howard Taft, David Petraeus and other exemplars of the “population-centric” school of counterinsurgency, Templer did believe in civic action. He encouraged the army to renovate schools, open hospitals to civilians, and generally help the populace. More importantly, to counter Communist appeals, he repeatedly emphasized to Malayans that they would be granted independence “in due course.”154 And, following the ancient Roman example, he pushed to extend Malayan citizenship to more than a million Indians and Chinese, thus giving them a stake in their adopted country.

  But winning “hearts and minds” also involved coercive measures such as resettling the squatters—a process begun by Briggs and completed by Templer—which would be unthinkable for twenty-first-century British or American counterinsurgents. Robert Thompson, the former Chindit who worked closely with Briggs and Templer, noted that warfare was not a popularity contest: “What the peasant wants to know is: Does the government mean to win the war? Because if not, he will have to support the insurgent.” “The government,” he added, “must show that it is not only determined, but prepared, to be ruthless.”155

  TEMPLER SHOWED THE requisite ruthlessness. In April 1952, after a British party was ambushed and twelve men killed, he arrived to demand “with a savage anger” that the residents of the nearby village of Tanjong Malim name the attackers. When they refused, he imposed a twenty-two-hour curfew and cut the rice ration in half. Forms were then circulated to all households so they could inform on the guerrillas anonymously. This led to thirty-eight arrests and, thirteen days later, to the lifting of the restrictions. Yet Templer took no joy in such tough measures, which reeked of “collective punishment” and aroused Parliament’s ire. Eventually he abolished them.156

  He also cracked down on the sorts of abuses that had been common in the early days of the emergency when British troops, many of them raw, frightened conscripts, had burned whole villages in retaliation for attacks and indiscriminately locked up and abused suspects: 200,000 people were held for less than a month, 25,000 for more than a month. On one occasion in 1948 Tommies had even massacred 24 Chinese civilians.157

  Templer realized that such blunderbuss tactics only drove more recruits into the Communist camp. He took a more measured approach in which small units would act on the basis of good intelligence. “My absolute top priority,” he declared shortly after arriving, “is to get the intelligence machine right.”158 The federal police’s Special Branch was given lead responsibility for this task and expanded from two officers to more than two hundred.159 Its detectives scored notable successes by interrogating Surrendered Enemy Personnel and by intercepting Communist couriers—Chin Peng’s chief method of communicating with his forces. Templer pressed troops to capture rather than kill insurgents “because of the information we can suck out of them.”160 Whereas in Indochina and Algeria torture was routine, here even high-level suspects were not tortured. Troops were warned, “Confessions must not . . . be obtained by any inducement, threat, or promise.”161

  Templer did not neglect the need for offensive action. He often told security personnel, “Get out and kill those bastards—communist terrorists.”162 To help accomplish this task, he sent troops to a Jungle Warfare School and issued a tactical handbook titled The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya, which for the first time introduced a common operational approach.

  One of the most important weapons in his arsenal was psychological warfare, which was employed “to cause general demoralization” in Communist ranks.163 British aircraft dropped millions of leaflets offering guerrillas a safe-conduct pass to surrender. Other aircraft flew low over the jungle to broadcast appeals to give up. These “voice aircraft” were especially effective (and spooky) when they named individual guerrillas down below. Rewards were offered for insurgents “dead or alive,” but higher sums were available if alive.164

  The biggest inducement for surrender was that the guerrillas could not sustain themselves in the jungle. In some New Villages all rice was cooked communally in well-guarded kitchens, and individual possession of the precious grain was prohibited. To keep themselves fed the Communists began planting gardens in the jungle. Whenever these were discovered, they were destroyed, either by herbicide-spraying aircraft or by troops who would uproot and burn the crops.165 Ching Peng recalled, “Our situation became so desperate at one point that I even looked into the possibility of making the rubber seed edible.” This didn’t pan out: rubber seeds contain a poisonous toxin that cannot be removed.166 Thus Templer, showing that he could act ruthlessly when he felt the need to do so, literally
starved the Communists into submission, much as the U.S. Army had once done to the Indians. By the time they gave up, most insurgents were a sorry sight, with, in the words of a British brigadier, “shaggy hair, emaciated countenance, ragged khaki uniform, and eyes like those of a hunted rat.”167

  As more Communists came in (eventually 3,982 surrendered or were captured),168 Templer decided to designate certain areas as “white,” meaning pacified. This involved the lifting of emergency regulations, including the curfew and food controls, thus providing an inducement for areas that were still “black” to fall in behind the government. By the time that Templer left Malaya on May 31, 1954, roughly a third of the country was “white” and the back of the insurgency had been broken. Significantly Templer and his wife drove to the airport in an open touring car.

  TEMPLER WAS ON his way to promotion to field marshal and a new job as chief of the Imperial General Staff. The country he left behind, eventually to be renamed Malaysia, was on its way to independence in 1957 with a pro-Western government led by Tunku Abdul Rahman. A British officer summed up Templer’s accomplishment by noting that during his two years “two-thirds of the guerrillas were wiped out, the terrorist incident rate fell from 500 a month to less than 100, and the casualty rate went from 200 to less than 40.”169 No other counterinsurgency campaign waged abroad by a Western power in the postwar era was as successful.

  Warning against overconfidence and mindful of the difficulty of measuring success in a counterinsurgency, Templer said in 1953, “I’ll shoot the bastard who says this Emergency is over.”170 No one did say so, at least not officially, until 1960, when there were no casualties inflicted by the insurgents. That year the state of emergency was lifted. A few hundred of Chin Peng’s die-hard followers would hold out in the jungles of neighboring Thailand until the signing of a peace treaty in 1989, but they would never seriously threaten Malaysia’s stability again.

  IN EXAMINING WHY the British were successful in Malaya while the French failed in nearby Indochina, it must be noted that the former was a peninsula bordering a friendly country, Thailand, whereas the latter had a long land border with the decidedly unfriendly People’s Republic of China. Isolating the insurgents from outside support is a critical part of any counterinsurgency, and that was much easier to achieve in Malaya than in Indochina. Chin Peng did not receive any significant aid from China or Russia, and his fighters never had any heavy weapons. Even small-arms ammunition was in short supply.171

  The British were also helped by the fact that the rebellion was always limited to the Chinese, who made up 40 percent of the population. If the Communists had shown more skill in appealing to the Malay majority, they would have been much harder to defeat. But the Malays, mostly conservative Muslim farmers, remained loyal to their hereditary sultans, who were allied with the British.

  In addition the British war effort benefited from a stroke of serendipity: the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 caused a worldwide rise in commodity prices, including that of the tin and rubber produced in Malaya. The resulting economic boom allowed lavish spending on social services and provided plenty of good-paying jobs, which helped dispel the lure of the guerrillas.

  Finally the British benefited from the enlightened generalship of Harold Briggs and Gerald Templer, who used the appropriate degree of force while rejecting the tougher but ultimately self-defeating tactics employed by French commanders in Indochina and Algeria.

  For all these reasons, the British war in Malaya was far less costly, and far more successful, than the French and American efforts in Vietnam. Over twelve years the emergency cost the lives of 3,283 civilians, 1,865 security personnel, and 6,698 Communists.172

  48.

  “A DISTINCTIVELY BRITISH APPROACH”?

  Why the British Succeeded—at Least Sometimes

  DEBATE HAS RAGED ever since the end of the Malayan Emergency about whether and to what extent its lessons can be applied in other “counterinsurgencies”—a term coined in 1960.173 British veterans of Malaya such as Robert Thompson, Richard Clutterbuck, and Frank Kitson suggested that the combination of civil-action and punitive measures they had employed could be used to quell other uprisings. Skeptics pointed to the demographic and geographic advantages enjoyed by the counterinsurgents in Malaya that did not necessarily exist elsewhere.

  But such natural advantages can be frittered away by foolish policy choices. Ireland is an island and hence even more cut off from the outside world than Malaya. It is also much closer to Britain, and yet the British were defeated there in 1921. Cuba is also an island, yet it too would be the scene of a successful insurgency just as the Malayan Emergency was winding down. Even in Malaya the government hardly appeared predestined to succeed in the early 1950s. Only the implementation of successful counterinsurgency policies under Briggs and Templer saved the British from defeat and gave Malaya the iconic status it continues to enjoy in military circles.

  The strategy that worked in Malaya was premised on close civil-military cooperation, a search for a political settlement, and the avoidance of large-scale “search and destroy” missions in favor of “clear and hold” operations designed to control the population combined with targeted raids on insurgent lairs utilizing accurate intelligence and minimal firepower. These have come to be seen as the defining features of what the historian Thomas R. Mockaitis calls a “distinctly British approach to counterinsurgency.”174 The British had arrived at this strategy after a process of trial and error in the interwar period, having seen that heavy-handed repression, such as that perpetrated by the Black and Tans in Ireland, had backfired. What might have been acceptable practice in the nineteenth century was forbidden to a liberal democracy under the evolving standards of the twentieth century.

  It is fair to note, as the historian David French has done in critiquing Mockaitis’s work, that the British approach was hardly free of violence or even human-rights violations. British troops committed some abuses in all their wars and always relied on considerable coercion—“meaning,” French writes, “measures that ranged from curfews and cordon and search operations at one end of the scale of violence, through collective fines and large-scale detention without trial, and culminated in forced population resettlement and the creation of free fire zones.” Distorted British memories of their own history that exaggerated how nice British soldiers had been to the population, French suggests, led British forces astray in twenty-first-century Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were so intent on avoiding conflict that they were unable to pacify their areas of operations. His points are well-taken. Nevertheless, there was a qualitative difference between the British and the French approaches, to say nothing of the even greater differences between the British approach and that of illiberal counterinsurgents such as Nazi Germany or Nationalist China. As French concedes, “the British did not wage ‘dirty’ wars in the same systematic manner and on the scale as the French did in Algeria.” “Most members of the [British] security forces, most of the time, did operate within the law,” French concludes, albeit within a law constructed to give them considerable latitude to maintain security.175

  The British approach was hardly unique (similar methods were employed, for instance, in Morocco and the Philippines), but it was effective. The British prevailed not only in Malaya but also, to one degree or another, in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 against the Mau Mau movement;176 in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959 against EOKA, the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, a terrorist group seeking Enosis (union) with Greece;177 in Oman between 1962 and 1975 against separatists fighting for independence for the province of Dhofar;178 and in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998 against the Provisional IRA seeking its own version of Enosis—unification with the Republic of Ireland.179 When the British deviated from their minimal-force strategy, it usually came back to haunt them, the classic example being the second Bloody Sunday, when on January 30, 1972, the Parachute Regiment killed thirteen unarmed Catholic protesters in Londenderry, thereby making the “Tro
ubles” in Northern Ireland much worse. The one exception was Kenya, where the British were more brutal than usual (they interned 70,000 suspects and killed at least 12,000) but got away with it because the Mau Mau rebels belonged to a minority tribe, the Kikuyu, and lacked “a clearly defined nationalist ideology” that could appeal to the African majority. Even the most prominent Kikuyu politician, Jomo Kenyatta, opposed the rebellion, although this did not stop the British from locking him up for eight years.

  The British, needless to say, did not win everywhere. Their empire was, after all, on the way to dissolution. We have already noted their failure to suppress Jewish terrorism in Palestine after World War II. They were equally unsuccessful in Aden and its associated territories, which they left in 1967, allowing the Marxist National Liberation Front to take over what would become known as South Yemen. But it was hardly Arab terrorism that chased the British out; almost all of the violence in Aden occurred after the British decision to leave had been announced in 1966 as part of a general retrenchment “East of Suez.” At most the insurgency slightly accelerated the timetable for withdrawal.180

  In Cyprus, meanwhile, the British hardly won an unqualified victory, but neither did EOKA achieve its objective of Enosis. Like many insurgencies, this one petered out in an unsatisfying compromise, with Cyprus gaining its independence but no union with Greece and Britain retaining two military bases.