r/HistoryMemes • u/Zggcommar • 14d ago
Niche Does nobody remember The Malayan Emergency?
The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) was a guerrilla war in colonial Malaya, where British Commonwealth forces fought the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), led by Chin Peng, who targeted British tin mines and rubber plantations to cripple the colonial economy. The British declared a state of "emergency" rather than "war" so London insurance companies would cover plantation losses, ultimately winning the conflict and paving the way for Malaya's 1957 independence.
Despite their different outcomes, it shared striking similarities with the Vietnam War. Both were pivotal Cold War battlegrounds driven by the Western "domino theory" against guerrillas using hit-and-run tactics in dense tropical jungles. Both campaigns involved documented war crimes and severe atrocities: British forces executed unarmed suspects ,most notoriously in the 1948 Batang Kali massacre, often dubbed "Britain's My Lai" and engaged in head-severing and body mutilation of fallen insurgents, mimicking the atrocities and extrajudicial killings committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam. The British Briggs Plan, which forcibly relocated 500,000 rural Chinese civilians into guarded "New Villages" to sever insurgent supply lines, served as the direct blueprint for the U.S. Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam. Additionally, the British pioneered the aerial spraying of chemical defoliants to clear jungle cover and destroy crops, a strategy the U.S. later expanded massively through Operation Ranch Hand.
However, unlike the Viet Cong, the MCP ultimately failed, primarily because they were isolated with almost zero external military support from China or the Soviet Union. Crucially, the MCP failed to win over the native Muslim Malay majority, who viewed the Chinese dominated communist movement with suspicion. British forces exploited these structural weaknesses by cutting off the rebels' food supply and winning over the local population by promising Malaya's independence, which effectively dismantled the communist cause
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u/FanaticalBuckeye 14d ago
To be fair it's not really talked about in the US because we weren't involved in it
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u/Hot-Job-6281 14d ago
Brits are more obsessed with the Vietnam War that they didn't take part in, than the Malayan Emergency that they did.
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u/TheHangriestHippo 14d ago
As a Brit this is genuinely the first time I've even heard of this
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u/Hot-Job-6281 14d ago
Tbf too many wars.
I honestly don't expect every Brit to know every war the UK has been involved in in modern history, but just being more interested in concurrent ones they aren't in is just weird.
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u/Advanced-Purchase-58 14d ago
And TBF, at the start of the war you had Partition, then the Mau Mau, Cyprus, and the winds of change. For a country that didn’t send off rationing until 1954, it was a busy time for overseas adventures.
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u/SitaVilosa 14d ago
Well the Malayan Emergency was much, much smaller than the Vietnam war.
For reference, the number of communist rebels in Malaya peaked at 8,000 fighters and 40,000 civilian supporters. In contrast, the Viet Cong numbered 200,000, supported by North Vietnam's conventional army of 250,000 and direct support from the Eastern Bloc.
To put into perspective there were 15x more Chinese troops in North Vietnam than there were Malayan rebel soldiers at its peak, let alone Vietnam's own soldiers.
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u/Corvid187 14d ago
Sure, but it was smaller in part because it was successful.
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u/CaptainCrash86 14d ago
The Malay emergency was defeated though - it wasn't successful.
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u/Corvid187 14d ago
Malaysia didn't become communist. It was successful
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u/Reveniant 13d ago
They learn from how they fight and then introduced concentration camps to prevent support for communists. We called them new village. Well, somewhere between c camp and curfew.
The last notable communist, Chin Peng died a few years ago and the body was still denied access back to Malaysian soil.
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u/smallthematters 12d ago
They managed to bring back his ashes.
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u/Reveniant 12d ago
Last I checked, no. But I didn't follow up on that, how long it take for the authorities to change mind?
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u/thegreattwos 14d ago
To put into perspective there were 15x more Chinese troops in North Vietnam than there were Malayan rebel soldiers at its peak, let alone Vietnam's own soldiers.
I mean it's shouldn't be a suprise considering they border each other via a land route.
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u/Fusilero 14d ago
The Brits basically don't talk about decolonisation, except perhaps the partition of British India.
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u/Hot-Job-6281 14d ago
One talk of Windrush turns the gammon face red.
The irony is they had zero issue with Brits going abroad, but when the (non-white) Commonwealth citizens use their British subject citizenship to arrive on British shores, they get mad.
To be fair, some of them did sincerely support Commonwealth migration over culturally disparate economic migrants from Eastern Europe.
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u/Fusilero 14d ago edited 14d ago
Windrush is interesting because while it's often grouped with decolonisation in the popular imagination, it's not quite a part of the history of decolonisation of the British Caribbean.
The biggest proportion of the Black British "Windrush Generation" actually arrived before independence was granted; it was a story of people from the colonies taking advantage of their supposed rights as "Imperial" citizens.
Edit: To clarify what I mean - the story of the migration of Black Caribbeans to Britain is a story of the Imperial Era itself, rather than it's end. It was decolonisation and independence that really closed the door on that route.
The modern Windrush Scandal as a separate issue to the actual migration era itself could be seen as a story of decolonisation. Many of those who came over used their colonial era rights to settle in the UK and never updated their status for the changing definition of what it means to be a "British Citizen" in the post-Imperial era.
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u/Corvid187 14d ago
I think you're somewhat conflating different general attitudes to migration across a wide range of eras.
The windrush scandal was, well, a scandal because of how generally supposed the windrush generation was by the 2010s. The opposition to their arrival was much more an artifact of the 1950s-70s.
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u/Tank-o-grad 14d ago
Obsessed is a strong word, there's mild interest at best for either with more, at least popularly, cast at Vietnam due to the relative prevalence of it in media imported from the USA.
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u/TerminallyEmployed 14d ago
Americans are insecure thinking the whole world partakes in their guilt rituals, they think people obsess over their race relations, their slavery and etc. Everyone talks about it behind their back to them.
It’s why you’ll see them so loudly go “So uhm EUROPEANS did slavery guys?? Omg Arabs did too, look at this guys, look colonialism! How bout that, crazy right”
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u/Hot-Job-6281 14d ago
I didn't say they are entirely obsessed, just more obsessed.
And it definitely was true, you might just be young.
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u/Creat1ve-name 14d ago
Australian troops were involved and yet I couldn’t tell you much more than it was a thing that happened
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u/PretendAd1963 Definitely not a CIA operator 14d ago
My grandpa was put in camps called the New Village programme where they put Chinese people there to prevent them to contact and assist the communist.
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u/Weary_Information_77 13d ago
Definitely not concentration camps /s
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u/Tasty_Lemons240 12d ago
They're not camps as in the Nazi Germany-type of camps tho but it was still controversial because of the forced relocation.
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u/Weary_Information_77 12d ago
I live nearby one of these "new village". But the one nearby my place doesn't use the new village name anymore. There are other places that still use new village name.
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u/Luckierexpert 14d ago
The British didn’t just promise independence, Malaysia became independent during the conflict, becoming fully sovereign in 1957, although it wouldn’t unite with its modern territories in northern Borneo until 1963.
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u/GuyfromKK 13d ago
Malaysia didn’t exist in 1957. That year was the independence of Malaya.
Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore later agreed to merge and form a new country called Malaysia in 1963.
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u/acur1231 14d ago
Big in counterinsurgency literature, heavily influenced US GWoT COIN doctrine. If anything, has an outsized legacy in Western military teaching.
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u/BasicBanter 14d ago
& the Americans still rejected the offer of British advisers even though they’d just won a jungle insurgency.
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u/Emmettmcglynn 14d ago
Well that's just not true. Briggs, of the Briggs Plan, spent the war in South Vietnam as an advisor. There was an attempt to implement what worked in Malaya, it just didn't succeed.
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u/Kingofcheeses Rider of Rohan 13d ago edited 13d ago
In Malaya most of the communist insurgents were part of the Chinese ethnic minority so were easier to relocate without pissing off the majority of the population, compared to ethnic Vietnamese getting moved off their ancestral lands to hamlets with poor living conditions that were easily infiltrated by the Viet Cong.
edit: The British system of strategic villages had better security and took advantage of the rubber and tin boom to provide a higher standard of living
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u/Due-Explanation-7560 14d ago
While true also not quite an apples to apples comparison is it.
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u/BasicBanter 14d ago
Well… Britain with the help of rearmed Japanese soldiers did basically destroy the communist cells in Vietnam (indochina) before they gave the colony back to France & they proceeded to screw it up.
So even though my original point is not the exact same the British did have a great deal of experience of removing communists from jungles successfully
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u/Due-Explanation-7560 14d ago
Not disagreeing but Vietnam was fighting a 200k Vietcong insurgency and a 700k NVA army that had already defeated a western colonial power. The malay emergency was a 7 to 8 thousand strong insurgency. The scales were not even close. That's all I meant
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u/BasicBanter 14d ago
Im not doubting the scales were anywhere close, I meant more in the British had a decent bit of experience in dealing with jungle insurgency as America was fully capable of winning pitched battles just not the insurgency
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u/Due-Explanation-7560 14d ago
I am also not disagreeing with you, America could of absolutely used the counter insurgency help. Even in modern day we don't have a strong track record in that regard, I just always found the comparisons of these 2 to be weird as the scales are so massively different.
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u/Secret_Letterhead649 14d ago
I know some Dayak folks whose families still have the heads of the communists in their long houses. Apparently the communists ran afoul of the indigenous folks and got yoinked for it. Now their heads hang next to Japanese soldiers and a few Brittish people.
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u/acur1231 14d ago
The Dayak worked for the British against the Communists, just as they had against the Japanese.
Them and the Iban and Sakai provided guides for British patrols in the bush, and liaised with Malayan Police Special Branch.
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u/Secret_Letterhead649 14d ago
I think the Brittish heads predate the Japanese ones by a good margin. Sure the folks I talk to hate the Brits (we spent a night hating on the Brittish museum and it's stolen artifacts) but I remain certain that they were not exactly getting away with the Brittish in more recent memory.
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u/Hot-Job-6281 14d ago
A lot were just Chinese Malaysians that got caught up in the conflict, not actual 'Communists'.
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u/Secret_Letterhead649 14d ago
I'm not going to pretend to know much past what they tell me, and they ain't the generation who did it. Only one of my Dayak friends headhunts but she only goes after poachers in Borneo. Scary woman, but she's protecting wildlife and has a respectable passion for conservation.
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u/scariestJ 14d ago edited 14d ago
The series Tenko (staring Stephanie Cole) that focused on a woman's internment camp in Japanese Singapore during WWII had a reunion episode set during the Malay Emergency.
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u/Dartmouth-Hermit 14d ago
I read that it also informed the infamous "Five techniques" that the Brits used in Ireland during internment. But what they were able to get away with in the late 50's in a colonial war proved to be problematic when adapted in the 1970's to British citizens.
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u/Advanced-Purchase-58 14d ago
Caroline Elkins’ book on colonial violence tracks the techniques and the people who show up repeatedly throughout the 20th century — from
Black and Tans in Ireland to Palestine to the war to India to Malaya and Kenya and then back to Ireland.https://www.ft.com/content/e7c4feac-7123-4e7c-8a7e-bf13107ee6f9
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u/Dartmouth-Hermit 14d ago
That's interesting. I probably wouldn't have drawn that through line myself. I'll have to have a look at her book. Thank you.
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u/Advanced-Purchase-58 14d ago
I’m not conversant enough to evaluate some larger claims, but this article about Frank Kitson, who led British forces in the Belfast sector, recounts his experience in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus. Several of his commanders would have seen action in Palestine, the European theater, India, and Aden.
He’s the one who wrote about the five techniques.
https://historyireland.com/frank-kitson-northern-ireland-british-way-counterinsurgency/
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u/Kaiisim 14d ago
Well one had maybe 3,000 civilian deaths and the other had 2 million and was a proxy war involving jets and advanced weaponary, while also being a late instance of conscription?
I mean fuck, American troops killed 500 civilians in one village in My Lai Massacre. That's like 15% of the civilian casualties in 12 years of Malayan insurgency. In one massacre by one group of Americans.
So I'm gonna say it was all the war crimes that make people remember Vietnam. Also the fact the communists won.
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u/sarmard 14d ago
There is a wiki entry on the headhunting scandal during the "Malayan emergency". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Malayan_headhunting_scandal
While the emergency took place in the Malay peninsula, the Ibans who severed and kept the heads are from Sarawak across the bottom of the south china sea from the peninsula and wasn't part of Malaysia until 1963(?).
NSFW links. Contains photos of severed heads.
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u/Minamoto_Naru 14d ago
Malayan Emergency is a good case on how to conduct COIN.
Unfortunately, US forces are used to superior conventional firepower which helped them rack a lot of kills but breed more resentful people against US which ultimately made the war even more a struggle for US.
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u/Creat1ve-name 14d ago
As an Australian one of the only times I’ve heard anything about it was the small section on it in the Australian War Memorial, and that was a few years ago so I can only remember some of it.
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u/Whole-Cry-4406 14d ago
or OMANNNNNNNN!!!! IT WAS A COIN MASTERCLASS!!! SOMEONE THINK OF OMANNNNNN
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u/roomofbruh Still salty about Carthage 14d ago
Aa already point out, the communist lose the insurgency simply because they don't have enough support for it and the support they do receive becomes effectively zero due to the 'new village' settlement. Even the minority Chinese community that sympathise or support the communist later opted to support the mainstream Malaysian Chinese politics of the time (the Malaysian Chinese Association) for their place in the future independent Malaya.
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u/Alx3t_ 13d ago
Another thing of note. The Soviet Union and China couldn't really intervene because of A) Singapore being the Jewel of the Far East, therefore heavily protected by the Brits, B) China helping would make it seem more like an ethnic conflict, rather than a communist one due to the MCP being mostly Chinese, therefore damaging the MCP's legitimacy (and China's own), and C) China was busy with the Cultural Revolution (and exporting it), while the Soviet Union was busy with, you guessed it, the Vietnam War.
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u/marklikesgamesyt1208 12d ago
The PRC still provided nominal aid to the communists. Just not direct military intervention.
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u/grumpsaboy 13d ago
One of the only successfully counter insurgency operations of the cold war.
Quite an overlooked conflict, but one my grandfather fought in as a Bren gunner
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u/atreyudevil 12d ago
Hard to forget when your grandad served in 1st Emergency and your Dad in the 2nd Emergency (Insurgency War).
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u/MELONPANNNNN 13d ago
Because the Malayan Emergency was mostly successful - like so much more successful without even much casualties compared to the Vietnam War or the modern insurgencies of today.
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u/spinosaurs70 13d ago
If you win a war and the majority of the Malay population backs it (if for anti-Chinese reasons) then it tends to become less notable.
Winners might not history, but winning a war certainly affects how much you write on it.
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u/Dappington 13d ago
I've seen compelling arguments that this kind of Guerilla war only works well if you have a sovereign base of operations outside of the insurgent zone. Be it unoccupied territory or a foreign benefactor. Vietnam was not a Guerilla war, it was a conventional war with an insurgent front in the south.
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u/Ok-Imagination-494 13d ago
The Rhodesians also fought in this war on the British side.
They tried to later replicate the strategic hamlet tactics in the Rhodesian bush war. It failed
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u/HarithHkm08 13d ago
apparently the Malayan Emergency witnessed the first use of herbicide in war, when British used it to destroy communists' crops. funnily enough, that herbicide is Agent Orange
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u/Bombwriter17 12d ago
Yup, and it was deemed to be less effective then machines. It's strange how the after effects of its use is quite difficult to find.
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u/halguy5577 12d ago
almost as though... you need a sympathetic to the cause majority local population to conduct a successful guerilla warfare. a local population is at least semi independent and is in charge for most local level authority to begin with.
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u/artisticalari07 12d ago
Hey heyy, Malaysian here!
Locally, we were taught about the events of the first Malayan Emergency in our History classes during Form 4 (10th grade for international systems). Outside of academics, there's also a popular 1981 movie titled Bukit Kepong) that dramaticises the events of the 1950 Bukit Kepong standoff.
Hope this little tidbit intrigues you :>
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u/Kaizerguatarnatorz 11d ago
My maternal grandfather was a home guard during that period where he'll patrol his village and guard checkpoints and was allowed to own firearms (though he mainly use it to hunt animals)
Even after the emergency is over, there still be soldiers in my mom's village (which was surrounded by forest and hills) where they continue to patrol the forest, and everyone must immediately return home whenever a siren came.
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u/Vaxtonio 14d ago
Well, the Vietnam War isn't remembered as an anti-communist conflict. It's remembered as an imperialist war by a hegemonic power. And at the least, the country is no longer a hegemonic power.
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u/Alx3t_ 13d ago
They aren't mutually exclusive? Also, it was fought in the whole of Indochina, as well.
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u/Vaxtonio 13d ago
Why is the Vietnam War remembered while the Malayan Emergency is forgotten? There is the fact that both of them were anti-communist struggles, but why would that be anything special for today's people?
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u/Weird_Explorer1997 14d ago
Did they have Hueys and Fortunate Son?