Francis Pike

Britain’s war in Malaya

A British paratrooper pulls down his parachute after landing in tropical forest in Northern Malaya for an assault on a Communist-held village during fighting following the Malayan Emergency. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

On 17 June 1948, seventy-five years ago this weekend, the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee declared war on the ethnic Chinese Malayan Communist party (MCP). Except he did not call it a war; he called it an ‘Emergency’.

It seems that the British plantation and trading companies in Malaya, such as Sime Darby, Guthrie, Harrisons & Crossfield, London Tin and Dunlop, demanded that the word ‘war’ should not be used because it would make their businesses uninsurable. By contrast the Chinese Malayan insurgents called ‘the Emergency’ the Anti-British National Liberation War. The Malayan War, which lasted for 12 years, might better be called the ‘Forgotten War’. Of all the Cold War conflicts it is arguably the least known. Why?

Firstly, there were no pitched battles. The MCP, which morphed into the Malay National Liberation Army (MNLA), fought a guerrilla war from the start. But, unlike, communist insurgencies in Korea and North Vietnam, there was little help to be had from Malaya’s northern neighbour, Thailand.

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