Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [265]
MCP units had mobilized on a state-by-state basis, as planned, but, lacking common objectives, many now launched operations on their own initiative. The most dramatic was a dawn attack by five groups of guerrillas on Batu Arang colliery on 13 July. Five men – including three Kuomintang figures – were identified and killed, the Kuala Lumpur train was held up and its passengers robbed. Demolition parties damaged excavation equipment and generators. Around fifty fighters were involved and the whole incident lasted less than a hour. The government was deeply alarmed when the mine demanded compensation.111 This set the pattern for the first weeks: labour contractors and others were executed and there were arson attacks on industrial buildings. There were also assaults on remote police stations. One incident at Langkap in Perak involved around 100 fighters. It was the most intense firefight of the Emergency, in which the guerrillas loosed over 2,000 rounds of ammunition.112 Although there were incidents in most states, Kajang in Selangor, the area where Liew Yao had been killed, was a centre of activity. These attacks gave a sense of an impressive underground organization, but made overall co-ordination of the campaign difficult.
But at a key crossroads of the central range there took place an incident that would prove to be a decisive military encounter of the Emergency. Ulu Kelantan was an isolated area of Chinese settlement high upriver in the northeastern state of Kelantan, one of the oldest Chinese settlements in Malaya. During the war it had been a battleground for rival Kuomintang and MPAJA forces. The area was a plausible site for a liberated area for the MCP. It backed onto the Thai frontier, and there was a profitable cross-border traffic to be taxed. It was not easily accessed by the British: the east-coast railway had gone out of action in the war and services had not been reestablished. Yet, with the jungle communication network the Party had constructed during the war, it had the potential to be a command centre for the various units working in the different states.113 The guerrilla commanders began to focus their thoughts on the small town of Gua Musang, and it began to seem like an insurgent’s El Dorado. It was the railhead of the old east-coast line, but to reach it from the state capital, Kota Bahru, was forty-four miles by road, and then eight to ten hours by river. A major operation was planned. The main forces were to come from battalions from the ‘model’ 5th Perak Regiment of the MPAJA, now renamed the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-British Army. A large party of guerrillas moved across the watershed in north Pahang to create a 12th Regiment in west Kelantan. And with other units from Perak, there were around 600–700 guerrillas concentrated in Kelantan, including men who were to become the MPABA’s chief commanders.114 Such a large concentration of men could not be kept together for long; the problems of supplying it were immense.
But they had anyway arrived too late. The Battle of Gua Musang had already between fought and lost. Local MCP men in the nearby Party stronghold of Pulai had seen the opportunity. In Gua Musang itself there was a garrison of only fourteen men in a reinforced police post and they had no radio contact with the outside world. A village headman in Pulai had been given a bicycle by the government to get a message quickly