Faced with a Communist guerrilla uprising in Malaya in 1948, the British prepared for a long piecemeal war. While infantry patrols harried the Reds in the impenetrable jungle, the British used a "carpet sweeper" technique on the jungle's edges: gathering up peasants from isolated huts and hamlets and concentrating them in walled "strategic" villages protected by troops and home guards.
Deprived of peasant sustenance and supply, the Red guerrillas withered away.
With Operation Sunrise, the South Viet Nam army, aided by U.S. and British military advisers, last week sought to apply the lessons of Malaya against the Communist Viet Cong marauders...
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