In order to provide a background to events, it is necessary to explain the complex politics prevailing in the region at the time, and this seems to be as good an opportunity as any to go off at a tangent!

What was loosely referred to as ‘Malaya’ in 1949, consisted of the Straits Settlements – Penang, Malacca and Singapore – which were Crown Colonies, and the Native States, which occupied the remainder of the peninsula. Some of the latter were members of the Federation of Malay States, semi-autonomous under their traditional rulers and British appointed advisors. Others, like Johore for example, were ‘unfederated’ and enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy, such as being permitted to maintain their individual military, customs and police forces. The whole shebang was under the blanket of British suzerainty and, at the time I arrived, this was invested in the British Military Administration (BMA), the body that had run the country since the Japanese surrender in 1945. Moreover, because of an armed insurgency then in progress, a State of Emergency had been declared in June 1948, giving the police and military extraordinary powers.

The Emergency was a legacy of the war. Pre-invasion, in what had then been a very farsighted move, the British had trained a number of Malayan Chinese in jungle warfare. After the British surrender and Japanese occupation in 1942, these men took to the jungle to continue the fight, providing the only resistance to Japanese forces on the Malay Peninsula. The Allies supplied arms and instructors via air drops, and they eventually developed into a small but well organised force – the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) - harassing their Japanese overlords in whatever way they could, thus diverting precious enemy manpower from the battlefronts.

After the Japanese collapse, these combatants emerged from the jungle and carried out vital policing duties until the liberating forces arrived. They were accorded official recognition for their contribution by the returning British authorities and even marched as military units in the London Victory Parade. Then, in an equally shortsighted move, the British Government delivered a slap in the face saying, virtually, ‘Thank you for your services, now hand in your arms and goodbye! For the MPAJA, that was not to be the end of the story.

Almost all the resistance fighters were members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), later banned, which was linked to the international communist movement. Its hidden agenda was not only to oust the Japanese oppressors but all foreign imperialism and it colluded with similarly determined groups in Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, Burma and Indo-China to bring the whole of south east Asia into the red camp.

Under their wartime commander, Chin Peng whose OBE, awarded for his services against the Japanese was later cancelled, between 5000 and 7000 former heroes returned to the ‘ulu’ as the Malayan Races Liberation Army (MRLA). It was neither a patriotic nor a liberation movement but an ideological one. Indigenous Malays had little or no part in it and, had it been victorious, they and their country would have been under a more implacable imperialism than was ever imposed by the British.

Cadres of the MPAJA in training

The Communists may have hoped for an easy victory, taking control of the country before British authorities could re-establish. Failing that, they sought to take advantage of any political rewards that the British had to offer and gain control via the ballot box. When it became obvious that Britain intended to treat the war merely as an hiatus, without making any concessions to local political aspirations, they set out to harass the Raj as ruthlessly as they had the Japanese.

The first recorded incident was on 16 June, 1948, when some rubber planters were ambushed and killed, and a State of Emergency was declared shortly afterwards. By 1949, police and military institutions, vehicles and personnel were being subjected to frequent attack and it was no longer safe to travel unescorted in most mainland areas. Rubber and tin, Malaya’s principal export products were in great demand throughout the post-war world and it was part of the insurgents’ plan to destroy these industries and thus damage the economy. White mine and plantation managers, expatriate police and military officers were the principal targets but nobody was really safe. Army personnel travelling beyond our depot were obliged to carry arms and move in convoy. Many of my shipmates aboard Lancashire were being sent to bolster the military presence and attempt to rid the country of terrorism. It would be another twenty years before this insurrection was finally quelled and by that time, Malaysia (Malaya plus some other territories in Borneo) had achieved independence from Britain by democratic means.

Similar turmoil embraced most of the other countries of the region. In the Dutch East Indies, just across the Malacca Straits, communists were also attempting to gain control while indigenous patriots were trying to prevent the Dutch from re-imposing colonial rule. British units were initially sent to assist and in at least one instance, some Japanese prisoners-of-war were re-armed as a stop-gap police force in a desperate attempt to restore law and order. In nearby Sumatra, a renegade Dutch army officer, Capt. ‘Turko’ Westerling, further complicated the situation by trying to set up a breakaway regime at Bandung, with himself as ‘head of state’. His was a short-lived attempt and he and his cohorts fled to Singapore, where he was languishing in jail in 1949. Things were eventually sorted out: the nationalists were victorious and the former colony became the Republic of Indonesia which, with the exception of a few Caribbean islands, saw the demise of the centuries-old Dutch colonial empire.

Further north, the French were trying desperately to retain their possessions in Indo-China in a conflict that was not ultimately resolved until the fall of Saigon, a quarter of a century later. On an almost daily basis, deserters from French troopships passing through the congested waters of the Straits, risked armed deck guards and shark-infested waters to swim ashore in a hope of avoiding horrors like Dien Bien Phu, for which they were headed. Conscripts and regular army troops who made it were handed back to French authorities. Foreign Legionnaires were the lucky ones. Because they were not French nationals, they were treated as illegal immigrants and deported to their countries of origin.