British Ways of Counter-insurgency

A Historical Perspective

Matthew Hughes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415825771
• eBook ISBN: 9781134920525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited collection examines the British 'way' in counter-insurgency. It brings together and consolidates new scholarship on the counter-insurgency associated with the end of empire, foregrounding a dark and violent history of British imperial rule, one that stretched back to the nineteenth century and continued until the final collapse of the British Empire in the 1960s. The essays gathered in the collection cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s; they are both empirical and conceptual in tone.

This edited collection pivots on the theme of the nature of the force used by Britain against colonial insurgents. It argues that the violence employed by British security forces in counter-insurgency to maintain imperial rule is best seen from a maximal perspective, contra traditional arguments that the British used minimum force to defeat colonial rebellions. Case studies are drawn from across the British Empire, covering a period of some hundred years, but they concentrate on the savage wars of decolonisation after 1945. The collection includes a historiographical essay and one on the 'lost' Hanslope archive by the scholar chosen by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to manage the release of the papers held.

This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

Introduction: British ways of counter-insurgency

Matthew Hughes*
Department of Politics and History, Brunel University, Vxbridge, UK

This essay introduces the special issue, drawing together the different studies around the central theme of the nature of the force used by Britain against colonial insurgents. It argues that the violence employed by British security forces in counter-insurgency to maintain imperial rule is best seen from a maximal perspective, contra traditional arguments that the British used minimum force to defeat colonial rebellions. It shows that the use of force became more difficult especially after the Amritsar massacre in 1919. The presence of white settlers in counter-insurgencies – such as in Kenya in the 1950s – accelerated abuse by security forces and complicated the measured use of force against insurgents by the colonial state. The article concludes by drawing lessons from the British experience of counter-insurgency to unconventional military operations today, suggesting that in some situations the use of maximal force is still an option in counter-insurgency.

The British way in counter-insurgency

The product of an international conference held in London in September 2012 and sponsored by the Marine Corps University Foundation (MCUF), the articles presented in this collection are framed around the question of whether there was a British 'way' in counter-insurgency when it came to the use of force by soldiers, a 'hearts and minds' strategy of pacification using minimum force against insurgents and their local civilian supporters. British armed forces were 'generally more scrupulous than most', and worked within the rule of law, avoiding the human rights abuses that marked out other colonial or post-colonial powers, it is argued.¹ 'No country which relies on the law of the land to regulate the lives of its citizens can afford to see that law flouted by its own government, even in an insurgency situation. In other words everything done by a government and its agents in combating insurgency must be legal', was the conclusion of a leading British soldier that expressed the ideal of British counter-insurgency, and an issue discussed in depth in Sir Robert Thompson's influential Defeating Communist Insurgency (1966).² More recently, Caroline Elkins in her Pulitzer-winning book on the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s wrote (ironically):

Decades had been spent constructing Britain's imperial image, and that image contrasted sharply with the brutal behavior of other European empires in Africa. King Leopold's bloody rule in the Congo, the German directed genocide of the Herero in South-West Africa, and France's disgrace in Algeria – the British reputedly avoided all of these excesses because, simply, it was British to do so.³

The defence of the British is that where abuses occurred during counterinsurgency these were exceptional aberrations, rather than examples of systematic or systemic abuse, a point well articulated by Thomas Mockaitis, one of the contributors to this volume:

.. .relatively few cases of documented abuse occurred and these were usually the work of local forces lacking the traditional discipline of the army... Even if allowance is made for the possibility that excesses might have occurred, the sparsity of reported cases over a twenty-year period suggests that on the whole the British behaved with commendable restraint... The British generally did not tolerate anyone taking the law into their own hands. Isolated incidents of ill-treatment no doubt occurred, but these were never the result of official policy. Allegations of misconduct were usually investigated and abuses stopped.⁴

US authors have also seen the British riposte to colonial rebellions as exceptional. Former US army officer John Nagl's recent book on Britain's experiences in counter-insurgency – set reading for US Marine officers studying today on staff college courses – draws lessons from the British success against communist insurgents in Malaya in the 1950s, comparing it to the American failure against insurgent guerrillas in Vietnam a decade later5 The current official US military manual on counter-insurgency (published, significantly, by a major US university press) makes the same point: the police in the van of operations alongside 'well-disciplined' British soldiers were vital to the British success in Malaya.⁶ The use of minimum force when confronting insurgencies minimised abuse against non-combatants during counter-insurgencies, something that is relevant to, say, US Marines trying to avoid needless deaths of civilians, such as happened at Haditha in Iraq in 2005.⁷

Counter-insurgency and history

As well as the discussion on the use of force, this collection contributes to the debate about whether historians and history can or should contribute to diplomacy, statecraft, and the waging of war.⁸ MCUF exists to support professional military education (PME) for soldiers, the 'ammunition for the mind' that is a force multiplier for the country's armed forces; US Marines need to have not just physical but also 'mental fitness'.⁹ Thus, university-level study at staff colleges now forms an integral part of officers' careers, and not just in the US; education for successful officers is taken almost as seriously as training in modern hi-tech armies. MCUF supports these programmes, many of which are based on an understanding of history and past experience. The focus of PME in the US today is on counter-insurgency, the operation that US forces are most likely to engage in the 'war on terror' after 9/11. Counter-insurgency has become the conventional military operation for Western armies. The unconventional is now the conventional. The counter-insurgency strategy of imperial Britain holds historical lessons for today's post-colonial superpowers such as the US and through PME soldiers can learn what to do and what not to do when fighting insurgents. Soldiers can ignore the past and blunder instead into wars that they were bound to lose: France and Britain in 1940, Germany and Japan in 1941 and, arguably, US forces in Iraq in 2003. It was for this reason that Thucydides wrote his famous history of the Peloponnesian War over 2000 years ago, to help 'those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past, and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.'¹⁰ Many of history's best soldiers were students of military history (some even wrote the history, such as Julius Caesar), a subject covered in the volume edited by Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich, to which readers are directed.¹¹

The history of British counter-insurgency lingers in other ways, ones that are not only topical but also have troubling legal and moral implications. Three of the speakers at the conference – David Anderson, Huw Bennett, and Caroline Elkins –work on British counter-insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s and are expert witnesses in the ongoing court case in the UK launched by Kenyans alleging abuse by British forces during the suppression there of the insurgent Mau Mau revolt. A similar court case is mooted for relatives of Malays killed by British soldiers in the communist-led Emergency in that country in the late 1940s, the subject of work by Karl Hack, another of the contributors at the conference.¹² The moral and financial implications for the British government of these legal proceeding are obvious and Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) civil servants attended the event, not typical attendees for such a forum. The release in April 2012 of the first tranche of a 'lost' colonial-era government archive that was held for many years at an FCO storage site at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire has excited academics and the media, and is the subject of the article presented here by Anthony Badger, the scholar chosen in June 2012 by the FCO to manage the re lease to the public of the Hanslope Park archive. The suspicion is that the Hanslope archive was kept hidden as it contained damning evidence of abuses committed during British colonial counter-insurgency campaigns. The Hanslope material promises to be a rich source for historians of empire; its discovery is bound up with the destruction and preservation of archives decades ago by colonial officials, many of whom were keen to cover up abuses by security force personnel and so destroyed the historical record. The Hanslope archive hastened the legal cases by Kenyan and Malayan victims of abuses at the hands of security forces in the 1940s and 1950s; a similar case is being discussed by Cypriots who suffered at the hands of the army, again prompted by the Hanslope disclosure. The Cyprus Emergency is the subject of the essay here by Simon Robbins.¹³

British counter-insurgency: maximal and minimum force

Returning to the main theme of this collection – the use of force – the debate on the British use of minimum force in counter-insurgency is sterile. The British never employed minimum force in their imperial policing and counterinsurgency campaigns, a point argued elsewhere and confirmed by the studies presented here.¹⁴ The use of force in counter-insurgency by British security forces is best viewed from a maximal and not a minimal position, asking the question: what were the limits to the use of force? To answer this question, we need to go back to 1919, India, and the British-run 'Committee to Investigate the Recent Disturbances in Bombay, Delhi and the Punjab, their Causes and the Measures Taken to cope with Them'. Chaired by Lord Hunter (and so known as the Hunter Committee), the former Solicitor-General for Scotland, the Inquiry was convened to determine the events surrounding a massacre earlier in the year by British-led troops commanded by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer of Indian demonstrators in the Punjabi town of Amritsar. During a period of popular unrest. Dyer had ordered his men to fire on unarmed protestors gathered in an open, walled space in the town, the Jallianwala Bagh. In a short, decisive exchange, soldiers shot dead some 400 Indians, wounding many more, after which the military withdrew without offering succour to the wounded.

When questioned by the Hunter Committee, Dyer was remarkably, usefully (stupidly) candid, both on the use of force and of the role of the legal system in colonial control. Dyer was bound as a soldier (and officer) by the King's Regulations and the Manual of Military Law, the latter regularly updated, the most recent version being one published in 1916. As the anonymous authors of the Manual informed Dyer, an armed insurrection justified the use of any degree of necessary force. Imperial military power depended on 'necessary', effectual and not minimum force. That said, the use of force was not absolute and evolving British and Indian norms mediated how society exercised and understood the idea of necessary force, which is why Dyer was in the witness box. The harsh, extreme suppression by British forces of the country following the 'Indian Mutiny' in 1857 was not acceptable decades later in 1919 at Amritsar. The successful colonial state had to manage force to make it practicable and palatable to a wider public, with colonial law justifying what was done. Dyer's admissions to the Hunter Commission betrayed both himself and the colonial state. Dyer's aim, he said, was not just to disperse the crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh but to produce a 'moral effect'. When asked by the Indian lawyer, Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, whether what he meant by this was 'to strike terror'. Dyer replied: 'You can call it what you like. I was going to punish them'.¹⁵ Dyer's candour and the Commission's findings meant that he was relieved of his command; he returned home to the UK and retirement. Popular subscription raised a £26,000 purse for the disgraced Dyer, a huge sum at the time, and not something that one would expect today in similar circumstances.¹⁶

Dye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction: British ways of counter-insurgency
• 2. 'Savage warfare': C.E. Callwell, the roots of counter-insurgency, and the nineteenth century context
• 3. An example to be followed or a warning to be avoided? The British, Boers, and guerrilla warfare, 1900 – 1902
• 4. Suppressing insurgencies in comparison: the Germans in the Ukraine, 1918, and the British in Mesopotamia, 1920
• 5. The war on terror that failed: British counter-insurgency in Palestine 1945 – 1947 and the 'Farran Affair'
• 6. Everyone lived in fear: Malaya and the British way of counter-insurgency
• 7. British abuse and torture in Kenya's counter-insurgency, 1952 – 1960
• 8. The British counter-insurgency in Cyprus
• 9. Nasty not nice: British counter-insurgency doctrine and practice, 1945 – 1967
• 10. The minimum force debate: contemporary sensibilities meet imperial practice
• 11. British counter-insurgency: a historiographical reflection
• 12. Historians, a legacy of suspicion and the 'migrated archives'
• Index