CHAPTER 6

The Malayan Emergency: British Counterinsurgency Phases and the Triumph of Geo-demographic Control, 1948–60

Karl Hack

TIMELINE

1948, June 16	Emergency declared in parts of the states of Johore1 and Perak
1948, June 18	Emergency declared nationwide. Police direction of the military in aid of the civil power.
1948–49	Both sides struggle to arm and formulate policies.
1950, April	Lieutenant General Briggs made director of operations in a civil capacity to direct all operations. System of War Executive Committees established for Federation (FWEC), States (SWEC), and Districts (DWEC).
1950, June	“Briggs Plan” and systematic resettlement fully underway.
1951, October	Malayan Communist Party’s (MCP) “October Resolutions” radically change insurgent tactics.
1951, October 6	High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney ambushed and killed.
1951, December	First municipal elections (Penang).
1952, February	Alliance formed from UMNO (United Malays National Organisation) and MCA (Malayan Chinese Association) to contest Kuala Lumpur municipal elections.
	General Sir Gerald Templer arrives as both director of operations and high commissioner, staying until April 1954.
1952–1954	Alliance sweeps municipal and state elections.
	Emergency incidents plummet in 1952 and then continue improving steadily.
1955, July	Alliance sweeps federal elections. Its leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, becomes chief minister.
1955, September	Amnesty terms announced.
1955, December	Baling Peace Talks between Malayan ministers and MCP fail.
1956, January–February	London Constitutional Conference sets date for independence and agrees emergency direction to pass to Malayans in the interim.
1956, March	Emergency Operation Council (EOC) commences, chaired by Tunku Abdul Rahman to direct operations.
1957, August 31	Independence (Merdeka) but many British remain in key positions.
1957, October	Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) allows continued British use of bases for “Commonwealth Strategic Reserve,” and continuing Commonwealth assistance to the civil power in counterinsurgency.
1960, July 31	Formal end of emergency. Small Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) units remain at the border.

The Malayan Emergency officially lasted from mid-June 1948 until July 31, 1960, with small numbers of communist insurgents fighting on from the Malaysian-Thai border area afterward, some until a final peace agreement in December 1989. The campaign started with both sides ill-prepared. The communists had anticipated a conscious escalation from labor militancy (including killing “bad” employers and opposition unionists), to prepare the country for a full “people’s war” over several months from March 1948. In their ideal world, the latter would have broken out in or after September 1948, against a background of increasing rural and worker support, preferably extending beyond their main Chinese support base to embrace more Malays and Indians.

The British colonial authorities, meanwhile, started in June 1948 with a police force of around 9,000, and a military of about 10 battalions (plus two local battalions from the Malay Regiment and 26 Royal Artillery Regiment deployed as infantry). Except for the Malay Regiment, the military had been intended to act mainly as a strategic reserve to project British power throughout the east. The diversion of this embryonic British-Gurkha strategic reserve to emergency duties—followed soon after by the arrival of British reinforcements—came as a severe disappointment. Throughout 1948–51, Whitehall would repeatedly demand to know when the tide in Malaya would be reversed, so that resources could be released. In 1948, meanwhile, neither the police nor the army were well prepared for counterinsurgency.²

The insurgents also suffered from early disorganization. They lost many men to early arrests, and more to police and army sweeps and cordon and search operations. Forced into the jungle months ahead of their ideal start date, they had to hurriedly move ex-wartime guerrillas, unionists, and party workers into the cover of the jungle.³ Starting with around 2,000–3,000 poorly organized men in mid-1948, they reached a peak estimated yearly average strength of 7,294 in 1951. This would fall to 5,765 in 1952 as resettlement of their rural supporters took its toll, and to 2,798 in 1955.⁴

By the latter date, the insurgents sought negotiations in the hope of ending the insurgency and returning to politics as decolonization accelerated. With negotiations in December 1955 failing, by independence on August 31, 1957 they were reduced to less than 1,800 members of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), of whom only a few hundred were fighters. Most were by then located near the border or in southern Thailand, to which the MNLA command had retreated in 1952–53 while leaving behind clusters of fighters in the Malayan states of Perak, Negri Sembilan, and Johore. From 1957 to 1959, the remaining Commonwealth forces therefore concentrated on helping local forces in a few large operations, with the aim of eliminating those insurgents remaining in Malaya. Despite the slump in MNLA fortunes, and occasional surges in surrenders, the grim reality was that approximately 67 percent of insurgents “eliminated” were killed (see Table 6.1).

In short, the emergency spluttered into premature life in 1948, peaked in terms of security force casualties and insurgent numbers in 1951, saw dramatic falls in incidents in 1952 and continuing but slower paced improvement thereafter, but still demanded sustained pressure against pockets of insurgents as late as 1957–59. In 1958, the MNLA command on the border ordered a gradual rundown of most remaining forces, a process only partially reversed in 1962, following encouragement from Beijing. Given the official end of the emergency on July 31, 1960, emergency conditions were thereafter only used in specific areas, mostly near the Thai border. Despite occasional assassinations and flying columns in the 1970s, the insurgents became little more than a containable irritation.

Returning to the main part of the campaign, we need to conceptualize the insurgents as more than merely a group of fighters and the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) officials who directed them. The MNLA⁵ fighters—about 80–90 percent Chinese plus a mix of Malays and Indians—were supported by far larger numbers of “Mass Organisation” (Min Yuen), in turn sustained by up to a million sympathizers—all this from a Malayan population that grew from around 5 million in 1948 to just over 6 million by 1957.⁶

Malaya’s population was in turn split between Malays and similar groups (around 49 percent by 1947) who claimed special consideration as what later came to be called bumiputra (sons of the soil) and who slightly outnumbered Chinese (38 percent and around 1.9 million in 1947) and a smaller Indian community.⁷ The Chinese were mostly first- to third-generation immigrant stock speaking a number of dialects. The Indians likewise were mostly of immigrant stock, attracted by jobs on Malaya’s plantations and in shops and offices. On the one hand, the mass of Chinese included many low-paid plantation and mine workers; on the other, wealthy towkays (powerful businessmen often also leading traditional associations), small businessmen, shopkeepers and traders, and an English-educated section. These patterns within the Chinese community would prove vital in the campaign that followed, providing significant groups who, given the right conditions, might be willing to oppose communism.⁸

Table 6.1
Casualties in the Malayan Emergency up to Independence, August 31, 1957

The geographic canvas on which the campaign was played out was a long stretch of land about the size of England, jutting southward from the Southeast Asian land mass toward the Indonesian archipelago. This was bisected by an expansive “main range” of jungle-covered mountain and forest running down the middle of the country, from which communist-controlled insurgents had fought the Japanese during World War II. That conflict, which had seen British-controlled officers of Force 136 (Special Operation Executive) sent from India and Ceylon to help train the anti-Japanese guerrillas from 1943, made the communist-controlled anti-Japanese guerrillas heroes to many Chinese.

At first when things became tough after 1948, villagers and guerrillas could recall that anti-Japanese resistance had survived nearly four years of occupation, during which the Japanese had at times massacred villages in retaliation for insurgent-inspired incidents. Surely they would also find a way to defeat British sweeps and (from 1950) resettlement. They could also look toward the communist’s rising postwar power, and then dominance, in mainland China. The declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949, British recognition of it in January 1950, and the Korean War, all suggested that communism might be history’s winning side and that Britain might be forced to withdraw forces from Malaya, as they had from Palestine in 1948.

With many Chinese in Malaya still imagining Southeast Asia as the “Nanyang” (South Seas—in other words, south of China), the idea that communism might roll southward through Indochina and Thailand to Malaya seemed anything but far-fetched as late as 1951. In this respect, it is important to remember that the Chinese were also split between those who still felt themselves Chinese sojourning overseas and the increasing number who recognized themselves as “Malayan” Chinese, as having put down tropical roots. Many of the anti-Japanese communist-led guerrillas of the war years had started out primarily as anti-Japanese, pro-China patriots. Some Chinese had even left Malaya to assist Kuomintang (Guomindang) forces in China. But Chinese fighters in Malaya itself became more and more Malayan minded as they and their comrades shed their blood in Malaya’s jungles and plantations and as captured comrades were tortured and died in the custody of the Japanese Kempeitei (secret police).⁹

The edge of Malaya’s jungle, where the anti-Japanese forces hid during the Japanese occupation, eased into lallang (long grasses and undergrowth at the jungle edge), then into smallholdings, rubber plantations, and tin mines, and finally into more heavily populated coastal strips. Moreover, the jungle edge itself was peppered by Chinese smallholdings, some legally owned and many more occupied illegally by Chinese “squatter” farmers. The latter housed up to half a million Chinese who had fled interwar underemployment, unemployment, and harsh labor conditions or who had settled there during the war for fear of Japanese massacres and oppression and to avoid increasing hunger.

The main concentration of towns and villages, however, lay on the plains, away from the mountains and jungle, which covered the interior two-thirds of the country. The western strip of coast was the more highly developed and urbanized, with good infrastructure and a higher Chinese percentage. The eastern strip was more sparsely populated, more Malay dominated, and relatively underdeveloped.

As in so many other insurgencies—whether anticolonial or postcolonial—the conflict would be characterized as much by miniature “civil wars” between and within individual ethnic and intra-ethnic groups about how to shape the country (as “nationalist” or “communist,” as truly multiracial “Malayan” or as “Malay dominated”) as about opposing the government. Finding and working with the grain of local society, and making the compromises necessary to facilitate entrenched anticommunist Asians who would be willing to work with the government, would be crucial to success. For instance, who among the Chinese would be willing to stand up against communism—at the risk of themselves and their families being killed—and for what interests, ideals, and concessions?¹⁰ This need to court key local partners would mean compromising early British visions of transition to a more pure Westminster-style democracy founded on issue-based rather than ethnic identity-based parties. In particular, that would come to mean the ethnically based UMNO (United Malays National Organisation, founded 1946) and Malayan Chinese Association (MCA, founded initially as a social welfare organization, in 1949), the latter run by traditional and business Chinese leaders.

This Malayan mosaic of mountain and plain, and of diverse linguistic and cultural communities, was also subdivided administratively. The “Federation of Malaya” (or more properly translated, “Federation of Malay Lands”) was divided into nine sovereign Malay states and the two “settlements” of Penang and Malacca. The federation was a classic case of a British imperial territory, which was not technically a formal “colony.” The British had made it one briefly—in the Malayan Union of 1946–48—but then backtracked due to fear they would permanently lose majority Malay support following volatile mass rallies and the foundation of the UMNO. The federation instituted on February 1, 1948, thus restored the sovereignty of the Malay sultans in each of their nine states (each with their own Malay Menteri Besar or first minister), with an ultimate power of veto in sensitive areas such as land policy, and where Malay protection was concerned. Though it retained the Malayan Union’s innovations of a strong central executive and central legislature—both with a large official (British) majority, there was thus a delicate balance of power and influence in the federation. The Malays insisted that the British return to the spirit of the original agreements made in and after 1874, by which each of the nine Malay sultans had remained sovereign, but accepted a British resident or adviser whose “advice” was to be “asked and acted upon” in all matters excepting Malay custom (adat) and religion. They also insisted that citizenship rules be framed in a way that included fewer Chinese than earlier British plans of 1946 had envisaged.¹¹

Indeed, the retreat from the union—and from that earlier promise of more generous citizenship extension for non-Malays—was one of the reasons the MCP concluded that further constitutional politics was futile.¹² As already noted, the MCP had cooperated with the British in wartime anti-Japanese activities. After the war, it emerged as an open party. In 1946–47, the MCP pursued “united front” policies, whereby it collaborated with other organizations to support laborers, demand faster moves to elections, and proposed a forward-looking “People’s Constitution” that envisaged far-reaching democratic and labor rights.

An additional reason for the MCP losing confidence in peaceful campaigning was British repression of labor organization, such as banishing key labor and communist leaders, using trespass laws to keep organizers off rubber plantations, and police interventions in labor disputes that left some strikers dead in 1947.¹³ The MCP secretary general who had supported a postwar united front and constitutional policy—Lai Teck—also disappeared with party funds in early 1947. Lai Teck, who had assumed heroic status for his apparent wartime bravado, was exposed as a triple agent who had betrayed comrades to the prewar and postwar British and the wartime Japanese. With postwar violence also ebbing away over time (violent crime was falling from 1947 into early 1948, until the communists changed their policy), and new labor laws due in June 1948 likely to limit communist influence in unions (most federations of unions were to be banned and union officials restricted to bona fide members of each industry without serious criminal convictions), the communists were in a bind.¹⁴

All this meant that by February 1, 1948, the day the new federation was inaugurated, the party’s new leaders felt that they had little alternative but to resort to increased “defensive” violence. There was some opposition within the leadership, because the party had been weakened by Lai Teck’s disappearance and had not yet gathered enough non-Chinese mass support. But simultaneous changes in international communist policy, toward ending united fronts in and beyond Central and Eastern Europe and toward armed insurrection elsewhere, bolstered militancy. British propaganda would later present the MCP as following Comintern orders, but the truth was that local and international forces converged to massively overdetermine revolt.¹⁵

MCP meetings in March and May 1948 decided to prepare for full revolutionary warfare by late 1948 by first targeting “bad” employers and those opposing communist labor policy. It was the resultant escalation in attacks and murders—culminating in five murders on the single day of June 16, 1948 (three Europeans plantation managers and two Chinese), which caused the British to declare a local emergency in the states of Perak and Johore. As such, the murders were part of a concerted policy, but their short-term result was neither anticipated nor desired by the MCP.

The British, meanwhile, had not detected any communist plot for revolution on a particular date, precisely because the communist “plan” was for gradual escalation, with the precise timing for full warfare held over for decision later in 1948. The “myth” of an easy chance to spot a definite plan and act earlier may suit intelligence communities’ desires to point to “lessons” (notably the self-serving one that more intelligence resources are always vital), but this does not fit the facts.¹⁶ Almost by definition the launch of a major insurgency is likely to be flavored by a severe lack of good penetration of an insurgent organization. This makes the central requirement the need to understand how to rapidly transform and scale up intelligence resources. In addition, any premature declaration of emergency powers and resort to mass arrest could remove the chance to observe and further penetrate a movement just as it is realized that that is urgent, by forcing more of its members underground quickly. Notwithstanding these structural limitations, the postwar pan-Malayan “Malayan Security Service” (MSS) was soon disbanded, with intelligence gathering returning to a Special Branch (SB) operating out of Malaya’s Police Criminal Investigation Division (CID). This ensured that the people gathering intelligence were organically linked to the operational police who had widest access to the public and information. By contrast, the MSS had been a pan-Malaya and Singapore organization focused on political intelligence and operationally detached from the police.¹⁷

Despite the British lack of the sort of evidence they needed for earlier action, the rising level of violence stemming from the communist decisions of March and May 1948 forced a harassed high commissioner to act. Sir Edward Gent declared an emergency at local and then national level between June 16 (parts of the two states of Perak and Johore) and 18 (nationwide, effective June 20). Under a barrage of press and planter criticism for the slowness of this resort to emergency, he was recalled to Britain for consultations, where his plane crashed on landing, killing him. With angry British planters and frightened anticommunist Chinese now backed by the press, the government not only arrested around a thousand suspect Chinese and Malay left-wing nationalists on July 20 but finally outlawed the MCP as a political party in July.

It would be September 1948 before a new high commissioner took over. Sir Henry Gurney, who had been the last British chief secretary in Palestine, flew over to join General Boucher (GOC Malaya). In the same month, ex-Palestine Inspector General of Police Colonel W. Nichol Gray also arrived as commissioner of police, followed by around 500 police sergeants, mainly recruited from British Army NCOs and from Palestine. With the police directing the campaign, very few Chinese in the detective branch of the police, and faced by insurgent groups of up to a hundred (and exceptionally the low hundreds), it is not surprising that the under-resourced security forces resorted to large sweeps, cordon and search, hooded informers or informers peering through slits on vehicles, and other methods reminiscent of Palestine and older colonial conflicts.

The use of the term emergency to cover these actions was an obvious one. The power for governors to issue a proclamation giving them control of property and persons and the use of courts martial for the latter had been established by Orders-in-Council of 1896 (for select fortresses) and 1916 (for all colonies). A March 1939 Emergency Powers (Colonial Defense) Order-in-Council had updated and extended these powers, envisaging their possible use in the general war that seemed to be approaching. The 1939 Emergency Powers Order-in-Council would be the model used in many postwar counterinsurgencies, whereby a governor or equivalent could after declaring an emergency make such regulations as he or she deemed necessary or expedient for public safety and defense. This is what the high commissioner for Malaya did in the Emergency Regulations Ordinance of July 1948.¹⁸

Such emergency rule was a useful device for retaining civil control and the appearance of the rule of law, while allowing the executive to issue emergency regulations (ERs), which suspended habeas corpus for discrete circumstances and needs (for instance, allowing detention without trial in Malaya). It could be used to give the army and police expanded powers of search and arrest, without burdening the army with the effort and odium of undertaking civil administration. From mid-1948, Malaya’s ERs (issued by the high commissioner in council) proliferated, extending to a national identity card scheme, individual and group deportation of suspected noncitizens, and (especially from 1950) a raft of powers to control residence and movement of food and people. In short, emergency powers preserved the existing form of civil control and liberties and the rule of law, while providing in reality for a targeted—but in many ways pervasive—suspension of liberties. They created a quasi-legal reality within which the military and police exercised considerable powers and discretion. They also allowed for extreme penalties, for instance from June 1950 extorting food for insurgents (as opposed to merely giving food) could attract the death penalty. Such draconian potential penalties gave added reason for those detained to cooperate, in the hope of being spared the worst. That maximizing of the gap between potential penalties for resistance, and yet rewards and assistance if helpful, was to continue to color the British approach to ERs in Malaya.¹⁹

The high commissioner of the federation thus retained control in Malaya, delegating the direction of the campaign against “bandits” or communist bandits—as the government initially designated their enemy—to the commissioner of police. The army, meanwhile, was called to assist the civil power, fortified in 1948 by the arrival of fresh units, such as the 2nd Battalion, the Scots Guards.

CAMPAIGN “PHASES” AND APPROACHES

It should already be obvious that the early period of the emergency was characterized by inadequate preparation and intelligence on both sides, and on the British side by a use of increasingly far-reaching emergency powers, and importation of British personnel with experience in Palestine and to some extent Palestinian methods and lessons. Sometimes attempts to avoid the mistakes of the last conflict created the mistakes of the next, as when Colonel Gray initially limited the use of armored cars for his police, in the hope of avoiding their isolation from the population (as he believed had happened in Palestine), and over-aggression.²⁰ Until reversed, this made the police desperately vulnerable in Malaya’s jungle-fringed ulu (up-river or up-country) roads, even as planters were receiving armor for their cars and trucks, in addition to special constables to protect their isolated bungalows.

Such early characteristics did not, however, continue unchanged. Among the most important changes would be the easing of the early “approach to counter terror,” with its large sweeps, and mass detention and large-scale deportation and intimidation of noncitizen Chinese.²¹ That “counter-terror” was transformed, notably from 1950, into a much more controlled and increasingly better calibrated mix of “carrot and stick.” Such dramatic changes in the overall feel and tone of the campaign highlight the degree to which it is necessary to carefully differentiate between different periods. By 1952, the highest of the imported Palestine-experienced British personnel (Gurney and Gray) would be gone, and the sergeants absorbed as local police lieutenants. The approach to the rural Chinese population would be radically changed, too, from attempting to intimidate them into cooperation in 1948–49 or else just move on or deport supposed recalcitrants, to providing coercive but also protective resettlement. This contrast should serve as a warning against any attempt to stereotype something as complex and shifting as an insurgency using one model for an entire campaign.

Yet that is what seems to have happened in British counterinsurgency historiography, in the period from approximately 2007 to 2014. Hence, for instance, David French’s emphasis in 2012–2013 on the British winning only where they “intimidated” the population more than the enemy works better for some periods in Malaya than for others, notwithstanding his simultaneous acknowledgment of the high importance of protecting the population. On October 15, 2013, Radio 4’s Terror through Time series broadcast an interview in which French argued that the British had won counterinsurgencies only where they had managed to intimidate the population more than the insurgents. This echoed the message of his The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 that “On balance where they won they did so by being nasty, not nice, to the people.”²²

French’s statement should be seen as sitting at the high-water mark of a tide of works rightly determined to correct the previous overemphasis on “winning hearts and minds” and “minimum force” as the core characteristics of a British way of counterinsurgency.²³ For Malaya, the classic statement of this argument was Richard Stubbs’s Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare of 1989, which had argued that an increase in positive measures after 1952 (notably elections at all levels, and improved facilities and protection for New Villages) had been necessary and key to turning round the emergency. According to him, the more purely coercive approach employed up to 1951 had instead produced mere “stalemate.” Such works undoubtedly overestimated the impact of such positive measures at the stage at which the emergency started turning (which was also earlier than Stubbs estimated and stretched across 1950–52).²⁴ Given high-profile high court cases from 2011–13 concerning British abuses in Malaya and Kenya, and the associated release in 2012–13 of thousands of colonial files kept secret by the Foreign Office, the more recent tendency has been toward accurately documenting abuses of prisoners and detainees, use of illegal force, and examples of collective punishment.²⁵ It has consequently tended toward emphasizing the place of abuses such as widespread torture of Kenyan detainees in what are characterized as wider British counter-terror and intimidation.²⁶ This tide has, therefore, now gone so far as to claim that, though the British did have notions of exercising “minimum force” in limited contexts, British forces also employed ideas closer to sufficient force and even “exemplary force,” which “targeted whole populations in order to punish insurgents, and to warn others not to support the rebellion”—this being, “by its nature indiscriminate and terrorising.”²⁷

As we shall see, however, such a characterization of British policy fits some periods better than others. It is most adequate for Malaya for the 1948–49 period of counter-terror, a period that garnered distinctly mixed results. For the following, transformative 1950–52 period, the British changed from the earlier, more heavily enemy-centric and “intimidation” or “counter-terror” approach, toward something closer to protective coercion or geo-demographic control. By geo-demographic control, it meant an approach that aims to integrate both enemy-centric and population-centric methods around a core of controlling the critical contested population and space.

This geo-demographic control (controlling people and space in tandem) set the scene. But it was not purely “population-centric” in the limited sense of concentrating on mainly positive measures aimed at the contested population—certainly not to the extent of underplaying enemy-centric and more coercive measures. Quite the reverse, from 1950 the Malayan campaign found a way of integrating enemy-centric patrols with operations targeted on clusters of New Villages and their surrounding area, with the ultimate aim of breaking particular MCP committees. The latter operations blended “lots of stick and lots of carrot”—often very tight controls but also clear inducements—rather than being merely coercive or mainly about “winning hearts and minds.” To oppose these approaches would, for Malaya after 1950, create a false dichotomy.²⁸

This blended approach meant that an individual army patrol might be laying ambushes or inserted deep in the jungle for aggressive patrols. The army’s main roles remained military and enemy-focused in themselves. But this did not mean that they were detached from population-centric measures: quite the reverse. On average it might take 1,000 hours of patrolling to encounter an insurgent, 300 to carry out an ambush, or longer if there was no information to act on. So tying these activities to good intelligence was vital to increase contacts and kill rates.²⁹ This need for quality information if anything intensified as the campaign turned against the insurgents. By 1953–54, insurgents had retreated deeper into the jungle and become much more selective in their attacks. This made achieving contacts increasingly difficult and thus gaining information about local insurgent movements more vital. It also made gaining more kills per contact even more important. Consequently, Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya, the counterinsurgency manual first published in 1952, emphasized not only the vital importance of good intelligence, but also training to improve marksmanship, selecting the man who was the best shot from a patrol to open ambushes, and matching best ambush layouts for different terrains. By contrast, close protection of New Villages and supervision of checks at their gates was increasingly turned over to Home Guard and police.³⁰ The army’s role was thus mainly kinetic, patrolling, and ambushing, but most military actions after 1950 were deeply embedded in a broader approach.

From 1950, the army’s military actions tended to contribute either to maintaining the “framework,” which is providing security around a specific area, or to the mounting of operations that blended enemy-centric actions (fighting) with nearby population-centric actions by the police and civil authorities (New Village control and surveillance, increasing protection, increasing amenities, increasingly tight controls including over food, and also increased identification and meeting of local needs). In the latter case, the army’s actions were carefully coordinated through the nexus of Malaya’s post-1950 War Executive Committee (WEC) system, to create a tightening noose around a particular insurgent committee or leaders. If necessary, ad hoc WECs were created across normal civilian boundaries, to match the operational area to the communist committee’s area of operations.

Such operations targeted the one or more New Villages that supplied a particular MNLA committee and were also seen as an essential source of increasing “live” intelligence (intelligence of future MNLA movements or intentions), for instance by turning MNLA suppliers in the villages. That live intelligence was in turn seen as the surest way to rendering the army’s patrols and ambushes successful, as contacts declined after 1953.³¹ Purely military action was by contrast considered much less likely to create the necessary live intelligence. Even if it did and succeeded on its own terms, without the wider geo-demographic control and targeting of a communist committee and its civilian support network, a detached army success would probably not have the same effect of destroying the insurgent ability to regenerate. During the critical 1950–52 period, furthermore, some of the most extremely coercive and “terrorizing” policies (such as removal of squatters without resettlement) and especially stretching or breaking of the law (the shooting of fleeing villagers or killing of the innocent) were reined in.³² Arguably, that reining in also helped to reduce the “push” factor that encouraged people to flee to the insurgents, or to support them out of anger or sympathy.

By contrast, overemphasis on large police-army sweeps and on intimidation in 1948–49, while vital in breaking up large enemy units, actually increased the size of enemy units and support, and their replacement rates.³³

Thus, while the correction of a post-1980s myth about the possibility of “nice,” “winning hearts and minds” counterinsurgency has been timely, there is a danger that this can overshoot and, in so doing, fail to accurately identify the real blend of policies and techniques that existed in “winning” or turnaround phases of rural counterinsurgencies. It may also underestimate the tendency to at least try and reduce the most undiscriminating and strictly punitive elements during Malaya’s most transformative phase.

Thus, the Malayan example detailed later suggests that, when we integrate the periodization of campaigns into our analysis, we may get a more subtle understanding of what was happening, and why, in distinct counterinsurgency phases. It also suggests that such analysis by campaign phase can help to avoid the tendency to mistake mere tactics and techniques for the overall strategic approach or policy blend in each period. Hence, enemy-centric operations, population-centric operations, intimidation, attempts to “win hearts and minds,” and other tactics all existed in most periods and blends. What changed was their detail, their relative weight in the overall recipe or menu, and the machinery and logic by which they were coordinated.

It is by the understanding of those differing blends, and differing logics and machineries for coordinating diverse tactics, that we can comprehend the overall “strategy” or characteristics of very different campaign phases. The additional implication is that a similar approach, stressing differences between phases, and trying to identify the precise blend of policies and logic of operation in each, might need to be applied more rigorously to other counterinsurgencies.

How, then, does this chapter periodize the Malayan emergency and justify that periodization? Any periodization is of necessity a model, a simplification, or a heuristic model designed to aid learning and understanding. It is something that seeks to capture the essence of more complex changes over time, with periods inevitably overlapping more than any model might at first suggest. That said, the following can serve as a periodization for the purposes of this chapter and for the purposes of comparative analysis:

1. Terror and Counter-Terror (1948–49)
2. Population Control, Geo-demographic Control, and “Clear and Hold” (1950–52)
3. Optimization (1952–54)³⁴
4. Mopping Up, Peacemaking, and Normalization (1955–60)

In using this periodization, it is vital always to keep in mind its limitations. For instance, it would be nonsense to think that all security force abuses (or group arrests and deportations) stopped dead by the end of 1949 or that all resettlement areas were fully efficient by 1952. Each period is a way of expressing the overall nature and weight of campaigning, rather than something absolute. Hence, for instance, the vast majority of deportations were made before June 1950, but a significant number were made as late as 1952, before the practice began a rapid decline. In addition, campaigns may exhibit quite different characteristics or stages of operation at the same point in time in different geographical areas, according to need.³⁵ Hence, as late as 1955–60 (coinciding with Phase 4 of earlier transition), one could find one area that might have been declared “white” (largely free of insurgency and with most emergency restrictions lifted) since 1953, while another area was “jet black” and as such subjected to combined, intensifying police-army operations and heightened food and other restrictions to try and break the nearby insurgent leadership. Overall, however, Phase 4 was a period when a long, slow move toward local political and military control and toward removing emergency restrictions in more and more areas was the dominant pattern.

The earlier periodization therefore does help to identify and aid understanding of key changes in emphasis and in the overall qualitative feel of the campaign. It also develops rather than contradicts the director of operations’ (DOO) 1957 assessment of how the campaign had developed up to independence, given in Table 6.2.

Table 6.2.
Director of Operations’ Campaign Narrative

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Narrative of the Campaign

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24. The fluctuations of fortune … fell roughly into four periods:

(a) June 1948–October 1949. The Communist attempt to seize power by violence and revolution was held and the CTs [Communist Terrorists, a term introduced in 1952] withdrew into the jungle to reorganise for a prolonged war.

(b) October 1949–August 1951. The CTs took the offensive to seize power by violence and revolution all over Asia. A Director of Operations (Sir Harold Briggs) was appointed to coordinate civil and military measures [in April 1950], both of which were showing some serious weaknesses. By 1951 violence had reached its peak, but eliminations also began to increase as SF methods improved.

(c) August 1951–July 1954. The Briggs Plan matured, bringing the dispersed Chinese population under control, and the CTs became less aggressive in the face of large numbers of eliminations. In February 1952, General (now Field Marshal) Sir Gerald Templer, was appointed as High Commissioner and Director of Operations with full power over all civil and military resources. The CTs lost over half their strength and SF [security force] and Civilian casualties declined to less than one seventh of the 1951 peak. The back of the revolt was broken.

(d) July 1954–August 1957. The crisis being over, the posts of High Commissioner and Director of Operations were again separated. CT strength dwindled steadily, as did incidents, contacts and casualties on both sides. Malayan political leaders gradually took over control in preparation for independence.

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Source: Adapted from DOO Report on the Malayan Emergency up to 31 August 1957, dated September 1957, as found in The National Archives (TNA), Air 20/10377, as published in C.C. Chin and Karl Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), p. 48.

What follows is a summary of each of the main campaign phases and their defining characteristics, combined with some explanation for the transition between phases.

TERROR AND COUNTER-TERROR (1948–49)

In this period, the insurgents attempted to seize bases in rural districts and launched large operations and ambushes utilizing up to a few hundred men. At peak strength, where they tried to establish liberated zones in outlying areas, they employed up to 500 men in a single operation.

In terms of control, the army were tasked with aiding the civil power, with the police coordinating operations. But with an initial force of around 9,000 police for a large country with variable infrastructure—and often lacking radios and adequate transport—the police were often unable to provide adequate guidance. In addition, insurgents enjoyed strong support and easy access to Chinese agricultural settlements on the jungle fringe. A police-army patrol might enter a village on one day, with an insurgent unit arriving to collect food, visit relatives, and even celebrate festivals soon after. Chinese villages on the jungle fringe thus constituted not so much a “no man’s land” as an “every man’s land” subject to contested control, with patrols facing both extreme uncertainty and the dilemma of how to extract information from villagers who would most likely also have to answer to guerrilla fighters.

The MCP did not, however, have things all its own way. It tried and failed to establish a few rural bases, accompanied by a few daring headline-grabbing seizures of populated areas. In July 1948, guerrillas seized and briefly held the northeastern hill town of Gua Musang. This lay deep in the mountains and jungles, along the branch railway line to the northeast. It had a long-established Chinese population and had been a major support center for the wartime anti-Japanese resistance. Despite this, troops were brought to bear within days, and the insurgents were soon battered out by regular troops supported by Spitfires.³⁶ Elsewhere, the insurgents seized Malaya’s only coal mining town, Batu Arang on the west coast not far north of Kuala Lumpur, on July 13. They corralled hostages, before retreating later in the day to nearby hills. On July 30, 26 Field Artillery and local police wreaked vengeance, detraining separately from the railway line east of Batu Arang, and converging at a sharp pace, shooting anything seemingly threatening as they moved in a pincer movement against what they believed were camps and communist-supporting villages. More than 20 were killed without a shot being fired in return, though a few revolvers were allegedly discovered. Twice as many arrests were made, and villagers’ huts were burned down afterward.³⁷ The identification of an area as “hostile,” though in effect it was probably an “everyman’s land” of civilians open to either side to move through, had had deadly effects near Batu Arang.

Secretary General Chin Peng’s hopes were highest in these first hectic, semi-organized months, from late 1948 to Chinese New Year 1949, with dreams of establishing rural bases from which they could drive government forces, before expanding. Both the examples given here were areas that had supported wartime anti-Japanese guerrillas. Batu Arang’s workers had held pitched battles with the police over strikes as early as 1937. Both, however, also showed how difficult establishing any real population base would be. Few populated areas—as opposed to jungle depths—were more than a few hours from a military concentration. Even the relatively isolated railway town of Gua Musang was soon recaptured, and Batu Arang was only held for hours. Deep jungle areas could be held for a time, but what the insurgents needed were locations near to concentrations of population.³⁸

That initial period of communist terror (notably through killing “collaborators”) and government counter-terror gradually pushed the communists to switch their tactics. By 1949, they were shifting emphasis toward economic sabotage and harassing of security forces by ambushes, and relying on friendly Chinese villages on the jungle fringe for information and logistics. Early on these villages formed the sort of “every man’s land” noted earlier, with both the communists easily wandering in to visit relatives and collect food, and in their absence security forces sweeping through making arrests or, where communist support was suspected, burning the huts of alleged supporters.

The government had had little contact with these “squatters,” and minimal intelligence on them. As a result the army sometimes acted on its own initiative in 1948–49. In addition, though technically they were only permitted to shoot to kill if they reasonably suspected people were armed, or were with people who were armed, units were told by HQ Malaya instructions of August 14, 1948, to shoot if in doubt about those facts. These instructions, despite noting the aforementioned restrictions, emphasized the necessity of shooting wherever it was believed armed people might escape, to still shoot if in doubt, and that—purportedly—a “recent” patrol had not shot, only to find themselves subject to attack soon afterward. In a situation where information from the police might be vague, the suggested responsibility to shoot when in doubt had terrible implications. This was particularly the case in and around the many jungle fringe villages that were believed to be frequented by bandits, or worse still where villagers were believed to have given the “bandits” food.³⁹

There seem to have been regular instances of one or a few people dying in such circumstances.⁴⁰ More spectacularly, 24 unarmed male Chinese rubber tappers suspected of providing food to insurgents—including elderly men—were shot in one incident by Scots Guardsmen, at Batang Kali on December 11–12, 1948. More research is needed into what circumstances made such events more likely, and what if anything reduced the chances and the severity of such failures. The initial impression is that the “every man’s land” nature of the terrain close to the jungle’s edge was a major contributor, with army orders to shoot people suspected of being armed, or people fleeing who were suspected of being armed even if “in doubt,” a major contributory factor. How far the administration’s and Sir Henry Gurney’s declared attitude contributed—that people had a responsibility to separate themselves from guerrillas—and that rural Chinese would by nature respond to whoever looked stronger, is not clear.⁴¹ In summary, since security forces in 1948–49 viewed rural Chinese villages as occupying contested and possibly hostile space, they sometimes went into that space briefed to be prepared to kill, and certainly to be willing to consider killing anyone who might be judged as “escaping” while possibly armed.

The shooting down of the 24 unarmed Chinese villagers in the single incident at Batang Kali of December 11–12 was initially reported as insurgents killed, and as one of the largest successes of the campaign thus far. Then it was reported as villagers shot during a pre-concerted attempt to “escape”; finally, the attorney general quelled growing complaints and doubts by “investigating.” In reality, he interviewed the soldiers involved and their commanders but declined to interview surviving villagers, claiming the self-evidently unreasonable justification that they probably would not speak and that even if they did, they would be liable to lie. It nevertheless quickly became clear that the villagers, having been detained and questioned in their kongsi house overnight, including with mock executions, had been separated into men and women and were known to have been unarmed. In January 1949, a new regulation, ER 27A, was rushed in, which legalized killing escaping prisoners even if unarmed, providing a warning was first given and ignored. It thus retrospectively legalized what the soldiers had eventually claimed had happened at Batang Kali, though in 1969–70 several of them would make sworn statements that the villagers had not been running and that they believed it had been cold-blooded murder.⁴² Batang Kali and, to a lesser extent, Batu Arang were probably exceptional in scale, but at another level typified a real and widespread danger for civilians in disputed zones.⁴³

The downside of army and police indiscipline was that counter-terror—as experienced by many rural Chinese—increased insurgent recruiting. Take, for instance, the letter sent by someone using the name “Tan Chin Siong” to MCA President Tan Cheng Lock. Chin Siong’s letter was received in May 1950, just after Briggs arrived as DOO in April, and when only around 18,500 rural residents had been properly resettled as opposed to dispersed or deported.⁴⁴ “Now you may call me a terrorist,” he wrote, “or you may call me a refugee.” He had fled arrest in 1948 and worked as a subscription collector. Why had numbers for the MNLA unit he supported ballooned? In 1948, it comprised 40 of very limited quality. Government arrests swelled “refugees,” until by 1949 it was 150. A year later, it was 180 and better prepared and motivated. He nevertheless claimed that only 10 percent were high-caliber leaders, 20 percent veterans of wartime anti-Japanese forces, and 70 percent “refugees,” continuing that, “It could be said that the Government helped the Malayan Communists to recruit.” Police demands for coffee money alienated people, he could obtain a communist an identity card by bribing special constables, and police sometimes shot people after disputes. But the main recruiter was the creation of “heartache” by forcing people to “evacuate” homes and crops, youth affected by this being the most ardent fighters. A government that knew only how to use force was stoking the fires: “The slogan that since death is everywhere they should fight against the Government to the end is common throughout the rank and file.”⁴⁵

Counter-terror was clearly an ambivalent policy. Even as it swelled insurgent numbers, Security Force (SF) sweeps, combined with large-scale detention (a peak of 11,000 were detained at any one time), and deportation of noncitizen Chinese (around 10,000 in the peak year of 1949, often under ER17D detained and deported as a group, without appeal), prevented the insurgents from establishing any main bases, broke them down into smaller units in late 1948–49, and provided base-level intelligence.

Indeed, SF action was successful enough to persuade the communists to change their tactics. By mid-1949, incidents slumped as the insurgents realized they could no longer simply wander into villages to gather supplies, nor keep large bases near populated areas, and that they needed to try and lessen the impact on villagers. They therefore stressed reorganization of their supply system from April to October 1949.⁴⁶ The consequent sharp decline in incidents in 1949 seemed to the British like a possible turning point and raised hopes of an early release of forces. The reality was somewhat different.

The insurgents’ initial hopes of setting up liberated areas for expansion had indeed been disappointed. Their largest units had been broken down, and their communications with villagers made less easy. The rapid raising of a part-time police special constabulary and its posting to plantations and mines, however ill-trained, had kept the effects of sabotage within sustainable limits and stopped European rubber plantation managers from leaving en masse. But overall numbers of insurgents, and supporters, increased throughout 1948–50. We thus have the classic situation of SFs “winning” the numbers and body count game where combatants are concerned, but losing the numbers game where insurgent support and replenishment was concerned, and also creating a ready supply of “accidental” new guerrillas: people fleeing arrest, angered by the death of their relatives, or bitter at the destruction of their huts and crops.⁴⁷

The insurgents were, however, forced to adapt, and now concentrated on reorganizing their MNLA (formally taking that name in February 1949, as opposed to various names including the words anti-British, People’s, or National), and the Min Yuen. The latter were reorganized into a cell structure better able to support MNLA despite SF sweeps, and despite greater SF presence near Chinese populated areas that had matured in the six months from September 1948. All this reorganization meant much reduced MNLA activity. It therefore seemed to the government—reading its weekly situation reports in early to mid-1949—that it had weathered the storm, when all it had really done was ride the first wave.

Once reorganized, the MNLA increased the number of types of operations from October 1949 into early 1950—including slashing of rubber trees, destroying trains and buses, ambushes, and even slightly larger attacks on police posts—creating a sense of crisis as the government realized it had previously been lulled into a false sense of optimism. Incidents reached 500 a month and SF and civilian deaths 200 a month during 1951.⁴⁸ In addition, though government pressure on rural Chinese villagers had made insurgent logistics more difficult, it had not induced rural Chinese to provide more than a smattering of information on the “CTs.” This was hardly surprising, as the government could provide little protection in return. As a result, “the bulk of the Army was deployed on large scale and fruitless searches in the jungle.”⁴⁹ These circumstances provoked disappointment and rising frustration in London as its hopes of releasing resources from Malaya reversed into a need to send yet more men.

There had also been no elections of note by this stage, in early 1950. Rural conditions and the need to concentrate on the emergency ensured that. Besides, racial tensions, heightened by the war years, remained. Malays alone were as yet recruited to the expanding Malay Regiment (which the sultans had insisted remain Malay only), Malays formed the vast bulk of the expanding police force, and Chinese assistance was coming mainly through the MCA, which had been raised by business leaders in August 1949. Set up in close liaison with the government as a welfare organization, the MCA was raising funds to help displaced Chinese squatters and providing ad hoc MCA advice on issues such as which detainees were safe to release on restriction orders. Despite its limited ability to boost recruitment of Chinese to the police, its role was significant in the face of the real threat of death, which its members faced. Even its leader, Tan Cheng Lock, had a close brush in October 1949, when a grenade was lobbed onto the podium, leaving him bloodied but unbowed.

The MCA was led by wealthy Chinese businessmen (notably tin mine and plantation owners) who had everything to lose to communism, as did many moderate to petty Chinese shopkeepers and businessmen in the towns and larger villages. But for the 500,000 or more rural Chinese, the campaign thus far had been experienced as terror (the insurgents did not hesitate to kill “running dogs” or people who refused them help) and counter-terror, with the government viewing them as likely to incline toward whichever side intimidated or coerced them more. Huts from which it was suspected bandits had been aided had been burned (theoretically after goods were removed), whole areas had been detained under ER17D, and approximately 10,000 deported in the 1949. The idea behind this latter move, in 1949 to early 1950, was partly that remaining villagers would not have confidence unless they knew hard-line communist supporters could not return to wreak vengeance for help given to the police.

In 1950, the British even toyed with “dumping” deportees on the China coast after the new PRC government temporarily blocked deportation early that year. It also considered moving some detainees to Borneo or Christmas Island (both local governments refusing to play ball). A squatter committee had recommended resettlement of some vulnerable Chinese, but as yet many had just been moved on, with Malay-dominated state governments reluctant to release land for people they saw mostly as immigrants and illegal squatters, when many Malay villagers remained in desperate poverty. Detainees, meanwhile, peaked at about 11,000 as the deportations slowed and then temporarily ceased in 1950, and the slow release of people to resettlement, on restriction orders, or to the small rehabilitation camp at Taiping (opened in 1949), failed to keep pace. In short, by early 1950 incidents were soaring, the rather lazy expedient of deporting whole areas where squatters were seen as under insurgent influence was in abeyance, Britain had recognized the PRC, the French position in Indochina was deteriorating, and there was a general sense of crisis.⁵⁰

One bright spot was that the police SB was beginning to build up a core of Chinese-speaking specialists, and of knowledge of the insurgents, particularly by using ex-communists and Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP). The very early emphasis on treating all insurgents as “bandits” who should suffer the normal penalties of law was shifting. By mid-1949, captured insurgents might still receive the death penalty (more than 200 were hanged eventually), but those surrendering were increasingly put to good use for information, on operations, and then for longer interrogation to reveal background information. Some police officers even tried to reclassify helpful captives as SEP, or otherwise avoid over-close scrutiny that might reveal civilian blood on SEP hands, and so necessitate their prosecution.⁵¹

Despite that bright spot, the overall feeling in early 1950 blended deep disappointment at the MNLA resurgence with frustration. The sense of crisis was to be vital to gaining new powers and legislation.

POPULATION CONTROL, GEO-DEMOGRAPHIC CONTROL, AND “CLEAR AND HOLD” (1950–52)

As noted earlier, this period began with incidents soaring in early 1950, as the MNLA, relying on its reorganized Min Yuen to provide support from rural Chinese settlements despite increased British area patrols, stressed sabotage, ambushes, and attacks on isolated police posts, and in addition tried to increase some attacking force sizes to upward of one to two platoons (100–200) again.

The iconic moment for the new strategy was an MNLA attack on the isolated ulu (upriver) police post of Bukit Kepong, in the southern state of Johore, on February 23, 1950. Two platoons of the MNLA 3rd Regiment launched a sustained attack just before dawn, resulting in 21 Malay police being killed, along with some family, as the police station and barracks were assaulted and finally burned down. The idea of such attacks was that the security forces would either withdraw from more isolated areas or at least lose local confidence, allowing a buildup of yet stronger forces and support bases.⁵²

It was not to be. Bukit Kepong turned out to be a high-water mark for such rejuvenated, up-scaled attacks. In part this was because the colonial and British governments successfully used the sense of crisis to transform the campaign. Indeed, a recurrent theme of the emergency would be how the British were able to use successive perceptions of crisis (1948, 1950, and 1952) to transform executive authority and reach.

In this case, a soldier—Lieutenant General Briggs—was appointed DOO, tasked in a civil capacity to direct all SF from April 1950, thus removing police direction. By this point, he could also call on the expanding police SB using small but increasing numbers of SEP with increasing skill. Even better, state opposition to ceding overall direction of population movement (state control of land being a critical issue) was now overcome, to some extent by the sense of crisis. Previously, individual states had moved small numbers of Chinese “squatters” from the jungle fringe, sometimes simply dispersing them without providing new land, and only on a very limited scale moving such people to new village locations with support. This was despite a squatter committee having met from early on in 1948–49, and recommended that the states engage in some resettlement of rural Chinese.

The slow progress was also due to commercial and Malay reluctance to surrender good land (Malay sensitivity over land being particularly acute), limited finance, and the previous ease of deportation of noncitizen Chinese up to 1950. More than 12,000 of the latter were deported by March 1953 (a similar number being voluntarily repatriated, with around 30,000 of all races combined being deported/repatriated up to March 1953).⁵³ Indeed, it was often the states with the fewest Chinese that proved most willing to resettle up to this point in time, and arguably the temporary pause in deportation for several months in 1950 (due to PRC objections) now helped to force the hand of the states, as did the sense of crisis as incidents soared following the Min Yuen reorganization and new MCP strategy. Together, these factors helped to coalesce a defining switch in emphasis from intimidating people in the “every man’s land” of the jungle frontier into not supporting communists, to bringing the inhabitants of that space under detailed protection and controlled coercion.

In early 1950, the newly arrived Briggs was able to formulate a comprehensive plan for the emergency—often known as the “Briggs Plan”—with the support of High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney. This included comprehensive, centrally coordinated resettlement of the “squatters” and was put into full operation from June 1950. As this ultimately signaled a shift to a qualitatively new approach to counterinsurgency, it needs to be described in detail. The Briggs Plan comprised:

1. Population movement and control. Comprehensive resettlement of over 400,000 squatters (ultimately turning out to be nearer 500,000, including some who were long-settled farmers) and (added from 1951) concentration of around 600,000 laborers. The latter involved moving workers’ dwellings relatively short distances to form more defensible clusters. Started in June 1950, more than three quarters of squatters were moved by the end of 1951, by which time planning was already starting to change emphasis from the actual act of movement toward future provision of greater security and aftercare. To that end, in 1952 the resettlements were rebranded “New Villages,” with clinics, schools, halls, and other facilities gradually to be added to the wired perimeters, search posts, curfews, and food controls—eventually transforming initially depressing surroundings to viable and long-lasting settlements. Despite mostly being fairly sparse and depressing places in 1951 to early 1952, the vast majority of New Villages would persist into independence, with a rising overall population. The latter was notwithstanding the understandable desire of a minority of their inhabitants to return to their original area or move on once restrictions ended.⁵⁴
2. Operational control. A unified civilian-military committee structure was established, running from the Federal War Executive Committee (FWEC) under High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney at the top, through State War Executive Committees (SWECs) under each state’s Menteri Besar, to DWECs, each under a district officer’s (DO) chairmanship, and ad hoc WECs when operations or problem areas spanned more than one civilian district. The leading local civilian chaired, with the senior police and military officers present, with others including SB and Chinese advisers attending as required.

   The local committee structure could help to identify areas where opportunities for more concentrated operations existed (for example, due to local SEP or new civilian informants) and to coordinate resource allocations. They could also make fine judgments, for instance on when a particular local Home Guard (which soared from 1950 to peak at around 300,000 in 1951–52)⁵⁵ could be armed (moving through carefully graded phases for Chinese Home Guards especially), or how far to increase restrictions (curfews, restricted food) and provide extra help to particular localities.⁵⁶ They also sometimes identified “uncooperative” New Villages or towns for special attention, with concentrated visits from dignitaries, restrictive if not punitive curfews, and demands for more information coupled with requests for villagers to say how they could be given more protection. The SWECs and DWECs were the nerve and command system of Malayan counterinsurgency. They were to remain key to controlling and balancing the changing mix of coercion and enticement offered to the most contested populated areas.⁵⁷

   This committee network was also made part of the government machinery, not just an alien accretion. The chair of any committee was the senior local official, from high commissioner (FWEC, or from 1952 Federal Executive Council) through Menteri Besar, or in his absence, British adviser (SWEC) to DO (DWEC). From the abolishing of the FWEC in 1952, there would also be several Malayan “members” present at Federal Executive Council (FedExCo) when it discussed emergency matters. These members had been appointed from 1951, each being a local Malayan appointed by the high commissioner to be in charge of one or more departments, as a sort of apprentice minister.

   Combined SF operations rooms were also set up at all levels, with the relevant army commander integrated into the WEC structure. At state level, a brigade commander normally set up brigade HQ in the state capital, located at the contingent (that is, state) police headquarters. That facilitated cooperation in a joint police-military operations room. This brigade commander was also a member of the SWEC. Under each brigade commander were several battalions. The battalion commanders in turn set up their HQ at Police Circle HQ at the administrative center of a district, each being a member of and operationally responsible to a DWEC. Again, there was a joint operations room.⁵⁸ In other words, the army and police HQ sat alongside each other, with their respective commanders being members of and responsible to the relevant WEC.

3. Military framework. Particular units were each to be associated with a specific area, allowing regular patrols and a buildup of intelligence, activity, and networking. The police could concentrate within this framework on policing as well as more narrowly on paramilitary counterinsurgency activity over time. The combination of resettlement and a proper framework were to be crucial. It meant that the space around rural settlements would be dominated, and populated forest fringe areas would cease to be “everywhere man’s land” and openly contested space. By dominating the latter, the security forces could start to provide a measure of real security, and so “confidence,” and to provide an environment more conducive to successful ambushes.
4. Striking forces. Remaining SF assets outside of the framework forces, including some military and SB, were—in the initial Briggs Plan—to be concentrated for larger-scale operations. The initial plan was to “roll up” the insurgents, concentrating striking forces to clear the country from the south first (starting with the state of Johore, just across the water from Singapore) to the north (Kedah, Kelantan, and Perlis). The first striking forces were concentrated in Johore from June 1, 1950.

   Given that the southernmost state of Johore was one of the two states where the insurgents were strongest, the roll-up floundered. Over 1951–52, an alternative emerged, that of deploying greater forces to smaller areas of opportunity. Such opportunities could be identified from where the local SWECs/DWECs and SB confirmed that a proximate MCP committee, committees, or commanders had become potential targets due to losses and/or flows of information on them. Notably, a number of key defectors or SEP from the Min Yuen and/or MNLA could provide the leverage for more sustained operations. The preferred targets, note, also shifted. As the Briggs Plan was implemented, these soon became not MNLA units per se, but their directing area committees and committee members. Targeting them started to involve, over 1951–54, increasing food control and patrols, arresting hardcore suppliers so less committed recruits would take their place and could be identified and “turned,” and then using the resulting intelligence and ambushes to create killing zones around one or more New Villages for the SF to exploit. At best, SF ambushes could in turn net a percentage of SEP as well as a larger number of “kills,” with the SEP fueling further successes, and making possible propaganda tailored even to small groups and individuals in the jungle.⁵⁹

The period 1950 to late 1951, meanwhile, saw a peak of activity, as insurgent supporters fled the rapidly implemented resettlement. These flights increased MNLA size and, because the MCP’s August 1950 “Guide to the Anti-Resettlement campaign” stipulated all-out opposition to resettlement and increased economic sabotage, the emergency reached its height.⁶⁰ It seems reasonable to suppose that any effective geo-demographic control is likely to create such an initial burst of recruitment for insurgents, as more supporters flee tightened controls, and some villagers react to increased government restrictions.

By October 1951, both the MCP and the SF felt themselves to be at a crisis point, as incidents peaked, and the cumulative pressure of population movement—now in its latter stages—brought a rapidly expanded and undertrained police force under severe stress. The police peaked at more than 67,000 full- and part-time police, with an additional 300,000 Home Guard and Malay Kampong Guard and 23 battalions (giving a total of 40,000 Commonwealth troops), in 1951–52. Despite his protests, Gray had been forced to accept a priority on full-pace resettlement over desperately needed police retraining, and the MCA were increasingly resentful at the immense pressure exerted on rural Chinese, and criticism by British and Malays of their failure as community leaders to do more.

Then, on October 6, 1951, the insurgents ambushed and killed High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney, setting in train sweeping British leadership renewal. At the end of the year, though the physical act of population movement was mostly complete, and peak-level forces in place, police retraining was still desperately needed, and there was an acting high commissioner and acting commissioner of police. It seems that the act of successfully bringing the emergency and the new policy of coercive protection and geo-demographic control into place had left its key architects dead, drained, or disillusioned.

The strain had no doubt been increased by London’s growing impatience. Throughout 1951, London was eagerly watching for a lull and chance to draw down forces, when instead it got a peak in activity and the dramatic ambush of its high commissioner. Fortuitously, the sense of crisis also guaranteed that Malaya could keep resources at near peak levels for longer and that its government would gain yet more centralized control. The incoming British Conservative Government of October 1951 sent its new colonial secretary, and following his report it was decided that the new high commissioner would be a military man and would combine the roles of DOO and head of civil government.

By February 1952, Sir Gerald Templer would be appointed as both DOO and high commissioner, with Colonel Arthur Young coming from the City of London as his new commissioner of police: renewed leadership would be ready to take advantage of the cumulative effects of resettlement and the Briggs Plan. In addition, Templer would be instructed to pay attention to both the emergency, and continuing the progress toward self-government already embodied in municipal elections of December 1951 (Penang) and February 1952 (Kuala Lumpur), and plans in train to increase Chinese citizenship (effected with September 1952 legislation).

Simultaneously with all this, the MCP had concluded that it could not sustain its current style of campaigning and issued orders that programmed forward for 1952 a reduction in MNLA numbers and incidents. These October 1951 directives—running to 60 pages of new instructions—also plotted a temporary shift in emphasis to increase planting (to offset resettlement), stockpiling, and political work. Its October 1951 directives (sometimes called “resolutions”) thus radically changed the short- to medium-term trajectory of the campaign just before the British leadership changes. The MCP orders involved:⁶¹

1. Downsizing and changing units and operational emphasis. Unit sizes were to be reduced, some men transferred to armed support groups (armed work groups or parties) to help provide close support and protection of the increasingly harassed Min Yuen. According to a 1953 Combined Intelligence Staff report, “It is considered that as a consequence of the transfer of personnel to Armed Work Forces and Cultivation Units, the overall M.R.L.A [MNLA] strength will have been reduced by about 1,600. However, the plan to raise new Platoons to offset withdrawals into selected deep jungle bases would result in a net reduction of about 1,500. … The reduction of military activity, the partial withdrawal to the jungle, and pressure by Government are having some effect on M.C.P morale.”⁶²

   Increased emphasis was also to be put on deep jungle planting and stockpiling to partially counter the way resettlement had reduced supplies from squatters, with some men to be redirected to this work. In addition, the previous emphasis on sabotage and economic attacks (for instance, on buses, trains, and slashing rubber trees) was to be severely curtailed so as to avoid harming the people’s interests, as were activities such as shooting at crowds to kill running dogs. There seems to have been a belief that the level of destruction and coercion employed in 1950–52 had become counter-productive. Hence, for instance, though running dogs would sometimes have to be killed, there were strict orders to try and avoid adverse public reaction, for instance by limiting shooting into crowds, and eschewing if at all possible acid throwing.⁶³

   According to the Combined Intelligence Staff Report, the October 1951 directives would reach proximate units almost immediately and then trickle outward over months so the very last units might get them as much as a year later. That implied a cumulative decline in incidents over one year, from the end of 1951 until the second half of 1952.⁶⁴ The fastest pace of improvement would come around May to October 1952, as Figures 6.1–6.3 show. Insurgent-inspired incidents declined from February 1952, from an average of 506 a month in 1951, to 295 in July 1952, and 198 in September.⁶⁵

2. Strengthening political foundations to enable later resurgence. There was to be a greater emphasis on penetrating political parties, unions, and schools and on courting the “medium national bourgeoisie,” meaning noncommunist nationalists below the biggest businessmen. This was rationalized as ending a previous adventurist “left deviationism” that relied too narrowly on just the “working classes” and their rural equivalents, the squatters, farmers, and rubber tappers.

Figure 6.1.
Emergency Monthly Statistics for 1952 (Rhodes House, Oxford, Mss British Empire s486/2/3: Young Papers, Combined Intelligence Staff (Malaya) Report of October 1952, Appendices A–G)

Figure 6.2.
Yearly Emergency Incidents (TNA: Air 20/10377, DOO, “Review of the Emergency,” September 12, 1957)

As with the 1949 reorganization, so the 1951–52 one was intended to sacrifice immediate scale of attack for a reorganization that would re-enable the MNLA for the new circumstances and presage a later upsurge based on increased political and logistic support.

In reality, the result was that incidents plummeted from about March 1952, some categories falling by half or more in just one year, but never did recover. The MCP had clearly felt compelled to take these actions, though the rapidity of the decline does beg the question of how far the directives also played into government hands, by easing pressure and allowing improvements in resettlement areas and organization to be accelerated.⁶⁶

Figure 6.3.
Yearly Total Security Casualties (TNA: Air 20/10377, DOO, “Review of the Emergency,” September 12, 1957)

The MCP leadership became so concerned that a year later, in late 1952, it ordered units to increase activity, but with limited effect. By then Briggs’s strategy, which was above all to increase “confidence” (his key word) by protecting villagers from insurgents and dominating the surrounding areas, was firmly in place.

It should be emphasized that, in conception, the Briggs Plan that had brought about the change in insurgent tactics was not merely about physically separating insurgents from their supporters—fish from water. Nor was it entirely coercive in nature, or on the other hand a pointer toward abandoning kinetics and coercion for “winning hearts and minds.” Its language was actually rather different. Security, confidence, and information were central and interlinked, as shown by the following Chiefs of Staff document on the Plan of May 1950:

3. In the long run security, and with it confidence and information, can only be restored and maintained:

1. by demonstrating Britain’s firm intention to fulfil her obligations in defence of Malaya. …
2. By extending effective administration and control of all populated areas which involves
   1. A large measure of resettlement into compact groups
   2. A strengthening of local administration
   3. Provision of road communication in isolated populated areas,
   4. Setting up Police Posts in these areas;
3. by exploiting these measures with good propaganda, both constructive and destructive.

Outline Plan

4. … to clear the country step by step, from South to North, by:

1. dominating the populated areas and building up a complete sense of security in them, with the object of obtaining a steady and increasing flow of information…
2. breaking up the Min Yuen within the populated areas;
3. thereby isolating the bandits from their food and information supply organisation in the populated areas;
4. and finally destroying the bandits by forcing them to attack us on our own ground.⁶⁷

Briggs’s vision had thus been that resettlement would not just separate out the insurgents, but undermine their support, and increase the flow of information, which would anyway become easier as areas were dominated by the security forces and everyday opportunities (on Home Guard patrols, in meeting resettlement officers, and so on) to discretely pass on information increased.

Even apparently, coercive measures, such as increased food control, had a parallel, positive role to play in giving confidence and a sense of security. In November 1950, DOO Order Number 17 tightened food control. In publicizing this, the DOO told villagers that “I intend to help you,” saying he knew they could not easily refuse insurgent requests, so he would make controls of food movement outside the villages strict enough that they could honestly say they could not bring or smuggle anything out. Control could simultaneously be protection and coercion. Each New Village had a limited number of gates, villagers were only allowed to take out a limited amount of water and food, and shops later had tins punctured before sale (so that food had to be consumed rapidly before spoiling). Again, something that might seem draconian, central rice cooking as introduced later on, actually had a positive side. It meant that villagers could eat their fill as precooked rice would not last if smuggled out, whereas earlier rations of uncooked rice had been significantly reduced during operations around New Villages.⁶⁸

Gurney also worked closely with the MCA right up to his death. On October 3, he wrote a note for use by Tan Cheng Lock that bitterly complained of inadequate Chinese elite help and then detailed five types of activity in which he hoped that Tan would help secure MCA help. Gurney and Tan were due to meet to discuss use of this, and further plans to transform the MCA from a social welfare organization into a political party with wide membership, when Gurney was killed on October 6. Both the government and MCA plans continued regardless, as did Chinese resentment that they were being pressured so hard, and Malay resentment that the MCA had not done more.

Papers for a November 1951 Federal Executive War Committee continued discussions on increasing Chinese citizenship and arming more Chinese Home Guard units. The latter had been introduced in September 1950.⁶⁹ Also in November 1951, in London a paper for Cabinet argued that, “The crux of the problem is winning the loyalty and confidence of the Chinese population.” By December, the MCA transformation that Gurney had encouraged was taking place as it started to change from social welfare organization into mass party. From February 1952, it also started to move into an electorally successful Alliance with UMNO (at local level first), thus providing a basis for cross-ethnic political cooperation. Chinese, however fearful that Malays might shut them out from power and from freedom to continue being “Chinese” in Malaya, could have increasing political as well as security hope. MCA expansion into New Villages, however skeptical some villagers may have been of this, also gave a potential route to seek redress of grievances, to voice needs, and to seek business links.

As Gurney had told the Legislative Assembly before his death in 1951, “this war is not to be won only with guns or the ballot-box or any other material instrument which does not touch the hearts of men.”⁷⁰ In other words. Templer, like Gurney, would emphasize “winning hearts and minds” not just alongside but, in part by, controlled coercion and spatial domination. More political measures and more controlled coercion advanced hand in glove over the period 1951–52.

By late 1952, Templer (assuming his post on February 17, 1952) and Young had settled in, and the new leadership was busy refining both the use of the Briggs Plan and the security forces as a “leaning organization,” which could optimize the development of operations around clusters of New Villages, for the change in fortunes maturing over 1951–52 was one that required vigorous exploitation. In many villages, communist cells and Min Yuen still instilled fear, and many more lacked adequate lighting or effective perimeter wiring. Operations also still had to be refined to make the most of resettlement, which was in itself merely the precondition of success, rather than success in and of itself.

Thus, into early 1952, physical population movement was largely completed (and aftercare only just picking up), incidents were starting to fall, SF-initiated contacts were holding up, and Templer was injecting new ideas and energy into an improving situation. The implications of all this combined were that from 1952 onward there would be some scope to retrain security force personnel and to increase transitioning to, or at least association with, Malayans and also the pace of elections. The next period thus became a period of “optimization” of the campaign.

OPTIMIZATION (1952–54)

The period of “optimization” was characterized by improvement of the intelligence apparatus and of “learning organization,” incremental improvements in operations around clusters of New Villages,⁷¹ taking the fight deep into the jungle as the insurgents increased their activities there, calibrated increases in use of the “carrot” or rewards and inducements, and an increase in the pace of advance toward self-government.

Optimization was facilitated by the prior completion of most basic physical resettlement, by the slackening pace of incidents caused by the MCP’s October 1951 directives, and by the fact that Templer combined civil and military power as both DOO and high commissioner, as well as bringing energy and new insights. Colonel Young as the new commissioner of police also brought a police service ethos that aimed to curb previous petty corruption and overemphasis on paramilitary duties.

This optimization was assisted by the dislocation of communist command. Chin Peng (MCP Secretary General from 1947 onward) has related how the Central Committee repeatedly failed to establish a durable headquarters base in 1952–54, because it could not both find an area safe and able to feed a large contingent. As he later put it, “our people at that time, we had … a whole haversack of money … but we can’t get a bit of food.”⁷² In 1952–54, the Central Committee began a series of shifts northward, culminating in its establishment on the Malayan-Thai border in 1954.⁷³

Templer, meanwhile, had taken up his post as high commissioner and DOO on February 17, 1952. Previously, these two posts had been separate. So Templer had unprecedented power to hire and fire. He early on announced that he would pursue both political advance and the focused attention of the entire administration on the emergency: telling the public that bandits “don’t play golf.”⁷⁴ Another illustration of his propagandistic approach to policy and instilling confidence can be seen in his response to an incident near Tanjong Malim.

In March 1952, he imposed a 22-hour curfew on Tanjong Malim after a British administrative officer was ambushed and killed nearby during attempts to repair a sabotaged water supply. Templer distributed questionnaires and told villagers he would read them and only then lift restrictions if information was forthcoming. On the other hand, in March he made it clear that elections (already begun at municipal level) would continue and proceeded to execute plans for giving Chinese more citizenship. In fact, “collective punishment” was something Templer made increasingly sparing use of over time. But the model of SWECs calling in leaders to berate a “bad” village or villages, followed by intensified controls to be lifted once information improved, was used repeatedly. Even then, when Templer himself visited such villages personally, about 20 in all, he carefully blended rasping blame for previous failure to help the government, with clear invitations to say what the government needed to do to help, offers of extra protection, and hints of practical help once things improved, including such things as advice on pig breeding and assistance gaining more land, or land titles. Such visits often included or were closely followed by the civil administrators best placed to help and MCA representatives. Even then, really substantive increased flows of information from “black” areas more often than not only came when sustained joint operations were launched there.⁷⁵

The general drift of policy was toward optimizing the preexisting trend toward basing operations around groups of New Villages. Templer’s particular contribution was to supercharge the improving situation. His previous experiences, as a former director of intelligence in London and his unprecedented authority as military-civilian supremo, were both useful.

An example of Templer bringing his unique level of experience and authority to bear on an already improving situation is provided by intelligence organization. SB had already been expanding fast—including its Chinese officers, and was increasingly skillfully exploiting SEP. But Templer quickly separated SB from the CID and allowed a separate SB Training School. Templer also introduced military intelligence officers (MIOs), who worked alongside SB at all levels to collect operational intelligence and translate it into a form usable by the army. Such refinements in SB were particularly important as it, not the army, remained the main locus for intelligence gathering and analysis throughout. Troops were only allowed to retain SEP for a minimum of time to exploit immediate information for operations, before turning them over to the SB. It was SB that then calculated if they could be sent back into the jungle immediately or straight on to more-detailed interrogation to help map the insurgent organization.⁷⁶ A few SEP were now going back into the jungle with police and soldiers, very soon after capture, to try and contact and ambush, or bring out, their ex-comrades. In 1953, a Special Operational Volunteer Force (SOVF) was also established, to allow willing SEP to serve for 18-month periods in 23-man platoons to dominate the areas in which they had been guerrillas, after their intelligence usefulness had been exhausted. Motivated by pay and especially by potential rewards, they were found only to be really useful when deployed in their old areas, under SB direction, and ideally against very specific individuals or groups.⁷⁷

As forces experimented with permutations of intelligence-food-military operations around now consolidating New Villages, Templer also helped build a more efficient system for the collection, analysis, and dissemination (CAD) of best-practice techniques. SB and other officers cycled through SB school for short courses, thus circulating lessons. Army unit experiences were collated.⁷⁸ The preexisting Jungle Training School helped ensure that experience was passed on. At numerous levels, this CAD system was fine-tuned. Templer instigated a Combined Emergency Planning Staff he could dispatch as his eyes and ears and an Operational Research Unit that was fed patrol report forms. Templer had many of the basic lessons and practices codified in the 1952 booklet Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya (ATOM), which by 1958 was on its third edition.

Templer’s reforms undoubtedly improved the effectiveness of the SF as a “learning organization,” refining the SF’s ability to study and codify what they learned. Techniques refined over 1952–54 included the classic New Village–based operations. A group of villages would be selected to correspond to a MNLA or MCP committee area. Hard supporters were detained, so the MCP had to rely on vulnerable supporters. The latter were compromised and turned into agents. Food operations were then intensified, for instance with central cooking of rice, punctured tins, and patrols increased, to make the insurgent need for supplies extreme. Then weak spots might be created as “honeypots.” Security forces, warned of insurgent use of the latter by their new live intelligence, could ambush insurgents, or capture and turn yet more of them. Combined with targeted propaganda, and better amnesty terms, sometimes large numbers of surrenders were attained as operations unfolded, especially around 1958.⁷⁹ Peak intelligence thus came not just from better organization, but from this structuring of operations to produce more “live” intelligence, which was then fed back into the operational loop.

The background to this continual refinement was a rapidly improving situation, which significantly reduced the pressure on SF. From 1953, the reduction in incidents and insurgents even allowed some more significant “striking forces” to be concentrated, to target particular larger areas, though not yet entire states as originally hoped for in 1950.

Another consequence of the MNLA’s shift in emphasis, and the falling pressure on SF at the jungle’s edge, was a move to increase access to and influence in the deep jungle. The MCP’s October 1951 directives had called for increased use of jungle planting, stockpiling, and the orang asli, and the government felt compelled to respond. There was therefore an additional emphasis on winning over the orang asli: the indigenous population of the jungle interior. Up until 1952, the insurgents had been better at securing support among the roughly 40,000 or more orang asli, running Asal Clubs (Asal meaning “origin”) each guided by one or more insurgents.⁸⁰ It was estimated that several thousand orang asli gave some support. These might help with food, tracks, and information.

The government responded to the MCP’s October 1951 directives (with their emphasis on more deep jungle planting) by vastly expanding its efforts in the jungle, once the nature of the directives became clear over 1952. In 1953, the Department of Aborigines tripled in size, and the Special Air Service (SAS) were deployed to help dominate the areas around an initial 11 jungle forts, into which paramilitary Police Jungle Companies (later called the Police Field Force) were injected. These offered foci and services (including medical, veterinary, and easy provision of basic goods). Above all, it has been argued that many orang asli inclined toward whichever outside group seemed most active and effective at the time. As this increasingly became the security forces, the insurgent support base among the orang asli dwindled to a few hundred by 1956. At the end of that year, the SAS helped train about 30 into the Senoi Paraq (in effect, three small mobile patrols of aboriginal Home Guard).

By 1957, the SAS could concentrate again on the role they had played on and off since establishment as the “Malayan Scouts” (in effect a local SAS) in 1950, before officially becoming 22 SAS in 1952; that is, acting as a backstop or deep jungle penetration component of much larger operations aimed at pressurizing identified communist leaders and their support area. By helicopter incursion, they could help prevent the targeted group slipping away, lay traps in deep jungle to whittle down numbers, and/or ensure that the targets were caught in a vice between themselves and regular Police Field Forces and soldiers operating from closer to the New Villages.⁸¹

Optimization also meant that numbers of SF fell from the peak levels necessary to achieve effective population control in 1950–52. For instance, police peaked at around 67,000 (including part-time police), and by 1953 numbers were falling. Colonel Young was able to retrain the police in batches from late 1952, launching Operation Service by which police were instructed to go out of their way to find ways of helping the public. Young and Templer also tried to tackle corruption in the police and civil service.⁸² Likewise, the Home Guard were slowly wound down over this period, and in other cases wire allowed to decay as areas around some New Villages improved, as resources were both reduced overall and concentrated at points of greatest need.

The optimization period also saw an acceleration in elections (begun in December 1951 with municipal elections in Penang) and in associating Malayans with emergency machinery at all levels. Because the WECs were entrenched in normal civil administration, it was relatively easy to manage a gradual transformation in them, simply by adding more Malayan unofficial representatives and later on by gradually promoting Malayans to positions that carried automatic membership, such as to DO (who chaired the DWECs).⁸³

At federal level, the FWEC and ordinary FedExCo were combined in 1952 under Templer. There were already local “members” of government responsible for some departments in the latter, and so these now became associated with top-level decisions on the emergency. With incidents at less than one-seventh of peak levels by mid-1954, the path seemed open to faster decolonization and transition of emergency control. The posts of DOO (Lieutenant General Sir Geoffrey Bourne and later Lieutenant General Sir Roger Bower) and high commissioner (Sir Donald MacGillivray) were separated by June 1954.⁸⁴ Combining the two posts had allowed emergency efficiency to be the top priority in selection, promotion, and removals, but the overriding need to prioritize this over, say, normal administrative abilities, had declined by 1954. During 1954, state elections also proceeded, and the Alliance (then consisting of UMNO and the MCA) pushed hard for federal elections to happen by the year’s end. They also briefly boycotted government committees in mid-1954, over the composition of the forthcoming FedExCo. They won minor concessions and more importantly put the British on notice that any resistance to accelerating decolonization could incur costs in emergency efficiency and confidence.

The first federal elections were duly held in 1955, with the Alliance winning all but one of the 55 elected seats. Following this, a local chief minister (UMNO’s Tunku Abdul Rahman) selected most ministers, thus increasing the number of local ministers associating with top-level emergency decisions in FedExCo meetings. A separate DOO sub-committee of the FedExCo, with the relevant military and police commanders, had been established by this point. This met separately once a week to offer advice to the FedExCo on operational planning. As the pattern of the Alliance winning almost all elections had become undeniable in 1952–54, it had been decided to associate politicians including those of the Alliance with this operations sub-committee, as well as with the FedExCo. In October 1954, five political leaders—two Malay, one Chinese, one Indian, and one European—became full members of the federal DOO sub-committee. In January 1955, “wider racial representation was provided on SWECs and DWECs as well, from which Operations sub-Committees were then formed to handle advice on day to day conduct of operations.”⁸⁵ Such integration was intended to have political capital, as well as be genuinely useful in refining the “hearts and minds” side of the campaign. Actual control of day-to-day operations remained with military officers, from the DOO and his staff at federal level downward.

By this stage, in 1955, not only was local control of emergency directions slowly shifting toward local representatives, but the emergency as a whole was taking on a qualitatively different nature, as it became increasingly obvious that the MNLA was undergoing a drastic and now irreversible military decline.

MOPPING UP, PEACEMAKING, AND NORMALIZATION (1955–60)

Here the artificiality of any hard periodization is again apparent. The first “white area” was created as early as September 1953, in Malacca. A white area was one where insurgent activity was deemed low to nonexistent. Upon being declared “white,” most emergency restrictions were lifted. This was aimed both at political appeasement of local opinion and politicians and as an inducement for further areas to improve.

We should also remember that within each period some areas might be at very different stages. As late as April 1956—even as white areas were spreading across the country—the DOO could talk of “screwing the people down in the strongest and most determined manner” as crucial for “bad” areas (involving intense food control, patrols, and intelligence activity). One of the responsibilities of the new Emergency Operations Council (EOC) from March 1956 was to take the political decision on when and where “Uncooperative Areas” might require “strong and positive action.”⁸⁶

Notwithstanding the variegated nature of the campaign, by 1955 it was clearly in a qualitatively different situation. More and more white areas were being declared, with little sign of these reversing. Militarily, the back of the insurgency had now been broken, and MNLA forces remaining in Malaya, though still significant in scale, were becoming more isolated. Politically, the Alliance had swept most municipal and then state elections, and its representatives were already functioning as nominated “members” (quasi or trainee ministers) on the FedExCo for functions such as mines and communications (an experiment started in 1951). The Alliance had also called for federal elections to happen before the end of 1954, with a move toward full self-government to start afterward. Federal elections would finally occur in July 1955, with the winner to form a government.

It was in this context that the Tunku announced in early January 1955 that, if elected, his ministers would seek an amnesty for insurgents, perhaps even allowing communists to join the constitutional process if they would agree to peace. Previous “surrender terms” only promised “good treatment” and left open the possibility of prosecution if a person had civilian blood on his or her hands. What followed was “behind-closed-doors” jostling. The Tunku and MCA colleague Tan Cheng Lock already sat on the DOO operations sub-committee. Its January 17 discussion concluded that no changes in surrender terms should happen for now. The British representatives emphasized that they did not want any recognition of the MCP or to allow it to convert declining insurgency into now potentially more dangerous subversion. In fact they far preferred no meeting at all with Chin Peng. The Tunku acknowledged at this stage that direct “negotiation” was impossible but did not want to rule it out. The holding position was that the colonial government made public, in March 1955, the de facto policy of not generally prosecuting SEP.

The MCP subsequently sent letters to Alliance ministers, starting in May 1955, offering to negotiate with them. In July 1955, the Alliance won 54 out of 55 elected seats, a majority in the Legislative Council. Alliance leader Tunku Abdul Rahman became chief minister, appointing most ministers bar those for key functions such as security and finance. Britain agreed that it would hold a Constitutional Conference in London in 1956 (January–February) to discuss further constitutional advance, with the Alliance clear that it would seek a date for full self-government. Transition—at every level from replacing Europeans in districts through to handing overall emergency direction to Malayans—now catapulted to urgent status.

The Tunku also made clear in August 1955 that he should offer to meet Chin Peng, even if only to explain new amnesty terms due for September 1955. Various statements also indicated, however, that he would not be bound on what he could and could not say. The Amnesty terms he was to discuss stipulated that all AMSEP (Amnesty SEP) could surrender to the public or take advantage of safe areas to facilitate their surrender, that SF should adhere to instructions to “shout before you shoot” rules, and that after “investigations” AMSEP showing peaceful intent would be reintegrated into society. Others would be offered the chance to leave for China. Above all, for the Amnesty period they would not be prosecuted for any crime committed under communist direction before Amnesty day.⁸⁷ The effect of these terms was limited, however, by September to October repeats of MCP offers to negotiate, and the clear desire of the Alliance to do this.⁸⁸ Preliminary meetings of October to November hammered out the terms for a formal meeting at the border town of Baling on December 28 and 29, 1955.

The switch from British to Alliance initiative in 1955 was dramatic, with the Alliance politicians needing to be seen to be doing everything possible to allow a peace and reduce irksome emergency restrictions. By contrast, the British instinct was to fear allowing Federation ministers to “negotiate,” lest they throw away a winning hand in an attempt to accelerate improvement, and so unblock the way to final independence.⁸⁹

Yet the British could not block the Alliance without risking withdrawal of its members from WECs and other bodies (as they briefly did in 1954). The British encouraged ministers, if they must go, only to explain amnesty terms and to take Singapore’s fiercely anticommunist chief minister, David Marshall. The high commissioner also announced on November 30 that continuation of the emergency at its present level would not be an impediment to further constitutional advance.

The negotiations themselves need not detain us. The Tunku, David Marshal, and Tan Cheng Lock faced MCP Secretary General Chin Peng and two of his colleagues in a school house at the border town of Baling. The British were not active participants. The Tunku insisted that anyone surrendering could choose between going to China, or investigations prior to reintegration: Chin Peng could not accept investigations or anything smacking of “surrender.” The Tunku refused legal recognition of the MCP. Without agreement, a visibly deflated Chin Peng returned to the jungle—not, however, before agreeing that if the Tunku gained a British promise of independence and local control of security forces, his men would “lay down” their arms.

The British breathed a massive sigh of relief. The Amnesty ended on February 8, 1956 (leaving normal surrender terms), having netted just 74 AMSEPs, and the January–February 1956 Constitutional Conference easily agreed to accelerate Malayan decolonization.⁹⁰ It agreed that the target date for independence should be August 31, 1957. In terms of “transition,” and possibly with a view to Chin Peng’s concession at Baling, it also agreed an earlier transfer of the direction of internal security.

In the period before independence, overall direction of the emergency was to transfer to a minister for Internal Defence and Security, who would in turn report to the FedExCo. This happened in March 1956. Tunku Abdul Rahman was not only chief minister but also minister for Internal Defence and Security. As such, he became chair of a new EOC. Below this EOC, of course, SWECs had long been chaired by the Malay Menteri Besar, with the SWECs’ European “executive secretaries” acting as the key link between the DOO staff in Kuala Lumpur and the SWECs, to communicate policies downward.⁹¹ As late as July 1957, 7 of the 11 executive secretaries were still European.⁹²

The DOO, meanwhile, remained responsible to the EOC for day-to-day operations and retained operational command of all the SF allotted to them. The EOC was also assisted by a Working Party of professional advisers, including the directors of Intelligence and of Information.⁹³ Furthermore, in the words of the DOO Report of 1957, “actual control of British military units remained the ultimate responsibility of the British GOC Malaya” and of unit commanders. When the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement was finally signed in October 1957, this remained the case. By that point, most British and Commonwealth troops had been concentrated in particular areas—notably Perak and the north Johore—reducing visibility, even though the number of battalions employed had only declined to 21. North Johore and Perak initially remained under operational control of HQ 17 Gurkha Division, the rest of the country now coming under control of the independent Malaya’s HQ Federation Army, which assumed control of all Federation Army units.⁹⁴

Below these higher levels, in the SWECs and DWECs, things also changed more rapidly in 1957–58, as Malayans were promoted to replace retiring British officials, Dos, and higher police officers.⁹⁵ Even so, a few British stayed in high police and administrative posts, including in SB. One SB officer—Tim Hatton—even became acting director on occasions before finally retiring in 1967.⁹⁶

Counterinsurgency campaigning thus progressed fairly seamlessly across independence. There was a renewal of the 1955 Amnesty terms as the Merdeka (Independence) Amnesty of September 1957–1958, and in October 1957 the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) came into effect, together with British agreements to provide an additional £33 million in grants and loans over 1957–61.⁹⁷ AMDA allowed the small “Commonwealth Strategic Reserve” (CSR, 28 Commonwealth Infantry Brigade) of British-Gurkha units plus a small Australian and New Zealand presence to continue in Malaya, ultimately until 1971.⁹⁸ AMDA also preserved the option of using the CSR and air assets in support of “Commonwealth and international obligations,” though requiring Britain to seek prior Malayan agreement for use of its bases in support of non-British territories.⁹⁹ This Commonwealth presence suited a Malaya, which needed plenty of time to develop its tiny navy and air force, with the latter insufficient to do more than assist emergency transport duties until after 1960.¹⁰⁰

CONCLUSIONS

There are additional areas of Malayan counterinsurgency that this chapter has not had space to address, such as the continual refinement of surrender, reward, propaganda, and rehabilitation programs.¹⁰¹ Those omissions have been necessary to keep the emphasis on outlining the main phases of the emergency and the predominant “recipe” for counterinsurgency in each one. That approach paves the way for a number of conclusions about the Malayan emergency specifically and about the analysis of counterinsurgency campaigns more generally:

1. The Malayan emergency proceeded through distinct phases of (1) terror and counter-terror, (2) creation and exploitation of geo-demographic control, (3) optimization, and (4) normalization and transition. Each one had a qualitatively different blend of counterinsurgency techniques. Particular tactics or techniques (coercive, kinetic, winning hearts and minds) existed in all phases, so anyone suffering confirmation bias toward one sort of tactic or another will find what he or she wants. What matters is tracing the change in emphasis among these, and the nature of the machinery and assumptions that patterned their use.
2. All the Malayan phases involved massive application of forces and resources, and dislocation and far-reaching controls for much of the population. For a population growing from 5 to 6 million, around 500,000 were resettled, around 600,000 concentrated, and at least 33,000 in total detained (peak averages being 8,000–10,000 in 1950–52 before falling sharply).¹⁰² About another 30,000 were deported or repatriated voluntarily, more than 8,719 of them as late as 1951.¹⁰³ Up to 23 battalions (still 21 battalions as late as 1957) encompassed a peak of 40,000 Commonwealth forces combined with 67,000 full- and part-time police and up to 300,000 Home Guard. To put this in context, for a U.K. population of more than 60 million the equivalent would be resettling 5 million and deporting and repatriating 300,000. For the United States, the equivalent would be more than five times those numbers. In addition, the sweeping nature of emergency powers amounted to a suspension of many of the human rights enshrined in the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¹⁰⁴ At times of nearby operations, a New Village might be surrounded by barbed wire, its adult men enlisted for Home Guard shifts, its workers forced to depart for their tapping or tin-mining work through limited gates after curfew ended and following searches, with little water and food for their lunch. Villagers discovered aiding the insurgents could be detained without trial and deported if not citizens. In a few cases, Templer went further, threatening collective punishment to encourage increased cooperation, or even enforcing it. So even with the more controlled, calibrated, and protected environment that slowly emerged across 1950–54, and even with the gradual appearance of village elections and facilities such as community halls and schools, villagers still experienced a highly coercive atmosphere.
3. Any attempts to shoehorn Malaya into a model of British counterinsurgency working primarily by “intimidating” the population more than the enemy, and by ‘terroristic’ policies would, however, miss vitally important nuances. That would ignore the way that policies in the key transformative Stage 2 shifted. The key period for excesses was Phase 1 of terror and counter-terror, when for instance some villagers were removed with little or no attempt at resettlement, up to 10,000 people were deported in the single year of 1949, and there were instances both of small and less frequently of larger numbers of unarmed civilians being shot. There was little effective protection of the rural population in this period, with many villages becoming dangerous “every man’s land.” As noted, however, this earlier period had ambivalent results, reducing insurgent unit size but probably increasing insurgent replenishment and support rates. By comparison, the transformative Phase 2 gradually reduced excesses and increased the use of targeting of controls (notwithstanding some early actions that amounted to collective punishment). It also featured simultaneous attempts to increase confidence in personal safety and in a better future. Indeed, precisely as villagers were targeted for more intense food-intelligence-SF operations, they experienced both increased controls (for instance, tighter rice rations or central cooking) and increased requests to specify their needs (as varied as extra protection, improved pig production, and more help registering land titles). It was a case of cumulatively applying more stick and more carrot over time from 1950 (rather than more of just one or the other), combined with increasing protection, less collateral damage, and more precise targeting of actions.
4. Undifferentiated models of counterinsurgency are, therefore, likely to prove of varying utility across different periods, and any “one-size-fits-all” model would also ignore the issue of sequencing. Using the analogy of making tea, one can illustrate the problem by wrongly assuming you can apply a generalized model of counterinsurgency regardless of the phase of campaign. If you simply put everything in a pot—water, tea leaves, and milk—and boil—what you get is not really what you wanted. Sometimes one thing may have to happen before another for a recipe to work. Specifically, for instance, some aspects of Stage 1 insurgency (such as less discriminate mass detentions and large army sweeps) may have been largely unavoidable in 1948 Malayan conditions, to establish base-level intelligence and break up the largest insurgent units.¹⁰⁵
5. The Stage 2 model that achieved a one-way direction of improving security in Malaya is an excellent demonstration of how changes across periods do matter. This phase saw the emergence of geo-demographic control (dual control of contested space and populations as the building blocks for kinetic- and population-centric actions). The army continued to have as its main tasks patrols and ambushes, but these were made to contribute mainly to the framework (units protecting particular areas to provide general security) or to specific intensified operations around one or more New Villages. The latter operations were refined over this and the optimization period until they commenced with arrests in New Villages to remove hard-line suppliers, followed by compromising softer suppliers who took their place, tightening food controls, then the exploitation of live intelligence from those turned to ambush insurgents. Ideally, despite 67 percent of eliminations being kills, such intelligence-led patrolling and ambushes would produce SEP, providing yet more live intelligence, so creating a virtuous circle. The army achieved far higher contact rates where they were able to exploit good intelligence, and the model generated the crucial information, as well as ensuring that enemy nerve cells (committees and commanders) were priority targets. By comparison, pre-1950 army sweeps, however necessary at the time, had been inefficient, and patrols without good information were vastly less efficient.
6. A system was developed in the second phase that was capable of tightly integrating population- and enemy-centric actions, coordinating all civil and security forces. Army commanders were made members of the relevant level of each civilian-directed WEC, and in addition had their operational headquarters alongside the relevant level of police headquarters, with whom they shared operations rooms. In addition, SB remained the main controller of SEP and provider of intelligence, which MIOs translated into a form usable by the army. Thus, the army retained mainly security, killing, and kinetic functions, but this system of WECs, joint operations rooms, and MIOs with SB made the army a tightly coordinated cog within a paradigm of geo-demographic or population control. Sitting alongside it, a DOO and DOO committee could also cascade general strategy downward through the WEC system.
7. Optimization in Phase 3 involved building on earlier phases. Hence, in the key transformative phase of 1950–52, the emphasis was on breakneck resettlement and police expansion to the detriment of training. Substantial retraining and then Operation Service only got underway from the last quarter of 1952, by which time incidents were already plummeting and insurgent numbers and activity declining notably. Nevertheless, Templer and the combined military-civil powers he was given supercharged an improving situation, with improvements to SB, collection, assessment, and dissemination of intelligence and good practice, and entire focus of administrative hiring and movements on emergency needs, being key factors.
8. Politics, exceptionalism, and the limits of planning. Any campaign is to some extent sui generis, and these impose limits and costs on the nature and cost of “success.” In the Malayan case, the colonial context, whereby the British personnel were embedded as civil servants and police commanders, facilitated the WEC system. The dearth of food in the jungle also made food control viable and useful, while the communists faced serious inter- and intra-ethnic divisions and lacked a supportive neighboring power. Even so, British pragmatism and concessions played an important part. Core aims were modest: a stable, anticommunist government, not ill-disposed toward Britain. Within that, the British recognized that if the role of counterinsurgency was to win space for an effective local elite to take over, you could not be too precise about the nature of that elite, and the political structures and practices it needed to thrive. Over-prescriptive nation-building or state-building might have significantly increased the cost of counterinsurgency in Malaya, as UMNO protests of 1946–47 and UMNO-MCA boycotts of councils in 1954 forewarned. Instead, the British quietly reduced focus on their original aim of producing a genuinely multiracial “Malayan nation” and issue rather than race-driven political parties, and gradually handed more powers to the Alliance of the ethnically based UMNO and MCA (and later on Malayan Indian Congress). They were lucky that these allies were relatively benign, for instance with the traditionalist and business-orientated MCA not particularly inclined to encourage high levels of violence against their enemies in resettlements, as some loyalist Kikuyu seem to have been in Kenya. Even so, it turned out that even in these favorable circumstances, who your plausible allies were, and what they needed and wanted to thrive, circumscribed the type of success, nation-building, state-building, and endgame that were viable.

NOTES

The author would like to acknowledge British Academy funding, which paid for key parts of the research that underpin this chapter, notably in archives in Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.

1. Malay and Chinese spellings for local names and locations are given throughout as commonly known in the period; hence “Johore,” not the more modern “Johor”; “Negri,” not “Negeri”; and so on.

2. I summarize the British plans for a strategic reserve (and Malayan forces) in more detail in my Defence and Decolonisation in Southeast Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore 1941–1968 (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001).

3. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) handled anti-Japanese resistance from Malaya’s fall in 1941–42 until liberation, with assistance from British officers and supply drops from 1943 to 1945.

4. The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA): Air 20/10377, Director of Operations (R. H. Bowen), “Review of Emergency in Malaya, June 1948—August 1957,” September 12, 1957. This document will henceforth be referred to as DOO Review 1957. Other sources cite slightly higher MNLA figures, with an estimated peak of 8,200 in January 1951, declining slightly to 7,800 by January 1952. The general pattern is, however, the same. See also WO 291/167, Operational Research Unit (Far East) Report 1/57, “A Comparative Study of the Emergencies in Malaya and Kenya,” 1957.

5. MNLA was the official name from February 1949, sometimes rendered MRLA (Malayan Races Liberation Army). This comes down to different interpretations of Min tsu, with Special Branch using “Races” in the 1940s–50s, and Secretary General Chin Peng preferring “National.”

6. Annual Report on the Malayan Union for 1947 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Printing Office, 1948), pp. 1–3, for a population of 4.9 million at the September 1947 census.

7. Ibid. In reality, interpretation of the figures is politically sensitive. Hence, “Malays” pure and simple were only 43.4 percent or 2.1 million, but with “Malaysians” (similar groups from surrounding areas) added at 267,030 (5.4 percent), becoming 49 percent. Indians at 534,148 were 11 percent, Europeans, Eurasians, and others totaled 2 percent, and the total 4,902,678. Chinese were 1,882,874.

8. See the discussion in Karl Hack, “ ‘Iron Claws on Malaya’: The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (March 1999), pp. 99–125, especially 115–23.

9. Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), chs. 4 and 9, pp. 112–21, 278–85.

10. For a similar analysis of Kenya, and the vital importance of government distribution of resources in allowing older patrons to reestablish patron-client groups and authority there, see Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 146–47, passim.

11. Five of the nine states had been loosely federated in the Federated Malay States 1895–96, but even this was loosened somewhat before the war, in a futile attempt to persuade the remaining states to also consider some sort of centralization.

12. Before the war, very few Chinese were citizens, though those born in the British Straits Settlements were British subjects. The citizenship offered around the time of the Malayan Union offered to naturalize most Chinese born in the Union area, but the rules under the Federation required long unbroken residence in the country as well as birth there for non-Malays.

13. For a discussion of the tango of intimidation and repression by British and communists and the literature thereon, see Karl Hack, “ ‘Between Two Terrors’: People’s History and the Malayan Emergency,” in A People’s History of Insurgency, ed. Hannah Gurman (New York: Free Press, 2013), pp. 17–49; and “Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counter-Insurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 4–5 (2012), pp. 671–99.

14. Karl Hack, “The Origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (October 2009), pp. 471–96. Arguments about whether or not there were “communist instructions” are a total red herring, not to say naïve about the way international communism worked at this point. The critical point is that Malayan communists regarded themselves as part of a world movement, and so the international communist “line” as a guiding, rather than a determining, light. See also Karl Hack and Geoff Wade, “Introduction: The Origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (October 2009), pp. 441–48.

15. Hack, “The Origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948.”

16. Ibid.; A. J. S. Stockwell, “ ‘A Widespread and Long-Concocted Plot to Overthrow Government in Malaya’? The Origins of the Malayan Emergency,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no. 3 (1993), pp. 66–88.

17. The performance and deficiencies—in personnel and in lack of focus in reports—of manuscripts is discussed in more detail in Leon Comber, Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–1960: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency (Singapore: ISEAS, 2008), pp. 25–58.

18. David French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 75–82, citing TNA: CO 717/167/5, unidentified to Sir M. Logan, November 16, 1948. He notes that just about the only thing governors could not do using emergency powers was to establish military courts to try offenders.

19. There is a good discussion of how these ERs sometimes also threw the burden of proof onto the accused in both Malaya and Kenya, in ibid., pp. 80–81.

20. Anthony Short, In Pursuit of Mountain Rats: The Communist Insurrection in Malaya (Singapore: Cultured Lotus, 2000), pp. 277–81. First published as The Communist Insurrection in Malaya (London: Frederick Muller, 1975).

21. For the early use of the term approach to counter terror, see ibid., pp. 160–69. More detail is added from U.K. documents in Huw Bennett, “ ‘A Very Salutary Effect’: The Counter-Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (June 2009), pp. 415–44.

22. David French interviewed on “The British Way” episode of Radio 4’s Terror through Time series, first broadcast Tuesday, October 15, 2013, and available on iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03cmt53/Terror_Through_Time_The_British_Way/. This echoes French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, p. 251: “they also won because the civil population came to understand that the security forces could intimidate them more effectively than could the insurgents.”

23. Several conferences and collections have trod this path over 2007–13, including Matthew Hughes (ed.), “British Ways of Counter-Insurgency: A Historical Perspective,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 4–5 (2012); and Paul Dixon (ed.), The British Approach to Counterinsurgency: From Malaya to Iraq and Afghanistan (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

24. The debate on stalemate versus continuous improvement across 1950–52 is traced in Hack, ‘ “Iron Claws on Malaya’ ”; “The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009), pp. 383–414; and most comprehensively in “Using and Abusing the Past: The Malayan Emergency as Counterinsurgency Paradigm,” in Dixon (ed.), The British Approach to Counterinsurgency, pp. 207–42.

25. The Malaysian case involved four elderly relatives of the victims of the 1948 Batang Kali killings of 24 Chinese asking for judicial review in the British high court and of British government refusal to hold an inquiry. The court ruled against them on September 4, 2012, and they appealed in 2013. For the initial judgment in Keyu et al. vs. Secretaries of State, see http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/media/judgments/2012/keyu-judgment-04092012.

26. The British high court decided on October 5, 2012, in favor of Kenyan plaintiffs that they could attempt to sue the British government. On June 6, 2013, the British government consequently announced the offer of £19.9 million compensation to be distributed among 5,228 ex-detainees. For the background to the Kenya trial, see articles by Stephen Howe, David Anderson, Huw Bennett, and Caroline Elkins in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (December 2011). The Foreign Office stash—of files removed from colonies at independence as sensitive—is now to be found at TNA: FCO 141. The judgment is at www.judiciary.gov.uk/…  /Judgments/mutua-fco-judgment-05102012.pdf.

27. For discussion of “exemplary force,” see Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Insurgency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 6.

28. The term was used to me by BBC journalist Fergal Keane as his shorthand for how I was describing Malayan policies, in an interview held on April 9, 2013, and first broadcast in The British Way’ episode of Radio 4’s Terror through Time series. I adopt the term here with due gratitude.

29. DOO Review 1957, p. 21.

30. Gerald Templer, “Preface to the First Edition,” in The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya, 3rd ed. (Kuala Lumpur: Headquarters, Malaya Command, 1958). See also my discussion of this in Karl Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counterinsurgency,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 4–5 (2012), pp. 679, 686–87.

31. The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations—increasingly infrequent “contacts” were expected to be on the basis of information (Preface to Third Edition, Ch. XI), this intelligence often coming from food control operations around clusters of New Villages directed by “war executive committees” (Ch. XI, p. 1).

32. Deportation followed a slightly complicated path, falling from a 1949 peak of around 10,000 to very few in 1950, rising to around 5,000 again in 1952, and then quickly tailing off.

33. Tan Chin Siong (possibly a pseudonym) to Tan Cheng Lock, letter translated on May 23, 1950, Folio 24.30, H.S. Lee Papers, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.

34. The borders of these periods could be adjusted slightly according to purpose, as several key processes overlap. Hence, 1952–54 was the period when “optimization” around resettlement predominated, but incremental improvements continued thereafter. Equally, for “transition” and “normalization,” political progress gathered pace from 1951 (first municipal elections, member system) onward, and white areas (with emergency restrictions lifted) were introduced from 1953.

35. Ignoring this point can result in naïve assumptions, such as that Malaya had changed to an overwhelmingly positive, “winning hearts and minds” mode as a whole by 1952–53. Deportations peaked at around 1,000 in 1949, fell sharply in 1950–51, rose to around 5,000 in 1952, and then trailed off rapidly. More work is needed on how far deportations in 1952 and 1949 (with a lot of group deportations as well as individual orders in the latter) followed a similar or differing pattern.

36. Short, In Pursuit of the Mountain Rats, pp. 102–4. Chin Peng (as told to Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor), Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), p. 232; C. C. Chin and Karl Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Emergency (Singapore: Singapore University Press), pp. 144–47.

37. The Straits Times, July 31, 1948; and Imperial War Museum, Davis Papers, Box 6. Don Sinclair, of McAllister and Co Ltd, Penang, September 7, 1949, to Mr. N. Alexander. Sinclair claimed some of his Chinese respondents reported 26 squatters had been shot out of hand near Batu Arang, including women with children in their arms, with some soldiers refusing to open fire. Chin Peng et al., Alias Chin Peng, p. 227. By contrast, the action was officially reported as 26 Field Regiment killing 22 bandits and capturing 18, TNA: CO 717170/1, Farelf SitRep 4, July 28 to August 10, 1948; Bennett, “ ‘A Very Salutary Effect,’ p. 439.

38. Chin and Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng, pp. 144–49.

39. Instructions on Use of Force, HQ Malaya Command to regional headquarters, August 14, 1948, John Davis Papers, Imperial War Museum, London.

40. Short, In Pursuit of the Mountain Rats, pp. 160–66. Imperial War Museum, Davis Papers, Box 6. Don Sinclair, of McAllister and Co Ltd, Penang, September 7, 1949, to Mr. N. Alexander. Bennett, “ ‘A Very Salutary Effect,’ pp. 433–37.

41. Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear,” p. 680, citing Gurney speech of November 18 to the Legislative Council (on “hardship … caused to innocent people”) and communication to the Colonial Office of December (that the Chinese inclined toward whoever frightened them more).

42. See judgment in the case of Keyu [Chong Nyok Keyu] et al. vs. Secretaries of States for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and of Defence, September 4, 2012, online at http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/keyu-sec-state-foreign-commonwealth-affairs-judgment-04092012.pdf. This was the case brought for judicial review of the British decision not to hold an inquiry into the Batang Kali massacre.

43. See Short, In Pursuit of the Mountain Rats, pp. 161–66. See also Sinclair, of McAllister and Co Ltd, for allegations that there had been numerous reports people had been killed and then described afterward as having been running away.

44. Ng See Seng, “Sir Henry Gurney as High Commissioner during the Malayan emergency, Oct. 1948–Oct. 1951: A Critical Assessment,” MA dissertation, Nanyang Technological University, National Institute of Education, Singapore, 2002, pp. 56–58.

45. Tan Chin Siong to Tan Cheng Lock. For more detail on the Chinese rural experience of the emergency (especially up to 1950) as being between two terrors, see Karl Hack, “Malaya—Between Two Terrors: ‘People’s History’ and the Malayan Emergency,” in Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency, ed. Hannah Gurman (New York: The New Press, 2013), pp. 17–49.

46. DOO Review 1957, p. 9, para. 27.

47. Tan Chin Siong to Tan Cheng Lock.

48. DOO Review 1957, p. 9, para. 29.

49. Ibid., para. 30, “there was little information forthcoming about the CTs.”

50. TNA: CO 1022/132, Detention and Deportation.

51. See, for instance, Arkib Negara Malaysia: 1957/0574060, covering surrendered bandits in Negri Sembilan (NS) in 1948–49. NS Commissioner of Police John Harrison seems to have tried to avoid valuable SEP being lost to investigation.

52. Special Branch interrogations (including those of Mat Indera, Marie bin Kadir, and excerpts from that of Tan Guat) released for Utusan Malaysia versus Mohamad Sabu trial, Penang High Court, October 8–9, 2012, and in the author’s possession.

53. TNA: CO 1022/132, Detention and Deportation.

54. The nature and persistence of resettlements and New Villages is discussed in more detail in my, “Malaya—Between Two Terrors,” pp. 17–49.

55. DOO Review 1957, pp. 20–21, gives 300,000 as the peak figure for the Home Guard in January 1951. At that time, it was separate Chinese and Kampong Guards, the two amalgamating in July of that year. By 1957, the Home Guard was down to 107,000, of whom 8,500 were in operational sections.

56. Progress Report on Home Guard for the Advisory Committee to the Federal War Committee, June 30, 1950; and 21.37a, Appendix D to Agenda for the Federal War Committee meeting of November 15 , 1951, in Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, H. S. Lee Papers, File 21.70.

57. See, for instance, Singapore: ISEAS, H. S. Lee Papers File 79/2 passim for several examples of such treatment by Selangor’s SWEC in 1952–53. For more detail, see Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear,” pp. 688–89.

58. DOO Review 1957, p. 19.

59. Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” p. 404.

60. Chin and Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng, p. 153.

61. TNA: CO 1022/187. I have analyzed these at greater length in my: “ ‘Iron Claws on Malaya,’ ” pp. 99–125; and “British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency in the Era of Decolonisation,” Intelligence and National Security 14, no. 2 (1999), pp. 124–55. Chin Peng—MCP secretary general—has broadly confirmed these interpretations in Chin and Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng, pp. 143–68; and Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore: Media Masters, 2003), pp. 270, 299–300.

62. Rhodes House, Oxford: Young Papers, MS British Empire s486/2/1, “Review of the Security Situation in Malaya: Aim and Strategy of the MCP,” around 1953, esp. para. 5. See also in the same papers, s486/2/3, CIS(52)(7)(Final), Combined Intelligence Staff Review of the Emergency as of 30th September 1952, October 10, 1952.

63. The full October Resolutions, running to more than 60 pages, are in TNA: CO 1022/187. For intelligence analyses of them, see Hack, “British Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in the Era of Decolonisation,” pp. 124–55. For Chin Peng’s view of their significance, as secretary general of the time, see Chin and Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng, pp. 153–64.

64. Rhodes House, Oxford, Young Papers, reports on the Malayan Emergency, 1952–53; Hack, “British Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in the Era of Decolonisation,” pp. 137–38.

65. Rhodes House, Oxford, Young Papers, CIS (52) (7) Final, “Review of the Security Situation in Malaya as at 30th September 1952,” by the Combined Intelligence Staff. Dated October 1952.

66. Stubbs makes this point rather well, though he goes further and suggests that it was an MCP miscalculation that allowed the new measures for “winning hearts and minds” to be implemented and have effect. In reality what took effect in 1952 was more the tightening of control and protection around New Villages, with the impact of slow improvements (police retraining and Operation Service were toward the end of the year) and elections and extended citizenship for Chinese (September 1951) likely to be slower to have an effect. Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 151–52.

67. See CAB 21/1681, MAL C(50)23, May 24, 1950, Appendix, “Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organisation and Armed Forces in Malaya (the Briggs Plan),” report by the COS for Cabinet Malaya Committee, as cited in Anthony Stockwell, Malaya, vol. II (London: HMSO 1995), pp. 217–21 for this document.

68. Hack, “Everyone Lived in Fear,” p. 686.

69. DOO Review 1957, p. 20. The Chinese Home Guard were amalgamated with Malay “Kampong” Guards in July 1951 as a single Home Guard.

70. Straits Times Annual 1952 (Singapore: Straits Times, 1953), preface.

71. These operations typically involved increasing food control and patrols, arresting hardcore suppliers to force reliance on softer supporters, turning some of the latter and generating live intelligence on insurgent intentions to facilitate ambushes and captures and so creating a cycle leading to local MCP committee dissemination or elimination. For a summary, see Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” pp. 383–414. DOO Instruction no. 36 of June 26, 1954, described food controls as “The main weapons of DWEC against the CT” going forward. See Singapore, ISEAS, H. S. Lee 7.44/1-19.

72. Chin and Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng, p. 162.

73. Chin Peng, My Side of History, 2003, pp. 323–29.

74. The Straits Times, Sunday, April 13, 1952, p. 1.

75. National Army Museum, Templer Papers, 7410-29-1-78, Templer, “Speech at Sepang,” August 1953, passim. In fact, many of these villages continued to be a problem (in the sense of a lack of information) until concentrated operations broke the nearby insurgent leadership, see, for example, The Straits Times, April 10, 1954, p. 7, for Templer threatening Sepang in 1954 with removal of its pigs if cooperation did not improve.

76. DOO Review 1957, p. 15.

77. Ibid., p. 21.

78. Hack, “British Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency in the Era of Decolonisation,” pp.129–33; TNA: CO 1022/27.

79. Karl Hack, “Corpses, Prisoners of War and Captured Documents: British and Communist Narratives of the Malayan Emergency, and Intelligence Transformation,” Intelligence and National Security 14, no. 4 (1999), pp. 216, 228–29.

80. The 1947 census suggested around 30,000 “nomadic aborigines,” though later estimates could be considerably higher. Obviously, quantifying mobile jungle peoples with whom contact was variable is tricky. See John Leary, Violence and the Dream People: The Orang Asli and the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (Colombus: Ohio University Press, 1995), p. 2. DOO Review 1957, p. 18, gave 50,000–60,000 as its estimate, but that is most likely too high. Annual Report on the Malayan Union for 1947, p. 1. Annual Report on the Federation of Malaya 1948, p. 1.

81. DOO Review 1957, p. 18.

82. The sharper-eyed reader will note that the same Colonel Young then went to Kenya in 1954 only to resign after months saying that local cover-ups of abuses and lack of support made a similar Operation Service and reforms there ineffective. See Rhodes House, Oxford, Young Papers.

83. Arkib Negara Malaysia (henceforth ANM) 2005/0018549, Minutes of Meeting of Negri Sembilan SWEC, Monday, October 3, 1955, for instance. The chair was Honourable Enche Shamsuddin bin Nain as Menteri Besar, and also in attendance were the British Adviser, Acting Chief Police Officer Enche Mohd. Salleh bin Ismail, Commander Gurkha 26 Brigade, British Secretary for Chinese Affairs, Planters’ Representative, two more Europeans, and Yap Mau Tatt and Honourable Enche Idris bin Matsil.

84. DOO Review 1957, p. 8.

85. Ibid., p. 14, para. 51.

86. ANM2005/0018534, Conference of Executive Secretaries [of SWECS], held on May 3, 1956, Item 6. TNA: WO 216/901, DOO to Templer, March 15, 1956. For instance, a near riot and accusations of women being visible semi-naked in search tents led to a report on food operations at Semenyih in 1956, see, for example, Report on the Conduct of Food Searches at Semenyih in the Kajang district of Selangor (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1956).

87. ANM1957/0569642 SEP. See also Karl Hack, “Negotiating with the Malayan Communist Party, 1948–49,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 4 (November 2011), pp. 607–32.

88. Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2002), p. 195.

89. Rhodes House, Oxford, Granada End of Empire television series, research notes with Guy Madoc.

90. Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda, p. 197.

91. ANM2005/0018534, Note of a meeting of the Conference of Chairmen and Deputy Chairmen of State War Executive Committees, November 28, 1955. Chaired by the DOO, this consisted mainly of the Menteri Besars, who were all Malay; the resident commissioners of Penang and Malacca, who were both European; and the British advisers, who were all European.

92. ANM 2005/0018533, War Executive Committees, List of Exec Secs of SWECs as of 1 July 1957, dated July 12, 1957. The others were three Malays (for Kelantan, Terengganu, and tiny Perlis) and one Chinese (for Penang).

93. DOO Review 1957, p. 14, para. 52.

94. Federation of Malaya Annual Report 1957 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press), p. 4.

95. ANM 2005/0018534, Conference of Executive Secretaries [to SWECs], held on May 3, 1956, Item 4. Interestingly, at this point everyone at this conference—for example, military commanders and the state secretaries—was European.

96. DOO Review 1957, p. 23, para. 85–86. Comber, Malaya’s Secret Police, p. 273.

97. Hack, Defence and Decolonisation, p. 231.

98. The reserve was organized as 28 Commonwealth Infantry Brigade from 1955, and continuing from then until 1971 based near Malacca in Malaya, and from 1971 to 1974 in Singapore as 28 ANZUK Infantry Brigade. AMDA negotiations were held up in 1957 first because the Malayans preferred to sign as an independent state, and secondly as there was British sensitivity about losing the British right to use nuclear weapons, which it wanted to have theoretically as a contribution to SEATO.

99. Hack, Defence and Decolonisation, pp. 226–31, summarizes the debates, and the British desire to be able to tell SEATO it could use Malayan-based aircraft as a nuclear-armed contribution to that organization’s deterrent, alongside Tunku Abdul Rahman’s need to tell some UMNO supporters there was no direct SEATO link following August 1957 press reports that nuclear weapons might be sent. British High Commissioner G. Tory reassured Malaya in September 1957 that Britain would not introduce nuclear weapons to Malaya or deliver them from Malayan bases without its prior agreement.

100. Hack, Defence and Decolonisation, pp. 146, 261. Malcolm Postgate, Operation Firedog: Air Support in the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (London: HMSO, 1992), pp. 137–38. By 1960, the RMAF still only had a handful of light aircraft.

101. The best work on propaganda and psychological warfare is Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda. For a flavor of the propaganda leaflets, see Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” pp. 405–9, and Chin and Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng, pp. 211–16. See also the various Malayan articles at http://www.psywar.org/articles.php.

102. DOO Review 1957, p. 17, gives 33,992. There was a peak of around 11,000 at any one time. The total figure may be too low, as the DOO figures for deportations at least look too low compared with more detailed Colonial Office figures.

103. DOO Review 1957, p. 17, underreports these. WO 291/1670, ORU (Far East) 1957/1, “A Comparative Study of the Emergencies in Kenya and Malaya,” p. 33. This also shows detentions peaked at around 10,000 in 1949, fell to 2,171 in 1950 and then recovered to 8,719 in 1951 and 5,755 in 1952, before trailing off to 496 by 1956.

104. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, p. 81.

105. Karl Hack interviewed by Octavian Manea, “Setting the Record Straight on the Malayan Counterinsurgency Strategy,” Small Wars Journal, http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/setting-the-record-straight-on-malayan-counterinsurgency-strategy.