Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Summoned by Churchill to a summit in Canada, Templer eventually gained audience with the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary Field Marshal Alexander at one in the morning. Churchill had been drinking and was in a lachrymose mood. Putting his hand on the General’s knee, he promised: ‘You must have power – absolute power – civil power and military power. I will see that you get it. And when you’ve got it, grasp it – grasp it firmly. And then never use it. Be cunning – very cunning. That’s what you’ve got to be!’ After that Churchill retired, making reference to Montgomery’s terse note by saying, ‘Well, Alex, there we are. We’ve found a man.’36

  Indeed. Templer was given political authority as high commissioner and effective control of the police and all services of the armed forces as director of operations. No British soldier since Oliver Cromwell had enjoyed such extensive powers. He had spent virtually his whole military career in intelligence, reaching the rank of director of military intelligence, but his more recent experience had been in nation-building as the head of the military government in the British Zone in Germany. During this time he had acquired notoriety for sacking the Oberbürgermeister of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, for being too old for the job, thereby launching Adenauer’s meteoric career to become chancellor of Germany. That aside, Templer was a wise, intelligent and humane administrator.

  His strategy was to build a unified Malaya, following Whitehall’s line of promising its peoples independence once the insurgency had been defeated. It may have been he who decided to abandon calling the enemy ‘bandits’ in favour of ‘Communist terrorists’. This served to locate the war in Malaya in a broader Cold War context. Talk of Communists would have greater purchase on American audiences, who could not otherwise comprehend why so much state power was being directed at mere ‘bandits’.37 Although Templer was unaware of it, his appointment coincided with a change in strategy by his opponents. In October 1951 the Communist Central Committee ‘resolved’ that indiscriminate terror was counter-productive, and that violence should be confined to such symbolic targets as British officials and the security forces.38

  Ensconced in the mock-Tudor King’s House in Kuala Lumpur, Templer refined the legacy of Harold Briggs, rather than doing anything startlingly new. He brought charisma and a brisk clip to his new job. Emulating Churchill’s notorious ‘Action this Day’ memos, he sent out ‘Red Minutes’, to which he expected answers and solutions by the end of the day. From the start Templer realized that the Emergency was not going to be resolved by military means alone. ‘The shooting side of the business is only 25% of the trouble and the other 75% lies in getting the people of this country behind us,’ he wrote in 1952.39 Captured terrorists were better than dead terrorists since they had valuable information.

  There was a clean sweep at the top: Major-General Hugh Stockwell, with vast experience in Burma and Palestine, came in as GOC Malaya; a senior Metropolitan Police officer, Sir Arthur Young, was brought in to civilianize the police; and Jack Morton was made director of intelligence, with Guy Madoc as head of a separate Special Branch. C. C. Too was retained and backed fully. Hugh Carlton Greene, a wartime propagandist and future director-general of the BBC, was appointed to run information warfare from the same complex which housed Special Branch, convenient for getting his hands on turned CTs.40 The US Consul-General was an ex officio member of the British Defence Co-ordination Committee, and received regular briefings from Special Branch. Templer told him that ‘If I have anyone who can’t work with the Americans I’ll fire him.’ Visiting US Aid Survey Missions also satisfied British requests for such things as radios, outboard motors, shotguns, armour plate, barbed wire and Chinese interpreters.41

  Templer believed in the value of seeing conditions on the ground. To that end, during the twenty-eight months he spent in Malaya he undertook 122 tours of the country, covering 30,000 miles by air and 21,000 by road. Each tour involved multiple stops, with the General firing sharp questions at officials and listening to the locals, whether villagers or planters. He made it clear from the outset that he was capable of acting ruthlessly. Almost as he arrived a dozen people, engineers and policemen, were killed in an ambush at Tanjong Malim, including Assistant District Officer Michael Codner, renowned as one of the men who had successfully fled German captivity in the Wooden Horse escape. Templer descended on the town, where he harangued the inhabitants for cowardice in allowing the Communists to operate in their vicinity. ‘This is going to stop,’ he declared. ‘It does not amuse me to punish innocent people, but many of you are not innocent. You have information which you are too cowardly to give.’42 He then stripped Tanjong Malim of its status as an administrative capital, which hit the townspeople in their wallets, and halved the rice ration. He also imposed a twenty-two-hour curfew policed by 3,500 guards covering a double barbed-wire fence, with fifteen watchtowers and powerful perimeter lighting. The villagers were also required to complete confidential forms giving information on Communist suspects and sympathizers. The first batch was transported in sealed boxes to King’s House, where Templer read them himself, passing the highlights to Special Branch. The forms were then destroyed to preserve anonymity.

  He and his staff endeavoured to reduce the ethnic tensions which underlay the Emergency. One problem was that the police were predominantly ethnic Malay, partly because Chinese families thought the rank of humble constable was beneath them. As the Chinese proverb goes, good men do not become soldiers, any more than good iron is used to make nails. Chinese businessmen were encouraged to subsidize police recruits. An essentially paramilitary police force was renamed a ‘service’, and its badge redesigned to include two clasped hands. The resettlement areas were renamed new villages, with all the connotations of a fresh start, and their amenities were constantly improved. Voluntary associations were encouraged to flourish, with Templer taking a particular interest in the Boy Scouts. His redoubtable wife Peggie threw herself into voluntary work and learned enough rudimentary Malay to broadcast in it. She also played a part in popularizing Women’s Institutes to help form an indigenous multi-ethnic middle class, with its own direct experience of democratic organization.43 Together with the Girl Guides and Red Cross, the WI was important in making younger women aware of wider social obligations than their mothers had accepted. Lady Templer also threw open King’s House to everyone from select groups of Malay villagers to aboriginal headmen, who delighted in eating bars of chocolate with the paper and foil wrapping still on.

  Templer set the tone at King’s House in eradicating instances of petty racist snobbery, becoming the first High Commissioner to shake hands with his own domestic servants, with whom he also danced the conga on special occasions. In a speech to Kuala Lumpur’s Rotarians, he made it clear that he had little time for the lotus life of many European colonists. ‘You can see today how the Communists work. They seldom go to the races. They seldom go to dinner parties or cocktail parties. And they don’t play golf.’ One St George’s Day, even the Sultan of Selangor found himself barred from celebrations at the Lake Club, of which he was the landlord rather than a member. Templer summoned the Club’s committee and read the riot act, pointing out that the British army in Malaya was a multiracial force including Africans from Nyasaland, Gurkhas, Indians and Fijians, not to speak of Australians, New Zealanders and white Rhodesian SAS men, and threatened to close down the Club. In a major address to the Chamber of Commerce, Templer stressed the responsibilities of European colonizers:

  The British community as citizens of a leading democratic country have a special responsibility for leadership and example . . . Europeans must learn to see themselves not just as transients without roots in Malaya but as part of a tradition of partnership between Britain and Malaya which has endured in the past and will endure in the future. They must take an active part in the life of the local Malayan community. They must crusade against racial barriers or discrimination wherever they may be found. They must set an example in employer–employee relationshi
ps and business ethics. They must be prepared to devote some time to voluntary activities.44

  Templer secured an invitation to the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II for the (Indian) General Secretary of the Plantation Workers Union and did not hesitate to bypass obstructive plantation managers by writing directly to their masters in the City of London if he felt that conditions and wages on their plantations were inadequate. Templer also had to guard against seeming to favour the Malay Chinese over the ethnic Malay majority, who reminded him of the superficially passive but secretly angry Arabs he had seen during his year in Palestine in the mid-1930s. Some Malays even sought relocation in dedicated resettlement in new villages to escape the squalor of their existing kampongs. One measure was to use government subsidies to alleviate the rapid drop in rubber prices following the Korean War boom. The army was in the vanguard of integrating the races, since in addition to an exclusively Malay regiment Templer established a multiracial Federation Regiment, with a surrogate Sandhurst in the shape of the Federation Military College.

  Templer did not neglect the role of armed force in driving the Communists to the negotiating table. Its role should not be downplayed in the interests of highlighting softer forms of counter-terrorism based on protecting the population, just because this has become modish in contemporary Iraq or Afghanistan. The cardinal principle was that guerrillas were best placed to combat guerrillas, especially if the security services had use of Surrendered Enemy Personnel to guide them to the lairs of their former comrades. A specialist jungle warfare school was established in a former lunatic asylum at Kota Tinggi in 1953, where the new lunacy, as taught by a veteran of Force 136, included getting used to such delicacies as fried iguana and python soup. An Anti-Terrorist Operational Manual, colloquially called ATOM, fitted into every squaddie’s sweat-soaked jungle greens.

  Troops were expected to combine the qualities of a cat burglar, gangster and poacher. They learned to whisper when speaking – for sound carries in the jungle – and how to use the noise of heavy rainfall to get into position for ambushes. Companies of soldiers competed with one another to have the best score-card of kills, with a hundred dead referred to as a ‘century’, as in cricket. In an environment where visibility was a matter of yards and everyone ended up looking ragged after lengthy patrolling, the danger of friendly-fire incidents was constantly stressed. Ambushes remained an ever-present risk on the country’s roads, but armoured trains secured the railways. There were amusing incidents. A Green Howards company commander saw three heads ducking down 200 yards ahead alongside the road his convoy was travelling. He ordered his men to dismount and launched a flanking attack on what turned out to be monkeys sheltering in a hollow.45

  Aircraft and Sikorski helicopters were used to resupply long-range patrols inserted into remote regions, and to boost army morale by rapidly evacuating casualties. A ten-minute helicopter flight covered the same distance as ten hours of walking through the jungle. Elite special forces, known as the Malayan Scouts but derived from the SAS, were dropped by parachute, or abseiled from helicopters to ambush CT squads. Six men would drop down in as many seconds. The use of former head-hunters from Sarawak led to a minor scandal when in 1952 the Communist Daily Worker published a photo of a Royal Marine commando proudly brandishing the severed heads of two terrorists, although they had been collected for identification purposes as a necessary alternative to hauling the bodies back to base through dense jungle.

  In a departure from the Briggs strategy of systematically working south to north, Templer and General Stockwell decided to use mobile patrols to combat CTs everywhere, while larger formations held areas that from September 1953 onwards were designated ‘white’ after being cleared of terrorists through intelligence-driven operations. In the ‘white’ areas, copied from the Japanese ‘Model Peace Zones’ of wartime Malaya, curfews and other restrictions were lifted. They spread like ink blots and within them normal life was restored, so that children could play in village streets rather than being cooped up indoors, and young couples could go for meaningful walks.

  By the end of 1953 around 7,000 MCP fighters had been killed or captured or had surrendered, although since their recruitment ran at an estimated 1,600 a year their numbers remained fairly stable at around 5,500. But they were decreasingly active. Incidents involving exchanges of gunfire declined from around 6,000 in 1950 to a thousand four years later. The last five years of the Emergency saw patrols chasing ever smaller groups of terrorists.46 Anticipating the Americans’ use of Agent Orange and the like in Vietnam, the British also used the chemical defoliant sodium trichloroacetate, manufactured by ICI, to clear roadside vegetation from which ambushes were mounted, and to spray clearings where the CTs grew their own food. The government claimed that these chemicals were non-toxic weedkillers or hormone plant agents.47

  The British also made use of Voice aircraft, codenamed Loudmouth, as employed by the US in Korea. The Americans supplied Dakota aircraft, which contained a diesel generator that powered four large loudspeakers attached to the undercarriage. Since the tree canopy inhibited anti-aircraft fire, these planes could cruise at low altitudes along square boxes of airspace, booming out pre-recorded messages to the guerrillas below. Some recordings had the authoritative tones of the voice of God. After three days spent mastering the Mandarin pronunciation, Templer’s voice announced from the sky: ‘This is General Templer speaking. To all members of the Malayan Communist Party. You need not be afraid and you can surrender. This is my personal pledge to you. You will not be ill treated.’ Others were messages from already turned terrorists, which were disconcertingly addressed to individuals. By 1955 all surrendered guerrillas claimed to have heard such messages.48 Chinese-language leaflets read, ‘Don’t feed the Communist mad dogs: they will bite you,’ illustrated with a Chinese farmer dropping a rice bowl as a fierce dog wearing a cap and Communist stars bit his behind. Flyers aimed at Communist fighters included some that showed the corpse of a Tamil called Ramesamy with the caption ‘He was shot dead like an unwanted dog.’ Broadcasts dwelled on former insurgents enjoying their New Year roast-duck meal after leaving the jungle.49

  Chinese officers in Madoc’s Special Branch won the intelligence war. They had the necessary cultural sensitivity and language skills. Locating enemy bases was one priority, sometimes achieved by planting homing devices in radios which were then sold on to dealers known to sell goods to people involved in the Min Yuen. Breaking into the Communist courier network was also important. Women were often preferred as couriers since the mainly male police force would be inhibited from giving them a thorough body search in societies where personal modesty is valued. A woman carrying a baby, often on loan from another Min Yuen member, was even better.

  The women courier network became the special target of a young Chinese detective, Irene Lee. She was a woman of deadly purpose; the Communists had killed her detective husband. Special Branch got its initial break after three weeks spent idling amid the racks and shelves of Robinson’s department store in Singapore watching Ah Soo, wife of the leader of Singapore’s Communist protection squad. Ah Soo eventually met with another woman carrying an identical plastic shopping bag which the two surreptitiously exchanged. Irene Lee followed Ah Soo out of the store, poking a Beretta in her back to force her into an unmarked car which was cruising alongside the pavement. Back at Special Branch HQ a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder was found to contain a message concealed in its false bottom. Ah Soo was induced to reveal her next contact by threats that she would be photographed between two smiling policemen and that 50,000 printed copies would be dropped in the jungle.

  At Yong Peng, where the second courier lived, Irene Lee persuaded her that she was a terrorist herself, inviting her out to celebrate a recent kill. The courier was abducted in a taxi and found herself in a room in Special Branch HQ, occupied by strange equipment, mirrors and two women in white coats. Terrified that she was going to be tortured, the courier readily confessed a
fter they merely gave her a manicure and a perm. This confession took Irene Lee to a rubber plantation near Ipoh, whose workforce she joined as a humble tapper. For several weeks she observed a fellow worker called Chen Lee, known to be a member of the Min Yuen. She confronted him after luring him to a darkened taxi parked at a lonely spot, showing him the rice he had smuggled inside a bicycle pump and medicines he had buried on the edge of the jungle. She also said she had evidence that he had passed three cartridges to terrorists, at which point he broke, knowing that possession of guns or ammunition carried a mandatory death sentence.

  Chen Lee’s information brought Irene Lee near the end of the chain: a book store on Batu Road in Kuala Lumpur. Somehow Special Branch had to get inside, although the only entrance was via the front from a busy street and Min Yuen agents kept permanent watch on the shop. Special Branch set up an import-export company based on a pineapple estate and cannery in Johore. They acquired a large truck, which each week plied between Johore and Penang, stopping every Sunday in Kuala Lumpur before taking its load onward to Penang’s docks. One Sunday morning the truck had a puncture outside the bookshop and the driver persuaded the Min Yuen agents to unload the cases of tinned pineapple to make it easier to jack the vehicle up. The driver, himself a Special Branch detective, sent off for bottles of Tiger beer, for it was hot work. The cases were piled up in front of the bookshop and in one of them Irene Lee waited to exit through a trap door. She picked the shop’s lock, photographed the store’s contents and was back inside the case before it was loaded back on to the vehicle. She had found two vital clues: the head courier was in Ipoh and it was a young woman.