Malayan Emergency: Triumph of the Running Dogs, 1948–1960

Cold War 1945-1991

by Gerry Van Tonder

When the world held its breath It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europewith the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict zones such as Iraq, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was Malaya By the time of the 1942 Japanese occupation of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had already been fomenting merdeka independence from Britain. The Japanese conquerors, however, were also the loathsome enemies of the MCPs ideological brothers in China. An alliance of convenience with the British was the outcome. Britain armed and trained the MCPs military wing, the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), to essentially wage jungle guerrilla warfare against Japanese occupying forces. With the cessation of hostilities, anti-Japanese became anti-British, and, using the same weapons and training fortuitously provided by the British army during the war, the MCP launched a guerrilla war of insurgency.Malaya was of significant strategic and economic importance to Britain. In the face of an emerging communist regime in China, a British presence in Southeast Asia was imperative. Equally, rubber and tin, largely produced in Malaya by British expatriates, were important inputs for British industry. Typically, the insurgents, dubbed Communist Terrorists, or simply CTs, went about attacking soft targets in remote the rubber plantations and tin mines. In conjunction with this, was the implementation of Maos dictate of subverting the rural, largely peasant, population to the cause. Twelve years of counterinsurgency operations ensued, as a wide range of British forces were joined in the conflict by ground, air and sea units from Australia, New Zealand, Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Fiji and Nyasaland.

259 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 30, 2017

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Coverage of this conflict has not been updated in recent times, so when something is published it is always encouraging and the effort to be lauded. This book had a good intro and background presentation on the period before and what led to the 12 year bush war. However it failed to deliver due to very poorly structured and organised layout of the rest of the book. The author obviously had some connection to the Rhodesian army, as most of the photos are of said units involved in Malaya. The reader is left clueless as to why the focus on the Africans, while coverage of the actual conflict was done via a series of first-hand accounts and anecdotes, along with random newspaper clippings.

Other than some 'new' photos and nice drawings of military hardware, there is nothing much to recommend to those already familiar with this particular campaign.