Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [310]
CTs ‘communist terrorists’ (not all of whom were combatants), 1,865 members of the security forces, most of them Malay policeman, and 2,473 civilians, most of them Chinese.6 The fury of counter-terror did not abate. In the second year of the Emergency veterans of clandestine warfare or colonial police operations in the Middle East and Africa continued to gravitate to Malaya. On the recommendation of Field Marshal Slim, Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, who had been second-in-command to Orde Wingate in Burma, was sent in 1950 to review the situation. On an early foray into the forest he was welcomed by a grenade, lobbed at him with the pin still in. To it was attached the message: ‘How do you do, Mr Calvert’. The Emergency remained a very personal war. ‘I went to the brothels and picked up the gossip of the gutter’, he recalled, and after six months he delivered a tough-minded report. British troops, he concluded, lacked aggression. One Scots Guards officer was allegedly heard to say that it was not his job ‘just to chase bare-arsed niggers around South East Asia’. Calvert recommended the formation of a deep-jungle penetration force, which included Orang Asli.7 From this the Special Air Squadron was revived as ‘The Malayan Scouts (SAS Regiment)’. They adopted a Malay kris as their emblem, but the ethos and philosophy was that of the Chindits: informal, unorthodox and hard living. By September 1950 the Malayan Scouts camp at Dusun Tua was filled with ex-Chindits, volunteer national servicemen and unruly elements from other units of which their commanding officers were trying to rid themselves. It even attracted a group of French foreign legionnaires who had deserted en route to Indo-China. Still the foe was elusive; one eight-week training mission from October 1950 brought no contact with the insurgents, and the unit attracted press criticism and the hostility of other units over its lax discipline, wild parties and the wearing of beards. New drafts for the SAS from the United Kingdom were appalled, and Calvert was recalled.8 In late 1951 the force was reorganized by Lieutenant Colonel John Sloane and many of the locally recruited men were sent back to their units. But from this a highly specialized form of warfare evolved, fought by shock troops, in which guerrilla warfare was met with its own methods.9
This was not a war which the British could win alone: in mid-November 1951, there were deployed in Malaya seven British infantry battalions, eight Gurkha battalions, three ‘colonial’ battalions and the Malayan Scouts, two Royal Armoured Corps regiments, one Royal Marine commando brigade, four battalions of the Malay Regiment, ten RAF squadrons, two Royal Australian Air Force squadrons and a small naval contingent. This reliance on imperial auxiliaries remained controversial and nearly collapsed when Nepalese communists campaigned to dissuade young men from joining the Gurkhas and Indian opposition parties in the Lok Sabha pressurized Nehru to end the use of the ‘sacred soil’ of India to recruit for the war in Malaya.10 The British looked further afield. Calvert had preferred Australian and Rhodesian recruits, in whom he felt the frontier spirit of empire still burned. He even travelled to apartheid South Africa to seek new drafts of men. But white troops were expensive. Instead, the first African units of the King’s African Rifles arrived in 1951 and would rotate in Malaya for the next few years. But for the Mau Mau rebellion, more of these askaris would have been sent. Most had joined for the improved pay and allowances, but they had a tough time in Malaya. It was fallaciously assumed that Africans were ‘natural’ jungle fighters, but the conditions were entirely new to them. So too was the diet. They were supplied from Australia with an ‘African’ maize meal, posho, which was often too roughly or finely ground for their taste. They were viewed with suspicion on all sides. In the field they were put to the task of ‘shamba bashing’ – the destruction of food crops in the jungle – and the communists put it about that they were cannibals.