1

Cinema’s Encounter with Colonial Insurgencies

In the years after 1945 powers such as Britain, France and Holland began to wind up their colonial empires in a period that has come to be known by historians as ‘decolonization’.¹ The model of ‘flag independence’ was established by the United States in the case of the Philippines in 1946 and was followed in 1947–1948 by independence in India and Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Dutch East Indies as Indonesia after a colonial war between 1945 and 1949. Over the next three decades European colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean also gained independence, first from Britain and France and later from Spain and Portugal, in some cases following insurgencies.

In the case of British cinema, the retreat from empire ensured that many post-1945 war films lacked any serious sense of imperial mission, unlike some pre-war movies such as Clive of India (1935) and Rhodes of Africa (1936). As I shall show in this chapter, the management of declining imperial power led to a focus lower down the imperial pecking order on junior or middle-ranking army officers, colonial policemen and civil servants carrying on their duty in a world of colonial retreat. To some degree this reflected a wider interest in the war movie genre on men in combat, as well as offering the occasional exposure of incompetence and rigid attachment to past glories, exemplified especially starkly by Richard Attenborough’s absurd Regimental Sergeant Major Lauderdale in Guns at Batasi (1964).

Such factors had an important bearing on the cinematic representations of post-war ‘emergencies’ in the British colonies of Malaya (1948–1960), Kenya (1952–1960) and Cyprus (1955–1959). These were all examples of counter-insurgency deployed to restore political order against indigenous insurgent movements in order to secure a managed transfer of power to a western-orientated post-colonial elite. At the same time, the United States, though formally committed to the end of European colonial empires, found itself fighting colonial-type insurgencies, especially in South Vietnam as I shall show later in the chapter.

All the ‘emergencies’ were resolved by the time of independence and there was no British equivalent of Algeria, where France eventually withdrew in 1962 leading to the departure of over 1 million white colons from a colony they had known as ‘Algerie Francaise’. It was only in Southern Rhodesia that Britain faced anything resembling the Algerian example, as a white settler regime of some 270,000 under its leader Ian Smith declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. But Rhodesia was, for the British public, a relatively remote colony and successive governments remained uninvolved in the bush war that developed in the late 1960s and 1970s before the eventual decision by the government of Mrs Thatcher to temporarily recolonize Rhodesia in 1979 and manage elections to secure the country’s passage to independence as Zimbabwe in 1980, an event that has so far not reached the cinema screen.2

In this chapter I shall examine the cinematic representation of these emergencies in two sections. The first section will look at five films depicting aspects of the counter-insurgency in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus: The Planters Wife (1952), Simba (1955), Windom’s Way (1957), The High Bright Sun (1964) and The 7th Dawn (1964). The second section will look at one major film that examined American counter-insurgency in Vietnam, The Green Berets (1968), though the disastrous reception of the film among critics (though not film audiences) helped to put Hollywood off filming serious counter-insurgency films for years, a theme that I will tackle in more detail in Chapter 4.

Tackling insurgencies in an era of decolonization

The decolonizing narrative that developed in Britain paid little attention – unlike in France – to radical insurgent movements, which were mostly seen as aberrations from the ‘normal’ parliamentary trajectory imposed by Whitehall. There was rather less need to use the cinema in any coherent propaganda role as in the Second World War, though film producers were broadly expected to produce films that were not too critical of colonial policy.³ In any case, most British film producers were keen to choose themes that resonated with the British cinema-going public and avoid anything too controversial or unpopular at the box office.

The films released in the 1950s emerged at a time of some hostility among sections of the British upper class towards the appeals of ‘Americanization’ from across the Atlantic, though many working-class cinema goers admired the American lifestyle, with its compelling images of suburban affluence, exciting dress styles and glamourous movie stars. For the British imperial establishment, the United States appeared to offer little to sustain a myth of empire that faced the possibility of oblivion in the post-war world, though they were forced to tag along with it during the 1950s in a Cold War climate of anti-communism.⁴

Cinematically, the United States remained an uneasy ally for Britain when it came to representing the Second World War and colonial emergencies. The end of the war had seen an especially emotive battle over ownership of the memory of the war and military combat with the release of Operation Burma (1945) by Warner Brothers. The movie showed a group of American paratroopers sent behind enemy lines in Burma under a Captain Nelson, played by Errol Flynn. The team has the usual range of characters drawn from the various cultural components of the United States: a Jewish guy and an Italian American, for instance, as well as a Nepalese Gurkha who acts as a guide and tracker for the team. The film had started life before the end of the war in 1944 and recognized at the start that the campaign in Burma had been an ‘Allied’ and not just an American one.

The film provoked fierce attacks by the British press on its apparent misrepresentation of the American role in Burma, to the point that the film ended up being banned from British cinema screens for five years. The press opposition in Britain reflected anger at the film’s subtext suggesting an inherent British subordination to the theme of ‘American derring-do, small scale or large scale, delivered at the right moment by men with the right qualities, can do the job’.5 The British public soon grew used to this phenomenon and there was only muted criticism in 1953 when the film Red Beret was released with the American actor Alan Ladd cast as a Canadian officer leading a British para raid on a German radar station. Cinema owners, by this time, were only too keen to have films with American stars since their appearance usually ensured good box office receipts. Operation Burma, coming as it did at the end of the war, struck a raw nerve. It confirmed all too clearly declining British imperial power as well as Hollywood’s evident willingness to expose its own ideological practices to public gaze by ransacking the successes of other national cinemas and projecting them as if they were its own.⁶

The issue helped to define some of the contours of post-war British feature films, especially in relation to war movies. During the 1940s two major film combines emerged in Britain, the Rank Organisation and ABC, that attempted planned programmes of production. Both became seriously hampered by the failure of the British government to enforce the 1947 quota of foreign film imports and, by the end of the decade, the larger of the two combines, Rank, had made a loss of between £4 and £6 million, a drain made worse by declining cinema audiences. Rank’s response to this crisis was to secure a relatively safe income by exhibiting American films in its cinemas and using the profits from this to fund its own more modest ventures in film making.⁷

This strategy managed to work during most of the 1950s, though by the decade’s end time was beginning to catch up on Rank. In 1960, it withdrew from mainstream cinema and concentrated on documentaries. In its heyday, Rank released several iconic war films that helped shape the post-war British memory of the Second World War. The American film distributors did not need many of the films that Rank produced, so there was a degree of parochialism about its films, made even more evident by the enforcement of a distinctly Rank ethos. The company was closely controlled by its managing director, John Davis, together with his American executive producer Earl St John. Actors had to sign seven-year contracts while film scripts were submitted to both British and American censors in advance of filming. Davis also followed a strongly right-wing political stance on the Cold War and was keen to see films produced with a markedly anti-communist tone. One of the most overtly political of these films was the Boulting Brothers High Treason in 1951, where police engage at the end in a shoot-out with an underground communist terrorist group attempting to sabotage Battersea Power Station.⁸

Nevertheless, Rank found itself navigating between a series of powerful institutional constraints in its ‘colonial war’ features. One issue that never went away was the need to break, where possible, into the American market. Here the familiar ideological battles of the Cold War helped steer the company into emphasizing the importance of counter-insurgency in the struggle against world communism. Another, and sometimes contradictory, issue was pressure from the British government to release films that accorded with the narrative of moving from old-style ‘empire’ to a new ‘multi-racial’ Commonwealth of newly independent states. A third consideration was the need to maintain the core values of Rank that were strongly shaped by the puritanical values of its founder, J. Arthur Rank, who was a Methodist lay preacher as well as multi-millionaire grain wholesaler.

Rank proceeded to release a series of iconic films that appealed to the generation who had come through the Second World War. In addition to war features such as The Cruel Sea (1953) and Reach for the Sky (1956), it released the odd comedy with a military theme such as The Bulldog Breed (1960) starring Norman Wisdom, and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) starring Virginia McKenna, depicting the SOE agent Violette Szabo in France in 1944–1945. There were also several films depicting daring British exploits in special operations, while others projected an image of relatively benign and well-intentioned colonial officials fighting counter-insurgencies as part of an orderly retreat from empire.

Rank released three ‘colonial war’ films in the 1950s – The Planters Wife (1952), Simba (1955) and Windom’s Way (1957) – while the later Malayan insurgency 7th Dawn (1964) was released by United Artists. The movies reveal some of the competing pressures on British producers of adventure films, especially between the demands of the American market and liberal ideas of the British Commonwealth. Commercial pressures to secure a profitable film usually ensured that some form of romantic narrative intruded to the point where it could almost completely marginalize the wider political and military narrative. Where there was any sort of political focus, the demands of Cold War anti-communism tended to come uppermost so that the underlying reasons for the campaign by the anti-colonial ‘terrorists’ were usually ignored or bypassed by a focus on loyal and subservient members of the colonized ‘native’ population, whether these be servants or members of the colonial police. If there was any focus on the ‘terrorists’, the usual device was to see these as led by ‘alien’ outsiders who had often been educated with ‘foreign’ ideas and values that conflicted with the ‘normal’ patterns of the colonial society.

At the extreme, these foreign ‘agitators’ were nothing short of evil, rather like some of Hollywood’s later terrorist nemeses in the 1980s and 1990s. As Susan Carruthers has suggested, some of the features released in Britain reinforced counter-insurgency efforts, especially in relation to Kenya and Malaya. They grew out of earlier propaganda efforts by film units organized by the Colonial Office after the Second World War.9 Rank’s first foray, The Planters Wife (dir. Ken Annakin who later filmed The Battle of the Bulge), was released in 1952. It is set in Malaya during the early phases of the communist insurgency and starred Jack Hawkins as a rubber planter Jim Frazer, Claudette Colbert as his wife Liz and Anthony Steel as Hugh Dobson the local police inspector. The narrative focuses on attacks from communist guerrillas, known by the British army at the time as ‘CTs’ or ‘communist terrorists’, especially on the Frazers’ rubber plantation. Released in the middle of the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunt in the United States, the film certainly had all the basic ingredients of an anti-communist Cold War melodrama, though the film grossed a paltry £32,000. Nevertheless, the film was quite popular with British audiences and was the sixth most popular film for 1952, reflecting perhaps the continuing insularity of British cinema.

The story of the insurgency in Malaya is one of the most widely known in the history of modern guerrilla warfare, partly because it influenced a school of counter-insurgency (COIN) exponents in the United States in the early 1960s. The insurgency was stimulated by the lightening conquest of Malaya by the Japanese in early 1942 which destroyed the structure of the colonial state. This state had in the pre-war years only marginally impacted on the lives of many over whom it ruled, though this became even more evident as the Japanese advanced down the Peninsula. The British released some 200 members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) they were holding in jail and gave them a crash course in guerrilla warfare at the 101 Special Training School (STS). The guerrillas then dispersed into the jungle where they formed the Malaya Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) that fought an insurgency against the Japanese until the end of the war.10

The British had not been particularly successful in maintaining contact with the guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya and had rarely supplied them via submarine, unlike the US navy with its guerrillas fighting in the Philippines. The MPAJA mostly continued the war on its own, helped by some from the civilian population, especially Chinese, who were usually described as ‘squatters’. Many of these ‘squatters’ followed the guerrillas into the jungle where they grew food crops by the war’s end. Most MPAJA insurgents knew the jungle well and had developed sophisticated guerrilla fighting skills. The guerrillas remained far more isolated from Allied contact compared to guerrilla groups in Burma or the Philippines; some officers from Force 136 (part of SOE) were sent in to assist them but were rarely involved in operational planning and did not even know the whereabouts of MPAJA camps and arms caches.

The relative failure of the British-led resistance fortified a myth, evident in some later feature films, that the jungle itself was a kind of malicious geographical influence on British military personnel. The jungle appeared considerably different to other, apparently cleaner, terrains such as mountains, forests or even deserts where it was possible to have a straight gentleman’s fight with Arab tribesmen or, later, the tanks and aircraft of the Afrika Korps. The jungle was often viewed as a dangerous hell complete with snakes, constant rain and tropical diseases which sapped men’s strength. It was also difficult to penetrate and required survival skills that were rarely taught in the British army before the Second World War.

At the war’s start, moreover, the jungle was perceived through a popular set of mythologies that associated jungles with exiled and marginal men festering away in remote wildernesses alleviated only by booze and native or ‘half caste’ women. This had been the theme of Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, while the novella The Heart of Darkness Conrad portrayed it as a hellish terrain where white men are at risk of slipping back into savagery and the only escape is death.¹¹ This pessimism was occasionally offset by more exotic imagery in cinema where the jungle is home to a super strong white man such as Tarzan (who first appeared on the silent screen as early as 1918), though this imagery soon dissolved in the face of rapid Japanese advances in early 1942 and the re-emergence of the jungle as a terrain of death and disaster.

Things were certainly different by the early 1950s when British and Commonwealth forces were no longer fighting a desperate battle for survival. It was the highly lucrative Malayan rubber plantations that was one of the chief reasons for the British government’s decision to fight a communist insurgency, as well as the chance to make up for the humiliating defeat in Malay and Singapore in early 1942. It became a commonly accepted precept in the post-war years that the jungle had only been dangerous in the Second World War because so many British soldiers had been poorly trained in ‘jungle warfare’. The Japanese army had learnt well how to survive in the jungle and its invading army came suitably equipped and trained. British soldiers who were not taken prisoner often found surviving in the jungle extremely difficult as they could not rely on much support from local Malays or Chinese. Many from these communities had been poorly paid ‘coolies’ working on rubber plantations before the war and there were few institutional structures binding them to the colonial regime, such as missionary schools and hospitals. Many British soldiers who stayed on to fight constantly feared being betrayed to the Japanese as well as having their food and equipment stolen (in a manner somewhat different to Burma, where both British and American forces received considerable support from the Kachin minority). The situation led to a rapid decline of morale that was later noted by the enthusiastic jungle fighter Freddie Spencer Chapman. Untrained British privates, he wrote, were lucky to survive a few months while NCOs might hold out a bit longer. But failing to adapt to the privations of jungle life, involving a diet largely of rice and vegetables, ensured eventual death, though he considered the jungle was a ‘neutral’ terrain in the sense that it provided ‘any amount of fresh water and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe – an armed neutrality, if you like, but a neutrality nevertheless’.12

This was not a message that either senior British commander wanted to hear. It was pointed out that dense jungles with full canopies were often much cooler than areas where vegetation had been cut down exposing soldiers to constant sunlight, while the idea of the jungle’s ‘neutrality’ really depended on the military abilities of those fighting in it.¹³ The guerrillas the British were up against had an initial advantage through their extensive knowledge of the terrain since the early 1940s, though this was hard to explain to film audiences who, in the 1950s, were almost completely unaware of the realities of bush craft and jungle survival. These really became popularized only decades later when the former Royal Marine Ray Mears hosted the TV series Extreme Survival in 1999. Freddie Spencer Chapman, however, certainly articulated a view that accorded with the cinematic image of the jungle as an inhuman terrain where lurked both wild animals and a dangerous enemy. By the time of the Malayan insurgency in the 1950s it became easy for film makers to equate the dark menace of the jungle, reinforcing an image, as Tony Shaw has pointed out, of communism as ‘a dark, clandestine, underground movement burrowing its way by stealth into liberal democracy’s weak points’.¹⁴

The insurgency in Malaya returned within a few years of the Japanese surrender in 1945 when a communist-led guerrilla insurgency broke out in 1948 in the Peninsula. The insurgency was organized by the MCP under its leader Chin Peng, who had served as a MPAJA’s liaison officer with Force 136 and even been awarded the OBE. The insurgency aimed at securing a communist revolution not dissimilar to the Viet Minh in Vietnam, despite the narrow ethnic base of support for the MCP among the Chinese ethnic minority (some 10 per cent of the population) and the evident problem of waging a guerrilla insurgency on a peninsula that could be easily cut off from outside support.

By the late 1940s, the insurgents presented a growing challenge to the colonial rulers in Malaya. The insurgents were now formed into the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and operated from jungle hideouts to attack rubber plantations and force the civilian population into supplying them with food. The campaign lasted for twelve years until its suspension in 1960, though by the time of Malayan independence in 1957 the state had expanded enormously to control population movements and isolate the guerrillas. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 led to a massive increase in the price of tin and rubber and this led to more resources being devoted in Malaya to building up the colony’s police force. The new High Commissioner in 1952, General Sir Gerald Templer, favoured a political, rather than simple, military solution to the conflict and this ushered in a new political process that culminated in independence five years later, though by this time some 500,000 people, including 400,000 Chinese squatters, had been resettled in ‘new villages’ to isolate them from the guerrillas.15 Despite these figures, Malaya remained a ‘small war’ since by its end only 519 British and Commonwealth troops were killed compared to some 6,710 guerrillas.¹⁶

Little of this emerges in The Planters Wife which marginalized the insurgency in preference to domestic melodrama. The film starts with a map that is focused first on China before wandering down to the Malayan peninsula. We see a cinematic example of the fashionable domino theory of the 1950s that the Malayan insurgency was part of a wider strategy by Communist China to spread revolution throughout South East Asia. This ‘strategic’ framework is developed during the film by three separate interlocking narratives anchored in distinct territorial spheres: the insurgency itself, centred in the jungle and depicted in terms of wild animal noises and animals such as snakes, monkeys and elephants. It is from this jungle terrain that the insurgents menacingly appear to attack the rubber plantations. This contrasts with the second sphere of white colonial power exemplified by the local barracks, the police, army and colonial club. This world is a tightly interlocking one; the rubber planter Jim Frazer (Jack Hawkins in one of his numerous imperial roles) who gets the army to supply him with a Bren gun to turn his home into an armed fortress: it is almost as if the film was finally answering the apparently hopeless request in Noel Coward’s song about the Home Guard ten years earlier. Finally, there is the third domestic and essentially feminine sphere inside Frazer’s home dominated by Frazer’s wife Liz (Claudette Colbert) but maintained by servants who cook food, bring tea and nanny Frazer’s son Mike (played by Peter Asher, brother of the actress Jane Asher). Claudette Colbert came to the movie with considerable cinematic baggage. Though now in her fifties she had starred in a few previous films with strongly imperial and orientalist themes, especially the seductive and manipulative Cleopatra in Cecil B DeMille’s vast melodrama Cleopatra (1934), where she is a white Egyptian queen ruling over a dark-skinned population.

Of the three spheres, it is the domestic melodrama between Jim and Liz Frazer that gets the most focus in the film. Both are committed colonials who have been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war, though the stress of the emergency has produced tensions in their marriage. Jim has gone on to make a success of his rubber plantation in the post-war years but all appear to be at risk from the communist insurgents led by Ah Song, a character clearly based on Chin Peng since he, too, had fought for Force 136 in the war.

The film was really a western given that the insurgents appear as jungle versions of bloodthirsty Indians constantly bent on attacking rubber plantations and rubber planters and the film descends at the end into an Alamo-type shoot-out that kills off the insurgent band, Ah Song included. This is also less an adventure film than a narrative of white colonial survival. Though it is not yet evident that independence is on the horizon this is no paean to colonial settlement. The rubber planters are a small and isolated community heroically defending their right to grow rubber in a situation where, it is asserted in an explanatory preface, ‘the jungle is neutral’ (a phrase taken from Spencer Chapman’s memoir).

The white community in Malaya was a mere 12,000, though they often demonstrate resolute and stalwart qualities; even the vulnerable and occasionally hysterical Liz knows how to handle firearms and shoots one menacing insurgent dead with a hidden pistol. There is a Kiplingesque subtext exemplifying the law of survival in the jungle with a dramatic encounter with a snake threatening the young school boy Mike. A pet mongoose eventually comes to the rescue and kills the snake after a struggle. The sub-narrative suggests that the law of the jungle, and by implication the threat of a communist takeover, can be mastered only by the rule of law embodied in the British colonial presence, though how far this can be maintained given the talk in the colonial club of returning to Britain is somewhat doubtful. Mike is eventually packed off to school in England and the film strongly suggests that the British colonial presence is only temporary.

The reasons for the insurgency are never properly examined in the film or the use of ‘new villages’ to isolate Chinese squatters from contact with the jungle guerrillas. We at least see some of the faces of the guerrillas and Ah Song himself puts through a telephone call to Liz Frazer, during the attack on Frazer’s house, asking for Jim to come to the phone so he can be killed by a sniper’s bullet. He is as much the clever and menacing terrorist as a resolute jungle guerrilla fighter. But it is not clear what exactly the tactics of the guerrillas are as they focus mostly on the rubber planters rather than the army. The Chinese population in Malaya during this period was mainly second generation, and some still owed allegiances to mainland China rather than Malaya. The film shows this by portraying a poster attacking the ‘running dogs’ who volunteer to help the British and one Chinese businessman (who had fought in Force 136) is taken off a bus and shot by an insurgent for collaborating.

The British army plays, somewhat surprisingly, a rather limited role in this film. It supplies weapons to the rubber planters and turns up, rather like the US cavalry, late in the day to save Frazer’s house from the attacking insurgents. The film is largely uninterested in the wider counter-insurgency developing in Malaya, though by the time it was released in 1952 this was already well under way under General Templer. The film failed to deal in any depth with civil-military relations in Malaya while its portrayal of the stoic and resolute rubber planters detracts from the army’s role which involved – at the peak of the insurgency – some 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a guerrilla army of some 7,000–8,000.

Despite these weaknesses, the American head of production at Rank, Earl St John, was pleased with the success of The Planters Wife and began to look for a follow-up. The obvious other colonial emergency to turn to was the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. St John sent a young script writer Anthony Perry to Kenya to research the film, while further advice was sought from the Colonial Office in London and the white settler organization The Voice of Kenya. Perry secretly sought guidance from a black Kenyan barrister living in exile in London, Charles Njonjo, who was widely viewed to be a Mau Mau suspect. Whatever advice Njonjo gave did not stop the resulting film titled simply Simba in 1955 following the conventional colonial imagery of the Mau Mau insurgency, though the movie attempted at times to impose a rather thin liberal gloss on it, comparable to some later mercenary films.17 This was also another British colonial feature that went down a western path given that its director, Brian Desmond Hurst, had learnt movie making in Hollywood under the guidance of John Ford.

The slender political focus of Simba reflected the dominance in political debate in the early 1950s of the imperially minded establishment in Britain together with its colonial offshoot in Kenya. There was for most of the 1950s relatively little open criticism of British colonial policy in Africa in the wake of the establishment of the Central African Federation in 1953, a year before Simba was released. The colonial government in Kenya had already got away by this time with a blanket suppression of virtually all African political activity, including the trade union organization the Kenyan Federation of Labour. There was also only a muted response in Britain to the colonial administration interning almost all the colony’s ablest African politicians, including Jomo Kenyatta. This was still a time when it was widely assumed that colonial rule would continue for the next few decades, given the rich resources of Kenya and its increased strategic importance in East Africa following the withdrawal of British forces from Egypt.¹⁸

Rank’s film Simba was released during a period when there was still strong support for the continuation of a British colonial role in Kenya, although the British public remained generally uninformed over the reasons for the Mau Mau revolt. Unlike the more ideologically driven insurgency in Malaya, Mau Mau was centred on ethnic Kikuyu who sought the restoration of land rights that had been taken away by white settlers since the foundation of British rule, first as a Protectorate in the 1890s and later as a crown colony in 1920. The colonial ‘pacification’ of the Kikuyu had never been complete and Mau Mau was a proto nationalist movement seeking both the expulsion of the settlers and the restoration of traditional patterns of African governance.

The issue became complicated by issues of race as the white settler community fell into a panic in the face of Mau Mau oathing ceremonies that appeared to confirm entrenched racist stereotypes of Africans as innately ‘savage’. By the time that the new governor of the colony, Evelyn Baring, arrived in 1952, the white community was in some state of hysteria – comparable, perhaps, to the colons in Algiers in 1957. Baring adopted a counter-insurgency strategy not so different to the one being pursued in Malaya. He avoided declaring martial law since the insurgency occurred only in parts of the colony and opted instead for declaring certain areas, such as Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Hills, ‘Prohibited Areas’, rendering them, in effect, ‘free fire zones’ where aerial bombing was permitted and there were no restrictions on the use of weapons. Other areas such as Nairobi and the Kikuyu Reserves were classified as ‘Special Areas’ where a more limited range of restrictions were applied.¹⁹

Despite these draconian provisions the British army found itself hard-pressed to control the Mau Mau secret societies without adequate local intelligence. There was a real vacuum of knowledge over how the secret societies worked among the semi-proletarian African labour force working on settler-owned farms or in nearby towns. To some observers Mau Mau appeared little more than a mythical cult, as in the case of the 1956 adventure film Beyond Mombasa (dir. George Marshall), as an exotic tribal ‘leopard men’ cult.

Mau Mau was really a label for a rural insurgency in Kenya among landless squatters who waged a low-level war involving the hamstringing of cattle, the destruction of crops and the murder of a few settlers (fewer than forty in all). White settler propaganda in Kenya was quick to depict Mau Mau activists as the embodiment of a dark and innately savage ‘evil’ African nature standing in opposition to the ‘enlightened’ forces of British colonialism.20 The insurgency would also be likened to a disease in a manner later used to describe the spread of terrorist movements, though it was hard to link it to the spread of international communism like other insurgencies in Vietnam and Malaya.

Some of these issues emerged in the film Simba, which starts with a stark contrast between the worlds of Africans and colonial whites. As the camera roams across a picturesque rural scene it comes to focus on an African cycling down a dirt road: this could almost, it seems, be an excerpt from a film to promote tourism until the African stops when he sees a bloodied white man lying on the ground. Instead of helping him he takes out a machete to finish off the job and hurriedly cycles away. The scene then switches to a plane about to land in Nairobi airport: it is Alan Howard (Dirk Bogarde) who has returned to his farm and family after years away in England. There is, clearly, a much starker gulf of culture and civilization between Africans and settler whites in Kenya compared to the Malaya of The Planters Wife. Equally, the colonial Kenyan whites appear far more vulnerable to attacks from insurgents who are not confined to jungle spaces but operate within their midst and can strike at any time.

The film’s imagery of colonial settlement in Kenya is one of fragility. There are no attempts by the settlers to fortify their homes, as in Malaya, and the wooden structures they live in seem highly vulnerable to attack. When Mau Mau warriors attack one house the terrified wife fires through a wooden door to hit one insurgent in the eye. The Mau Mau commander fires back through the door to shoot her down. There is little to protect the isolated white farms who are supplied by the police with rockets normally supplied to ships in distress. As in The Planters Wife, telephone connections can be easily cut by the insurgents while the police are over-stretched; lacking airpower they depend upon a force of uniformed loyal Askaris transported on the back of a lorry carrying rifles and the odd machine gun. Their movements too can be hampered, when the Mau Mau destroy a wooden bridge.

Much of Simba is concerned with identity, exemplified by cuts on the bodies of Africans revealing them as Mau Mau supporters. This practice was eventually abandoned to help disguise the Mau Mau activists, though one scene shows a group of Africans awaiting to be searched. One African man panics and runs off to be shot down by an Askari; his body has cut marks identifying him as a Mau Mau insurgent. The film also depicts a Mau Mau oathing ceremony, providing a good opportunity for reproducing images of ‘savage’ African ceremonies reminiscent of colonial adventure yarns such as Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. One of the posters for the film described the movie as capturing the ‘white heat’ of the Mau Mau conflict in the ‘green hell’ of Africa, while Mau Mau cuts on the body were embodied in the slogan ‘Mark of Mau Mau!’

Simba provides no serious explanation for the insurgency in terms of the increasing landlessness among the Kikuyu of the Central Highlands. Africans are for the most part depicted as living a tribal existence, though some wear western clothing such as trousers, shorts and hats.21 There is only one educated and ‘civilized’ African in the story in the form of a black medic, Dr Karanja (played by the American actor Earl Cameron). Karanja is not, on his occasion, a secret fanatical nationalist but – we find later – the son of the local chief who supports the insurgency.

Simba contains stark gender divisions linked to images of female domesticity. The homes of the settlers are the core symbols of white ‘civilization’ in Africa and the main targets of Mau Mau attacks. The film goes to considerable lengths to show the destructiveness of the insurgency; artefacts in the homes are destroyed and buildings set on fire, while the only things taken away are firearms. Family life lies at the heart of white colonial society: Bogarde’s Howard character has returned to meet again with his former girlfriend Mary Crawford (played by Virginia MacKenna) whom it seems he is destined to marry; his fatherly qualities are already on display when he takes charge of an African orphan child. The Africans, on the other hand, lack any real family life of their own or are under the brutal control of traditional leaders such as Karanja’s father, a tribal headman who despises western education and dismisses his own son for being a white man at heart.

The film was certainly in tune with Cold War fears of subversion, graphically brought to the cinema screen the following year in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Simba embraced some of the features of the Hollywood western like The Planters Wife: the hunt by a posse of Askaris across the African bush for the escaping Mau Mau leader; as well as the final shoot-out in the beleaguered house of Alan Howard with savage Mau Mau warriors advancing bedecked in war paint; the Askaris, too, arrive in the nick of time to rescue the situation like the US cavalry. Such tropes were symptomatic of Earl St John’s efforts to break into the American market and Simba indeed had quite a positive reception in the United States, where the critic in The New York Times felt it ‘a compassionate and chilling melodrama, spread across a fine semi documentary canvass in striking Eastman colour and threaded about equally with sensitivity and violence’.²² In Britain, critics were less impressed and Penelope Houston thought the film a ‘narrow and thin-skinned piece of melodrama’.

Adopting some of the features of the western reinforced the film’s indifference to African society in Kenya. The imagery of Mau Mau combined a series of screen stereotypes reminiscent of imperial adventure movies as well as conflicts in the American west between settlers and ‘savage’ Red Indians. The film interpreted the innate ‘savagery’ of Mau Mau as a product of weak social structures that left Africans an amorphous mass easily led by fanatics like Karanja’s father, a figure desperate to cling on to a vanishing way of life. There were this tropes in the film that accorded with the wider ‘modernization’ theories that were becoming increasingly prevalent in both American and British Cold War political discourse. African society appeared to be in a marked process of decay and dissolution markedly different to the rather more coherent society of the insurgents in colonial Malaya in The Planters Wife. To the extent that it had any sort of political message, Simba developed a superficial line of discussion about the destabilizing effects of education on ‘the African’ in Kenya for which it failed to come up with any answer beyond its bleak ending of a final shoot-out in which most of the insurgents apparently end up dead.

The third of the Rank ‘colonial war’ films, Windom’s Way, was released in 1957. It is set in an unnamed Asian country that has now passed out of formal European colonial control. Some critics thought the film referred to Malaya since the story is centred on a rubber plantation but the script (written by Jill Craigie, wife of the left-wing Labour politician Michael Foot) was based on a novel by James Ramsey Ullman set in Burma. The film, directed by Graham Neame, marked a significant change of tone from The Planters Wife since the British rubber planter Patterson (Michael Hordern) is a signally unappealing character with little interest in negotiating with his plantation workers and committed to draconian methods of control.

Windom’s Way is interesting for the way it moved post-war British cinema towards issues of ‘pacification’ and counter-insurgency in post-colonial states where western powers have considerable investments at stake. This was no simple Cold War film since the plantation workers are not apparently led by communist activists. Meanwhile in the surrounding jungle an insurgency rages whose origins and exact political goals remain unspecified (though it is vaguely based on the Karen insurgency in post-war Burma). At the end of the film government forces take on the insurgents, a battle heard only in the distance as the focus turns back to the central character of the story, a liberally inclined British doctor Alec Windom (sympathetically played by Peter Finch) managing a local hospital. Windom’s life has been dramatically transformed by the sudden arrival of his former socialite wife Lee (Mary Ure) who has abandoned London to come and live with her husband.

Once more a romantic theme detracts from wider political issues, though the film portrays the problems in establishing legitimate authority in post-colonial societies. The plantation workers are Buddhists and become outraged when their religious leader dies in a police cell after his arrest. They burn down Patterson’s house and force Patterson to flee to the capital where he asks for military assistance. The new state appears strongly supportive of western commercial interests and quickly obliges since it is engaged in a long-running war with the insurgents. Windom tries to calm the situation down by urging a more conciliatory policy towards the rubber workers and warns the duplicitous government commissioner Belhedron (played by the Anglo-Indian actor Marne Maitland) that unless he offers them a safe passage back to the plantation and the removal of the soldiers he risks more people going over to the insurgents. Belhedron appears to take the advice but then plans the opposite by having his soldiers surround the village. Windom by this time has started on a journey through the jungle into the highlands with the local mayor to try and bring the workers back, but finds he is too late as they have now joined the insurgents – their young leader explaining that they have been taught by the insurgents to see the situation in a new way. The mayor is taken away and shot as a government collaborator.

Ullman’s novel Windom’s Way was broadly based on the real-life American doctor Gordon Seagrave. The son of Baptist missionaries, Seagrave was born in Rangoon and graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1921. In the Second World War he worked with the Chinese New 5th Army at Toungoo in South China.23 He preferred to work under the Americans rather than the British and took part in Joseph Stillwell’s retreat into India in 1941. Over the next few years he developed a medical unit in Burma at Ramgarh Hospital and he continued after the war as chief medical officer in the last years of British colonial rule in 1945–1946.²⁴ He stayed working in Burma after independence but was charged with treason in 1950 for helping Karen rebels. The sentence was commuted to six months and finally lifted by the three-man Supreme Court of Burma.

Windom’s Way presents a glamorized and misleading view of Seagrave’s career as well as the Karen insurgency, which would be later portrayed in more graphic form in Rambo III. The film script stuck to some degree to the original novel, though shifted the terrain of the conflict to a newly independent colony that appeared to resemble Malaya. Given this was a British-produced film this is not altogether surprising given that that British cinema audiences would be more likely to be familiar with Malayan issues compared to Burma which had largely disappeared from media scrutiny following its independence from Britain in 1948.

Ullman’s novel also had some features that made the newly independent Asian state resemble South Vietnam, especially with its American military adviser and COIN expert Colonel Hasbrook who has the ear of the government in the capital. Unlike Graham Green’s Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, Hasbrook has no illusions about any sort of ‘third force’ standing between the government of the unnamed state and the communist guerrillas operating in the north of the country with both Soviet and Communist Chinese assistance. At the start of the novel Hasbrook has considerable faith that Windom’s medical work advances the prestige and interests of the United States in the country: he is ‘the only American who’s really living out with the gooks’²⁵ and ‘the sort of work you’re doing here’, he tells Windom, ‘is better propaganda than all the loans and V.I.P delegations and radio programmes put together’.²⁶ The strategy of winning hearts and minds is undermined by Hasbrook’s dismissal of Windom’s efforts at mediation, which he views as politically naïve and failing to recognize the country’s critical geopolitical position in the wider global Cold War.

For all its liberal efforts, the film captures many enduring orientalist and colonial stereotypes of the period: generally placid Buddhist Asians driven to run amok by the blinkered attitudes of the plantation owner and the untrustworthy double-dealing commissioner Belhedron, ably performed by Marne Maitland (who would go on to perform various evil characters in Hammer horror films). The film ends with Windom back in his hospital helped by his wife treating patients who have been injured in the insurgent war. The message appears to be that applying western liberal principles in such a polarized non-western political settling is unlikely to be all that successful and the best thing to do is focus on what can be achieved through medical support: a moral in effect for many western aid agencies in the decades to come in various parts of the world. Jill Craigie’s morally ambiguous script can perhaps be seen as reflecting doubts among many British intellectuals in the 1950s on the possible long-term benefits of colonial nationalism which, to many, appeared to threaten, even before the Congo crisis of 1960, the foundations of international order and civilized relations between states.27

Taken together The Planters Wife, Simba and Windom’s Way have been seen by Tony Shaw as possibly contributing to what he has termed a Cold War ‘siege mentality’ in Britain during the 1950s.²⁸ If true, this idea might be extended even into the 1960s given the popularity of one of the most famous British siege movies of all, Zulu (1964) with Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. However, at another level, it is easy to overstate the impact of Cold War ideas on cinema audiences even if McCarthyite thinking was clearly evident among some British movie moguls like John Davis. In the end, fear of communism is not going to sell a movie unless the narrative is sufficiently thrilling, romantic, bloodthirsty or frightening enough. By the turn of the new decade, a newer cinema audience was starting to emerge with less commitment to empire, memories of the war or the containment of the communist ‘threat’ and this would be reflected in the progressive unravelling of the ‘colonial emergency’ subgenre.

Another film centred on the Malayan ‘emergency’, The 7th Dawn, was released by United Artists in 1964. The movie, directed by Lewis Gilbert and scripted by Karl Tunberg (famous among other movies for scripting Ben Hur), was based on a novel The Durian Tree by Michael Keon. It had as its main star the popular American actor William Holden, who had previously appeared in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. By this time Rank had finished its run of colonial insurgency films and it was an American studio that was now moving into the arena of colonial insurgencies, with a rather different set of priorities. By the mid-1960s neither the British nor the American film industry had sought to put on screen the exploits of one of the great neglected heroes of the Second World War, Frederick Spencer Chapman, who had fought the Japanese in war-time Malaya. The story here though became complicated by prejudice and opposition from sections of British military’s High Command to irregular warfare along with wider Cold War ideological considerations.

A skilled mountaineer and Antarctic explorer, Chapman was a Lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders when he joined the Special Training School 101 (STS 101) in Singapore to train Australians and New Zealanders in guerrilla warfare in 1941. The School came up with a plan for parties of soldiers to stay behind in the jungle should there be a Japanese invasion, though the whole project was quashed by the colonial governor Sir Shenton Thomas for being essentially defeatist. However, a few months later Chapman found himself involved in undercover operations with some members of Force 136 against the advancing Japanese and took part in several successful sabotage operations that blew up some seven Japanese trains along with fifteen bridges and over forty vehicles, leaving at least 500 Japanese dead. Here was a real-life British Rambo whose war record might well have become the stuff of movie legend, especially as Chapman’s guerrilla tactics went further than the special operations filmed in They Who Dare or Ill Met by Moonlight. After losing the rest of the 136 team, Chapman went on fighting in the jungle alongside the communist MPAJA guerrillas until he was eventually picked up by the submarine HMS Statesman.

Chapman’s close war-time collaboration with the MPAJA soon became an embarrassment to the British government following the outbreak of the ‘Emergency’ in Malaya in 1948. He received the DSO and Bar in 1946, although an Efficiency Decoration had to wait until 1970. His war memoirs, published in 1949 as The Jungle Is Neutral, had a preface from Field Lord Wavell who admitted that Chapman had ‘never received the publicity and fame that were his predecessor’s lot’ and his war-time exploits languished in obscurity over the following few decades. Suffering major back pain Chapman committed suicide in 1971 and there the matter might have remained except that the upsurge in special operations in the 1980s and 1990s in both Britain and America sparked renewed interest in Chapman’s life, leading to a biography being by Brian Moynahan in 2009.

The world of The 7th Dawn bears little relationship to Chapman’s experiences. The film had a thin narrative and weak direction. The central character, Major Ferris (William Holden), has fought with the guerrillas against the Japanese during the war, picking up some insurgency skills along the way. He is friends with a Chinese communist insurgent Ng (played by the Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba) and a Eurasian school teacher Dhana (played by the French actress and fashion model Capucine). In his crumpled jungle clothing Ferris is markedly different to the welcoming British army commander and he expresses strongly anti-British feelings over the failure of the ‘limeys’ to come to the assistance of the guerrillas much earlier.

These early scenes reflected the failure of Allied armies to invade Malaya before the Japanese surrender in August 1945. With little outside support, the MPAJA relied on its own resources during the Japanese occupation, though little of this emerges in The 7th Dawn. The movie starts with the guerrilla threesome of Ferris, Ng and Dhana breaking up as the war comes to an end. Ng is vaguely based on the character of Chin Peng and leaves Malaya to go for training in Moscow while Ferris settles down with Dhana, his mistress, in post-war Malaya. His character was loosely based on John Davis, an SOE operative in Malaya who worked for Chin Peng. He becomes a successful businessman owning extensive rubber estates, supported by Dhana, very loosely based on the Chinese novelist Han Suyin, author of the semi-autobiographical novel And the Rain My Drink. Ferris is no communist like Ng, though he remains sympathetic to his former friend; he is also far more understanding of the cause motivating the insurgents than the reactionary Patterson in Windom’s Way, though the film fails to investigate the issues of landlessness or the focus of the insurgency among the ethnic Chinese. Indeed, the film retains many orientalist stereotypes as Asians are either loyal and compliant servants, angry anti-colonial insurgents such as Ng or duplicitous schemers secretly helping the guerrillas.

Alongside such stereotypes is the mixed-race Dhana, a school teacher with an uncertain cultural identity and ambiguous loyalties. She finds herself slung between the world of the white colonizers, with whom her lover Ferris is associated, and the needs of the colonized whom she understands only too well from her position as a school teacher. Rather implausibly she becomes the leader of a people protesting against restrictions on the use of bicycles to curb the movements of the insurgents. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times thought she was a ‘pointless and platitudinous figure’ given she is eventually caught carrying two grenades hidden in a melon and sentenced to be hung.29 Though she can avoid execution, she refuses to disclose any information on the whereabouts of Ng and goes to the gallows in defence of principles of loyalty that we know to be worthless since it is Ng who admits, in a fight in the jungle with Ferris, that it was he who planted the grenades to mobilize the population behind the freedom struggle. Ferris and the young daughter of the British Resident Candace Trumpey (Susannah York) struggle to get back in time to inform the British of this information but are held back by a swirling flood that washes away a bridge.

The 7th Dawn is an end of empire film with the message that the British are resolved to secure the colony’s independence in an ‘orderly’ fashion. It was still considered politically controversial by the British government, who refused any support, so that the British army and the soldiers in the movie are actually Australian. Despite the 1960s clothing of some actors, this was a fairly conventional movie portraying a zealous officer Cavendish (Allan Cuthbertson) relentlessly hunting down guerrillas. Cavendish demands the destruction of a village that is believed to be hiding weapons and explosives. He also insists on Dhana supplying information on the whereabouts of Ng, though we later come to realize that this was a foolish quest since the British discover the guerrilla base area anyway.

For all its supposedly controversial status, little of the British counter-insurgency in Malaya is portrayed in The 7th Dawn. No features in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to show counter-insurgent resettlement programmes; indeed, the full scale of this would only emerge in the film Lion of the Desert in 1981 (starring Anthony Quinn as the guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar), focusing on the Italian counter-insurgency of Marshall Graziani in Libya in the late 1920s. The 7th Dawn, by contrast, has a scene involving the firing of a village believed to be supporting the insurgents. The wailing that can be heard on the sound track of the film when squatters were ejected from the mock-up movie village was in fact those of real squatters who had inhabited it. Though it was considered necessary to remove them before filming could take place, the ejection by Australian soldiers was deemed essential since even the fake village was considered likely to be acting as a safe haven for insurgents.30

The movie does show, though, an SAS parachute drop into the jungle to attack Ng’s headquarters. A fierce fire fight ensues with extensive casualties on both sides; Ng himself flees into the jungle where he is tracked down by Ferris. The film fails to follow up the outcome of the raid and loses interest in it, though the scene was broadly based on a series of real parachute drops by both the SAS and regular army units in the early 1950s such as Operations Hive and Termite. The drops were always risky as the men were falling into a canopy of trees and The 7th Dawn shows some coming stuck and also being shot before they reach the ground. This was no jungle version of Arnhem since the casualties remained small. Even men in all for the largest one called Operation Termite.

The 7th Dawn remains focused on the love triangle between Ferris, Dhana and Trumpey, while Ng’s apparently noble and committed role as a communist insurgent unravels as he emerges as a cruel fanatic willing to sacrifice the woman he loves for a doomed cause. The strongly Cold War anti-communist themes of the movie might have held some sway with audiences in the early 1950s but were already looking dated by 1964 while a martinet such as Cavendish was starting to be lampooned in films such as The Guns of Batasi (starring Richard Attenborough) released the same year. The fact that this was the third feature film set during the Malayan ‘emergency’ released in ten years (four when the comedy The Virgin Soldiers – released in 1969 – is included) indicated something about the importance of the colony to post-war British interests as well as the apparent success of the counter-insurgency waged there against the Chinese-based communist insurgency. To this extent, cinema played at least a limited part in the emerging myth about the Malayan insurgency which would later prove so important to the re-emergence of COIN in the United States following the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The release of The High Bright Sun in the same year, starring Dirk Bogarde, was set in Cyprus during the guerrilla insurgency of EOKA between 1954 and 1959, led by General Grivas, had a slightly more political edge. Directed by Ralph Thomas, The High Bright Sun came out after most major British colonies had gained political independence, including Cyprus in 1960. The film was impelled by little sense of real anger, though it depicts some of the losses in a small war. Even though this was a post-Suez movie, there was little sense of defeat regarding Cyprus by 1964. Grivas and EOKA might be able to claim they had secured independence and the ending of the island’s status as a ‘fortress colony’, but the British had still managed to retain their military bases there.31 So not much, in the end, had been lost from a British point of view: Britain even avoided being involved in escalating tensions between Greek and Turkish communities that eventually led to the Turkish military invasion of 1974 and occupation of the eastern half of the island.

The High Bright Sun had a rather different view of Greek society compared to The Guns of Navarone. It starts with an EOKA attack on a British military lorry, leading to the deaths of two soldiers. The walls of Nicosia streets are daubed with ‘ENOSIS’ and ‘Makarios’, though EOKA itself is depicted as an underground terrorist movement heavily dependent on its leadership General Skyros, closely resembling the real General Grivas complete with military uniform and moustache. Skyros, like Saadi Yaacef in The Battle of Algiers, is hiding out in an urban area, in this case Nicosia, where Grivas organized the original insurgency before moving to the Troodos Mountains in the interior. Skyros’s whereabouts are discovered accidently by a visiting young American archaeologist Juno (played by Susan Strasberg). Skyros at first decides to spare killing her as she proclaims her neutrality in the conflict, though this proves worthless as she ends up being hunted down by EOKA after it emerges that she has a romantic relationship with British intelligence officer Major McGuire (played by Bogarde).

Bogarde’s portrayal of McGuire is quite ironical as it emerges that this is a war in which the army has little real commitment. McGuire’s commanding officer sits at his desk reading women’s magazines while McGuire talks of ‘duty’ being a ‘subversive word’. He later tells Juno, ‘There are no rules. Just survive!’ He is eventually relieved of his command for hiding Juno without letting the army know and, in a climactic finish, shoots her would-be EOKA killer on the airport tarmac in Athens. MacGuire and Juno have by now fallen in love and the film ends on a happy note. True to form, the romantic interest comes out uppermost as the plot descends into criminal melodrama.

The spate of British colonial war films had largely run their course with the release of The High Bright Sun. Audience interest in this type of colonial action movie was channelled by the late 1960s into the subgenre of mercenary films that we examine later in this book. Most former British colonies had now gained independence and much of the patrician gestures towards multi-racialism in the 1950s films seemed increasingly dated.

Vietnam and the making of The Green Berets (1968)

By the mid-1960s the United States was already bogged down in a counter-insurgent war in South Vietnam, a state that was nominally independent but had been conjured into existence in the middle 1950s in the wake of the 1954 Geneva conference that partitioned Vietnam into north and south. Like Britain in Malaya, the United States was fighting to maintain an independent state in South East Asia in order to stop what was often viewed in strategic circles as a threat of communist expansion from Communist China and the Soviet Union over a vulnerable set of weak non-communist dominoes.

The United States became involved militarily in South Vietnam in the late 1950s through a body known as the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG). The MAAG controlled special forces and counter-guerrilla operations at a time when the United States, like Britain, began to revive its special forces, using in some cases older OSS operatives from the Second World War as trainers. Two of these – Colonels Aaron Bank and Russell W. Volckmann – formed the elite counter-guerrilla group called the Green Berets in 1952 that was split into small ‘A Teams’. These teams had men with a range of skills such as foreign languages, sabotage, assassination, rock and mountain climbing and jungle warfare. For the first decade of its existence the work of the Green Berets was largely unknown to the US public, though it was first deployed to South Vietnam as the 1st Special Forces Group (SFG) in 1957.

The Green Berets gained greater prominence with the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. John F. Kennedy was an enthusiastic supporter of counter-insurgency and the Green Berets appeared to embody all that was best in this concept, though it was disliked by senior sections of the military and officials in the DOD for the way it kept strong control over local operations. Before the involvement in Vietnam, US military doctrine in FM31-21 Guerrilla Warfare and Special Forces Operations (1955) saw special forces performing a partisan, rather than insurgent, role especially in potential conflict in the European theatre involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It had little to say on special forces in extra-European theatres such as Indochina. This soon changed as the 1st SFG began training local anti-communist militias that helped implement civil-military development programmes organized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an early example of what would later be known as ‘civil-military cooperation’ or CIMIC. In South Vietnam, this CIMIC programme tended to focus on creating ‘Civil Irregular Defense Groups’ (CIDGs), especially so-called tribal communities such as the Montagnards (otherwise known as Degars) in Vietnam and Cambodia, Tai tribes in Vietnam and Meos in Laos.32

The growing role of special forces led to tensions with military high command that came to a head with the formation of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in February 1962. Over the next couple of years, the MACV increasingly took over control of special operations from the MAAG, subordinating them in the process to a more conventional vertical structure of military command. The commander of the MACV, General Paul Harkins, had a career record stretching back to before the Second World War. He was an arch exponent of conventional warfare and keen to forge a close alliance with the Diem regime in Saigon, even if this meant frequently turning a blind eye to the weaknesses of the ARVN high command.33 He especially disliked decentralized special forces groupings operating in the Central Highlands and along the Cambodian border; the groups were bound by horizontal team networks with close links, in some cases, to the various local tribal groupings.³⁴ Many of these communities consisted of small decentralized hill or mountain tribes that employed a simple agricultural technology before they started to be used by the French in the latter phase of their counter-insurgency against the Viet Minh in the early 1950s.³⁵ They were often bitterly opposed to the majority populations of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, who tended to look down on them as primitive, ‘dirty’ or, in Vietnamese, ‘moi’, though this was by no means as virulent as some later US propaganda would like to pretend.

Some Montagnard communities had already moved during the 1950s towards the NLF, especially after it created a ‘Montagnard Autonomy Movement’ against the Saigon government. The work of USAID in establishing the CIDGs did much to change the situation over the next few years.³⁶ The CIA began to revert to the position held by French ethnography in the 1920s as it asserted the cultural distinctiveness of the Montagnards compared to the mainstream Vietnamese population. This approach did not exactly accord with the orthodoxies of the mainstream US programme of nation-building and modernization, but worked as an effective strategy of winning over the Montagnards as vital intelligence assets behind counter-insurgency. However, a further Montagnard revolt in 1964 against the Saigon regime led the South Vietnamese government to insist on taking over direct control of the CIDGs through its own special forces.³⁷

Harkins’s opposition to the independent role of US special forces in 1963–1964 was largely motivated by the political need of the US administration in Washington to be seen to be maintaining a close alliance with the Saigon regime. The differences between US special forces and the MACV leadership were in any case largely tactical rather than strategic. Both essentially agreed that the overall purpose of US involvement in the country was the defence of the South Vietnamese regime and the containment of communist expansion. The question was really over means, with the special forces advocates arguing that conventional forces were mostly ill-suited to fighting across jungles and rice paddies and in alliance with ARVN forces that were all too often corrupt and unreliable, while the US central command found that the war was increasingly moving beyond a simple guerrilla insurgency by 1964–1965 with growing infiltration of the south by regular forces of the NVA.

The problem was that the special forces’ position had no serious long-term military credibility. They lacked any modern strategic figure like Orde Wingate to espouse the idea that the whole of US strategy should be converted to counter-insurgency, and argued instead for expanding the special forces and counter guerrilla operations beyond the confines of South Vietnam to encompass Laos and Cambodia. This would, they hoped, eventually deprive the communist North of effective safe havens and force them back to the negotiating table.

The special forces and counter-insurgency camp remained ardent supporters of efforts to win ‘hearts and minds’ at the village level as well as establishing ‘strategic hamlets’ to remove peasants from contact with NLF cadres. However, they lacked serious support among the mainstream Vietnamese peasant population in the south and were forced to rely on tribal communities like the Montagnards. This was a hazardous and slender base on which to evolve a really credible counter-insurgency strategy since these communities could hardly be championed as noble warrior proxies, as in earlier phases of European imperial rule. The photos and images of apparently backward-looking Montagnards ensured that they could hardly replicate warrior allies such as the Sikhs and Gurkhas in the British army or the Harkis fighting alongside the French army in Algeria. They had an image that hardly compared to that of the Plains Indians in the imagination of the American public and indicated that it would be increasingly difficult to forge reliable allies among the majority populations in Indochina. The tactics of the special forces thus largely confirmed their own marginalization when they allied with tribes almost uniformly treated with racist contempt by the majority Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. This image of cultural inferiority would even rub off onto the Green Berets, who earned the nickname of ‘snake eaters’ after some Montagnards caught and ate a snake at Fort Bragg during a visit by President Kennedy in 1961.38

The CIA and special forces operated more like armed missionaries than as simple ‘advisors’ when it came to equipping and training Montagnard men for counter-insurgency operations. The Montagnards were not really a stone age people as some writers of the time suggested. They had become settled during the French colonial period into stable village communities where they grew both wet and dry rice and learnt to alternate crops. They also entered the cash economy by working on rubber plantations on both sides of the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, usually at very low rates of pay.³⁹ The CIA offered better monetary prospects by paying young Montagnard men in the early 1960s to become mercenary fighters.

By the middle 1960s, the American public began to learn more about the role of special forces in protecting the Montagnard communities via the strategic hamlet programme. In January 1965 Howard Sochurfk wrote in the National Geographic how the Green Berets had managed to build villages such as Buon Brieng which survived in a ‘sea of terror’.⁴⁰ An information film at this time, Frontier Vietnam: Montagnard Tribes Defend South Vietnam, compared the Montagnards to North American Indians from the era of the frontier wars of the eighteenth century. ‘Americans encountering these (Montagnard) people and their situation’, the film’s narrator stated, ‘often feel transported’ two hundred years back into time to our own Indian wars … like the primitive tribesmen of those earlier wars the Montagnard on his own ground is a formidable ally’.⁴¹

It was in this context that Robin Moore’s collection of short stories, The Green Berets, was published in 1965. The book was partly based on personal experience along with a fantastical imagination. Moore was no military professional but an enthusiastic adventurer with a glamorous idea of covert special operations. His war service in the Second World War had not been in the mainstream army at all but the US Army Air Corps, where he was a nose gunner. He later went to Harvard before becoming a television producer in the 1950s. His background was wealthy (his father was co-founder of Sheraton Hotels) and this helped him to secure, via the Kennedy family, permission to train as a Green Beret. He eventually arrived in South Vietnam in early 1964, less as a journalist than a well-informed, if subversive, military insider passionate about the idea of decentralized counter-insurgency led by fully trained special forces teams.

Moore’s fictional work was at points a good example of the Cold War fantasy literature prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a champion of new technology, such as the Fulton surface-to air ‘Skyhook’ retrieval system that was first depicted at the end of James Bond movie Thunderball in 1965 (and later used in the movie The Green Berets). He also imagined the Green Berets going beyond a campaign of containment to a more offensive strategy inside North Vietnam itself. The last story of his collection ‘Hit em Where they live’ has the Green Berets leading, Rambo-like, a team of Montagnards into the fictional North Vietnamese city of ‘Hang Mang’, destroying parts of it and capturing a senior Communist Party official. The Filipino-American leader of the team, Captain Jesse de Porta, declares after the operation is successfully accomplished: ‘Now we must keep pressure on the Communists. Next thing they know there’ll be A Teams around Hanoi and Uncle Ho will be asking for a new peace conference.’42

Moore’s stories were boyish fantasies that attempted to win on paper what the United States was clearly not winning at the local level. They elevated the Green Berets to military supermen dispensing weapons, medical assistance and superior technology to a backward but loyal people needing support against a cruel and unjust enemy. The outlook was already familiar on screen with the film Never So Few in 1959 focused on the minority Kachins in Burma though the Green Berets lacked as yet any sort of cult following in the United States. By 1964, Kennedy was dead and the COIN concept was falling out of favour with many senior strategists in the Pentagon, who doubted its worth against a North Vietnamese enemy increasingly resorting to more conventional forms of warfare. There was strong DOD hostility to Moore’s book and Moore had his security clearance removed; he was also threatened with indictment for breaching security, though this was clearly absurd once extracts of the book were included in the Congressional Record by Gerald Ford (then in the House of Representatives).⁴³

The Green Berets certainly sparked a new popular interest in American special forces, aided by the release in January 1966 of ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. The song appealed to traditional codes of masculine valour as it praises the ‘fearless men who jump and die’ and are ‘trained to live, off nature’s land’. Such men are nothing less than ‘America’s best’ since ‘one hundred men will test today/But only three win the Green Beret’. The song would over the years be sung in several other versions, including one by Dolly Parton, and suggested that codes of masculinity were clearly evident in popular representations of the Vietnam War a couple of decades before the emergence of Rambo in the 1980s.

But turning Moore’s novel into a film was another matter. There was some degree of hostility in the Pentagon to the book’s suggestion that there were poor relationships between military commanders and Green Berets. The stories revealed sexual relationships between Green Beret men and Montagnard women while in the story ‘Home to Nanette’, the Green Berets operate in Laos even though this was illegal under the 1962 agreement neutralizing the country. The story’s hero, Bernard Arklin, works for several months with the tribal Meos, takes a Meo woman lover and is unkempt and long haired. He encounters Colonel Williston of the MACV who is angered by his unkempt appearance and the way a mission had been mounted without the MACV’s permission. ‘You Special Forces people’, he exclaims, ‘always go native or something.’44

None of this, fairly obviously, could appear in the film version of The Green Berets, eventually released by Warner Brothers in 1968 starring John Wayne. It was the one film released by Hollywood on the Vietnam War while it was being fought and Wayne was one of the film’s three directors. He dispensed with Moore as a script writer and hired the conservative writer James Lee Barrett. The result was a script that was far more acceptable to the Pentagon and created a considerably different image of special forces to the one in Moore’s book. In the movie, they are shown as being under the full control of central command in a campaign to protect defenceless Montagnards as well as in special operations reminiscent of the Second World War.

Wayne’s film ended up as a curious hybrid war film/western. Wayne was a strong enough figure in Hollywood to alleviate any doubts in the DOD; his long film career even included a movie about jungle guerrilla operations (against the Japanese in Back to Bataan in 1945).⁴⁵ The Green Berets had at the start a documentary quality as it outlined the basic goals of the Green Berets training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This soon evolves into a more conventional war narrative as a Green Beret ‘A Team’, led by a Colonel Kirby (Wayne), are tasked with building a strategic hamlet rather like a North American frontier settlement to protect the local Montagnard population from attacks by the NLF and NVA.

The movie was the first feature film on Vietnam to employ the Montagnards as active participants in COIN, though the imagery was considerably different to the near-savage people depicted in Apocalypse Now a decade later.⁴⁶ The film at points resembles a real Green Beret operation in the Central Highlands involving Montagnards from the village of Tra Trung on 1 November 1967. A total of 350 Montagnard villagers were burnt out of their homes by an NLF attack and their assistant village chief was murdered.⁴⁷ However, the NLF/NVA remains largely faceless and depersonalized, only acquiring any sort of identity when the narrative turns to a kidnap operation by a Green Beret team to seize a leading North Vietnamese commander. The operation is partly based on one of Moore’s stories but might have been taken out of a Second World War movie involving a top Nazi officer somewhere in Europe. In a rather implausible location of a former French colonial chateau, the Green Berets seize and drug the senior North Vietnamese officer, who is one of the very few enemy characters portrayed in the film. But the scene was badly placed coming after the main NLF/NVA attack on the American fort and marked something of an anti-climax in the film. It appears in any case in a revised form since Pentagon officials objected to an earlier script version suggesting a foray into North Vietnam to secure the kidnap.⁴⁸

The Green Berets was heavily burdened with conventional US Cold War propaganda: to some critics this appeared as a survival of a rather dated anti-communist ideology reminiscent of the films of directors like Sam Fuller over a decade before that were rooted in fears of the global spread of communism. The film’s more fundamental problem was its failure to engage with the mythology of the American war film, a mythology, as Bernard F. Dick has pointed out, that was based on the ‘paradox of a nation involved in global war but never attacked’, certainly not in the sense of being invaded or occupied. The mythology presumed a basic national unity in response to attacks on close allies and a national cause worth fighting for in terms of a sense of mission to spread freedom and democracy by a divinely protected nation.49

The myth could work in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and, slightly less convincingly, in the case of Korea following the invasion of the South by the communist North in June 1950 at the height of the Cold War. But this was never likely to be the case in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of the US Congress on 7 August 1964 authorizing President Johnson to take whatever measures he thought fit to deal with communist incursions into South Vietnam without any formal declaration of war. The attack on the US destroyer Maddox by three North Vietnamese PT Boats was hardly a ‘Day That Will Live in Infamy’ and it would not be until the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington of 9/11 that a similar mythology could resurface of an apparently innocent nation unjustly attacked by an external enemy with ideals and values totally at variance with those of the United States.

The moral capital of the American war film was thus considerably degraded even before The Green Berets was made and has never been really restored in any subsequent waves of war films. The hostile response around the world to the film on its release was enough to put Hollywood producers off making further films on Vietnam for another decade, some years after the US troop withdrawal in 1973 and the collapse of the South two years later.⁵⁰ The Green Berets became an easy target for anti-war groups and cinemas showing it were frequently picketed. The original film studio involved with the film, Universal, became disenchanted with the entire project and sold it to Warner Brothers, who ended up doing well on the whole venture: costing only $7 million the film proved popular at the box office and grossed over $21,707,000.⁵¹ This might seem surprising but it appears that many film viewers in the United States were drawn to the film as another John Wayne movie as well as one that they could enjoy as a traditional sort of western.

The location of the film at Fort Benning, Georgia, was also a little odd. After all, by the 1960s a whole post-war generation of film audiences had become used to war movies against the Japanese being shot in dense jungle settings where military resolve is tested in murderous combat together with snakes, disease and a battle-hardened enemy. The location was due to the close cooperation between Wayne and the US military which secured some 20–30 Hueys for use as props, while the army brought a platoon of Hawaiians from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to serve as ‘oriental’ extras.⁵²

From early scenes of choppers flying over wooded terrains it is clear this is not a particularly Asian landscape as the trees turn an autumnal gold. Wayne was overweight and too old to give a credible performance as Colonel Kirby while the facilities in the strategic hamlet, complete with fridge and a beautifully designed ceiling made of pinewood supports and bunk beds, suggest more a holiday chalet than a serious military installation in a war zone. As the base camp comes under attack from waves of NLF and North Vietnamese, almost always shot from behind and menacingly faceless, this appears to be more a remake of The Alamo than a jungle war movie: when the NLF capture part of the camp they even make Indian-like whoops.

Despite these weaknesses, The Green Berets struck an accord with the cinema-going public: it provided a limited space for criticisms of the war. The main character giving vent to such ideas, a newspaper correspondent, Collier (played by Richard ‘Cactus’ Pryor), later changes his views following his direct experience of the war itself in the strategic hamlet: a trope that would be later used in We Were Soldiers (2002). This was largely overlooked in the wider derision the film received when it showed the sun sinking over the sea at the film’s end: something that can only really happen in California rather than Vietnam. The false political geography at the heart of this trope revealed, for many critics, the imperialist mind-set at the heart of the film. But even the cartoon quality of the film can lead to a misreading of its longer-term impact. It is still widely shown to military audiences, and even used on training programmes. Its very absurdity perhaps helps bind together new military recruits and get them to at least talk and think about counter-insurgency as this was understood in the 1960s.

Summing up

The colonial counter-insurgency films of the 1950s and 1960s now seem stranded in the past and displaced by action films that gripped audiences over the following decades. In part, this obscurity can be explained by the indifference of the American film industry which was generally averse to portraying colonial counter-insurgencies. Even the essentially American novel Windom’s Way became transformed into a British colonial feature closely resembling Malaya, with the American counter-insurgency advisor being transformed into a British diplomat. The one notable exception to this aversion to colonial insurgency was the film Exodus (1960), as I shall show in Chapter 7, where the sympathies of the audience are focused around the Jewish insurgents fighting for an independent Israeli state, while it is the British colonial administration and military in Palestine that are the external enemy.

None of the British colonial insurgency films managed to rival the mainstream war movies of the era such as Reach for the Sky and The Dam Busters. The public memory of them has largely faded, though most of the films that I have examined in this chapter can be easily obtained on DVD. The films failed to establish any clear links with later films dealing with insurgency set in Vietnam or, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. The focus on competent or resilient fighters, doctors or commanders such as Jim Frazer, Alan Howard, Major Ferris or Major McGuire hardly ensured any long-term success for the films that lacked any distinct identity: Frazer, for instance, could easily be remembered as another settler fending off hostile Indians, while Dirk Bogarde’s portrayals of Alan Howard and Major McGuire have been largely forgotten compared to the same actor’s screen appearances in popular comedies of the 1950s or later more challenging films such as The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967).

The British colonial war movies thus hardly created a distinct cinematic myth of unconventional war. At best they can be seen as helping form the basis for a subgenre that would emerge rather later in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of a major insurgent war in Vietnam and the growth of international terrorism. However, a far more striking development occurred in British cinema in this period in relation to films depicting special operations, and this will be the subject of the following chapter.