Authors: James R. Arnold
The Malay majority wavered. They resented how the British government directed resources and granted privileges to the Chinese,
almost as if it was rewarding the lack of Chinese commitment to the government. One Malay politician suggested that the country
was approaching chaos because of the slow progress in defeating the insurgents and the likelihood that worse fighting lay
ahead. In overly polite and understated language he warned, “The number of [Commonwealth] troops pouring into this country
has been creating a feeling of suspicion on the part of the masses.” The Malay public worried that an even more “bloodthirsty
war” was about to begin.”
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In December the brilliant Briggs fell ill with what proved a fatal sickness and retired. Efforts to name his successor stumbled
when several prominent candidates declined the appointment, thus causing civilian morale to plummet further. The British commissioner
of police proved unequal to his task and was relieved. Racial antagonism between Malay and Chinese intensified. Government
policy makers appeared to have lost all direction, and defeat loomed.
A Plan and a Man
BY OCTOBER 1951, THE MALAYAN Communist Party Central Executive Committee met to review the war to date. Over the past year
guerrillas had staged some 6,100 incidents while inflicting the highest record of losses on civilians and security forces.
The Central Executive Committee did not have precise figures. What they did know was that they had massed their fighters to
the greatest possible extent in an effort to obtain important results. Company-sized units of 100 to 300 men had attacked
remote police stations, European business offices, and mining installations. The goal was to overpower the regular and irregular
police guards, capture weapons and ammunition, and demoralize the native constabulary. These assaults had been costly and
seldom succeeded. The Central Executive Committee did not realize that its fighters had become demoralized, with many shying
away from contact with the British.
The second major Communist objective was the New Villages. Communist agents had infiltrated squatter communities to persuade
the people to resist relocation. Guerrillas ambushed truck convoys conveying the squatters to the New Villages. They fired
into newly settled villages in hopes of stampeding the inhabitants. In spite of making the strongest possible effort, the
Communists had failed to prevent the expansion of the New Villages.
During its October 1951 review, the leadership concluded that while it could foment terror, depredations against the people—slashing
rubber trees, burning workers’ huts, sabotaging public utilities, ambushing Red Cross convoys, derailing trains, shooting
up New Villages, killing for identity cards—merely increased the general population’s misery. The committee decided that these
tactics had been a mistake since they alienated the very people they most needed to support the insurgency. The MCP leadership
decreed that henceforth the masses were to be courted. The sole legitimate targets for terrorist operations were the British
and their “running dogs.”
The Executive Committee resolved that in order to wage a protracted struggle, the formed guerrilla units had to break contact
with the security forces and withdraw deeper into the jungle to rest and refit. Couriers set out on foot to disseminate this
decision to all guerrilla units. The jungle was no longer a completely safe haven. Fear of ambush and the need to dodge British
patrols caused the couriers to move cautiously from one jungle post office to the next. Consequently, months passed before
many guerrilla leaders received the new orders.
At the time no one realized the enormous significance of the committee’s decision. The British had no knowledge of this strategic
shift for almost a year. Only then were intelligence officers able to link prisoner interrogations with captured documents
to discover that there had been a fundamental shift and that the insurgents had lost their revolutionary momentum. The shift
most dramatically changed the status of the village police posts. For the previous three and a half years, policemen had confronted
a mortal threat of massed attack by overwhelming numbers. Henceforth, attacks came from small bands of twenty to thirty and
were typically only nuisance raids. Relieved of their fear of annihilation, the village police could focus on providing security
and restoring law and order.
Yet it was the inherent nature of a counterinsurgency that the British were unable to assess accurately its progress until
after the fact. The British did not perceive that the tide was turning. They did not know Communist strength had declined
to perhaps 500 hard-core guerrillas supported by another 4,000 fighters of indifferent morale. They did not know that the
year 1951 would prove the high-water mark of the insurgency.
The Return of Winston Churchill
Great Britain’s October election of 1951 brought a new Conservative government led by a revived Winston Churchill. Churchill
returned to office to find his country still struggling from its exertions during World War II. Food stocks were as depleted
as they had been at the height of the U-boat menace in 1941. Strict food rationing remained in place. Prosperity seemed a
distant mirage. The Malayan Emergency was costing the nation’s pinched economy half a million dollars per day. In Asia, some
800,000 United Nations soldiers including a Commonwealth Division were challenging Communism in Korea. More than 100,000 French
troops were fighting the Viet Minh in Indochina. Although Churchill supported both fights, he believed that the fate of the
entire Far East truly depended on Malaya. The prime minister requested a complete report on Malaya, and its contents depressed
him. Committees charged with winning the war were spending most of their time bickering. The police force was riven with factions.
Worst of all, in Churchill’s view, no one seemed to sense the urgency of the problem. He issued orders to Secretary of State
Oliver Lyttelton—“The rot has got to be stopped”—and sent him to Singapore.
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Lyttelton arrived in Malaya before Christmas 1951. His initial survey convinced him that the British were on the verge of
losing Malaya. On his last night at King’s House he found the regular staff absent, replaced by police officers. They sheepishly
reported that the Chinese butler who heretofore had served the secretary his after-dinner coffee had been removed from his
position because he was a Communist agent.
Lyttelton described the essential conundrum facing a counterinsurgency: “You cannot win the war without the help of the population,
and you cannot get the support of the population without at least beginning to win the war.”
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The antagonism between the Malay majority and the Chinese minority seemed overwhelming. A Malay political delegation met
with Lyttelton to propose a compromise solution: accept the existing situation and let Malaya be granted in dependence forthwith
under British administration.
This proposal was immensely attractive. It addressed the prime Malay concern about power sharing with the Malayan Chinese
by acknowledging that the Malays would remain politically dominant. If the British accepted it would motivate Malays to put
forth far more effort in the war. It meant the war would come to an end soon and Commonwealth troops could escape what appeared
to be a jungle quagmire. But in the minds of Lyttelton and Churchill the proposal violated basic British values, not the least
of which was the preservation of a disintegrating empire, and smacked of declaring victory and going home. Consequently they
rejected it.
Instead Lyttelton recommended a colossal Organizational change: the installation of a supreme warlord in charge of both military
and civil affairs. As Lyttelton pondered candidates he briefly considered Britain’s most famous warrior, Field Marshal Bernard
Montgomery. He correctly suspected that the immensely proud Montgomery would not want to risk his reputation in Malaya’s jungles.
However, Montgomery did send a Lyttelton a brief note of advice: “Dear Lyttelton, Malaya. We must have a plan. Secondly, we
must have a man. When we have a plan and a man, we shall succeed; not otherwise.” If the field marshal’s advice was rather
obvious—Lyttelton later wrote with British understatement that “this had occurred to me”—it still made the solid point that
heretofore British efforts had yet to marry leadership and strategic execution.
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That was about to change.
The Rise of Sir Gerald Templer
Lyttelton’s choice for warlord was General Sir Gerald Templer. Templer arrived in Malaya in February 1952 to assume an exceptional
posting as both the high commissioner and operational commander of the military. Not since Oliver Cromwell had Britain invested
a soldier with this combination of military and political power. But Templer was an exceptional man. He had served in the
trenches of France during World War I, competed on the 1924 British Olympic hurdles team, won the army’s bayonet fighting
championship, earned the prestigious Distinguished Service Order in Palestine, and risen to corps command during World War
II’s Anzio campaign. During the Allied occupation of Germany he was director of military government and later became the director
of intelligence at the War Office. His combination of combat and civil leadership coupled with an intelligence background
well prepared Templer to meet a novel challenge.
Templer coined the phrase “winning hearts and minds” to describe the foundation of a counterinsurgency strategy.
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He tackled the difficult problem of constructing a political system that would unite Malaya’s many ethnic groups into a stable
structure. He was very much a man of action, disdaining all theoretical constructs. He saw that the existing bureaucracy,
with its numerous committees and duplication of authority on the state and district levels, was failing because the civilians,
policemen, and soldiers could not agree. He told one such committee, “My advice is for you to thrash out your problems over
a bottle of whiskey in the evenings. If you can’t agree I don’t want to know why. I’ll sack the lot of you and bring in three
new chaps.”
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Templer’s political goal was a united nation of Malaya with “a common form of citizenship for all who regard the Federation
or any part of it as their real home and the object of their loyalty.”
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With Templer’s encouragement, in January 1952 the United Malay National Organization and the Malayan Chinese Association
cooperated to form the Alliance Party. The Alliance Party contested the capital’s municipal elections and won nine of eleven
seats, thereby vaulting itself into national prominence. Templer pledged that legislative elections would be the first step
toward independence.
The issue of what would happen after in dependence haunted some Europeans and many Malayans. One experienced reporter warned,
“Unless a united Malayan nation is achieved before the British government hands self-government to the country a much more
terrible Emergency of racial strife may break out.”
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Templer addressed this problem head-on. In September 1952 all aliens born in Malaya, including most notably 1.2 million Chinese,
received full citizenship. Later Templer signed a decree requiring every New Village to have a school where the language of
instruction was Malayan. Newly constructed primary schools in other towns and villages had the same requirement. The ability
to speak Malayan was intended to cement future generations to a united Malaya while reassuring the current majority Malay
population. Templer also explicitly addressed the question of land tenure when he said that the inhabitants of the New Villages
needed to own the land where they lived. By deft political manipulation, Templer cleverly changed the calculus of battle.
By hitching the forces of nationalism to an emerging demo cratic Malay state, the British undercut an insurgency against colonial
oppressors and replaced it with a competition for the future of an in dependent nation.
Encased in this velvet glove was an iron hand. Ten days after describing his vision for a united Malaya, a particularly bloody
guerrilla ambush brought Templer to the town of Tanjong Malim, fifty-five miles north of Kuala Lumpur. The town had a bad
reputation for violence, with almost forty incidents in the past three months. Recently seven Gordon Highlanders had died
in an ambush and fifteen civilians and policemen had been murdered. Now for the sixth time guerrillas had cut a water pipeline
outside of town. This time they remained on the scene to lure the repair crew and its police escort into a carefully prepared
killing zone. Among the killed were a highly respected district administrator—the celebrated Michael Codner, who had earned
a Military Cross for his role in the famous “Wooden Horse” escape from a German prison camp during World War II—the area executive
engineer of public works, and seven policemen. Once again no townsperson admitted hearing, seeing, or knowing anything about
the ambush.
Templer ordered community leaders to assemble and then during an hour-long rant charged them with “cowardly silence.” He said
that he would install a new town administration backed with more troops. When some nearby listeners nodded approval, Templer
lashed out: “Don’t nod your heads, I haven’t started yet.”
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He proceeded to impose a twenty-two-hour-a-day curfew, during which time no one was to leave their homes. No one was to leave
town at any time. Templer closed the schools and bus service and reduced the rice ration by 40 percent.
How long these measures remained in place would depend upon the townspeople. Ten days later each household received a confidential
questionnaire in which they were supposed to denounce any known Communists. With a fine sense of the theatrical, Templer had
the completed questionnaires deposited in a sealed box, brought to the capital by selected community leaders, and then opened
the letters himself. He read them, made notes, and then destroyed the originals to preserve confidentiality. He sent the village
notables home with instructions to tell the people how the letters had been handled. After processing the questionnaires,
authorities made some minor arrests and Templer gradually lifted the restrictions. From a tactical standpoint, Templer’s angry
retaliation failed; the people arrested were Communist supporters or sympathizers, not members of the guerrilla band who actually
had ambushed the repair crew. Moreover, given the limited extent of literacy in the town, the use of written questionnaires
was not the best way to obtain responses. But strategically Templer had made his point: a new authority was on the scene and
was prepared for stern action when called for.
Because of Codner’s hero status, the incident received widespread publicity. Templer’s notion of collective punishment produced
a storm of protest from British and international media. Among many, the
Manchester Guardian
labeled his behavior “odious.” Templer cared not. His first months in Malaya had an electric political and morale-boosting
impact: “he was not only there, but was most certainly seen to be there.”
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