War From the Ground Up (28 page)

In line with Cabinet policy set out above, the armed forces were to contain the Indonesian threat until Sukarno desisted: the Commander of British Forces in Borneo, Major General Walter Walker, was ordered to ‘contain Indonesian aggression without escalation to open war'.
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The Cabinet policy of restricted conflict was based on the assessment of the British Chiefs of Staff that without heightened military action ‘short of full-scale war', Confrontation could not be won by military means alone.
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To understand how government policy was translated into an operational approach, we have to examine the situation below the jungle canopy which faced the British military. The first Indonesian raid came on 12 April 1963, against a police station at Tebedu in Sarawak. It was conducted by Indonesian-trained guerrillas led by Indonesian army officers. The Indonesian raids became far more serious from 28 September 1963, when a force of 200 well-trained regular Indonesian soldiers attacked a remote British army outpost at Long Jawai. Throughout the Confrontation, Indonesia also supported the Chinese Communist Organisation (CCO), who conducted sabotage in Sarawak and Sabah.

The Indonesian threat was not small: at the start of the Confrontation, British Intelligence estimated that there might be some 24,000 Chinese sympathisers in Sarawak, while along the border were 10,000 Indonesian troops, supported by an unknown number of volunteer guerrillas.
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Throughout Confrontation, Indonesian forces employed the tactics of guerrilla warfare: they would attempt raids against military, police or government targets inside Malaysian Borneo, which were frequently remote outposts.

The thick jungle terrain appeared to favour the Indonesians, as they could approach unseen, attack, and then melt back into the rainforest. The border itself was 970 miles long, and the sea coast considerably longer. The aboriginal inland populations (mainly Ibans) lived in kampongs
(longhouse villages), many of which were inaccessible except by air, or river followed by a long trek. These kampongs were scattered all over the jungle, making it impossible to supervise each one. The terrain thus made the civilian population vulnerable to the Indonesians. To cover this huge area General Walker's forces stood at only 13 battalions (10,000 men) and 15 helicopters; this was increased by January 1965 to 16 battalions and 80 helicopters. Nonetheless, his four brigade frontages remained seriously overextended, standing at 181, 442, 267 and 81 miles.

The Indonesian Confrontation was for the British armed forces a peculiar conflict. It had elements of a counter-insurgency campaign: the Indonesians used guerrilla methods and sponsored the CCO. Yet by late 1963 the Confrontation could also be seen as a small conventional war, as British troops were directly fighting the regular Indonesian army.

Rather than trying to shoehorn the problem into a pre-existing doctrinal template of counter-insurgency or conventional war (the two types of conflict that British forces of the 1960s were oriented towards), the operational approach drew on both concepts to create a unique concept tailored to that particular situation. Two men were chiefly responsible for its development. The Commander-in-Chief Far East, Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, was responsible for all army, air and naval forces in the area. He delegated to the Commander of British Forces in Borneo, Major General Walker, who ran ground operations on a daily basis.

A light infantry man commissioned into the Indian Army in 1933, Walker had served on the North-West Frontier, Burma in 1942–5, and as a brigade commander in the Malayan Emergency. As the Director of the Malaya Jungle Warfare School, he had himself written the army manual for counter-insurgency operations in the jungle, stressing the need for platoon and company patrols and ambushes as being superior to big brigade clearance operations.
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Walker's experience reinforces the fact that he had been sent to Borneo on account of his extensive operational experience in the jungle.
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In this sense the conflict was from the start recognised as one which required specialists in this type of terrain, rather than being a conventional small war which happened to be in the jungle.

Walker used many concepts from the Malayan Emergency. He was by his own account ‘tremendously influenced' by Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer.
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The imperative of getting the civilian population on side was
directly transplanted from Malaya to Borneo. Army-civilian-police committees were established at each level of command, as well as a campaign to win over people in the remote villages. Yet the Confrontation was not a re-run of Malaya, and Walker recognised this. Walker's task was not to put down an indigenous guerrilla movement, but to defend the local population from the Indonesian incursions while avoiding pushing Sukarno into open war. Neither was Walker's thinking limited to counter-insurgency; in Burma he had led a Gurkha battalion in some of the most savage conventional battles the British army experienced in the Second World War.

When Duncan Sandys, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, visited Malaysia in September 1963, he told Walker that: ‘it is not the policy of Her Majesty's Government to become caught up in a war … try to stop it from escalating. Do everything you can to stop it'. Walker thought this attitude smacked of defensive thinking.
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He believed that the war having already started, the emphasis should be on ending it by winning: ‘offensive action is the very essence of successful military operations when faced with guerrilla or terrorist forces'.
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Indeed, while Sandys was thinking about Confrontation from above the jungle canopy (note how at this time British policy-makers were still very sensitive to the Kennedy White House's scepticism towards British military action in Borneo), Walker was thinking about the conflict from the ground upwards.

Walker saw that a defensive strategy would not work on the ground: the terrain made it impossible for the British to guard against Indonesian infiltration in such a large area: ‘the Indonesians held the initiative because they could operate from safe bases in Kalimantan … they knew the bases were safe from attack because there had been no official declaration of war'.
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As policy-makers can sometimes forget, an armed conflict has to succeed on the ground as well as in terms of international politics. Let us examine Walker's plan in that context.

Walker's approach was based on an understanding of the terrain on its own terms. Bear in mind that the average contact distance with the enemy in the Confrontation was only 5–10 metres, which is the normal limit of visibility for infantry moving in that type of jungle.
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Guerrillas could appear unseen and unheard, attack, and then vanish into the rainforest. Walker believed that unless commanders took a firm stand, they could very soon have all their forces tied down defending their
bases. The only way to beat them was to make them feel insecure in the jungle by taking control of it. Walker notes that, as in counter-insurgency operations, there was no ‘rear' area; every man in uniform had to be a potential front-line infantry soldier.

Patrol bases were designed to be defended by a third of their occupants, be it a section in a platoon base, or a platoon in a company base. The other two-thirds of the unit were out on patrol, dominating the jungle in an offensive role. Walker stressed that ‘results could not be achieved by attacking and shooting the enemy then returning to base. He had to be played at his own game by living out in the jungle for weeks on end… The jungle has got to belong to you; you must own it; you must control and dominate it'.
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Troops spent a very high proportion of time out on patrol. One Gurkha ambush stood for 40 days before the enemy arrived.
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The domination of the jungle, in conjunction with hearts and minds, was intended to take advantage of the vast and intimidating jungle by taking control of the physical and political terrain.

Through colonial experience, a principle of ‘minimum force' had developed to deal with civil disturbances and colonial insurrections. The principle was to apply the least force necessary to maintain order. Yet it would have made no sense to apply minimum force, a defining principle of the Malayan campaign, at the tactical level. Practically, commanders clearly could not order troops to spare enemy lives as far as possible if a contact occurred, especially since the enemy was the aggressive and professional Indonesian infantry, not the communist guerrillas of the Malayan Emergency who usually fled when attacked; it would just have seemed like incompetence.
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Walker pragmatically raised the level at which minimum force was applied from the tactical to the operational level. He intended to use minimum force within an offensive approach to dominate the jungle. In practice, this led to the development of operations codenamed ‘Claret', which started in April 1964. These were top secret clandestine raids across the border into Indonesia, which regained the initiative from the Indonesians by making the Indonesians feel insecure everywhere. Claret operations, although used against regular troops, were an extension of the approach of psychological domination of the opponent by appearing to be everywhere at once. This is very close to the way insurgents normally operate. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs), for example, try to make soldiers feel nervous everywhere, even though
there may only be a few devices in a big area. Walker had coined the phrase ‘to out guerrilla the guerrillas' as a brigade commander in Malaya; he now used this pragmatically in a different context.
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Walker kept a tight control over the direction of Claret raids so as to limit Indonesian casualties in the theatre as a whole and thus avoid escalation of the conflict by not provoking Sukarno. He devised a set of seven “Golden Rules” to that end: he, as Director of Operations, would personally authorise every operation; only trained and tested troops were to be used; the penetration depth was to be limited, attacks being only to thwart enemy offensive action, never in retribution of one's casualties, and civilian casualties were never to be risked; there was to be no air support, except in extreme emergency; operations were to be planned and rehearsed for at least two weeks; every operation was to be planned and executed with maximum security, cover plans made, code names for each operation used, and soldiers sworn to secrecy, with no details to be discussed over radio or telephone, no ID disks worn and no identifiable material to be left in Kalimantan; and no soldiers were to be captured alive or dead.
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Hence Walker was using the jungle terrain to his advantage: instead of trying to fight a conventional war against the Indonesian guerrilla tactics, he fought them in the jungle using light infantry who beat them at their own game. The terrain was central to this approach: by keeping the conflict below the jungle canopy, Walker was able to raise the application of minimum force to the operational level, as the world could not see anything of what happened on the ground.

Claret operations connected to political objectives primarily by undermining the Indonesian army's morale for Sukarno's enterprise. A succession of extensions of the distance across the border for Claret operations were authorised in 1964 and 1965 in line with political conditions. For example, Secretary of Defence Denis Healey in November 1964 authorised an extension in response to Indonesian parachute landings in peninsular Malaysia.
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Soon after Major General George Lea took over from Walker as Director of Operations in March 1965, the Indonesian Army became more aggressive. On 27 April 1965 the Indonesians launched a full battalion-sized attack on a company base manned by British Paratroopers at Plaman Mapu in Sarawak, which was only just beaten off. In response Lea attempted to establish a no-man's-land 10,000 yards inside
Kalimantan by an intensive series of Claret operations ‘to make absolutely clear to the Indonesians that their proper place was behind their own frontier'.
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While a battalion in 1964 conducted an average of two Claret operations per month to ambush Indonesians, by mid-1965 eight per month was normal.
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2/10
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Gurkha Rifles, for example, arrived in Sarawak in March 1965 and launched operation ‘Super Shell' in August and ‘High Hurdle' in September.
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These were multi-company operations which involved simultaneous attacks on an Indonesian camp and the River Koemba that supplied it. This approach achieved its aim, as most of the fighting was confined to the Indonesian side of the border. In one instance, an Indonesian commander even sent a note to his British opposite number from 2/2
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Gurkha Rifles saying that he was retreating and wanted to be left alone.
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These more daring operations did not provoke an Indonesian public response, even though it was evident that Commonwealth troops had violated the border. This was probably because the Indonesians did not want to lose face by admitting to military defeats.

One of the most gripping first-person narratives of Claret operations is Brigadier (then Captain) Christopher Bullock's
Journeys Hazardous: Gurkha Clandestine Operations in Borneo 1965
(1994). He emphasises the relentless tempo of cross-border operations that his company carried out. What is remarkable in his account is how particularly arduous these operations were, and the level of jungle experience required to beat the Indonesian regular forces, who were themselves a skilled enemy. This experience had been built up over years of regimental experience in the jungles of Malaya during the Emergency. Just as Walter Walker was a jungle specialist, so were many of his troops.
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Cross-border operations were regulated to suit the political dialogue at the international level. The authorisation for ‘hot pursuit' across the border requested in 1964 was suspended until after the meetings of foreign ministers of Afro-Asian countries, the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) ministerial meetings, and the Malaysian elections, in order to minimise the likely political fallout resulting from such operations. Lea started what was known as a ‘be nice to Indonesians' period in October and December 1965 in response to events (the PKI coup and Indonesian Army counter-coup), which meant that all Claret operations were suspended. As the Indonesian Army started to fight the communists in late 1965, it was assured that the British would not
exploit the situation. Hence the tempo and nature of cross-border operations were regulated at the operational level to ensure that the principle of minimum force was being applied.