Row over medal for Malay veterans

IAN BRUCE, Defence Correspondent

December 20 2005

Tens of thousands of British veterans of the Malayan emergency are to be allowed to receive medals from the Malaysian government commemorating their part in winning a bitter jungle campaign against communist insurgents in the 1950s and 1960s.
However, the veterans, the majority of whom were teenage national servicemen at the time, are then to be banned from wearing them at Armistice parades because it would contravene Foreign and Commonwealth Office rules over "foreign medals awarded for events in the distant past".
The decision, taken by a special Cabinet Office committee on December 7, but yet to be announced, was last night branded by regimental campaigners as "a Scrooge-like insult" to a generation of conscript soldiers who spent up to two years at a time fighting in Malayan jungles.
A total of 519 British troops were killed – 95 of them from Scottish regiments – in more than a decade of ambushes and skirmishes against ethnic Chinese guerrillas in some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Thousands more became casualties from malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery and jungle sores, as well as booby-traps and snake bites.
The Malaysian government, which came into being after the defeat of the insurgency in 1966, decided more than 10 months ago to finally honour the men who underwrote its existence and sovereignty. It offered the Pingat Jasa Malaysia medal to all Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen who served and fought there during the emergency.
Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, all of whom committed troops in the late 1950s, accepted the offer and submitted lists of those eligible along with details of their service records.
Britain, which at the height of the conflict had 35,000 troops in Malaya, said it would have to consider its position.
In January this year, Baroness Symon, a government spokeswoman, told the House of Lords: "Her majesty's government rules preclude the acceptance and wearing of foreign medals for events in the distant past or more than five years previously.
"In addition, the rules do not allow for a foreign award to be accepted if a British award has been given for the same service. Eligible veterans of the emergency in Malaya should already have received the Malaya bar to their general service medals."
The "bar" is a small strip across the top of the general service award, and not a medal in itself.
George Fleming, is a Belfast veteran who served on a Royal Navy warship in support of the troops ashore, and has been a leading campaigner in trying to persuade the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence to allow the award.
He said: "The government is inconsistent in its own rules. It has recently awarded medals for the 1956 Suez campaign and allowed Russian medals to be pinned on UK survivors of the Murmansk convoys in the 1940s."
Brigadier Allan Alstead, who served in Malaya for three years as a young infantry officer, added: "This is not only a snub to the tens of thousands of young Britons who found themselves at war in the jungle, but also to the Malaysian government.
"The Malayan veterans are being victimised. This is a Scrooge-like insult which does this government no credit."
A spokesman for the FCO confirmed that "an announcement will be made in due course" after a meeting of the review committee on December 7, but declined to say what decision had been reached.
"The foreign secretary asked the committee to review the rules in the light of exceptions that had already been made and the importance of such medals to veterans. A paper was submitted to the committee and their ruling is pending."
A senior defence source told the Herald: "What we have here is classic Whitehall fudge mixed with bloody- mindedness and inflexibility.
"We have been told that the medals will be issued, but cannot be worn.
"It's like giving a child a toy at Christmas and telling him he can only play with it in the house. It's ludicrous, given the sacrifice so many made in a forgotten war."

Soldiers adapted fast to heat, insects and insurgents

IAN BRUCE                                                                           December 20 2005

When Allan Alstead was shipped out to Malaya in 1956, he was a newly-commissioned and very green 19-year-old second lieutenant in the King's Own Scottish Borderers.
Holding a training pamphlet on jungle warfare, he found himself in "the ulu" – army slang for deep jungle – with 50 soldiers at his back and very little idea of what he was doing.
"Fortunately for me, I had a good sergeant and experienced corporals and lance-corporals as section commanders," he recalls. "They carried me through until I learned the hard way.
"It was a bit like sitting the driving test with a copy of the Highway Code on your lap which you've only just seen for the first time.
"Most of the Jocks were national servicemen who were not only serving overseas in hostile and alien terrain, but were away from home for the first time in their lives. Amazingly, they adapted fast to heat, insects, wildlife and communist insurgents."
The soldier, who rose to become a brigadier, remembers conducting "fan" patrols.
"We would go out on a compass bearing for 1000 yards – no easy matter when the jungle is that thick – and then move due west or due east and return on a reciprocal course, hoping to find our camp in the process and always wary of ambush and booby-trap on the way.
"Most of the maps we were issued were just white paper with grid lines and an occasional river marked on them. It was nerve-racking stuff, but the Jocks learned to live there as if they'd been born to it and eventually defeated the guerrillas at their own game."
The brigadier also remembers the sacrifices made.
"Like many young men, I had a girlfriend back here. She eventually got fed-up with me being away and decided not to wait. That was pretty common for soldiers of our time, but always hard to take.
"The other hard thing was losing people in action. It's a fact of military life, but it doesn't make it any easier to bear. There was special bond in the small units in which we operated in the jungle."

Success of the patrol and ambush strategy

IAN BRUCE                                                                            December 20 2005

THE Malayan Emergency was a full-blown guerrilla war waged by ethnic Chinese Communist guerrillas against British and Commonwealth forces for more than a decade.
The insurgents operated in small raiding bands from jungle hideouts, striking against railways, rubber-plantations and military bases.
Their hard-core fighters were drawn from between 30,000 and 40,000 Chinese who had fought against Japanese occupation in the 1940s.
Britain committed more than 35,000 troops and Australia a further 13,000 at the height of the insurrection, and most of Scotland's infantry regiments were rotated through combat duty in the jungles of the Malayan hinterland.
In the end, allied forces forced the guerrillas back, beating them at their own game in what became a junior leaders' war of platoon and company ambushes and patrols, rather than set-piece battles.
The British plan was also a model of winning hearts and minds of the ethnic Chinese civilian population and Malays, separating the insurgents from supplies and potential recruits.
Some say the war was classed as an emergency to conceal its intensity and political ramifications.
Others say it was to enable claims to be made on insured property, most of it British owned, destroyed or damaged in guerrilla attacks. Insurance policies on major rubber plantation and railway equipment would have been null and void if a war had been declared.
Malaya cost Britain 519 dead, more than were killed in 30 years of fighting the IRA in Northern Ireland. Yet it was to become a forgotten war, overshadowed by Vietnam.
It is also arguably the only counter-insurgency campaign won by any major power in the last 100 years.