The Malayan Emergency 1948-1960 – Men of the Malay Police Field Force wade along a river during a jungle patrol in the Temenggor area of northern Malaya in 1953, photographed by a British official photographer, created and released by the Imperial War Museum (public domain image)
(18) MALAYA – MALAYAN EMERGENCY
(1942 / 1948-1960)
“Communist resistance forces in Malaya settled old scores and terrorized the indigenous population, while mujahideen holy warriors staged reprisals and terror killings against the Chinese–hundreds of innocent civilians were killed on both sides”
Malaya continues the focus of my wild-tier special mentions for conflicts or wars that broke out – or continued – in east or south-east Asia after the Second World War but originated in it. As opposed to Indonesia’s war of independence that commenced even before the formal ceremony of surrender by Japan on the U.S.S. Missouri, Malaya was a growing guerilla conflict that became full-blown war after Britain declared a state of emergency on 17 June 1948.
Hence the term Emergency – although it was also used by Britain to avoid referring to it as a war, apparently for insurance purposes, at least in part (as British insurers would not pay out claims in civil wars, presumably to rubber plantations or other British economic interests).
Like most of the postwar conflicts or wars in Asia, it had its origins and got its opportunity from the Second World War – in this case, the Japanese occupation of British Malaya and Singapore. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army or MPAJA “had been the largest anti-Japanese resistance group in Malaya” – a communist guerilla army “composed mainly of ethnic Chinese guerilla fighters” which had been “trained, armed and funded by the British to fight against Japan”. Its veterans then used that against the British themselves after the war, as the core of the communist Malayan National Liberation Army or MNLA which fought for Malaya’s independence from Britain and to establish a communist state.
The insurgency had its roots in Britain’s postwar restoration of its colonial rule, as well as the economic problems that came with it. Britain declared the state of emergency following attacks on plantations and the British victory in the Malayan Emergency that followed is often upheld as a model of counter-insurgency warfare, a counterpoint to the American defeat in Vietnam, although the better comparison may well be to the French defeat in Vietnam.
I’m not so sure whether the British strategy truly serves as either a model of counter-insurgency or as a counterpoint to French or American defeat in Vietnam. Britain had a number of advantages in the Malayan Emergency that were effectively unique to that conflict or at least were not readily adapted to the conflict in Vietnam, and its strategy was equally as much a sledgehammer as the latter rather than any surgical precision, even despite those advantages.
And in the end, Britain had to grant full independence to Malaya (as Malaysia) just as France did in the First Indochina War, while the communists remained able to renew their insurgency in what is known as the Second Malayan Emergency from 1968 to 1989.
