(3 of 8)
The Neutral Jungle. The basic fact about the war in Malaya is the jungle. "The 'thing that astonished me most," writes Colonel F. Spencer . Chapman, an Englishman who spent three years there in World War II behind the Japanese lines, "was the absolute straightness, the perfect symmetry of the tree trunks, like the pillars of a dark and limitless cathedral. The ground itself was covered with a thick carpet of dead leaves and seedling trees. There was practically no earth visible, and certainly no grass or flowers. Up to a height of ten feet or so, a dense undergrowth of young trees and palms, but out of this wavy green sea of undergrowth a myriad tree trunks rose straight upward ... for 150 feet before they burgeoned into a solid canopy of green which almost entirely shut out the sky."
Four-fifths of Malaya—a country about the size of Florida—is tropical forest covering mountains up to 7,000 feet high. In this jungle, inhabited by tigers, elephants, bison, monkeys, gibbons, deer and bear, alive with all manner of insects, including malaria-bearing mosquitoes, bloodsucking leeches, pythons and multicolored birds, where orchids and rhododendron flourish, there is hidden an army of about 5,000 Communist guerrillas.
In World War II the Communists, known then as the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army, were accepted as allies. Colonel Chapman, the survivor of a British "stay-behind" party after the fall of Singapore, describes a Communist camp: "A roughly leveled parade ground, about the size of a tennis court ... A motley guard of honor consisting of about 20 Chinese, including two girls, armed with service rifles or shotguns . . . The majority of them were under 20, and there was one boy who could not have been more than twelve . . ."
All the methods of Communist propaganda were employed at this rude camp: wall newspapers, political plays, tireless singing of Communist songs. When an informer was brought in, "after being burned with brands and beaten almost to death with rattans, [he was] finished off with a bayonet in the grave that had been prepared for [him]." Out of these surroundings came Chin Peng, slight, 31, pimply-faced, fanatical leader of the Malayan Communists, for whose capture the British will pay $26,000.
By Any Means. The Communists had expected to take over Malaya after World War II, but the British beat them to it. In 1948 the Malayan Communist Party passed a resolution advocating "the capture of power by the peasants and workers by any means." This meant going back to their hidden jungle camps and attempting to paralyze the country's life by terrorism and sabotage. Soon they were derailing trains, cutting telephone wires, ambushing police, murdering planters and holding up schools. Unwilling to call them "Communists," the British (who had recognized Communist China) labeled them "bandits"; afraid of skyrocketing insurance rates, they proclaimed the war "a state of emergency." But a captured Communist woman guerrilla put the situation more simply to an Ipoh judge: "You win we die; we win you die."