Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [281]
The war had now retreated from the towns, and the enemy was largely unseen. For British and Gurkha troops, the campaign was a succession of long, exhausting ‘jungle bashes’, broken by sudden, furious combat. In the dense undergrowth, adversaries might not spot each other until they were almost face to face. A Gurkha, Jasbahadur Limbu, described an encounter with a guerrilla: ‘We looked at each other. He did not have his weapon ready, but mine was. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. I then shot him dead…’42 But direct skirmishes constituted only 10 per cent of incidents in the early stages of the Emergency.43 The most deadly encounters were ambushes on the roads. An incident in Sungei Siput on 31 December 1948 was typical: a troop of A Squadron of the 4th Hussars, in three vehicles, was attacked by around seventy guerrillas. Of the nineteen British soldiers, seven were killed and nine wounded. In what was a chaotic firefight, the Hussars’ radio malfunctioned and they could not call for assistance. As the survivors tried to escape they saw the guerrillas firing lethal rounds into the wounded they had left behind.44 In 1949 the guerrillas killed 229 and wounded 247 security forces personnel. This sowed fear and dismay, but the communists failed to convert it into more substantial gains. On 1 February, in an attempt to claim patriotic legitimacy across all communities, the guerrilla force was renamed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).45 Its commanders still looked to create a ‘liberated area’ in the Pulai and Gua Musang region. Two fighting units around 200 strong, and one more 100 strong, were concentrated in the old resistance stronghold of the Cameron Highlands, where there were ready supplies from Chinese vegetable farmers who had colonized its elevated valleys. It was also Malaya’s most popular hill station; but now the roads up to it were designated ‘red routes’ and the few intrepid golfers needed military escorts to reach the fairways. At the same time the other large concentrations of guerrillas in Johore pressed northwards towards Tasek Bera in Pahang, a large inland lake that nestles at the southern end of the central range. This was the dead centre of the peninsula: a point from where the MNLA could launch diversionary attacks on the main north–south railway, and its northeastern branch line, while the northern force created a ‘little Yenan’ at the railhead at Gua Musang. In Party annals these treks would be known as ‘the little Long Marches’.
Both operations were aborted. Gurkha operations unsettled the Gua Musang area, and there was no repeat of the occupation of mid 1948. The tropical rainforest is sparse in natural provender and commanders faced acute difficulties in keeping large units together for more than a short period of time. The communists turned to the aborigines, the Orang Asli, for supplies, but they had little to give and the big battalions had to be broken up. The convergence on Tasek Bera failed for the same reason. Smaller bands of guerrillas were pushed deeper into the jungle interior and further from the villages. In the meantime Chin Peng had left the Cameron Highlands in December 1948 to fulfil his original objective of creating a Party military HQ in central Pahang. With a five-man bodyguard, he moved into the Kuala Lipis region, travelling about sixty miles as the crow flies towards Raub; but, finding his way blocked by the security forces, he then swung to the east and south to a place known as ‘Ten Milestone Village’, on the road just east of Mentekab. But such was the tortuous nature of forest communications that he arrived there only in May 1949. Half an hour’s trek from the road, a camp had been prepared for him, and he was reunited with