Jungle of Snakes (18 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
However, by 1950 there was a growing disconnect between perceptions of progress and the reality on the ground. Slowly the
realization that the situation was getting worse gained ascendancy among British leaders and politicians. Simultaneously,
Communist successes on the mainland of China emboldened the insurgents. They were better armed and organized than ever before.
They held the initiative and were conducting regular ambushes along roads and railways and attacking police stations to obtain
arms and reassert control of the villages. Each month the guerrillas killed or abducted scores of civilians. The police had
lost confidence and appeared powerless to stop the terror.
After two ineffectual years of counterinsurgency, Attlee’s government summoned from retirement Lieutenant General Sir Harold
Briggs to coordinate all antiterrorist activities conducted by the security forces. Briggs was a World War II veteran who
had commanded with distinction the Fifth Indian Division in Burma. His experience in jungle warfare was the prime reason the
government chose him. Briggs wanted to decline the appointment but his former chief, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, overcame
his reluctance. Briggs’s task in Malaya was daunting: he was a former soldier acting in a civilian capacity as director of
operations, in charge of military operations in support of a civil government.
Briggs arrived in Kuala Lumpur during the first week of April 1950. On the basis of his prior briefings and quick in-country
tour, he reported his impressions to High Commissioner Gurney. Insurgent morale and strength were increasing. They drew support
from the country’s Chinese population, particularly the squatters. Active propaganda and terror squads were embedded in the
Chinese population and those cells were “undetected and unscathed” because of lack of useful intelligence. Government counterinsurgency
efforts were badly hampered by the lack of Chinese-speaking officials. In a startling departure from his predecessor, Briggs
concluded that military successes against the “bandits” had little capacity to degrade the insurgency. Instead he agreed with
Gurney that the proper focus was to win over the Chinese population. Only then could the initiative be wrested from the insurgents.”
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However, Briggs related that the Chinese population lacked confidence in the government’s ability to protect them against
Communist terrorists and particularly the Traitor Killing Squads. The Malayan Chinese Association, a government-promoted effort
to offer Chinese civilians an alternative to Communism, remained inert due to fear of Communist reprisal. Briggs recognized
that this could not be changed everywhere all at once and thus avoided the temptation to operate simultaneously throughout
the country. Instead, he proposed a gradual program, methodically securing the country in phases from south to north. The
ultimate objective was the elimination of the whole Communist Organization in Malaya.
Briggs began by recasting the tools needed to carry out his strategic intentions. He created the Federal Joint Intelligence
Advisory Committee in May 1950. Prior to this time, intelligence came from the military, civil government, or police. With
each entity pulling in a different direction, there was redundancy and omission. The new committee coordinated the collection,
analysis, and distribution of all intelligence. Its success inspired the formation of the Federal War Council to coordinate
all military, civil, and police counterinsurgency efforts. With Briggs serving as chairman, this small group was designed
to be a flexible tool to devise policy and allocate resources. Meanwhile, the Special Branch continued as the sole internal
security department in charge of dealing with internal subversion and counterespionage.
Having forged the necessary tools, Briggs addressed strategy. Heretofore few planners had understood the political dimensions
of the conflict and the salient role played by the local people. The Malays already appreciated that however much they wanted
in dependence from Britain as a long-term goal, they did not want to live in a nation where the Chinese merely replaced the
British as overlords. Briggs clearly saw that the people who mattered were the Chinese. He resolved to implement programs
to convince the Chinese, particularly the rural squatters, that an in dependent Malaya offered them a more attractive future
than a Malaya dominated by Communist Chinese rulers. Toward this goal Briggs wanted to avoid indiscriminate punitive measures
and focus on providing security for the squatters against the terrorists.
Because of the ongoing Korean War and a host of other imperial commitments, Briggs could not request a large military presence.
To compensate for the manpower shortage, he proposed to recruit Chinese into an Auxiliary Police so they could participate
in defending their homes against the insurgents. This provocative idea contained the obvious risk that a recruit could be
disloyal to the government. He could desert to the Communists, provide them with inside information about military operations,
or even lead a British patrol into an ambush. Accordingly, Briggs was willing to move slowly on this initiative to give time
for the new recruits to prove their reliability. But overall, in Briggs’s view, the potential gain outweighed the risk. Quite
simply, without the cooperation of the rural Chinese the British could not defeat the insurgents.
New Villages
The centerpiece of what became known as the Briggs Plan was whole-hearted implementation of Gurney’s population-resettlement
program. Gurney’s original program had been “conceived in uncertainty, carried [out] in indifference and born in haste . .
. bitterness, recrimination and hostility.”
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Under General Briggs the program operated much more efficiently. The government designed dormitory villages for the rubber
and tin wage earners and agricultural villages for rural farmers. A well-protected truck convoy appeared at dawn in the old
village, British soldiers helped the inhabitants load their possessions, and the trucks whisked the people away to a new life.
Each relocated family received building materials to erect a house and a $100 cash payment. The impressive logistical feat
impressed Gurney: “The machine now works so quickly that a piece of virgin jungle becomes a settlement of 200 houses complete
with roads, water and police posts and fencing in ten days.”
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Gurney did not see that the speed of the resettlement came at the sacrifice of careful preparation. Some of the new agricultural
villages were on unproductive soils and had been chosen merely because no one else wanted the land. The village infrastructure
was often poorly built with contaminated water and sewage systems that spread disease. Regardless, from a British standpoint
the mandate was to move the squatters as fast as possible behind barbed wire in order to isolate them from the insurgents.
By the end of 1951 authorities could report the mission almost accomplished, with the relocation plan 80 percent complete:
about 400,000 squatters had been moved into more than 400 “New Villages.”
Formerly, the inhabitants of the New Villages had lived in self-sufficient isolation. They were unaccustomed to community
life. The role of the Chinese-speaking British resettlement officer was crucial for their adaptation. Finding willing and
capable candidates to serve as resettlement officers was difficult. While many British spoke Malay, few spoke Chinese. Briggs
scoured the corners of his administration to locate suitable resettlement officers. He insisted that all government departments
release their most able Chinese-speaking officials for this duty. From outside came more recruits including former missionaries
who had fled China in the face of Communist pressure. By dint of language skills, hard work, and tactful cultural sensitivity,
the resettlement officers eased the transition from rural squatter to village dweller.
However, there were not enough to go around. Consequently, after a resettlement officer established a New Village’s basic
administrative structure, he moved on to create the next village. He left behind a Malayan Chinese administrator who assumed
resettlement duties. These brave men had to live in the New Village, where they were prime targets for assassination. In addition,
they faced tremendous temptation in the form of bribes from families seeking special favors or kickbacks from merchants dealing
with scarce goods. Although some died at the hands of the Traitor Killing Squads and some succumbed to corruption, the remarkable
fact is that most performed an exceedingly difficult job with courage and integrity.
They could not have survived in the absence of the village police post. A typical police post numbered ten or a dozen men,
all Malays, who found themselves trying to secure a village that was home for 500 to 2,000 Chinese. They received no help
from the inhabitants and were commonly betrayed. Every hour a phone call came from district headquarters. If a policeman failed
to answer, headquarters had standing orders to dispatch immediately a patrol to assist the isolated post, which presumably
was under attack. Because the guerrillas had great difficulty with command and control due to the inability of their detachments
to communicate quickly with one another, they usually fled when the reaction team arrived. A determined police post could
defend itself against most attacks even in the face of surprising odds. Nonetheless, as long as the Communists had the capacity
to form combat teams of 100 men or more, every police post was under deadly threat.
Death of a High Commissioner
The Briggs Plan, with its notable emphasis on winning popular support over killing insurgents, eventually produced decisive
long-term results. However, this was not immediately apparent. In April 1950 the commander in chief of the Far East land forces,
General Sir John Harding, declared, “Our greatest weakness is the lack of early and accurate information of the enemy’s strength,
dispositions and intentions.”
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Harding well understood the reluctance of rural Chinese to denounce the Communists: “The Chinese population is generally
content to get on with its business even if it entails subsidizing the Communists; nor is it willing generally to give any
information to the Police Force for fear of reprisals until it is given full and continuous security by our Forces.”
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More than a year later, in June 1951, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, and Briggs issued a combined assessment
of the situation. For public dissemination they confidently claimed that the campaign had reached a turning point. They knew
that the reality was something else. A police report in September 1951 stated, “Thousands of Chinese of all walks of life
are now living behind barbed wire and are expected to be policed by a handful of untrained men who are tied down by gate and
perimeter patrol duties. Proper police work is well nigh impossible and duties in resettlement areas result in corruption,
boredom and ill discipline.”
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In addition, many squatters remained outside the New Villages, where they were subjected to insurgent coercion.
In October 1951 Gurney complained that after three years of British efforts to protect the rural Chinese by organizing a massive
population shift into the New Villages, Chinese Communists had infiltrated these villages, were active in schools and labor
unions, and were not being denounced by the Chinese inhabitants of the New Villages. Gurney bleakly concluded that if things
continued on their present course the Chinese rural population would soon fall under Communist control.
Two days after this gloomy prediction Gurney and his wife departed the capital to spend a weekend at a rural resort. While
his Rolls-Royce climbed a steep, narrow road, a guerrilla platoon opened fire with Bren guns and rifles from concealed positions
in the jungle undergrowth. Thirty-five bullets riddled Gurney’s Rolls and flattened its tires. Gurney managed to open the
door and stagger to a roadside ditch, where he died, having apparently sacrificed his life to draw fire so that his wife,
who remained crouching on the floor of the Rolls, could live. The high commissioner’s escort vehicle arrived on the scene
and engaged the guerrillas with Bren gun fire. A bugle call from the jungle overlooking the road sounded the retreat and the
shooting stopped as the guerrillas withdrew along a previously cleared line of retreat.
The guerrillas had no idea whom they had killed. Rather, they had set their ambush on a portion of road frequented by security
force traffic and waited to see who drove by. British intelligence did not know that Gurney’s death came from a band of opportunistic
guerrillas shooting at a careless target. They suspected that the Communists had deeply infiltrated the security forces. A
desperate frenzy of military action ensued. Royal Air Force bombers dropped tons of ordnance onto possible jungle escape routes.
Twenty-five-pound medium batteries of the Royal Artillery bombarded the jungle. Infantry units near and far bashed through
the undergrowth looking for the men who had killed the high commissioner. When these efforts proved futile the British resorted
to removing the entire population of the nearest Chinese town and leveling it. However satisfying the revenge, it could not
hide the fact that the autumn of 1951 marked the nadir of British efforts to counter the insurgents. Three weeks after Gurney’s
death, another ambush in the same area killed sixteen and wounded seventeen. During the ensuing month, security forces suffered
their heaviest weekly casualties ever.
The rise in combat casualties suggested to the public that Great Britain was involved in a never-ending conflict with victory
nowhere in sight. Public confidence both in Malaya and in the United Kingdom waned. The public was skeptical about official
pronouncements having heard ever since 1949 frequent predictions that the Emergency would soon be over. The response was reminiscent
of the experience when the American public had wondered why it took more men to keep the Philippines “pacified” than to win
the war in the first place. Malay politicians began to question openly the wisdom of British strategy.