A bizarre component consisted of a hundred Japanese soldiers, unreconciled to the outcome of the Second World War.

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 161. The postwar conditions in Malaysia.

At their jungle meeting they decided to rename their organization the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army and to divide it into a small strike force of full-time paid guerrillas, operating from hidden bases and organized as eight regiments, together with a larger pool of active supporters who would provide funding, food and intelligence gathering. The guerrilla regiments varied in strength from 300 to 800 fighters, of whom around 10 per cent were women. A bizarre component consisted of a hundred Japanese soldiers, unreconciled to the outcome of the Second World War. The Communists wore rudimentary uniforms, with three stars on their caps called tiga bintang to symbolize the major ethnic groups in Malaya. In practice 90 per cent of Communists were ethnic Chinese.

The civilian supporters’ network was called the Min Yuen or Masses Movement, and included people well placed to gather intelligence such as clerks and waiters working in offices or clubs used by the habitually indiscreet British. The Communist Central Executive controlled the entire structure through a network of political commissars and political cells. Chin Peng agreed an overall strategy which would begin with attacks on British managers and ‘collaborating’ local overseers on isolated mines and plantations, as well as against government and police outposts in small towns and villages. The idea was to reveal the nullity of government power by exposing its inability to offer protection. It would also force the British to vacate the countryside in favour of the larger towns. Under Phase Two, in rural areas liberated from the British, the Min Yuen would be co-opted into the guerrilla force and prepared for Phase Three, an all-out assault on communications links and the major towns to force the British out of Malaya completely.

Until subsequent events in southern Iraq disabused them of the conceit, the British liked to congratulate themselves on their expertise in a softly-softly, hearts-and-minds approach to counter-insurgency warfare, and were inclined to sneer at the more robust ‘cowboy’ approach of the Americans.11 Although part of the deeper class illusion of the British as Greeks to American Romans, this attitude was born of the success of the Malayan counter-insurgency and persisted into the early 2000s. The lessons of Malaya have been incorporated into current current US and British counter-insurgency warfare doctrine, by among others generals David Petraeus and Rupert Smith, but this may only involve selectively raiding the past to justify the prescriptions of the present. Modern armies are obsessed with the military learning cycle, of learning from past ‘best practice’ and mistakes. The problem is which part of the past provides the lessons, something to be explored below. Much hard fighting and coerced population transfers had to have occurred before hearts-and-minds warfare could ever be implemented. Moreover, there is a large silence over who the British may have learned from themselves, for the Boer War was a very long time ago, even in the late 1940s. Fortified villages, the key element of British counter-insurgency tactics, had been pioneered by the Japanese occupiers, something the British never acknowledged – except, that is, for a district officer called Howe. ‘The Japs put barbed wire around Titi and Pertang, garrisoned these towns with troops and made all Chinese of the locality live within the defended areas,’ he observed. ‘Could we not try the same idea?'