Massacre in Malaya

Exposing Britain's My Lai

Christopher Hale

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780752487014
• eBook ISBN: 9780750951814
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was the longest war waged by British and Commonwealth forces in the twentieth century. Fought against communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya, this undeclared 'war without a name' had a powerful and covert influence on American strategy in Vietnam. Many military historians still consider the Emergency an exemplary, even inspiring, counterinsurgency conflict. Massacre in Malaya draws on recently released files from British archives, as well as eyewitness accounts from both the government forces and communist fighters, to challenge this view. It focuses on the notorious 'Batang Kali Massacre' – known as 'Britain's My Lai' – that took place in December, 1948, and reveals that British tactics in Malaya were more ruthless than many historians concede. Counterinsurgency in Malaya, as in Kenya during the same period, depended on massive resettlement programmes and ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate aerial bombing and ruthless exploitation of aboriginal peoples, the Orang Asli. The Emergency was a discriminatory war. In Malaya, the British built a brutal and pervasive security state – and bequeathed it to modern Malaysia. The 'Malayan Emergency' was a bitterly fought war that still haunts the present.

1

THE BATTLEFIELD

The Least Known Part of the Globe

‘Public opinion,’ lamented Isabella Bird in 1879 ‘never reaches these equatorial jungles; we are grossly ignorant of their inhabitants and of their rights […] unless some fresh disturbance and another “little war” should concentrate our attention for a moment on these distant states, we are likely to remain so, to their great detriment […] I felt humiliated by my ignorance.’

For much of the nineteenth century Malaya lay in the shadow of British India. A position in the Malayan Civil Service, the MCS, was for second-raters: the elite served the Raj. It was not until Britain lost Malaya and Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 that its value was fully appreciated. When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the near-bankrupted new Labour government in London would do everything in its power to hold onto ‘these equatorial jungles’ and their wealth. The Malayan Peninsula divides the Bay of Bengal from the South China Sea and resembles a misshapen limb bent towards the vast Indonesian Archipelago and the Philippine Islands. Once called ‘Further India’ or the ‘Far Eastern Tropics’, this arc of islands and peninsulas was demeaned as an extension of India or a tropical appendage of the Far East. With the exception of Thailand, Europeans who came here encountered not a single polity that resembled a nation state. Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei are all creations of imperialism – French, British, Dutch and American. It was the Japanese armies that rampaged through the Malayan Peninsula and into the Philippines and Indonesia in 1942 that definitively stamped out a grander regional identity, a fact of conquest recognised by British military commanders when they established ‘South East Asia Command’, or SEAC, to oust these impertinent Asian imperialists. For Alfred Russell Wallace (with Charles Darwin, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection) Southeast Asia was the ‘Malay Archipelago’. This plucky naturalist spent little time in the peninsula: it was the archipelago that fascinated him most. He began his engrossing account:

To the ordinary Englishman this is perhaps the least known part of the globe. Our possessions in it are few and scanty; scarcely any of our travellers go to explore it; and in many collections of maps it is almost ignored, being divided between Asia and the Pacific Islands […] Situated upon the Equator, and bathed by the tepid water of the great tropical oceans, this region enjoys a climate more uniformly hot and moist than almost any other part of the globe, and teems with natural productions which are elsewhere unknown. The richest of fruits and the most precious of spices are indigenous here …

Wallace published The Malay Archipelago in 1869. Three decades later, this hot, wet and teeming world was transformed utterly by Portuguese, Dutch, French and English colonisers. Territorial borders that were once contested between European powers now demarcate the political boundaries of the brand new nations like Malaysia and Indonesia, which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. From the point of view of Asian nationalists, the colonial powers violently dismembered a unified ethnic and cultural domain. There is no territorial logic that can rationalise severing modern Malaysia from the rest of the Indonesian Archipelago. When Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque sailed into Malacca harbour with guns blazing on 2 May 1511, he inaugurated the destruction of a distinct ‘Malay World’ encompassing much of modern Southeast Asia, whose legendary splendour rivalled that of Mogul India. Nations depend on such assertions of antiquity and unity. According to Gandhi, ‘India was one undivided land […] made by nature.’ Nehru spoke of an ‘impress of oneness’ going back 6,000 years. ‘Mother India’ is a myth. In pre-modern times, the Indian subcontinent was never a single political or cultural entity. It was in fact a mutable hotchpotch of petty and middle-sized kingdoms that had little in common. Arguably, ‘India’ was a European invention: there is no equivalent term in any indigenous language. Likewise, ‘Indonesia’, which yokes together the Greek ‘Indus’ and ‘nèsos’, meaning islands, was first used by English ethnologists and popularised by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian. Nations, in short, demand a prestigious genealogy. Today, the legend of a once glorious ‘Malay World’ inhabited by a unitary indigenous people nourishes chauvinist racial politics that enshrines Muslim Malays as indigenous ‘Bumiputera’ or ‘Princes/sons of the Soil’. The idea is profoundly atavistic. It is a truism to say that we are all the children of migrants. Modern genetics has sketched a global cartography of human interconnectedness, the consequence of a history of incessant wandering, settlement and emigration.

This axiom is especially pertinent to Southeast Asia where successive waves of migrants have churned back and forth to forge unique regional cultures. These are the ‘Lands of the Monsoon’ straddling the equator, much warmer than China and wetter than the greater part of the Indian subcontinent. For millennia, Southeast Asia has been a maritime crossroads. Its rugged and intricate topography is deeply incised by oceanic waters, and copious rainfall has generated an intricate network of interlaced waterways. The first classical geographers, such as Ptolemy, recorded jewel-like clusters of ports in the region they called the Chersonesus Aurea, the Golden Chersonese. Though on its northern borders Southeast Asia was cut off from the continental interior and its ancient centres of human dispersal by the icy ramparts of the Tibetan plateau, the entire region to the south has been exposed to seaborne settlement and incursion of peoples and cultures as well as ceaseless internal migration from island to island. These convergences and dispersals have over tens of thousands of years created a human topography of remarkable diversity that in many ways evokes the civilisations of the ancient Aegean, which Plato compared to ‘ants and frogs around a pond’. Thousands of years before Europeans came here, Southeast Asia was globally interconnected. Archaeologists have excavated the bones of Stone Age humans in Perak whose ancestors evolved in Africa. Modern humans, with their big, inquisitive brains, were wanderers and explorers who seem to have loped across the ancient land bridge connecting Asia with the far reaches of the archipelago before the end of the last Ice Age. These long-vanished people may well be the distant forebears of the Malayan aboriginals, called in Malay ‘Orang Asli’, the ‘original people’. The Malays, too, were intruders once. They probably migrated southward from the Asian interior and then spread across the entire archipelago. Later, the great pump of the monsoon brought Greeks, Arabs, Persians and Indians from the west and Chinese from the east. Here, for 1,000 years, was one of the great centres of Hindu culture centuries before the coming of Islam. This astonishing human and cultural liquescence renders meaningless the idea of a single race of indigenes. Before the first Europeans sailed tentatively into the Straits of Malacca, fleets from India and China sailed to Southeast Asia with one monsoon and returned home with another. For millennia, the great migrational pump of the monsoon churned and shuffled the gene pool.

In the vast water world of Southeast Asia, the Malayan Peninsula is in some ways anomalous. Unlike the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines, this slender rocky limb is attached to the Eurasian landmass and forms its south-eastern extremity. Modern Malaysia, of course, shares the peninsula with Burma and Thailand. Many borderland regions become battlegrounds and this one is no exception. Thai rulers once claimed sovereignty over the northern Malay states of Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan, and Terengganu; it was here that Japanese armies landed in December 1941 and it was to the Thai border that Malayan communist guerrillas retreated in the mid-1950s. Many retired communist freedom fighters still live in ‘Peace Villages’ close to the Malaysian border in Thailand. For some years radical Muslim insurgents linked to ‘Jemaah Islamijah’ have been engaged in a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the southern Thai state of Patani. The colonial administrator, Sir Hugh Clifford, in his book In Court and Kampong, left us a wonderful account of the pristine peninsula rain forests as they were in the late nineteenth century:

These forests are among the wonderful things of the Earth. They are immense in extent, and the trees which form them grow so close together that they tread on one another’s toes. All are lashed, and bound, and relashed, into one huge magnificent tangled net, by the thickest underwood, and the most marvellous parasitic growths that nature has ever devised. No human being can force his way through this maze of trees, and shrubs, and thorns, and plants, and creepers; and even the great beasts which dwell in the jungle find their strength unequal to the task, and have to follow game paths, beaten out by the passage of innumerable animals, through the thickest and deepest parts of the forest. The branches cross and recross, and are bound together by countless parasitic creepers, forming a green canopy overhead, through which the fierce sunlight only forces a partial passage, the struggling rays flecking the trees on which they fall with little splashes of light and colour. The air ‘hangs heavy as remembered sin’, and the gloom of a great cathedral is on every side. Everything is damp, and moist, and oppressive.

Mountain, river and jungle. These are the physical protagonists that have channelled and sculpted the incessant flow of migrations and settlements, the drama of encounters, skirmishes and wars. It is a topography that can be both a barrier and a refuge. Some seven or eight major mountain ranges ripple down the peninsula separated by deep furrows. The most impressive is the prosaically named Main Range, which extends uninterrupted from the Thai border to Negeri Sembilan before tapering into the flat lands of Johor. The granite cores of the Main Range are encrusted with a patina of sedimentary limestone that has been eroded to a distinctive topography of towering bluffs and spires riddled with caves and fissures. This rocky landscape is itself sheathed up to a level of about 2,000ft by immense evergreen rainforests that once covered four-fifths of the peninsula. This ancient jungle is now being steadily eroded by desolate plantations of oil palms.

To east and west, the long green spine of the central ranges descends to rolling foothills and coastal plains. The west coast facing across the narrow Straits of Malacca towards the great island of Sumatra is edged along its entire length by tangled mangrove swamps and shimmering expanses of mud. These mud flats can deceive the unwary. When British troops landed on Morib Beach near Port Swettenham in September 1945, what in aerial photographs appeared to be solid ground turned out to be a deceptive crust concealing layers of silt that ensnared tanks and trucks. On the other side of the Main Range, the east coast possesses an entirely different character. The north-east monsoon that batters its shores between November and February checks the spread of mangroves. Long sandy beaches stretch for mile upon mile broken by shingle spits and rocky headlands. The east coast is notoriously treacherous, as thousands of Japanese soldiers discovered when they struggled through pounding waves towards the beaches at Kota Bahru in December 1941. On the west side of the peninsula, the Straits of Malacca are sheltered by the island of Sumatra and the Malayan highlands and are for much of the year as placid as an inland sea. For merchants and travellers propelled across the Bay of Bengal by the monsoon, the straits are the maritime gateway to Southeast Asia. Sir Hugh Clifford called the straits the ‘front door’ of the peninsula – the east, across the Main Range, was ‘the other side of silence’.

The peninsula can boast no grand relics of ancient civilisations like the pyramidal Buddhist temple of Borobudur on Java or the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Excavations at Sungai Batu in the Bujang Valley in Kedah have uncovered evidence that the Chola (or Chozhan) kingdom in southern India established some kind of settlement here on the banks of the Muda River to mine and export local deposits of iron ore. Malaysian archaeologists have claimed the Bujang Valley as early evidence of Malay civilisation. Although Chinese records from the first century seem to refer to a kingdom called ‘Lang-ya-xiu’ or ‘Langkasuka’, excavations have so far uncovered not a shred of evidence of an indigenous culture. Malays were thoroughly Indianised before their conversion to Islam. ‘Singapura’ is believed to derive from a Sanskrit term meaning ‘Lion City’. In the north-east, the Malay states of Kelantan, Terengganu and northern Pahang may have developed similarly derivative ties with the Mon-Khmer lands to the north. The simple fact is that the peninsula was hard to settle. Granite, the bedrock of the peninsula, does not yield fertile soils – and from whatever direction the peninsula was approached early settlers found their way to the interior blocked by jungle. Settlement was localised in a few relatively favoured lowland areas and in clusters scattered along the coastal edges of the peninsula, where rivers met the sea. It was not that the Malays and the other peoples passing through the peninsula were in some way deficient. The ancient civilisations of Burma, Thailand and Cambodia all flourished in great fertile river basins. Well-fed rice growers built the great monuments of central Java. The main factor shaping the history of the Malayan Peninsula is a severely limited capacity to grow food crops, which over time has handicapped the development of political power. Malaya has been described as a ‘causeway and breakwater of massive proportions’, but as English political geographer Halford Mackinder always insisted, even a sea power has to be ‘nourished by land-fertility somewhere’. Even Malacca, the great west coast emporium of the spice trade, which dominated all the small river-basin sultanates of the peninsula as far north as Kedah and Patani, was held back by the limited food production capacity of its hinterland. According to a Chinese observer, the soil of Malacca was barren and saline; rice had to be imported from Java. For much of its history, the peninsula was a backwater.

As the classical geographers suspected, the ‘Golden Chersonese’ were endowed with riches. But the most valuable were secretive – and inedible. Iron, as we have already noted, was mined in the Bujang Valley in Kedah and exported to southern India more than 1,000 years ago. It was only much later in the nineteenth century that Malaya’s mineral resources became unique assets – tin above all was the making of Malaya. In wet tropical climates, granite weathers swiftly. As the core rock crumbles, quartz, feldspars and other silicate minerals break down to form clays which are carried away by streams. The toughest crystals coalesce as gravels. Concentrated inside these alluvial gravels is a heavy mineral called cassiterite that accumulates in what geologists call lenses that are distributed along a horizon in the gravel. This, in brief, is the creation story of tin. So it was that the lodes, veins and scattered crystals released from the granitic cores of the peninsula ranges were washed into the foothills of western Malaya to form a band of alluvial fans impregnated with this dull silvery ore. Tin in this form is not difficult to extract – and Malays had extracted small amounts for centuries. It was Chinese immigrants who first saw the immense potential of Malaya’s alluvial tin deposits. The tin rush that began in the Larut field in 1848 would transform Malaya from a backwater into an economic powerhouse controlled by people feared as outsiders. The Malayan wars had begun.

The Sudden Rampage, 8 December 1941

Early morning, 4 December 1941: Samah harbour on the Japanese occupied island of Hainan in the Gulf of Tongkin. As a sheet white moon set in the western sky, the sun burst above the horizon making the still ocean surface shimmer gold and silver. This picture-postcard vista delighted Colonel Masanobo Tsuji as he stood on the bridge of the amphibious assault ship Ryujo Maru, ‘The Dragon and the Castle’. Designed as an aircraft carrier, this odd flat-topped vessel was the temporary headquarters of the Japanese 25th Army, commanded by Lt General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Colonel Tsuji owed nothing to privilege and everything to intelligence and grit. He loved kendo fencing – but spurned most other time-wasting sports, as well as alcohol and women. He had vowed to abstain from any sexual activity until after Singapore had fallen. Tsuji was notoriously short-tempered and regarded as a killjoy by many of his fellow officers. But that morning the lurid splendour of the rising sun perfectly matched his exultant mood.

If the diminutive colonel was a prig, he was one with clout. He was the strategic mastermind behind a plan of conquest that would, in less than two months, bring more than a century of colonial rule in Malaya to an inglorious end. As the moon dipped out of sight, and the hot-red sun rose ever higher above the horizon, the Ryujo Maru and an armada of Japanese troopships, led by the flagship Chokai and flanked by two lines of destroyers and minesweepers, began steaming south-west towards the coast of Thailand. The die, as Tsuji reflected, had been cast. As the lush tropical coast of Hainan Island receded slowly astern, he conjured up the faces of his mother, his wife and children waiting at home in Japan. The fate of the nation hinged on the success of his plan.

Crammed inside the Ryujo Maru and the other transport ships were 83,000 soldiers, squatting or sprawling just a few inches apart. Most of the men were horribly seasick. Tsuji was one of the few onboard who seemed immune. This was the Japanese 25th Army – their mission: the invasion of British Malaya and the capture of Singapore. Tsuji had begun detailed planning at the Taiwan Army Research Centre at the beginning of 1941 for the conquest of Southeast Asia. The Chinese had ceded Taiwan (called Formosa by the Portuguese) to the Japanese in 1895 and the island had become a fortress with a large garrison. Japanese soldiers had very little experience of fighting in the tropics. At the research centre, Tsuji and just ten staff officers struggled to gather every scrap of information they could lay their hands on about tropical warfare. They staged exercises on the sandy beaches of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu to simulate the rigours of disembarkation. Tsuji and his team investigated ways to cope with heat, mosquitoes and snakes; they advocated hygiene and recommended swallowing the raw livers of tropical snakes for stamina. As the Japanese armada turned into the Gulf of Thailand, the emperor’s soldiers in their cramped and uncomfortable quarters below deck longed desperately for the voyage to be over. They were confident of victory. A lucky few had the stomach to wolf down meagre rations of rice, miso and pickled radish. Some pored over Colonel Tsuji’s pamphlet Read this Alone and the War can be Won. This was both a practical guidebook and propagandist exhortation:

… at stake in the present war, without a doubt, is the future prosperity or decline of the [Japanese] Empire […] Regard yourself as an avenger come face to face at last with his father’s murderer. Here before you is the [Westerner] whose death will lighten your heart …

Although Tsuji stressed that the task of the Imperial Army was to build a new ‘Asia for Asians’, they should not ‘expect too much of the natives’. Malays, many Japanese believed, were backward peasants. The Chinese, on the other hand, Tsuji warned, were mere ‘extortionists’ – not fit to join the ‘Asian Brotherhood’.

The Japanese convoy closing in on the Malayan Peninsula was one part of an audacious master plan intended to oust the European powers that had for centuries abused and exploited the peoples and treasure of Asia. This imperial crusade was a desperate gamble. Japanese armies were still at war with Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist forces in China; in Europe, the German onslaught against Stalin’s Red Army was foundering in the ice and snow of the Russian winter.

Although Japanese and American diplomats continued to wrangle in Washington, General Hideki Tojo and his planners were convin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and Sources
• A Brief Note on Terms
• Preface: ‘Grossly Unreasonable Force’
• Part One: The Four C’s of Colonialism
• 1 The Battlefield
• 2 The Making of British Malaya
• 3 The Racial State
• Part Two: The Japanese Crucible
• 1 A Nation Is Like a Fish
• 2 The Other Side of History
• 3 Tennouheika Banzai!
• 4 Fighting Back
• Part Three: Malaya Ablaze
• 1 On the Brink
• 2 Infernos
• 3 The Empire Reborn
• 4 The Communist Dilemma
• 5 The Road to Revolt
• 6 The Meaning of Emergency
• 7 The War Without a Name
• 8 Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns
• 9 A Very British Massacre
• 10 Advantage Chin Peng
• 11 The War on the Squatters
• 12 The Lowest Ebb
• Part Four: Remaking Malaya
• 1 War on Hearts and Minds
• 2 A Terrifying Combination of Crassness and Voodoo
• 3 Malaya’s Secret Wars
• 4 A War Without End?
• Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Plate Section
• Copyright