War Two in order to join a Scots Guards ski battalion destined for Finland. His wartime service included three years in Burma, much of it behind Japanese lines. He had then commanded an SAS squadron in north-west Europe from late 1944 until the regiment was disbanded in 1945.
Pryce-Jones was a stranger to neither the jungle nor danger. In fact, in 1950, General Sir John Harding, Commander-in-Chief of Far East Land Forces, had called him for a briefing on the explosion of terrorism in Malaya, asking him to produce a detailed analysis of the problem. In order to do this, Pryce-Jones had gone into the jungle for six months, where he had hiked some 1,500 miles, unescorted, in guerrilla-infested territory, and talked to most of those conducting the campaign. Though ambushed twice, he had come out alive.
According to what he had later told Callaghan, much of his time had been spent with the infantry patrols trawling through the jungle in pursuit of an ‘invisible’ enemy. Because of this, he had concluded that the only way to win the war was to win the hearts and minds of the population, rather than try to engage an enemy that was rarely seen. The Communist Terrorists, or CT, were following Mao Tse-tung’s philosophy of moving through the peasant population like ‘fish in a sea’, then using them as a source of food, shelter and potential recruits. What the British had to do, therefore, was ‘dry up the sea’.
To this end, Pryce-Jones’s recommendation was that as many of the aboriginals as possible be relocated to villages, forts, or kampongs protected by British and Federation of Malaya forces. By so doing they would win the hearts and minds of the people, who would appreciate being protected, while simultaneously drying up the ‘sea’ by depriving the guerrillas of food and new recruits.
When his recommendations had met with approval, Pryce-Jones, as the OC (officer commanding) of A Squadron in Minden Barracks, had sent Callaghan into the jungle to spend three months supervising the relocation of the kampongs and checking that the defence systems provided for them and the hearts-and-minds campaign were working out as planned.
Throughout that three months Callaghan had, like Pryce-Jones before him, travelled alone, from one kampong to the other, avoiding guerrilla patrols and mostly living off the jungle, covered in sweat, drenched by rain, often waist-deep in the swamps, drained of blood by leeches, bitten by every imaginable kind of insect, often going hungry for days, and rarely getting a decent night’s sleep.
In fact, it had been a nightmare, but since Pryce-Jones had done the same thing for twice that long, Callaghan wasn’t about to complain.
‘It wasn’t that difficult,’ he lied as the pretty WRAC corporal, Mary Henderson, brought in their cups of tea, passed them out and departed with an attractive swaying of her broad hips. ‘Although there are slightly over four hundred villages, most are little more than shanty towns, inhabited by Chinese squatters. Before we could move them, however, we had to build up a rapport with the aboriginals – in other words, to use your words, win their hearts and minds. This we did by seducing them with free food, medical treatment, and protection from the CT. Medical treatment consisted mainly of primitive clinics and dispensing penicillin to cure the aborigines of yaws, a skin disease. The kampongs and troops were resupplied by river patrols in inflatable craft supplied by US special forces, or by fixed-wing aircraft, though we hope to be using helicopters in the near future.’
‘Excellent. I believe you also made contact with the CT.’
‘More than once, yes.’
‘And survived.’
‘Obviously.’
Pryce-Jones grinned. ‘Men coming back from there brought us some strange stories.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. Your clandestine warfare methods raised more than a few eyebrows back here – not to mention in Britain.’
‘You mean the prostitutes?’
‘Exactly.’
‘The best is the enemy of the good. We did what we had to do, and we did our best.’
Pryce-Jones was referring to the fact that some of the kampong prostitutes had been asking their clients for payment in guns, grenades and bullets instead of cash, then passing them on to the guerrillas in the jungle. Learning of this, Callaghan had used some of his SF (Security Forces) troops, there to protect the kampongs, to pose as clients in order to ‘pay’ the prostitutes with self-destroying weapons, such as hand-grenades fitted with instantaneous fuses that would kill their users, and bullets that exploded in the faces of those trying to fire them.
‘What other dirty tricks did you get up to?’ Pryce-Jones asked.
‘Booby-trapped food stores.’
‘Naturally – but what about the mail? I received some garbled story about that.’
Now it was Callaghan’s turn to grin. ‘I got the idea of mailing incriminating notes or money to leading Communist organizers. The poor bastards were then executed by their own kind on the suspicion that they’d betrayed their comrades.’
‘How perfectly vile.’
‘Though effective.’
‘Word about those dirty tricks got back to Britain and caused a great deal of outrage.’
‘Only with politicians. They express their outrage in public, but in private they just want us to win, no matter how we do it. They always want it both ways.’
Pryce-Jones sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He sipped his steaming tea and licked his upper lip. ‘But are we winning?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Callaghan replied without hesitation. ‘The war in the jungle’s definitely turned in our favour. The CT groups have become more fragmented. An awful lot of their leaders have been captured or killed. Food’s scarce outside the protected kampongs and the CT are therefore finding it more difficult to find recruits among the aboriginals, most of whom are now siding with us and clinging to the protection of our secured villages and forts. Unfortunately, now that the CT propaganda has failed, they’re turning to terror and committing an increasing number of atrocities.’
‘You’re talking about Ah Hoi.’
‘Yes. Only recently that bastard disembowelled an informer’s pregnant wife in front of the whole damned village. He left the villagers terrified. Now he’s rumoured to be somewhere south-west of Ipoh and we’ll soon have to pursue him. What shape are the men in?’
‘Better than the first bunch,’ Pryce-Jones replied.
Callaghan knew just what he meant. After Pryce-Jones had submitted his recommendations regarding the war, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, veteran of the Chindit campaigns in Burma and commander of the World War Two SAS (Special Air Service) Brigade, had been asked to create a special military force that could live permanently in the jungle, to deny the guerrillas sanctuary or rest. That special force, based on the original World War Two SAS, was known as the Malayan Scouts.
Some of those who volunteered for the new unit were useful veterans of the SOE (Special Operations Executive), the SAS and the Ferret Force, the latter being a paramilitary unit drawn from Army volunteers, and former members of SOE’s Force 136. The ‘Ferret’ scouts had led fighting patrols from regular infantry battalions, making the first offensive sweeps into the jungle, aided by forty-seven Dyak trackers, the first of many such Iban tribesmen from Borneo. Though doing enough to prove that the British did not have to take a purely defensive position, the Force was disbanded when many of its best men had to return to their civilian or more conventional military posts.
Unfortunately, too many of the men recruited in a hurry were either simply bored or were persistent troublemakers whose units were happy to see them go elsewhere. One group had even consisted of ten deserters from the French Foreign Legion who had escaped by swimming ashore from a troop-ship conveying them to the war in Indo-China. To make matters worse, due to the speed with which the Malayan Emergency built up, there was little time to properly select or train them.
Shortly after the arrival of that first batch, there