MY COMMENTS: I have a collection of books about the Malayan Emergency, which I have read. I totally disagree with the story surrounding the Emergency. The Malayan Emergency was not what we have been told about.
In 1945 after the end of World War 2 Britain was almost bankrupt. During the postwar reconstruction which began almost immediately there was a boom in raw materials, including rubber and tin. The rubber estates and tin mines in colonial Malaya began churning profits for British commercial interests as well as tax revenues for the British Crown. In no time Malaya was the single largest revenue earner for the entire British Empire. Then in 1946 Dato Onn organised all the Malays, he torpedoed the idea of the Malayan Union, he established UMNO and immediately began agitating for Malayan independence. The Independence movement picked up steam quite quickly. This made the British very uncomfortable.
And - more importantly - on 17 August 1945 Soekarno had declared independence for Indonesia. Which resulted in the Indonesian War of Independence which lasted for FOUR years until the Dutch gave up and withdrew in 1949. There was serious fighting in Indonesia but there were no Dutch soldiers to do any fighting. Because the Dutch had lost Indonesia to the Japanese, Holland had been occupied by the Germans and there was no more Dutch colonial influence. So after the Japanese surrender, the British who had landed about 100,000 troops to reoccupy Malaya and Singapore offered to help the Dutch regain Indonesia. (Very white and neighbourly colonials).
British troops from Malaya were sent to Indonesia to fight Soekarno. The British Royal Air Force took off from air bases in Singapore, Johor, Melaka to bomb Indonesia. The British did not do all that for free. The British secured concessions from the Dutch to exploit oil and gas deposits in Indonesia. Plus other goodies of course.
Because the British seriously needed the colonial revenues to help prop up London. Then in 1946 Dato Onn Jaafar was very successful in organising the Malays to defeat the Malayan Union, he founded UMNO in 1946 as a 'united Malays national organisation' and he wanted independence for Malaya - all this in 1946.
The British had a major trump card in their pocket - the single supreme leader of almost all the Communist organisations in Malaya at that time was a British secret agent. At that time 1945 - 1948 there were the:
The name of the supreme leader was the Vietnamese Chinese Loi Tek. Also known as:
- Loi Tek / Loi Teck
- Lai Tek
- Lai Teck
- Lai Te
- Loi Tak
- Mr. Wright (or simply Wright)
- Light (sometimes used in English sources)
- Chang Hung (also rendered Chang Hong) (who signed the Blantan Agreement)
- Wong Kim Geok
- Lee Soong
- Vietnamese names attributed to him
- Phạm Văn Đắc
- Hoàng A Nhạc (also written Hoang A Nhac)
- Nguyễn Văn Long (reported by Leon Comber)
- Lai Rac
- Trương Phước Đạt (or Truong Phuoc Dat) – before he appeared in Malaya in 1936.
- Other reported aliases
- Wong Siu-tong
- Lao Wu Huang
- Huynh Kim Ngoc
- Ly Minh Son
- Huang Kuo-
- Total number of aliases
- Japanese historian Yoji Akashi and later researchers have suggested that Lai Teck may have used more than 50 aliases during his career as a communist organizer and intelligence agent.
- His many identities reflected his extraordinary career as a triple agent, successively serving the French Sûreté, the British Special Branch, the Japanese Kempeitai, while simultaneously rising to become Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya.
Then in March 1947 the British informed their master spy Lai Tek that his cover had been blown. So on 6 March 1947 Lai Tek escaped to Singapore and beyond. He also emptied the funds belonging to the Communist Party. The Communists in Malaya were totally embarrassed, insulted and made fools of. The British had totally played them like playing a guitar.
Just over 15 months later on 16 June 1948, the Communists launched those revenge attacks against the British planters in Sungei Siput in Perak and killed Arthur Walker, John Allison and Ian Christian.
Two days later on 18th May 1948 the British declared the Malayan Emergency. The young woman in the video Prof Rachel Leow, professor of History at Cambridge University raises the question (and the doubts) why did the British have to declare a state of Emergency over the whole country over the shooting of three planters in just one area Sungei Siput, Perak? She says it was such a disproportionate response for the British to despatch 40,000 British troops to Malaya, organise 250,000 Home Guardsmen and mobilise another 60,000 Commonwealth troops over the death of three British rubber planters. It was not an all out shooting war by the Communists. It was just a Communist hit squad that was sent to shoot those planters.
Well we can argue till the cows come home. But once the Brits declared the Emergency in 1946 the whole idea about Independence, Dato Onn's ground work was all pushed to the back burner for another 11 years. British revenues were intact for another 11 years - until 1957.
And why did the British agree to our Independence in 1957? Again it was money. After the end of the Korean War in 1954, the rubber prices had crashed. There was an economic slowdown around the world. Colonial revenue from Malaya was also affected. The British had to fork out money to pay the salaries of Civil Servants in Malaya. So they cut us loose and "gave" us independence on 31 August 1957.
Chin Peng said Lai Tek was killed by his communist comrades in Bangkok. When I was in school in Ipoh (early 1970s) I positively remember the Straits Times carrying a news report that Lai Tek the British agent had escaped to London.
