The Making Of The British Army (64 page)

Once an infantry battalion is without artillery support it can only fight the direct battle – what it sees to its front. Even with its own mortars it cannot much influence what the enemy is doing out of range or sight of its riflemen and machine-gunners, and the enemy then has freedom to manœuvre and concentrate against the weakest point. And then, when small-arms ammunition, grenades and mortar bombs are expended, the bayonet buys only a few seconds more. The Glosters were down to three rounds a man, and the Bren guns to one and a half magazines (40–50 rounds). Carne, who had fired every round in his own pistol, ordered the companies to break out as best they could, and to go it alone.

But the Chinese were swarming so deep in the brigade position that evasion proved all but impossible. Only the remnants of ‘D’ Company – just forty men – made it.

Farrar-Hockley, who was taken prisoner after the battle, would later rise to four-star general. For his conduct on this occasion he was awarded the DSO – an exceptional decoration for a captain at this time, for since the First World War the DSO had come to be bestowed
principally in recognition of leadership at battalion-command level.
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Colonel Carne, likewise captured, would endure eighteen months’ solitary confinement and drug-assisted brainwashing; he won the battalion’s second VC. He had ‘moved among the whole battalion under very heavy mortar and machine-gun fire, inspiring the utmost confidence and the will to resist among his troops,’ ran the citation: ‘On two separate occasions, armed with rifle and grenades, he personally led assault parties which drove back the enemy and saved important situations. His courage, coolness and leadership was felt not only in his own battalion but throughout the whole brigade.’

There had been courage across the whole brigade, indeed – not least in the Hussar squadron’s sterling efforts to cover the withdrawal of the battalions. At one stage, with Chinese infantrymen crawling all over the Centurions, trying to prise open the hatches, the tanks were reduced to hosing each other with their machine guns. The squadron leader, Major Henry Huth, received the DSO for what he described as ‘one long bloody ambush’, and his second-in-command the MC – an uncommon allocation of medals to the armoured corps. It would be the last time that British tanks fired in anger, save for a few rounds in the Suez intervention of 1956, until the Gulf War of 1991.

In all, 29th Brigade suffered 1,100 casualties in the battle of the Imjin River, including 34 officers and 808 other ranks missing – a quarter of the brigade’s fighting strength on the eve of battle. Of these, 620 were from the Glosters, of whom 522 became prisoners of war,
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180 of them wounded. Fifty-nine Glosters had been killed in action, and a further thirty-four would die in captivity. But the Chinese had bought their victory dearly, for their casualties were estimated at around 10,000. As a result, the Chinese 63rd Army, which had begun the offensive with three divisions and approximately 27,000 men, was pulled out of the front line.

Seoul did not fall to the spring offensive. But when the armistice was signed in 1953 the conflict was frozen rather than resolved: it was, said the UN commander, General Maxwell Taylor, who had commanded 101st Airborne on Market Garden, ‘a suspension of hostilities – an
interruption of the shooting’. The 38th parallel became a ‘demilitarized zone’, and to this day 25,000 American troops remain in South Korea – more than a quarter of the British army’s entire strength.

The legend of ‘the Glorious Glosters’ is still a powerful one. It is probably the more powerful because although the regiment was known throughout the army from their days as the 28th Foot and for their unique back-badge, they were in no way special. Gloucestershire did not have the reputation, say, of Liverpool or Tyneside as a brawling sort of recruiting area; the regiment did not attract particularly ‘smart’ officers (indeed, it had more than its share of officers on attachment, a sign that it was not attracting enough regulars); and in its ranks was the same mix of National Servicemen, reservists recalled to the colours and regular soldiers, not all of whom would have been entirely willing volunteers. Its leadership was solid, however, from top to bottom – and in some cases inspired. As Major Pat Angier was buried with hasty rites within the company position his batman wept; and his citation, like that for Carne’s VC, stated that ‘His courage, coolness and leadership was felt not only in his own battalion but throughout the whole brigade.’ What made them glorious was not so much what the Glosters were but the way they had fought – though it was the way they were that had made them fight as they had – and the action at Imjin was felt throughout the army. Once more the conduct of a workaday infantry battalion had demonstrated fighting spirit to every other regiment in a way that could only encourage emulation.
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Imjin is a battle to study not for its tactical lessons – other than, in the duke of Wellington’s old phrase, in how not to do it – but for a shining example of how a battalion of 700 men can conduct themselves when they have been let down. Lord Moran’s words again ring true – if not perhaps the whole truth, then sufficient unto the day: ‘The individual shrinks to nothing … Only the regiment matters.’

Shortly after breakfast on a fine tropical June morning in 1948, Arthur Harris, the manager of one of the Anglo-Malayan Rubber Corporation’s plantations in the northern Malay state of Perak, set off on his rounds. As he left his bungalow three ethnic Chinese gunmen shot him dead. It was the beginning of the ‘War of the Running Dogs’ – as the insurgents called the collaborators with British rule.

In the following weeks there were more attacks. Unarmed British officials, planters and managers were shot, as well as Malays, Chinese and Indians who worked with them in the tin mines and rubber plantations – the ‘running dogs’. The governor-general reluctantly
declared a state of emergency. The counter-insurgency campaign that followed would last until 1960 when the final defeat of the Communist terrorists (‘CTs’) would pave the way for Malayan independence – the second great step on the long withdrawal from empire which Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’ had portended sixty years earlier.

In the book of the army’s finest hours the ‘Malayan Emergency’ stands as one of the finest. The strategy for this sustained campaign with huge manpower and logistical demands – much greater than those of the Korean War – was above all an imaginative and well-executed strategy that brought victory, but it was also one applied with superb tactical skill. And this was a campaign fought against an enemy whose political creed and experience of guerrilla warfare made them perhaps the most formidable of any in the ‘small wars’ which – despite the interruption of the bigger conflicts – have been the staple of the army’s operational experience for the past century and a half.

Malaya in 1948 was an explosive mix of ethnic groups. The largest segment – 50 per cent – of the population of four and a quarter million were the indigenous Muslim Malays, who accepted overall British rule but were strongly loyal to their sultans, the sovereign heads of the nine states of the Malay Federation (Johore, Pahang, Negri Sembilan, Selangor, Perak, Kedah, Perlis, Trengganu and Kelantan). There were around two million Chinese, whose numbers had grown rapidly in the preceding ten years, in part as a result of the Japanese occupation when they had been brought in as slave labour. Many were second-generation Malaya-born but their loyalty, culturally at least, was to China, whether Communist or Nationalist. Crucially, half a million of the Chinese in Malaya were squatters who had fled the towns during the Japanese occupation, and who had no title to the land on which they eked out a living. There were half a million Indians, mainly Tamils working in the plantations, and the same number of other non-indigenous residents and transient workers, of whom the British (some 12,000) were significant both as administrators and in running the country’s businesses. And of key importance, though the least significant when the Emergency began, were the aboriginal tribes living deep in the jungle, stubbornly refusing to recognize the authority of the sultans. No one knew quite how many they were, for no one had any dealings with them; estimates ranged between 50,000 and 100,000.

British rule in Malaya stretched back to 1874. When the Japanese over-ran the peninsula in 1942 the Malayan Communist Party (MCP)
organized the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), a largely Chinese force despite its name, which with clandestine British support and implied promises of equality for the Chinese after the war had helped speed liberation, although the country was not in the end retaken militarily.
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This, on top of the débâcle of defeat in 1941, made re-establishing British rule tricky, and after the majority Malay opposition forced the Attlee government to drop plans for equal rights the MCP initiated a campaign of terrorism to oust the British and install a Communist regime. With exquisite oriental irony, it was led by the 24-year-old Chin Peng, who had been an MPAJA liaison officer with the British army and had been awarded an OBE and two mentions in despatches for his service. The MPAJA now transformed itself into an insurgent army, simply substituting ‘British’ for ‘Japanese’, though prudently changing its name soon after to the Malayan Races’ Liberation Army.

By the end of 1948 eight MRLA ‘regiments’ were operating throughout the peninsula in large cells on traditional Maoist guerrilla warfare lines (i.e. in rural areas, as opposed to the Leninist approach of focusing on towns and cities), financed in good measure through extortion from the local squatter population. Chin Peng’s plan was to raid isolated estates, tin mines, and police and government buildings to drive the security forces into the urban areas. He would then set up guerrilla bases in the ‘liberated areas’ to train new recruits from the Min Chung Yuen Thong (usually simply ‘Min Yuen’), the urban-based ‘mass revolutionary movement’. In the third phase the expanded army would move from the rural areas to attack the towns, villages and railways, with the Min Yuen acting as auxiliary saboteurs to cripple the economy. From this would come the climactic phase: with the country on its knees, the British army would be defeated in conventional battle. The concept was succeeding in China itself, and would succeed in French Indo-China (and to a large extent in US-supported Vietnam); its first real test against the West, however, in Malaya, would prove an instructive failure.

Attacks on British administrators and ‘running dogs’ were stepped up, but at first the army was not keen to get embroiled. There were only
nine regular infantry battalions in Malaya Command – six of them Gurkha, three Malay – plus a field artillery regiment. The GOC, Major-General Charles Boucher, himself a Gurkha officer, asked the commander-in-chief of Far East Land Forces (in Singapore), Lieutenant-General Sir Neil Ritchie, for reinforcements, but Ritchie had different strategic priorities, believing that a conventional threat to the region from a Russo-Chinese pact claimed all his resources. It took the new commissioner-general for South-east Asia, Ramsay MacDonald’s son Malcolm, to persuade him to help, and by then the insurgency had gained a dangerous momentum which the police, even with greater powers and now armed, could not contain. By the end of 1948 Boucher had six more battalions, including three in 2nd Guards Brigade – the first time the Guards had served so far from London in what was officially peacetime.

Boucher’s plan was to break up the MRLA concentrations and drive them deeper into the jungle, cutting them off from active Min Yuen support and isolating them from the squatters from whom they might extort money, food and intelligence. But the overall campaign – military, police and civil affairs – lacked any real unifying drive, which was hardly surprising since the high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, lacked any useful experience (a deficiency already manifest in his tardy declaration of a state of emergency). Matters improved somewhat when Sir John Harding relieved Ritchie as commander-in-chief the following year, and when two more brigades including 3rd Commando Brigade Royal Marines were sent. A true winning move, however, came with the creation of the post of director of operations, and the choice of the man for the job. The new CIGS, Slim, called out of retirement a former 14th Army officer (who had also distinguished himself in East Africa and the Western Desert), Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Briggs, of whom he was to write: ‘I know of few commanders who made as many immediate and critical decisions on every step of the ladder of promotion, and I know of none who made so few mistakes.’