History is funny, in that entire wars can sometimes get lost to it.
Often, the bloodier, more atrocious conflicts take the spotlight, notably the two world wars
and Vietnam. That doesn't mean some of the lesser-known wars weren't horrible, though,
nor that they were insignificant. Far from it. One conflict which tends to get swept
under the rug is the Malayan Emergency. While you've probably heard of the Emergency before,
you may not know what actually happened on the Malay Peninsula between 1948 and 1960
in the wake of the Japanese occupation. In this video, we hope to rectify that, telling the story
of an oft-forgotten war fought between the British Commonwealth and an army of communist guerrillas.
The British Empire remains the largest the world has ever seen, and from the early 1800s to 1957,
many of the states of the Malayan Peninsula were a part of it. From the late 1800s to 1942,
four of these states—including Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan,
and Pahang—formed the Federated Malay States and were under the control and protection of Britain.
A further five made up the Unfederated Malay States. These were Johor, Kedah, Kelantan,
Perlis, and Terengganu. Lastly, four physically smaller states located on the peninsula made up
the British Straits Settlements, including Penang, Malacca, Dinding, and Singapore. Collectively,
these federated states, unfederated states, and colonies were loosely defined as British Malaya.
While British rule of Malaya came with its own slew of problems,
nothing could have prepared the Malayans for the Japanese occupation during the Second World
War. Just an hour before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Lieutenant General
Tomoyuki Yamashita's 25th Army made an amphibious landing on a beach in the unfederated state of
Kelantan. This was at one of the most northern points of British Malaya, on the eastern coast.
After defeating the British Indian Army on the beach,
the Japanese stormed south along the peninsula, smashing through the Allied defensive lines.
Fast losing their foothold, the British made a deal with the Malayan Communist Party or MCP.
In short, they released ethnic Chinese communists from prison, armed them,
and trained them to fight a guerrilla war against the Japanese. These guerrillas were later deemed
the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army or MPAJA. While eager, they weren't deployed in time to
have a significant impact upon the advancing Japanese. They were also too few in number.
By the 31st of January 1942, British Malaya was in Japanese hands. Singapore, however, did not fall
until mid-February, following the largest British surrender in history. The Japanese invasion of the
peninsula was a massive blow to British morale. It had also broken the illusion that the British had
things under control in Malaya, and demonstrated to the peninsula that the British could bleed.
As for the MPAJA, they had less than 200 members at this time, and many of their
attempts to harass the invaders were met with reprisals against Chinese civilians. As a result,
many Chinese fled into the forests, where they worked with the MPAJA
or joined their ranks. Throughout the brutal Japanese occupation—and
following some major setbacks, such as the Batu Caves massacre—the MPAJA's numbers swelled,
reaching 4,500 guerrillas by 1943. By the end of 1944, that number was greater than 7,000.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, however,
the British stepped back in before the MPAJA could seize control,
outright banning the communist organisation and recalling their guns. Almost 5,500 weapons were
returned to the British in demobilisation parades—but not all of them were returned.
After World War II, the British merged the various states of what was formerly British
Malaya into the Malayan Union, a British colony, to consolidate their hold on the peninsula.
Singapore was the only state that remained separate. The Malayan Union was short-lived,
however, established in April 1946 and succeeded by the Federation of Malaya in 1948.
This new federation was a British protectorate, and the situation there was far from ideal.
Many Malayans were sick of the British and now knew that they could be defeated. World War II had
damaged the economy, and unemployment was rife. This prompted people to push for trade unions,
which inclined them towards the MCP. The communists organised hundreds of strikes
between 1946 and 1948, and the British colonial police responded with arrests,
deportations, and the banning of trade unions. On the 16th of June 1948, Malayan communists gunned
down three British plantation managers in the town of Sungai Siput in the state of Perak. Following
these murders, the British declared the situation an emergency, and things went south from there.
Ready to wrest control of Malaya from the British, many ex-MPAJA members banded together to form the
Malayan National Liberation Army or MNLA. Now they would fight another guerrilla war,
this time against the people who had previously trained and armed them.
The Malayan Emergency or, as some know it, the Anti-British National Liberation War had begun.
Now, many historians make comparisons between the Emergency and the Vietnam War due to the
time in which the Emergency occurred and some of the strategies employed and atrocities committed.
There were more differences between these conflicts, however—differences
that had a drastic effect on the overall result of the war. Notably, the scale of the two conflicts
can't really be compared. Where the PVAN and Vietcong boasted forces whose numbers were
in the hundreds of thousands, the MNLA reached a peak of some 8,000 troops, and unlike in Vietnam,
the MNLA didn't enjoy military support from any powerful external nation. Much of the MNLA was
ethnically Chinese as well, representing just one of the peninsula's ethnic groups,
a group for which many Malayans had no love. Still, there were over 3 million ethnic Chinese
living in Malaya at the time, of which as many as a million may have been MNLA sympathisers.
Unlike America in the Vietnam War, the British sought to avoid branding the Malayan Emergency
as a war. Rather than fielding massive armies and marching head-first into the fray,
they answered unconventional tactics in kind, and they also contested the MNLA with some 250,000
members of the Malayan Home Guard and over 65,000 police, many of whom were Malayan.
British and British Commonwealth forces amounted to around 40,000 troops. Despite their numbers,
and despite how they wanted the war to appear to the Malayans and the rest of the world,
the British did not simply roll over the MNLA and were not opposed to playing dirty.
With the MNLA woven through the jungle and receiving support from the rural Chinese
population, the British—a term we're using as a bit of a catch-all for the British,
the British Commonwealth, and the pro-British Malayan forces—weren't
initially sure how to handle the guerrillas, who targeted Britain's rubber plantations and
tin mines in the hopes that it would bankrupt them. Things changed in 1950, however, when
Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Rawdon Briggs came to town. As the British Director of Operations,
Briggs implemented the appropriately named Briggs Plan, which was basically to starve the MNLA out.
The British constructed 450 fortified settlements to detain ethnic Chinese
after they forcefully relocated as many as 400,000 from their homes. Doing so, they prevented
these people from producing food that could potentially end up in the mouths of the MNLA.
This strategy had the added effect of nipping civilian intelligence networks in the bud.
As many as 100,000 non-Chinese Malayans were also placed in these so-called "new villages," however,
leaving a sour taste in the Malayan's mouths. The British weren't above burning farmland and houses
to smoke out the pro-MNLA civilians, nor spraying crops and trees with Agent Orange to further
starve the MNLA. They often laid waste to jungles and swamps with aerial and artillery bombardments
to blast the guerrillas out of hiding and into ambushes. They also flew in specialised units
adept at jungle warfare, such as the Royal Marines and the SAS, to give the guerrillas a taste of
their own medicine. Sweeping the countryside with entire armies simply wouldn't have worked.
If burning civilian homes and Agent Orange weren't grim enough for you,
the British committed at least one massacre against the civilian population.
We're talking, of course, the Batang Kali massacre of December 1948, later described
as Britain's My Lai and swept under the rug by the British government for over 60 years. Here,
a British unit known as the Scots Guards rounded up 25 civilians at a rubber plantation,
interrogated them, and then shot 25 of them dead in front of their wives and children.
After bringing in some Iban headhunters from Borneo to fight the MNLA, some British soldiers
assumed the practice of headhunting, taking the heads of slain guerrillas as trophies.
Torture was used as an interrogation method and to incite fear as well.
Atrocities aside, the Briggs Planned largely worked. Throughout the 1950s, the MNLA's strength
waned. To put it in perspective, by the end of the conflict, some 6,700 guerrillas had been killed.
In September 1955, the government offered the remaining communists amnesty if they
put down their guns and turned themselves in. Few took this offer, and the government
retracted it in February 1956. Concurrently, the Federation of Malaya, sick of all the drama,
was striving for independence, which it gained on the 31st of August 1957. Over the next
three years, the Emergency petered out, with the MNLA's demands for peace getting knocked
back again and again. The surviving guerrillas fled to the Thai border in 1960, where they
regrouped in preparation for the Second Malayan Emergency, which would begin in eight years' time.
But that's a story for later. For now, had you heard of the Malayan Emergency before today?
Do you know anything about it we didn't cover in this video? And lastly, would you like us to
cover the Second Malayan Emergency? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.