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By Root 4556 0

to Gua Musang in the event of trouble with communists in the Pulai area, but when the attack came, in early July, many villagers from Pulai joined it, including the headman himself. They had been told that Kuala Lumpur had fallen to the communists and that this was merely a mopping-up operation. They first captured the police inspector, but he managed to escape to the police post to rally its defenders. He was persuaded to surrender when it was suggested to him by his sergeant that grenades could be lobbed into the post from a huge limestone outcrop that towered over the town. The defenders were then each given $20 and a cup of coffee by the victorious guerrillas. The first British army relief party was pushed back, but the second forced the guerrillas to retire into the jungle, together with villagers. The final attack was supported by RAF Spitfires. The villagers believed that they were from liberating Chinese armies, until they were strafed by them.115 The communists had held their liberated area for five days.

Once again, the leadership’s plans had been pre-empted from below. The large units had to break up, and many of the Perak units slipped back over the watershed to operate in Kinta, around Ipoh and Sungei Siput. Now that an orthodox strategy was denied it, at least for a time, the MCP changed tactics. For much of the rest of the year the characteristic operations were small scale, often led by the MCP’s ‘special mobile squads’ in urban and semi-urban areas. They were brutal affairs. The first attacks occurred in Ipoh: on 1 October a Kuomintang newspaper in Ipoh, Kin Kwok Daily News, was attacked with a grenade. It landed on a reporter’s table and killed him instantly. Most of the victims were Chinese contractors and businessmen. There were also attacks on the night trains from Kuala Lumpur and, increasingly, rubber estates were the targets of specialized industrial sabotage. Trees were slashed with knives to put them out of production. On the night of 18–19 November, in Tapah alone 30,000 trees were destroyed. Planters estimated that most would take up to seven years to recover. The cost was measured in tens of thousands of dollars.116 Another campaign was against national registration. The ‘bodystealing cards’, as they were called, hit the MCP hard, as they damaged their units’ ability to move freely. Slogans appeared in public places: ‘Photographers will be killed. Authenticators will suffer.’ Photographic shops were raided and negatives and prints stolen and destroyed. The purpose of the cards, the MCP announced, ‘is to tie up people tightly, thus enabling them to burn, kill, drive out, rape and make fun of the people at their pleasure’. It instructed people to ‘Use your identity cards as joss paper.’117

But it was in the squatter settlements that battle was joined most fiercely. The British saw entire peasant communities as supporters of the guerrillas. Operations against them began in Sungei Siput on 20 and 29 October, when 456 squatters were evicted and their houses burned behind them. In Tronoh in the same month over 700 people were forced into town when their homes were destroyed. The rebel town of Pulai in Kelantan was razed to the ground. The management of Batu Arang, with the help of the British army, managed finally to evict 5,000 squatters from their land. In justifying these actions to Creech Jones, Gurney argued that the squatters ‘have no part whatsoever in the community life of Malaya. They do not speak the Malay language and remained completely Chinese in outlook. By no stretch of the imagination can they lay claim at present to belong to the country.’118 Suspects were summarily detained. An over-large quantity of rice, drinking cups or torch batteries were sufficient grounds for arrest.119 The military applied a ‘callus test’ to find those whose hands did not seem hardened by toil. Gurney argued that the displaced squatters of Sungei Siput were offered alternative land in the Dindings, that they were in fact ‘resettled’. One of the few journalists to write about this in any depth was Harry Fang