The Malayan Emergency was ostensibly just one of many efforts designed to retain one of Britainâs far-flung colonial possessions in the aftermath of the Second World War. It might be seen as one of a number of post-war colonial policing campaigns, such as those in Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, in which many lives and resources were expended but which were ultimately futile and marked Britainâs withdrawal from those territories. Some might consider the Emergency simply as an artefact from a by-gone era, fought by two competing philosophiesâcolonialism and communism, both of which are now largely irrelevant. Moreover, all the key actors in the Emergency have since perished and one would be forgiven for thinking, some sixty years after its cessation, that the historical memory of Emergency would be fading rapidly.
And yet, the Emergency remains a subject of intense interest, not least because of the philosophical links between lesson derived from the counterinsurgency campaign in Malaya and the doctrine that drove much of the British and US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, the story of the Malayan governmentâs campaign to defeat the threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) has its own integral historical value, not least in terms of decolonisation and the birth of an independent Malaya, the role of nationalism, communism, and Britainâs subsequent position in the region. The Emergency is also an episode of history with dramatic twists of fate and unforeseen consequences worthy of a novel or screenplay. For instance, during the Second World War Britain had worked together with communist forces to wage a guerrilla campaign against the occupying Japanese forces. However, within three years, the two former allies would be fighting each other in bloody and protracted guerrilla war for the future of Malaya. Just days after declaring a state of emergency, High Commissioner Sir Edward Gent died in an aircraft returning to London for talks with the Colonial Office. Two years later, communist forces would go on to murder his successor, High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney. Plans for Malayaâs independence were accelerated rapidly under the pressure of the Emergency and were realised in 1957âsomething Colonial Office planners would have thought unforeseeable at the end of the Second World War. Moreover, at this time there were still some 1830 insurgents at large, most still with the intent of subverting the new nation. Despite the end of the Emergency being declared in 1960, a hard-core rump held out in the deep jungle on the border with Thailand for some twenty-nine years, before surrendering in 1989.
The Emergency unfolded against a complex geo-political backdrop. At its most simple, indeed primal, level, were the mountains, jungles and rubber plantations which covered vast sways of the Federations 51,000 square miles, many of which were not yet mapped. Freddy Spencer Chapman memorably described the jungle as neutral. However, in the story of the Emergency, the jungles and rubber plantations take on a form relevance that they become actors in their own right. Living within these 51,000 square miles were a rich mix of ethnic Malay, Chinese, and Indians. Prior to the Second World War, they had lived in one of a collection of Malay States (under indirect rule) or Straits Settlements under the sovereignty of the British Crown. After the Second World War, the British tried to unify these states and give all residents, not just the Malays, equal rights and franchise. This proved highly divisive and under intense pressure from the native Malays the British were forced to end the Malayan Union experiment and introduce in April 1948 an alternative arrangement much more favourable to the Malays in the former of the Federation of Malaya. Thus, at the time of the declaration of a state of emergency, politically Malaya was a highly changed part of the Empire. To make matters worse, the Berlin airlift started in the month before the declaration of a state of emergency and the Chinese Communist Party was victorious in China in the following year, and the growing fear of global communism is tangible in the documents written by British officials trying to understand what was happening in Malaya.
Within this context are the intense personal storiesâmen like Lt. Col. Frank Dalley, a man who led a resistance force against the Japanese during the Second World War, and who suffered horrendously as a prisoner of war, but who returned to Malaya to lead the Malayan Security Service (MSS); or Sir Percy Sillitoe who subverted the MSS more effectively than the communist insurgents ever could; or Police Commissioner Lt. Col. Nicol Gray and Director of Intelligence Sir William Jenkin who clashed so furiously that both men resigned their posts; or General Sir Harold Briggs who effectively worked himself to an early death creating his blueprints for counterinsurgency operations; or the sheer force of nature that was General Sir Gerald Templer. Moreover, the Emergency is the story of secret organisations, agents, double agents and at least one triple-agent. It is the story of the detention, deportation or forced relocation of thousands of Malayaâs Chinese community and thousands of British and Commonwealth police officers and soldiers mounting cordons, patrolling, and setting ambushes across Malayaâs rubber plantations, along the fringes and within the deep jungle, while their colleagues in the Royal Air Force (RAF) mounted thousands of photographic intelligence and strike sorties.
The Emergency was a highly violent affair: 1868 security force personnel, 2473 civilians and 6697 insurgents were killed between 1948 and 1960.1 At the height of the campaign, the Malayan government had twenty-three battalions of troops, fifty thousand police officers and six squadrons of strike or bomber aircraft pitched against some three and half thousand insurgents.2 Yet, by its nature, the Emergency was not a war. The military were acting in support of the civilian authorities and the police remained the lead agency responsible for the restoration of internal security. Although the armed wing of the MCP wore uniforms and were organised along military lines, their supply wing (the Min Yuen) and supporters within the Chinese squatter community and towns did not; the communists employed what might now be called an âasymmetricâ strategy. The Emergency was thus a struggle not necessarily for territory but the allegiance of Malayaâs population. At a minimum, the MCP needed the active support of only a small proportion of Malayaâs communities and the passive acquiescence of the majority to undermine the government. Conversely, the government needed to collect and assess a sufficient amount of information, from aerial photographs, captured documents and captured personnel but, ideally, from informers and agents, to identify, arrest or kill sufficient numbers of insurgents to halt their revolutionary momentum. Intelligence was thus central to the prosecution of the Emergency.
The Emergency has been studied from various angles and perspectives over the past eighty years, not least by imperial historians, military historians, Malayan nationalists, Cold War historians, counterinsurgency theorists, and decolonisation specialists, including a new sub-set of revisionists who focus upon the use of force. Despite the diverse range of commentators drawn to the Emergency, most accounts begin with failure of the intelligence services to forecast the communist insurgency. The historiography then begins to facture into two main interpretations. The first is espoused by authors such as Anthony Short, who produced the official history of the emergencyâThe Communist Insurrection in Malaya, Richard Stubbs, Kumar Ramakrishna and Simon Smith.3 They portray the Emergency as a struggle for effective governance waged between the Malayan authorities and the MCP. Their individual arguments are nuanced, particularly around the importance of the plan put in place by the Director of Operations, General Sir Harold Briggs, in 1950. However, there is strong commonality between these writers in their belief that counterinsurgency campaign had reached a nadir when Sir Henry Gurney was murdered in 1951. However, this act allowed the appointment of Sir Gerald Templer as his successor. They argue that Templer energised the counterinsurgency campaign and developed a policy of âhearts and mindsâ to complement population control implemented by Briggs. They suggest it was this strategy that ultimately won the campaign against the insurgents.
The second broad interpretation of the Emergency is provided predominantly, but not exclusively, by Karl Hack in a series of articles written between 1999 and 2018.4 Hackâs argument focuses upon the theory that the MCPâs âOctober 1951â Directives prove that coercion and population control had forced the MCP into scaling down their insurgency prior to the arrival of Sir Gerald Templer in 1952. As such, the Malayan governmentâs counterinsurgency campaign âsucceeded in âscrewing downâ Communist supporters, rather more than wooing âhearts and minds.ââ5 This was possible because Malayaâs ethnic, social and political structures allowed the large-scale deportation and relocation of the Chinese squatter community. As result, the pivotal point in the Emergency, according to Hackâs thesis, was not the arrival of Templer in 1952 but âthe switch from poorly directed counter-terror and coercion in 1948â49, to tightly organised population control from 1950.â He rejects âthe traditional view that the leadership and policy changes of one British general (Templer) were both necessary and sufficient to transform the campaign.â Instead, âthe critical conditions [for counterinsurgency success] had existed before Templer and âhearts and mindsâ, and that in the most important policies there was, and was always likely to be, continuity not change around 1952.â6
The concept of intelligence does not feature heavily within these broader interpretations of the Emergency. Both key schools of thought do, however, share the view that the declaration of a state of emergency was a function of the failure of the Malayan Security Service (MSS) to forecast the start of the communist insurgency.7 From this point, the historiography again splits into two distinct sections. Woven into the arguments articulated by Karl Hack, and others such as Huw Bennett and David French, is the idea that the Stateâs use of violence was the predominant factor in securing intelligence.8 This policy led to the widespread destruction of villages by British troops, the forced deportation and resettlement of many thousands of Malayaâs Chinese community, and even the indiscriminate murder of innocent villagers. Implicit in his hypothesis is that intelligence was not obtained by craft, guile or consent. It was beaten and forced from a vulnerable Chinese community.
Leon Comber and Georgina Sinclair take an alternative view.9 They suggest that the Special Branch of the Malayan Police emerged from the debris of MSS, which was abolished shortly after the declaration of emergency, and rapidly became a model intelligence agency. By the early 1950s, Special Branch was able to map most of the communist forces ranged against it. Under the auspices of the Briggs Plan, it successfully targeted the Min Yuen, the communist supply network, which forced the MCP to change strategy dramatically. Later, from 1952, Special Branch switched its attention to targeting key MCP leaders. At each stage it worked in close cooperation with the military, via a committee structure implemented by General Sir Harold Briggs, the Federationâs first Director of Operations. Thanks to the efforts of Special Branch, the back of the insurgency was supposedly broken by 1952. The centrality of an effective Special Branch to effective counterinsurgency operations was recognised not only during the Emergency in a series of reviews but subsequently by a series of theorists, including Sir Robert Thompson and General Sir Frank Kitson and Thomas Mockaitis.10
However, the manne...