An operational analysis of the emergency in Malaya 1948-1954

Abstract

This thesis has been conceived neither as a military history of the Emergency in Malaya, nor as a politico-military study, but as an operational analysis; the difference is more than semantic. In surveying the Emergency originally, it seemed to me that an orthodox military history in the nature of a campaign study might be a significant contribution to knowledge: I was quickly disabused of this notion for several reasons, one of which has already been expressed by another student of the subject: "When I was put on to examining sources of material for an official history," wrote J.B.P. Robinson, "I looked first for documentation which would give me (and the Historian) a picture of the main thread of events - a framework, a backbone on which to hang side issues. I quickly found this approach to be a mistake; it was not only fruitless but actually misleading. The emergency is not a sequence of events in which a broad pattern of development can be traced. Even considered in operational terms alone, it is (in a physicist’s language) a continuum of random occurrences. It is like one of those maddening jig-saw puzzles that do not have a picture, the random occurrences can be made to fit together geographically, but they do not build up a colour reproduction of a tidy battle scene." In the course of the Emergency itself, not only is there an almost complete absence of the ebb and flow of battle which one associates with an orthodox military history - on no occasion for example did the casualties in a single action amount to more than a platoon on either side - but in the context of the real problems which had to be faced, a concentration of attention on the purely regimental and military, would have little more than antiquarian interest. For the problems which this thesis seeks to examine are not merely (or even mainly) military in origin, but affected virtually every aspect of government. Before the Government of Malaya could begin to suppress the insurrection, it had to set its own house in order and integrate its efforts. To do this it had first to refurbish the forces at its disposal; intelligence services, police and armed forces. It is the interaction of this process with the actions of the insurgents themselves - which I have termed operational analysis - with which this thesis is mainly concerned. Moreover, it has in my opinion been given added significance by several comparative writings on the subject.