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Radio War Nerd EP #452 — The Malayan Emergency (Patreon)

Published:
2024-06-29 00:57:14
Edited:
2024-06-29 17:16:55
Imported:
2024-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Recorded: June 26, 2024

We review the Malayan Emergency 1948-1960, the gruesome British counterinsurgency that's held up as an example of COIN that "worked."

Images & Maps

*Map of Malaysia

*UK Communist newspaper Daily Worker (now Morning Star) the only media to report on British colonial atrocities in Maylay

*"The jungle has been neutralized" Time hagiography on UK High Commissioner Gerard Templer

*Henry "Jiffy Pop" Gurney, aka Not-Dark Helmet

*

Total time: 1:10:13

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

NYCM&AHole

That part of the virus research is in the deleted Fauci emails

JoR

Didn't listen yet, and this is purely anecdotal, but going by YouTube comments (something John attests by), the current and future generations are much more "woke" on the British then I think most people were decades ago. Again no actual science or anything behind this. Maybe with Elizabeth dead and their culture not as popular as before (the Beatles, James Bond), no one bothers to idolize them anymore as "snarky and quirky" anymore.

Michael

Fuck the queen

Sean Kelly

Thanks for doing this one!

Dorst Savijeski

Strange how we don't learn as a society of liberal democracies. Had the abolitionist or Quakers, or magna Carta count for nothing. Notwithstanding the tudy abroad protests I am happy Hong Kong is out of imperial hands.

Allen Brambleshire

I am an airline pilot for a major airline, SO I CANNOT HELP MYSELF but offer some explanation for Johns flight back to Christchurch! Airline aviation is the one thing in this world I actually know about. Finally I can be of some use! I'm not surprised at all you diverted back to Christchurch. The entire bottom half of the south island has only 3 places to land suitable for airliners. Queenstown, Dunedin, and Invercargill. If you can't land in Queenstown, you don't have many choices. Sometimes it makes more sense to land at a more nearby alternate, sometimes it makes sense to return from where you took off. I would wager in this case they probably went back to Christchurch because diverting into Dunedin or Invercargill probably wont help anyone too much. AFAIK, Christchurch is a bigger airport so has better facilities and support in terms of airline personnel, equipment, parking spaces, hotels, etc. to support a diverting flight. It doesn't always work out that way though. It could have also been the case that weather in Dunedin was also shitty. There have been times I was trying to get into Rochester and diverted into Buffalo or vice versa. However I've also returned to Detroit after being unable to land in Rochester on a DTW-ROC flight. It just depends on a lot of stuff. Weather, fuel, time of day, airline services, parking availability, etc. The decision of where to go is made together between the Captain and the flights Dispatcher. Yes! You are correct that aircraft and airport facilities do allow for landing in low visibility weather conditions. However every airport does not have the same capabilities. However, radar is not used for landing. Radar is used by ATC for maintaining aircraft separation. What guides an airplane to the runway in low visibility conditions is an Instrument Approach Procedure. These are either based on radio signals that beam out from the runway that the aircraft can follow in (Instrument Landing System approaches "ILS" ), or they are based on GPS positioning where the aircraft follows a plotted GPS path (RNAV or RNP approaches). At most major airports around the world such as JFK, LAX, or Auckland, their runways will be equipped with the best Instrument Landing Systems "ILS", runway lights, and procedures, where most airliners can land in almost completely nil visibility. Queenstown is not one of these airports. Political reasons or traffic volume can go into whether or not an airport is fitted with the best ILS's, but in Queenstown's case it is probably not even possible because of the mountains. The radio beams require a straight line unimpeded by terrain, while Queenstown is surrounded by huge mountains. So while in Christchurch or Auckland you may be able to land in zero visibility, not so in Queenstown. They just don't have the equipment for it there. So Queenstown does not have any ILS's that allow for landing in zero visibility. It doesn't have any ILS's at all. It has one VOR approach procedure, and the rest are RNPs. These are mostly GPS based approach procedures that do not allow for super low visibility landings. Speaking of the mountains, Queenstown has some of the most GNARLY approach procedures in the world. These are approaches that are some of the most challenging and leave little margin for error. You have to snake up these mountain valleys with huge mountains on either side, in the clouds, where you cant see anything except follow your instruments. Then you have to do the same thing to takeoff! The lowest minimums I see for Runway 23 (landing facing west) requires a minimum cloud ceiling of 700ft. Ground fog would certainly be a problem there. The fog probably came sooner or lasted longer than was forecast. Here is a link to view one of Queenstown's instrument approaches so you can see what I'm talking about. LOOK AT THAT TERRAIN. Its like flying the death star trench run! The gnarliest airport I've flown into is Bogota, but that's still nothing compared to Queenstown. I'd love to get the chance to fly to it someday. https://www.aip.net.nz/assets/AIP/Aerodrome-Charts/Queenstown-NZQN/NZQN_45.1_45.2.pdf

Allen Brambleshire

For Mark: At Rochester, if the winds are favoring runway 22 (winds from the southwest), a minimum cloud ceiling at least 200ft and at least 1/2 mile of forward visibility is required in order to land. If the winds are favoring runway 4 (winds from the northeast), a minimum cloud ceiling of at least 100ft and at least 1200ft of forward visibility is required in order to land. The difference is because runway 4 has better runway lights and ILS equipment. Just fun to know in case your ever trying to get home and wondering if the fog is too thick or the clouds too low.

NYCM&AHole

What about the shire?

Don Tickles

The preamble.... Ummm... How is everybody feeling about that

Don Tickles

Still we love our boys ok

CR

“It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?” — Norm Macdonald

xnfec

A few years ago, I was talking to a family friend and he told me that when he was a kid working in a paddy field in Perak state, a patrol came by and he remembers being terrified in case they thought he was an insurgent. This would have been in the late fifties. Up until quite recently, there were still areas of northern Malaysia that were closed to the public. I think they recently did a deal with the remaining insurgents whereby they could retire to southern Thailand and the Malaysians could open up the closed areas. In her book, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, the author Lynn Pan recounts meeting a Malay who had been shipped to China by the authorities as an insurgent. He was from the Malay-majority state of Pahang. It was the only part of Malaya where the communists managed to recruit ethnic Malays. In the late forties, the British were also building the welfare state so they did need a lot of money for that. They were also taxing the hell out of their colonial subjects. Niall Ferguson is also at Harvard. I wonder how he gets on with Caroline Elkins? There is a forest-park near KL still named after Templer and Gurney Drive is famous part of Penang. If you are ever in Singapore, you can visit Fort Siloso (the coastal battery supposed to defend Singapore). It is quite an interesting place. It is part of the Sentosa resort.

Hans Anders

I’m with you on the demons John. I caught covid two years ago, and it went LONG. I’m only now improving after confronting a bunch of suppressed emotions. For people interested, I’ve learned a lot from what Gabor Maté wrote on the health impact of repressed anger.

Borvis

Very very interesting episode. Speaking to conservative Brits, they make the same claims about the Vietnam conflict between 1945-46 (dates conveniently cutoff). Operation Masterdom [Have you done an episode on this already?]. Fantastic operation name, of course. The claim is that if the Brits/French had been allowed to “finish the job,” there would have been no later Vietnam War. Among other indignities, Brits used post-ww2 Japanese troops to suppress the local population. Typical!

Nicholas Levis

Wow, thank you Captain, I now know 1,000 times more about this than I did five minutes ago.

Nicholas Levis

John, as the three recent historians who have been real about the British Empire, you mentioned two greats, Caroline Elkin (History of Violence) and Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts), and... a third, who was that? (Haven't found it by scrolling.) Thanks for another top show.

Enoch

Pilot for a non major airline and 100% to what Allen said. Glad there's a better writer than me to explain all that. Wouldn't surprise me at all if the airline also had a special pilot group just for Queenstown. As gnarly as the actual approaches are, the single engine procedures have got to be nuts.

CR

I am in a weird spot where even when I first learned about the countersinurgency in a pro-empire perspective the idea was that the British “won” and the only real way to “win” is to kill everyone. And they did. Just like Indonesia “won”.

CR

_Legacy_ of Violence by Elkins

CR

The third was Mark Curtis about them using Islamic radicals. They also mention James Chen on Malaya

Nicholas Levis

Yes, Legacy, and I have it on my shelf. Thanks for filling in Curtis for me, that's what I was looking for to complete the RWN British Empire Trifecta.

Danny Duplex

Hey guys. Great episode. Two points. There are definitely a lot of differences and similarities between Malaysia and the Southeast countries part of "The Vietnam War. " For instance, the anti-communist Hmong groups that the U.S tried to finance against the Pathet Lao were a minority, not a majority. That divide and conquer strategy still existed in some form. Pretty clear why even though some of these groups were able to fight for a long time they couldn't do any permanent damage to the government. Second, do you guys think you can talk about the hamlet plans being floated around as a "day after" for Gaza? I first saw Elliott Abrams pushing that idea, and now the Israeli sources are saying it too. Just on its face having unnamed "Arab countries" police people while the IDF continues killing Gazans sounds ridiculous but people keep bringing it up.

Patrick Link

How about an episode on the fall of Singapore at some point? Or a show on Imperial Japan altogether?

Trazdat

Crazy to see how effectively memory-holed the damage the British did has been. I looked up civilian casualties after listening: Wikipedia’s confidently says 2,478, and the highest I could find elsewhere says 5,000. I’m sure if anti-communist death toll methodology was used there’d be at least another zero to those sums.

Aiden

Awesome! I’ve been hoping for this topic.

Hilary is Pant-suited Syphilis

Between this and reading Vincent Bevins “Jakarta Method” and William Blum’s “Killing Hope” it is plainly obvious the project to save capitalist stratification of society against an incipient proletarian challenge was a carrot and stick approach, workers in the developed world were given the carrot, the ability to be a mini Baron on their own plot of land and a life of conspicuous consumption (since the Volcker shock being eroded of that) while the third world was just given the stick. It’s super depressing reading the hope people in the third world had in the wake of World War Two and then watching it being bled out of them over the next thirty of so years. My wife’s family is from Laos, politics is a taboo subject. You can sense the fear in peoples eyes when the topic is brought up. The best recourse is just to keep your head down, work hard and be ignorant of all political matters. You can sense the opposite lesson that Secretary of State Lansing warned Woodrow Wilson about the Bolsheviks was taught to them. Politics is an avenue of pain, conflict and suffering, not an avenue for improving one’s lot.

T

My dad worked with a former Australian SASR soldier who said the only SASR soldier he saw killed in Malaysia was killed by a rogue elephant

jkjkjkj

Great episode but a quick clarifier: bumiputera are not exclusively Malay. There are other indigenous (non chinese/indian) groups in Malaysia who are bumiputera who are not Malay or Muslim, mostly in sarawak and sabah, where non Malay bumiputera generally form majorities. Typically non Malay bumiputera are nominally favored by Malaysias affirmative action and racial preference system but in reality most of the benefits go to ethnic Malays

Gabe Weisert

Great episode! Would you mind adding the books used/cited to the show notes? Thanks! PS. I grew up in Malaysia in the 80s and "the communist threat" was still very much alive and well in the newspapers (Mahathir used it very cleverly). The one British book on the topic that was in every expat house was called "The War of the Running Dogs," an appalling racist apologia.

Mark Ames

I'll have to tell the story about when my boss in Russia chartered a Yak to Kursk, and the pilots couldn't land because of low fog. So my boss yelled at me to do everything and anything to convince them to land. I went into the cockpit and offered a couple bottles of French brandy. I'll tell the rest later.

Ryan McCarthy

My mom came from a Chinese Malaysian family on Borneo, my grandfather ran a bicycle shop before the war and when the Japanese invaded he was funding the insurgency (he ended getting caught and put in a concentration camp but, according to my relatives, was broken out by guerillas the day before his scheduled execution). After the war the British helped him establish himself with a small rubber plantation but he was still secretly funding the MCP and I guess he didn’t get caught this time! The bumiputera system has some odd wrinkles- as I understand it, Islam is part of the legal definition of Malay but bumiputera also includes Borneo indigenous, many of whom are Christian (I’ve never seen so many little Catholic Churches/ sacrament shacks as when driving through Sabah). Many members of my family married indigenous Borneans and as a result I have a few cousins who are legally bumiputera and enjoy the various advantages but culturally they are basically Chinese

John Hieronymus

You all should reach out to Caroline Elkins she seems incredibly interesting and like a good interviewee. Just her involvement in uncovering the document destruction at the end of the British empire would be an amazing story to hear

Ezra de Leon

I first learned about the "Malay Emergency" in the book Ghost Force by Ken Connor, a former NCO in the SAS. It's a largely positive history of the regiment and doesn't go into any of the atrocities or human rights abuses but there are some interesting anecdotes and details about their training (and I read it when I still thought the SAS were super cool badasses). One of the things I remember is that when they went into long-term "patrol" in the bush, they were expected not to wash or bathe because in the dense jungle, sight wasn't as useful as smell, and the odor of soap could tip off the enemy. He also went a bit into SAS misadventures in Indonesia, as I recall. The book came out before 9/11 so Connor's final chapter on the future of the SAS was way off. He foresaw that economic sabotage could be done by non-military people with equipment that could be bought at a hardware store in the target country. A wrench in the wrong spot and a power transmission station can be taken offline when it matters, for example. Who knows how this prediction panned out?

radiowarnerd

Hi Allen, Thanks so much for this excellent response! Now that I've slept for, like two weeks, I can take a more rational approach and see that it probably wasn't a good idea to try to land that night. At the time, though, I thought, "Let's just go for it. If we die it'll probably be really quick." But it's true that Queenstown must be a scary landscape for panes. We throw sticks to a labrador in the river here and the main runway is just a bulldozed gravel plateau opposite the river. Must be a scary place to land.

radiowarnerd

Yes, one of the books I read then discarded in contempt was War of the Running Dogs. It had that classic Thatcher-era coverup and sensationalism.

radiowarnerd

Thanks for filling out the context here. I did know that indigenous peoples were included in the bumiputera system but they seem to be more numerous than I thought.

Jeff Normal

I was under the impression that when people were deported to China, it was the REPUBLIC of China…I doubt Chiang Kai-shek gave them a very warm welcome. (Hopefully I’m mistaken, can’t remember where I heard this, but it seems like the kind of thing the British would do)

Blown Magnet

“Muh-lay” not “May-lay”