The Suffolk Regiment numbered only 32 officers and 566 other ranks: by 31st March 1950 it had 33 and 650 respectively. In January-February 1951, battalions went on to ’War' or ’Higher Establishment' which gave them a further rifle company and put them at just over 800 on the average. See also relevant issues of Quarterly Historical Reports 1st Bn.
The Suffolks (SECRET) . At the Higher Establishment a full strength battalion would consist of 840 officers and men of whom 250 were administrative (Brooke, Interview.)
was also required to protect estates and mines, hence opportunities for taking offensive action were few. Moreover, the majority of British troops were National Servicemen, and few of the remainder had any experience of jungle fighting:
"I looked round at the men I had to lead in this arduous campaign," wrote one company commander, "They were so young and so incredibly innocent, boys of nineteen most of them.... Most of the older men had been with me in Greece.... but there were only a few of these.... The others were very young and I did not know them well for they had joined the unit at Port Said on the way out,"43
A constant problem was the question of ’turn over’, both of battalions and of the men within them. The normal tour of a battalion was three years. Of the eight hundred men, some four hundred were National Servicemen, and three hundred of the remainder might be Regulars on a three year engagement; the engagement of the remaining one hundred was usually longer. In a three year tour of duty all the National Servicemen and Regulars on a three year engagement would have been replaced at least once. A Commanding Officer might return home after his tour with about fifty of the men whom he had
taken out three years before, and about two thousand would have passed through his hands during that time.414 Even the six battalions of Gurkhas included some 3,500 partially trained recruits x^ho were used to guard estates and mines until sub-units of special constabulary could be formed. The proportion of recruits to seasoned soldiers within the Gurkha
battalions x-;as abnormally high; 'even rifles had hardly been issued xMien the Emergency began’.45 Like everyone else in Malaya the Gurkhas learnt the hard x^ay. While it x^as in principle a gross misuse of troops to employ them in static tasks dotted around the countryside in sub-sections, in practice protection for the hard pressed rubber estate and mine managers could have been provided in no other x^ay.
As the British Government committed its reserves from elsex/here, it was apparent that they were ill-conditioned for the conflict and many
units shox-zed signs of being hastily scratched together. As part of 2nd Guards Brigade, the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards xvere warned for duty in Malaya on Friday 13th August 1948, a day subsequently referred to by all
affected as 'Black Friday’. The battalion, stationed at Chelsea Barracks, ” 5 Campbell, pp 9-11.
414 Henniker, Red Shadow, pp 192-193. 45 Bredin, p 127.
was well under strength in both officers and other ranks. It had been heavily involved in London Duties for more than a year and had to be hurriedly built up to strength with men who had not completed even their basic training. ’Let it be freely admitted,' states an official account of
the battalion’s tour, 'that when the 2nd Battalion stepped ashore in Malaya, the standard of training of the majority was extremely low. '45 Because of the rapid turn-over referred to above, promotion within the battalion had to be equally rapid. It took about a year to create and perfect a series of standardised manoeuvres and drills for jungle fighting which were
introduced throughout the battalion. Early in 1950 drafts of recruits from the United Kingdom began arriving at steady intervals and in fourteen
successive courses each of three weeks duration a battalion training staff taught them about operations in Malaya; techniques for patrolling, action on contact, the laying of ambushes and other common procedures,
"As the Rifle Companies gradually filled up with these carefully trained men during 1950, so the operational efficiency of the
Battalion may fairly be said to have improved, an improvement borne out by the ever greater percentage of kills to contacts as compared with the previous year."47
However, until the above skills had been mastered, which in the Scots Guards' experience had taken fifteen months, a battalion new in country amounted to little more than an impressively large number of names on a nominal roll.
Lack of intelligence was a constant problem. The intelligence organisation was so skeletal and disarticulated that it could not provide sufficiently accurate information to base successful operations on.48 Insurgents were killed by chance encounters and then only after hours and 45 Scots Guards, p 22. By 1952 the procedure had changed and battalions warned for service in Malaya were given time to condition themselves
for their task. The 1st Battalion Somerset Light Infantry was with the British Army of the Rhine when it was alerted for Malaya and began to train in the German pine forests. Company Commanders were flown out to Malaya to attend jungle warfare courses prior to the battalion's arrival. The soldiers, guided by their officers, underwent two months training at the Far East Training Centre at Kota Tinggi. Two years later (1954) the battalion again spent three months retraining to refurbish and sharpen its basic skills. Whitehead K . ; History of the Somerset Light Infantry, London, 1961.
4 7 Scots Guards, p 23.
48 FARELF Intelligence Reviews (SECRET) for the years 1948—49 never spoke of individual insurgents and rarely mentioned units; they simply referred to 'bandits' and 'bandit gangs'. H.Q. Malaya District was no better informed.
hours of fruitless ’speculative’ patrolling.14g An attempt to bridge the gap until army units could be trained, by using a specialised formation known as Ferret Force was not a lasting success. Ferret Force was far too small and ephemeral for the task and its leaders, mostly ex-officers of Force 136 were almost all Malayan Civil Servants and urgently needed in the administration.50
As in the Burma campaign of the Second World War, so in Malaya operations suffered because so few could speak and read the local
languages to any degree, let alone well enough to interrogate or to translate captured documents. Nor could the army obtain enough help from the police and civilian organisation, who were often equally lacking in detailed knowledge of the country and its people. Many ex-members of the Malayan Civil Service felt that the insurgents had obtained a firm hold on the rural areas only because government officials had neglected their duty, 'The sole trouble in Malaya,’ said one, ’is that the administration's officers are out of touch with the people.... are not used to dealing with problems on the spot, and scarcely know either the country or the people.’51
However, it is clear that Malaya's problems were not singular in nature but affected the whole machinery of government. With an
intelligence bureau looking in the wrong direction, a police force in serious disrepair, and an army untrained in counter-insurgency tactics but expected to be instantly expert - while it already had a hard enough task raising the basic military skill of its large proportion of new recruits - it is scarcely surprising that the M.C.P. was allowed time to train and consolidate during the vital early stages when it was most vulnerable. But the most costly mistakes of all were made in the sub equent planning of the
^ Looking back on Operation SICKLE, in December 1948, the commander of a Gurkha battalion wrote: "Contrary to what one might expect, there was no information about anything in the area on the day the operation was due to start apart from the generally accepted fact that the haystack did contain a needle or two; then, to carry the simile a little further, the only thing to do was to disturb the hay and hope at least to get our fingers pricked." His final summation was: "There is no ’intelligence’ worth the name.... Appendix C to Quarterly Historical Report, 1st
Battalion, 2nd King Edward V I I ’s Own Gurkha Rifles, December 31st 1948 (SECRET).
5(1 The employment of Ferret Force is discussed in greater detail in Chapter VI.
anti-terrorist campaign and here, it was the government on the spot, and not the shadowy Colonial Office officials in London who were greatly to blame.
Government Planning
Despite these grave weaknesses, the Government, had it perceived them clearly, could have remedied them quickly and mounted a systematic counter-offensive while the M.C.P. was still struggling to over come its own unpreparedness. Had this been done, the insurgency could have been torn up before it had firmly established the roots which were to nourish
it for twelve arduous years. Instead, from June 1948 to April 1950, the Government moved from one ad hoc solution to the next, until finally a comprehensive plan - the Briggs Plan - was evolved and accepted. Even then it took the assassination of a High Commissioner, a revolution in British colonial policy, and two years of ruthless and dynamic leadership by
General Templer, before the main pillars of insurgent strength were broken. This is not to say that all operational planning undertaken by the government in the early period was futile. An enduring contribution to the containment of the Emergency and the protection of Britain’s economic stake in Malaya was made in the first weeks by the Commissioner-General, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald. On 18th June he flew to Kuala Lumpur and in
consultation with Gent, the G.O.C. Malaya, Major General Boucher and the Commissioner of Police, Mr. H.B. Langworthy, he insisted that installations vital to the ’life, economy and employment of the country', namely the estates and mines, had to be protected. It was as well that he did. Until he intervened, no common purpose had emerged in Kuala Lumpur. Gent was still not convinced that a major threat to the economy existed; Langworthy wanted merely to pursue malefactors by the normal means; Boucher prepared to use all
available troops on jungle operations and to carry on training with the remainder. It was MacDonald, using the considerable prestige of his office, who also interceded with the C-in-C FARELF, Lieutenant-General Sir Neil Ritchie, to secure the reinforcements from Singapore and Hong Kong.52 Had this not been done, the insurgents might have come a good deal closer to their initial aim of weakening the Government’s resources and making it possible to establish secure base areas. In turn, the employment of Special 52 Thompson, Interview.
Constables, Auxiliary Police and Kampong Guards helped to damp down the insurgency and protect the economy. Along the Thai border, a Frontier Force composed predominantly of Malays with local knowledge of jungle routes and smugglers’ trails patrolled the area to prevent infiltration. To provide offensive air support for the troops on the ground, fighter aircraft were flown from Singapore to be stationed at Kuala Lumpur.53 At sea, the Royal Navy prevented the insurgents from being succoured from outside. National Registration in selected areas extended the Government’s surveillance over the civilian population. Comprehensive Emergency Regulations were issued which were to grow into a bound volume of 150 pages by 1953, and covered
every foreseeable situation varying from one regulation empowering the Mentri Besar of a state to direct that undergrowth abutting a main road which might facilitate an ambush, be removed by the owner of the land, to another
empowering the government to take control of businesses whose profits were likely to go to ’bandit’ funds.54
However, for the first two years government policy had a curious binomial quality. On the one hand there was a tendency for affairs to be conducted on a ’business as usual' basis, with little sense of urgency, while on the other, the army in particular took to pursuing insurgents as
if it was engaged on a larger scale partridge drive.
To take the second case first. Having underrated the enemy in his opening statements, General Boucher compounded the error by his concept of operations; in fact the general saw his strategy as a simple process of
’disinfection’:
”1 cannot give you details of my plans, he said in a public statement on 6th July 1948, "but I can give you an example of how they work.
53 Terrorism, pp 2-18.
54 Emergency Regulations, E.R. 40 (4)c; and E.R. 41 pp 40 and 41. The