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South East Asia Command’s search for allies, and its bonanza of arms, extended to the Malays as well. There were anti-Japanese groups in Perak and Kedah that called themselves Askar Melayu Setia – the Loyal Malay Soldier – and in the wild west of Pahang, Wataniah – For the Homeland. They had their own Force 136 liaison officers, and the British parachuted in to them some Malay agents: mostly former civil servants or pilgrims to Mecca who had become stranded by the war in the bazaars of Cairo and Bombay. As the tide of war turned, these movements obtained covert support from Malay courts and district officers, not least to counter-balance the influence of the MPAJA. For the British their importance was not so much military as political: they were vital to dispel the idea that the Malay majority were disloyal to the Empire.

American agents of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, were also becoming increasingly interested in Malaya, and had parachuted in at a late stage. On direct orders from Colombo, and working with Wataniah, a small party captured the Sultan of Pahang en route to Kuala Lumpur, and placed him under armed guard. The sultan was kept in a squalid jungle camp together with a huddle of fractious Chinese refugees for over three weeks. This was ostensibly to prevent him falling into the hands of the communists; it was also to stop him acting as titular head of the independent Malay government that was about to be formed in the capital. But the rumour was put about that the communists had taken him, and this raised ethnic tensions in the state.71 In the event, few of the royal houses were molested. In Kedah, the defence of the Sultan of Kedah’s palace and of Malay villages was orchestrated by a youth organization, known as Saberkas, a co-operative society formed in the state capital in 1944. Among its patrons was a middle-aged prince from the ruling house of the state, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who had before the war enjoyed a reputation as something of a playboy. Like many Malay aristocrats he had lain low in the occupation, working as a district officer and, with quiet acumen, tried to deflect some of the worst excesses of Japanese rule away from the population. In the interregnum he managed to use his influence with Malay young men to recruit four lorry-loads of Malays for Force 136 and to keep racial violence at bay.72 These acts would give him good credentials for the defence of Malay interests when, some six years later, as a somewhat unlikely contender, he would emerge as a major political force.

The Malay elite had lost ground in the war, and now struggled to reclaim their position. At the height of the violence in Batu Pahat in Johore, Sultan Ibrahim appointed a fifty-year-old local notable, Onn bin Jaafar, as district officer, after the incumbent was assassinated by the MPAJA. Over the years Onn had enjoyed a stormy relationship with his royal patron; he had been raised at court, and his father had been the sultan’s chief minister, but his family had fallen from grace and Onn had made his own way in Singapore as one of the first full-time Malay journalists. In 1928 he was accused of lèse majesté and treason after he wrote a series of articles called ‘Tyranny in Johore’ for an English-language newspaper, attacking the sultan for abuse of power, extravagance and corruption (‘His motor car deals would excite the envy of a Lombardy Jew’).73 However, a talented man of letters was too influential to overlook, and Onn was rehabilitated by Sultan Ibrahim shortly before the war. Onn had stood quietly to one side as the Japanese conquered Malaya; his son, Hussain – a later prime minister of Malaysia – served in the Indian Army. But like other prominent Malays, he had been implicated in Ibrahim Yaacob’s movement for independence in 1945. As the violence in his district reached a head, and Kyai Salleh’s supporters massed to attack the Chinese town of Batu Pahat, Onn made a decisive