The Malayan Emergency, also known as the Anti–British National Liberation War, (1948–1960) was a guerrilla war fought in Malaya between communist pro-independence fighters of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and the military forces of the Federation of Malaya and the Commonwealth (British Empire). The MNLA fought to win Malayan independence from the British Empire and to establish a communist state, while the Malayan Federation and Commonwealth forces fought to protect British economic and colonial interests and combat communism. The term "Emergency" was used by the British to characterise the conflict in order to avoid referring to it as a war, because London-based insurers would not pay out in instances of civil wars.
The war began on 17 June 1948. British forces had killed a number of left-wing activists in Malaya, and following several retaliatory attacks on plantations the British declared a state of emergency. The leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), Chin Peng, along with his allies, fled into the jungle and formed the MNLA to wage a war for national liberation against British colonial rule. Many MNLA fighters were veterans of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), a communist guerrilla army previously trained, armed and funded by the British to fight against Japan during World War II. The communists gained support from many civilians, mainly those from the Chinese community. The communists' belief in class consciousness, ethnic equality, and gender equality inspired many women and indigenous people to join both the MNLA and its undercover supply network, the Min Yuen. Additionally, hundreds of former Japanese soldiers joined the MNLA. After establishing a series of jungle bases, the MNLA began raiding British colonial police and military installations.
The British attempted to starve the MNLA using scorched earth policies, including food rationing, killing livestock, and aerial spraying of the herbicide Agent Orange. British units carried out extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The most infamous example is the Batang Kali massacre, which the press has referred to as "Britain's My Lai". The Briggs Plan forcibly relocated a million civilians into concentration camps called "new villages". Many Orang Asli indigenous communities were also targeted for internment because the British believed that they were supporting the communists. The widespread decapitation of people suspected to have been guerrillas led to the 1952 British Malayan headhunting scandal. Similar scandals relating to atrocities committed by British forces included the public display of corpses.
British armed forces suffered well over a thousand casualties, making the emergency Britain's deadliest operational theatre since the Second World War. The emergency has often been compared to the Vietnam War, which included similar tactics and terrain. However, the Vietnam War involved large field armies of rival states with over a quarter million combatants and over 100,000 insurgents, whereas the emergency was mostly a low-intensity insurgency; the MNLA never numbered more than 8,000 members at a time. Still, some 11,000 people died in the emergency. Although the emergency was declared over in 1960, communist leader Chin Peng renewed the insurgency against the Malaysian government in 1968. This second phase of the insurgency lasted until the dissolution of the MCP in 1989.
Origins
Socioeconomic issues (1941–1948)
The economic disruption of World War II (WWII) on British Malaya led to widespread unemployment, low wages, and high levels of food price inflation. The weak economy was a factor in the growth of trade union movements and caused a rise in communist party membership, with considerable labour unrest and a large number of strikes occurring between 1946 and 1948. Malayan communists organised a successful 24-hour general strike on 29 January 1946, before organising 300 strikes in 1947.
To combat rising trade union activity the British used police and soldiers as strikebreakers, and employers enacted mass dismissals, forced evictions of striking workers from their homes, legal harassment, and began cutting the wages of their workers. Colonial police responded to rising trade union activity through arrests, deportations, and beating striking workers to death. Responding to the attacks against trade unions, communist militants began assassinating strikebreakers, and attacking anti-union estates. These attacks were used by the colonial occupation as a pretext to conduct mass arrests of left-wing activists. On 12 June the British colonial occupation banned the PMFTU, Malaya's largest trade union.
Malaya's rubber and tin resources were used by the British to pay war debts to the United States and to recover from the damage of WWII. Malaysian rubber exports to the United States were of greater value than all domestic exports from Britain to America, causing Malaya to be viewed by the British as a vital asset. Britain had prepared for Malaya to become an independent state, but only by handing power to a government which would be subservient to Britain and allow British businesses to keep control of Malaya's natural resources. Under Britain's proposal, a British High Commissioner would choose the members of the Executive Council and the Legislative Council. Ninety percent of Malay Chinese, who made up 40 percent of the population, would not be given citizenship in the new state.
Sungai Siput incident (1948)
The first shots of the Malayan Emergency were fired during the Sungai Siput incident, on June 17, 1948, in the office of the Elphil Estate near the town of Sungai Siput. Three European plantation managers were killed by three young Chinese men suspected to have been communists.
The deaths of these European plantation managers was used by the British colonial administration to either arrest or kill many of Malaya's communist and trade union leaders. These mass arrests and killings saw many left-wing activists going into hiding and fleeing into the Malayan jungles.
Although the Malayan communists had begun preparations for a guerrilla war against the British, the emergency measures and mass arrest of communists and left-wing activists in 1948 took them by surprise. Led by Chin Peng the remaining Malayan communists retreated to rural areas and formed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) on 1 February 1949.
The MNLA was partly a re-formation of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), the communist guerrilla force which had been the principal resistance in Malaya against the Japanese occupation during WWII. The British had secretly helped form the MPAJA in 1942 and trained them in the use of explosives, firearms and radios. Chin Peng was a veteran anti-fascist and trade unionist who had played an integral role in the MPAJA's resistance. Disbanded in December 1945, the MPAJA officially turned in its weapons to the British Military Administration, although many MPAJA soldiers secretly hid stockpiles of weapons in jungle hideouts. Members who agreed to disband were offered economic incentives. Around 4,000 members rejected these incentives and went underground.
The MNLA began their war for Malayan independence from the British Empire by targeting the colonial resource extraction industries, namely the tin mines and rubber plantations which were the main sources of income for the British occupation of Malaya. The MNLA attacked these industries in the hopes of bankrupting the British and winning independence by making the colonial administration too expensive to maintain.
History
Communist guerrilla strategies
The Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) employed guerrilla tactics, attacking military and police outposts, sabotaging rubber plantations and tin mines, while also destroying transport and communication infrastructure. Support for the MNLA mainly came from the 3.12 million ethnic Chinese living in Malaya, many of whom were farmers living on the edges of the Malayan jungles and had been politically influenced by both the Chinese Communist Revolution and the resistance against Japan during WWII. Their support allowed the MNLA to supply themselves with food, medicine, information, and provided a source of new recruits. The ethnic Malay population supported them in smaller numbers. The MNLA gained the support of the Chinese because the Chinese were denied the equal right to vote in elections, had no land rights to speak of, and were usually very poor. The MNLA's supply organisation was called the Min Yuen (People's Movement). It had a network of contacts within the general population. Besides supplying material, especially food, it was also important to the MNLA as a source of intelligence. The MNLA and their supporters refer to the conflict as the Anti-British National Liberation War.
The MNLA's camps and hideouts were in the inaccessible tropical jungle and had limited infrastructure. Almost 90% of MNLA guerrillas were ethnic Chinese, though there were some Malays, Indonesians and Indians among its members. The MNLA was organised into regiments, although these had no fixed establishments and each included all communist forces operating in a particular region. The regiments had political sections, commissars, instructors and secret service. In the camps, the soldiers attended lectures on Marxism–Leninism, and produced political newsletters to be distributed to civilians.
In the early stages of the conflict, the guerrillas envisaged establishing control in "liberated areas" from which the government forces had been driven, but did not succeed in this.
British and Commonwealth strategies
During the first two years of the Emergency, British forces conducted a 'counter-terror,' characterised by high levels of state coercion against civilian populations; including sweeps, cordons, large-scale deportation, and capital charges against suspected guerrillas. Police corruption and the British military's widespread destruction of farmland and burning of homes belonging to villagers rumoured to be helping communists, led to a sharp increase in civilians joining the MNLA and communist movement. However, these tactics also prevented the communists from establishing liberated areas (the MCPs first, and foremost objective), successfully broke up larger guerrilla formations, and shifted the MNLA's plan of securing territory, to one of widespread sabotage.
Commonwealth forces struggled to fight guerrillas who moved freely in the jungle and enjoyed support from rural Chinese populations. British planters and miners, who bore the brunt of the communist attacks, began to talk about government incompetence and being betrayed by Whitehall.
The initial government strategy was primarily to guard important economic targets, such as mines and plantation estates. In April 1950, General Sir Harold Briggs, most famous for implementing the Briggs Plan, was appointed to Malaya. The central tenet of the Briggs Plan was to segregate MNLA guerrillas from their supporters among the population. A major component of the Briggs Plan involved targeting the MNLA's food supplies, which were supplied from three main sources: food grown by the MNLA in the jungle, food supplied by the Orang Asli aboriginal people living in the deep jungle, and MNLA supporters within the 'squatter' communities on the jungle fringes.
The Briggs Plan also included the forced relocation of some one million rural civilians into concentration camps referred to as "new villages". These concentration camps were surrounded by barbed wire, police posts, and floodlit areas, all designed to stop the inmates from contacting and supplying MNLA guerrillas in the jungles, segregating the communists from their civilian supporters.
In 1948, the British had 13 infantry battalions in Malaya, including seven partly formed Gurkha battalions, three British battalions, two battalions of the Royal Malay Regiment and a Royal Artillery Regiment being used as infantry.
The Permanent Secretary of Defence for Malaya, Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson, had served in the Chindits in Burma during World War II. Thompson's in-depth experience of jungle warfare proved invaluable during this period as he was able to build effective civil-military relations and was one of the chief architects of the counter-insurgency plan in Malaya.
In 1951, the British High Commissioner in Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney, was killed near Fraser's Hill during an MNLA ambush. General Gerald Templer was chosen to become the new High Commissioner in January 1952. During Templer's two-year command, "two-thirds of the guerrillas were wiped out and lost over half their strength, the incident rate fell from 500 to less than 100 per month and the civilian and security force casualties from 200 to less than 40." Orthodox historiography suggests that Templer changed the situation in the Emergency and his actions and policies were a major part of British success during his period in command. Revisionist historians have challenged this view and frequently support the ideas of Victor Purcell, a Sinologist who as early as 1954 claimed that Templer merely continued policies begun by his predecessors.
Control of anti-guerrilla operations
At all levels of the Malayan government (national, state, and district levels), the military and civil authority was assumed by a committee of military, police and civilian administration officials. This allowed intelligence from all sources to be rapidly evaluated and disseminated and also allowed all anti-guerrilla measures to be co-ordinated.
Each of the Malay states had a State War Executive Committee which included the State Chief Minister as chairman, the Chief Police Officer, the senior military commander, state home guard officer, state financial officer, state information officer, executive secretary, and up to six selected community leaders. The Police, Military, and Home Guard representatives and the Secretary formed the operations sub-committee responsible for the day-to-day direction of emergency operations. The operations subcommittees as a whole made joint decisions.
During the Malayan Emergency, Britain became the first nation in history to make use of herbicides and defoliants as a military weapon. It was used to destroy bushes, food crops, and trees to deprive the guerrillas of both food and cover, playing a role in Britain's food denial campaign during the early 1950s. A variety of herbicides were used to clear lines of communication and destroy food crops as part of this strategy. One of the herbicides, was a 50:50 mixture of butyl esters of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D with the brand name Trioxone. This mixture was virtually identical to the later Agent Orange, though Trioxone likely had a heavier contamination of the health-damaging dioxin impurity.