from Bengal in May 1943. Two British officers, John Davis and Richard Broome, who had briefly contacted the communist forces in February 1942 before escaping to India in an open boat, returned by submarine, together with some Chinese agents. Part of what later became styled as ‘Force 136’, the Chinese were recruited chiefly from Kuomintang circles; many were students from Malaya who had been stranded by the war in Chiang Kai Shek’s capital, Chungking. They were, by definition, staunch enemies of the communists, but on landing in Malaya they passed into the hands of the MPAJA and operated out of their camps, chiefly from Blantan, 2,000 feet above the towns of Bidor and Tapah, in the state of Perak. It was a mining area with some of the densest concentrations of Chinese in Malaya, and a bastion of MPAJA support. The resistance laid networks of supply and intelligence, particularly among the tens of thousands of Chinese workers and peasants who had taken refuge on the jungle fringes to grow food. The war years had seen a massive move of Chinese pioneers into the hinterland of the towns, mines and estates. They had begun to migrate in the Depression years when wages were low, and workers moved between farming and industry as conditions dictated: a reserve army of the proletariat. But during the war many had become established peasant farmers, with atap (thatched) dwellings, vegetable plots and pigs. The squatters provided the MPAJA with food, intelligence and recruits. Their ramshackle settlements were a screen from Japanese policing, and provided lines of communication. A hut or a coffeeshop was used as a staging post, and behind it a trail would lead into the hills. In the undergrowth, the trails would connect to jungle tracks, running up watercourses and mountainsides. The central range was a matrix of such paths. Outside the jungle, couriers on bicycles linked these networks.30 At Blantan, Davis and Broome finally made contact with Freddy Spencer Chapman, but they were as isolated as Chapman had been before their arrival; they had no radio contact with India until January 1945. Their attempts to set up an independent intelligence organization with their Kuomintang Chinese agents in the towns ended in disaster when it was betrayed in March 1944. Its leading personality, a Singapore businessmen turned secret agent, Lim Bo Seng, died of dysentery in a Japanese jail. He was Force 136’s only casualty of the war, and was to become Singapore’s national martyr.
The fragile alliance between the British and the MPAJA was sealed by an agreement, sketched on a page torn from a school exercise book, at Blantan on 26 December 1943. The communist leadership was represented by a new arrival in the camp, a man the British called ‘the Plen’, and who signed the agreement as ‘Chang Hong’. It placed the MPAJA under South East Asia Command and promised communist ‘co-operation’ in what ‘Chang Hong’ insisted was to be called ‘the retaking’ of Malaya. Future relations between the British and the Malayan Communist Party were not discussed. But at a further meeting, in mid April 1945, when agreement on practical arrangements had become pressing, it seems that the British officers went further in promising that, in return for support, the Malayan Communist Party would be able to operate legally as a political party after the war. This was later disavowed, but most communists assumed that the concession had been won, and so too did many British officials. In the wake of this second agreement, British officers began to parachute into the Malayan jungle in greater numbers. On the day of the Japanese surrender the head of the Malaya section of Special Operations Executive, Innes Tremlett, a Singapore Special Branch officer, summarized the situation for Mountbatten. There were 308 Force 136 men in Malaya: 88 British officers, with their Gurkha guards. The British had supplied around 2,000 guns and other weapons to the MPAJA. This was but a small part of the MPAJA’s armoury, which was stocked with pickings from the battlefields of 1942. The force had between