Legends of the Dragonfly: Fighting the Communists During the Malaya Emergency, 1947-1960

By Vincent Hancock

On discovering the tragic news that his worst fears have been realized by the sudden sinking of his MTB boat, ‘The Wilful Lady’ and the loss of all her crew at sea, Rex our intrepid adventurer decides to forge a new life for himself as a soldier of fortune. This was not to be as the tide of war was coming back again to Malaya but this time the enemy of my enemy is no longer my friend. An eight thousand strong well trained and equipped communist terrorist insurgency had begun with the murders of British rubber plantation owners and rubber tappers alike. Rex is coerced into working for the British once again despite his objections. To make matters worse, the terrorist who became known to the locals as ‘bandits’ were financially well supported by the Communist Party of Malaya with an active membership of tens of thousands of civilians predominantly Chinese squatters and displaced citizenry. Only this time Rex our protagonist would take up the role of a European Police Sergeant working for the Federation of Malaya Police Force. Before his war was over, Rex will have made new friends and face daring challenges that would change his world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728356730

Book preview

© 2020 Vincent Hancock. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/25/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5611-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5612-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5673-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter 1: Leave No Man Behind

Chapter 2: Soldiers of Fortune

Chapter 3: Batang Berjuntai Is Bandit Country

Chapter 4: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Chapter 5: The Jungle Fortress

Chapter 6: Q Squads and Q Operations in Malaya

Chapter 7: Malaya: A Most Beautiful Country

Chapter 8: Kris: Bladed Weapons of Malaya

Chapter 9: The Daimler Dingo

Chapter 10: Head Hunting

Chapter 11: The Dredge

Chapter 12: The Jungle Is Hostile, Not Neutral

Chapter 13: The Belum Valley Operation

Chapter 14: The Crocodile Hunter

Chapter 15: Cherita Zaman Dahulu (A Tale of Old Times)

Chapter 16: Betrothal

Chapter 17: Rendezvous with Fame

Chapter 18: The Railway Line

Chapter 19: The Emergency and Our Struggle

Perhaps I should write in the past tense, though that would be a memoir of a day long gone and more like writing about a dream that was and is now no more. The best compliment I can pay to these people is to write in the present tense and let you see as to who they really are. People are not just ordinary faces in the crowd. I think it was the late eminent doctor Johnson who said, Laughter is what distinguishes man from the beast.

Maybe he had never heard of the hyena, Adolf Hitler, and the Hitlerite movement. The Japanese treated their own soldiers with contempt and brutality if they failed in their duty; Nazis, on the other hand, were looters, thieves, and thugs who ravaged European peoples as their spoils of war. There is a little ditty common to both Malaya and Singapore, which is rather descriptive of the Chinese: These are Hainanese coffee, Hokien mee, Teochew teow, and Cantonese chee. Of course, the Hainanese are noted for their coffee and likewise the Hokien for their noodles. Teochew kway teow comes with black treacle and eggs. Chee is the gateway of the mysterious female, and the Cantonese are noted for their Chee yet never drain it.

A wise man builds up a wall, but a wise woman overthrows it. The Chinese character shou 寿, which belongs to the language of ceremony and etiquette, is an interesting ideograph to study. Some Chinese-English dictionaries have dozens of definitions for it. It means old age, years, a long prosperous life, longevity.

The meaning of the character shou is by no means limited to the secular meaning of the word. It also embraces a wider religious significance, verging on the idea of immortality among Western people. The quest for an elixir of life which can impart immortality has occupied the minds of the Chinese from the earliest times. Si Wang Mu, the Royal Mother of the West, who lives in the Kwan Lun Mountains, possesses a peach tree bearing fruit every thousand years. From the peaches of this tree, the elixir of life can be distilled, and this is the reason why peach symbolises longevity.

Image%201.jpg

My five-man jungle squad 1951

Each person’s life depends on what he or she decides to do about it. If through understanding and action, it is possible to free ourselves from the usual patterns of growth, decay, and one-sidedness, then the duration and quality of the lives we lead is up to us and no one else. We are our own and only responsibility and the sole arbiters of our own destiny.

(Rex: Sunday 15th January 1967)

In memory of my father Vincent James Hancock (Pet name: Rex):

30 November 1924 to 10 May 1989, RIP

The Malays regard the British as kings who have been deposed and are angry at the Chinese for presuming to reign in their place.

Foreword

How many of us can say that we have walked the knife edge that separates life from death? You know that every decision you make, right or wrong, could result in your own death or that of everyone around you. And how many of us would choose that path, deliberately, for the greater good of humankind, or for a cause you believe in, and not just because of conscription, an accident, or fate?

Well, this book is about just such a person, a true-life hero, defined as someone who is admired for his courage, outstanding achievements, or noble acts. This book is about the author’s father, Vincent James (Rex) Hancock, and his time deep in the Malayan jungles of Southeast Asia, during what was known as the Malaya Emergency (Darurat Malaya, 1947–1960).

It is a reminder of lost stories during a period of British colonialism in our Far East colonies. The indigenous Malay population preferred British rule over the Chinese Communists, terrorists led by Chin Peng, who wanted to govern Malaya through violent armed struggle. These accounts must be told today, before they are lost forever. The constant threat of enemy snipers picking you off, or booby-traps that would cause a slow, painful death, infectious diseases, mosquitos, snakes, spiders, and even monkeys giving away your position, and all of this before you even come face to face with another human being who just wanted to kill you.

I have known the author for many years and was honoured when he asked me to write this foreword. My background was first as a soldier working deep undercover and then later as a police officer in a large United Kingdom city. He knew that my experience would give me an insight into the man himself, not to judge, but to truly understand the difference between those who run towards danger and those who run away from it, to protect those weaker than himself, and to understand instinctively the psychological make-up and especially the personal human cost of simply being …. truly heroic.

T. E. O’Hare

Image%202.jpg

Rex in Singapore, 1969

I have been asked by avid readers of my first book By the Tale of the Dragonfly, my true-life genres based on my late father’s five journals, if there will be another book. These journals were forgotten about for thirty years after his death, left sitting in a box and never intended for publication, until recently. I would love to continue writing more on the subject if there is still a demand for memories of British colonialism during the declining days of the British Empire. I would like to thank all my readers and friends for their support and interest with my late father’s adventures during this bygone era in both books. I hope you enjoy this second submission, Legends of the Dragonfly, as much as I have writing it. It has been an emotional rollercoaster remembering it all again.

The term dragonfly I used again in the title for this second book was a code challenge used during my late father’s early life working for the British Special Intelligence Services in South East Asia known as SIFE (Special Intelligence Far East). I waited this length of time before considering publication to ensure all those who took part in operations back during those high-risk days were no longer alive. For it was only after I enlisted with the British military, that I became aware of this part of my late father’s clandestine way of life in our former colonies back in Malaya and Singapore. Rex lived his life always by being ahead of the others. A hero by all accounts who did dangerous work secretly to make my world a safer place to live in.

Challenge: By the Tale

Response: Of the dragonfly

Vincent Hancock, 10 March 2020

Introduction

This work is based upon a collaboration of ideas plus fond memories taken from five journals left behind by Rex, a term of endearment for Vincent James Hancock, my soldier-of-fortune father. Rex was a wild jungle dog my father loved who followed my him everywhere he went. The stories he wrote were assembled many years later, which accounts for some gaps in the writings. History is usually recorded by the survivors of conflict, but many brave Malayan men and women were killed in the struggle against Communist bandits. There remains to this day a great deal of omitted, redacted, or politically sensitive historical events missing made by those serving at the lower end of the chain of command.

These heroes were young male and female special constables, police corporals, European police sergeants, and later police lieutenants, all junior officers. The Malayan National Liberation Army MNLA was a communist guerrilla army that represented the interests of the Chinese immigrant squatters who were displaced non-citizens. They had no interest at all in Malay culture or the rights of the indigenous Malay people who were ruled by their sultans for centuries. In 1948, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) waged an unjustified, ruthless guerrilla war to overthrow the British and her loyal colonial subjects.

In 1946, shortly after the end of the second world war, the British came up with the Malayan Union Proposal which favoured granting citizenship to the Malayan Chinese immigrants, many of whom were illegal squatters from the various provinces of China. This proved hugely unpopular with the wider Malay population, so the British withdrew their proposal. It was probably the spark that fuelled the flames for the war the MCP had prepared for in advance, should negotiations fail. The communist used the MUP failure as the excuse to begin their violent struggle against British rule in Malaya. Refusing to hand back all their military grade weapons the British had supplied them during the war to fight the Japanese, they kept it back in reserve as a contingency plan. This clearly signalled a preparedness by the Malayan Communist Party to go to war with the British and Malayan government, which was most likely their original intention. In short, the colonial British and Malaya governments did not want this war. It was the Chinese communist leadership in Malaya who started it by murdering innocent civilian plantation owners turning a prosperous developing nation into a bloody undeclared war zone lasting many years.

Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA), The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960): causes and general description

The Malaya Emergency began in May 1948 when Chin Peng moved his 10,000 strong Chinese communist army deep into the jungles of Malaya and started his violent struggle against British rule. The Federation of Malaya police regulars were no match militarily against these bandits, who were veterans of jungle warfare. These Chinese terrorists later became known as communist terrorists (CTs). It was nothing short of a miracle how combat veterans, initially from British-controlled Palestine (before it became the state of Israel), were pooled together to form up and train (rather hurriedly) the new Federation of Malaya Police Special Constables, which became an effective paramilitary police force.

This is the story of one such European Police Sergeant EPS (later promoted to Police lieutenant), the jungle squads he commanded and the brave police special constables, both men and women who served with him, many of whom lost their lives fighting against a formidable, well-equipped, Marxist-inspired guerrilla army shortly after the end of the second world war in Malaya. This book is dedicated to their memory.

Chapter 1

Leave No Man Behind

Thursday, 1 January 1948

The Netherlands came to the Indonesia archipelago in the year 1596. Early Dutch expeditions dominated Portuguese settlers, who had arrived in 1498. Before long, the Dutch established control over the entire region, outclassing even the British and Spanish, who were their trading competitors. The Netherlands’ United East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) was established in 1602. But by 1619, VOC started to colonise the archipelago of Indonesia, forcibly establishing a central governance in the Indonesian city of Jayakarta, changing the name to Batavia, now modern-day Jakarta.

Some two hundred years later, the VOC acquired additional ports as trading bases and safeguarded their interests by assimilating all the surrounding territorial islands. The VOC’s early motive to colonise Indonesia was driven by wealth creation based on commerce, but at the expense of the local indigenous Indonesian population, who were heavily exploited. The Dutch used up all the fertile land in Indonesia, leaving the local peasants insufficient arable territories to grow crops for their own subsistence. Because of the profiteering, greed, and arrogant mistreatment by the Dutch, the local Indonesian workers suffered long famines and deprivations of basic daily requirements to sustain a healthy life for themselves and their families.

Poor conditions suffered by indigenous Indonesian peoples led to local resistance against Dutch rule. After the Japanese left following the end of the Second World War in 1945, anti-Dutch sentiment grew to end Dutch rule, finding favour with the Indonesian Communist Party, or Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) who supported the idea of an armed insurrection against Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia. This was a time of great struggle leading to the deaths of thousands of innocent people in that region.

Image%203.jpg

Dutch gunboat HMS Flores; Allan C. Green, 1878–1954

There is a time and season for all things. Believing in this one truth, I write this journal for my children and my children’s children, but not so they may justify me, for I alone am responsible for my own actions. But rather that my people may know and perhaps understand their own grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, and other relatives and friends, in the quest for their own identity. Do you moralise the ideal or do you remember these atrocities committed against humanity in the name of idealism? I remember a long time since past when the ghost of all my crew appear to me in the dreamtime on the opposite seas of life and death, where the dead do not rest but come back to haunt us.

I was in town, chasing another big score for my crew, when news came to me through the bamboo telegram. What I had always feared had happened to my boat and her entire crew. I’ve always had a premonition that one day, a Dutch gunboat would finally catch up with me whilst I was out at sea, carrying out my contraband trade. The Wilful Lady, my boat, was attacked and sunk through Dutch naval ambush action; as far as I knew, all my Malay crew were lost. A Dutch navy gunboat, accompanied by a submerged submarine, knew the position of my motor torpedo boat (MTB) and waited for her in a well-planned ambush off the coast of Sumatra.

The Dutch gunboat blocked their escape route from a bay in Sumatra to the sea by firing her heavy guns at them. When my crew attempted to make a run for it into open waters, another Dutch U-Boat class submarine suddenly surfaced and smashed into my PT MTB with great force in the darkness of the moonless night. The Flores-class Dutch gunboat accompanying the Dutch submarine carried three 5.9-inch guns, one 75-mm gun, four heavy Browning 50-calibre machine guns, one 40-mm Quick Firing anti-aircraft pom-pom gun, plus 20-mm machine cannons. She also had eight .303 light machine guns.

My informants later informed me that the two Dutch navy vessels eliminated all my surviving crew swimming in the sea with machine gun fire after sinking my boat. In her high-speed run to escape, the Wilful Lady crashed into the surfacing Dutch submarine. In one night, I had lost my means of making a good living out here, along with my loyal Malay crew, who were treated unjustly as Bugis pirates. Fortunately, Zainal, my coxswain, had gone home on personal family business, but the rest of the crew were missing, presumed lost at sea to the brutal Dutch.

Nobody was ever going to admit they executed my men without any trial or due process. Around the same time, Roy, my long-standing friend and business partner, also disappeared off the radar while onboard along with his own MTB. I don’t believe in coincidences, but karma makes for strange bedfellows in this life. It was almost as if the whole thing was engineered by British or Dutch authorities to shut me down. In this game of cat and mouse, who can say for sure? But the British were aware of my small-scale maritime enterprise out in these backwaters of their waning empire. They even on occasion employed my services to ferry their agents around discreetly undetected by the local authorities.

I had abandoned my boat in the past when pursued but always recovered her after it was safe to do so. News came through my bamboo telegram regarding the whereabouts of Roy and his crew, and I soon discovered that Roy’s crew had also been ambushed. Roy survived the attack, but unfortunately, he was captured by Indonesian Communist insurgents. According to my intel, he was then handed over to Sukarno’s PKIs. Because of my best friend’s unexpected internment by the PKI, I decided to plan a daring mission to rescue him.

Politics aside, I knew that Roy’s life depended on a hostage rescue with surgical precision. I could never leave my best friend behind to his fate with these brutal bastards. My main objective was to rescue Roy before he was handed over to professional interrogators. He had already suffered many years as a prisoner of war when the Japanese occupied Singapore.

Shortly after my entire entrepreneur financial investment was wiped out with the sinking of my boat, a representative from the British Civil Service knocked at my door.

He was middle-aged and well dressed in the finest Savile Row. Oxford or possibly Cambridge educated, no doubt. He introduced himself as Michael, sat down at my table, and opened his leather briefcase, which contained my file. He stated that he represented the British government and said that I was, quote, a man of no visible means of support. He also said that due to the nature of my occupation, I was considered a vagrant in the Federation of Malaya.

With his next breath, he explained that the British were having trouble with communist insurgents in Malaya and added that the Crown required my services again.

Your King needs you and calls on you again to serve the Empire, he said.

I responded in the negative. No bloody well thank you, I said abruptly.

The look on his face at my response was priceless. I reiterated that I had already served my country during the last war and lost many good friends; I suggested he look elsewhere.

Michael paused, looking sternly at me, and responded, You are already in country and with all the necessary qualities we need for the job at hand.

I shook my head at him again.

In his best pompous civil servant tone, he said, Well, I am really sorry you feel that way. The British Colonial Service is often a frequent cover occupation used by cloak-and-dagger personnel of the Special Intelligence Services. We will give you a week to think things over and finalise your personal affairs. But if you remain adamant not to help us and your answer remains the same, we will view you as persona non grata. A man with no visible means of support.

Agent provocateur and enemy of the state came to mind, and as much as I detested threats, I could see that he was deadly serious about reactivating this former combat soldier.

Exactly what do you have in mind? I asked.

With this started a whole new career for me with the British Security Forces during the Malaya Emergency. I had already started with my own private mercenary army and wanted none of this. But things moved on rather fast from there due to the need for former combat veterans to help with the Malaya Emergency. I was one of many others still out in Malaya who responded to their call of duty to serve the Crown once again.

Knowing that time was running short to rescue Roy, I set about bringing into motion a daring rescue plan.

I used what influence I had with the Royal Navy brass, calling in a favour to covertly infill into Sumatra via an Acheron A class diesel electric submarine. The infill had a forty-eight-hour window for my three-man rescue team. Backup exfiltration, if we somehow missed the submarine pickup, would be with Mat Awi’s Bugis pirates, who had no love for the communist insurgents uprising in Indonesia (I always have at least two escape lines when the operation is deemed high risk). On this occasion, we would be using oxygen rebreathers rather than scuba diving gear, which leaves a trail of evidence via bubbles on the surface.

Scuba diving gear uses compressed air. As pure oxygen is poisonous to divers beneath a hundred feet, we deployed with enriched air nitrox (EAN) rebreathers, using mixtures of 40 per cent nitrogen and 60 per cent oxygen. My plan was to remain unseen, maintaining a depth of a hundred feet underwater throughout the infiltration operation.

Our submarine insertion was close to the shoreline as possible, removing any possibility of detection. For this rescue operation to succeed, surprise and a ruthlessly intense attack was paramount.

When you are a smaller mission team outnumbered by a larger enemy force, there is no time to take prisoners. I had anticipated a long swim inland from the submarine infill point. But lady luck was shining on us this day. On this mission, we had at our disposal the highly classified self-propelled Royal Navy powered body boards. Our weapons consisted of two supressed 9mm Sten Mark IIS submachine guns, with folding stock for ease of transport. All was made ready and moved to the aft escape trunk. I loaded up the De Lisle .45acp carbine as well as three 9mm Canadian Browning High-Power pistols as backup weapons.

The De Lisle .45acp (Automatic Colt Pistol cartridge) firearm was essentially a WWII short magazine, Lee-Enfield Mark III rifle modified with a highly effective sound moderator built around the pistol calibre barrel. The specialist carbine coup-de-grâce was its amazingly reliability for silent sentry elimination. Used by special operations forces during the second world war, British commando brigades, and the Special Operative Executive (SOE). Designed by John Moses Browning in 1904, the .45acp (11.43×23mm) rounds were harder hitting than the 9mm Luger and would ensure my team a silent, quick kill for any sentries posted around where Roy was being held.

The 9mm sound moderated Sten Mark IIS submachine gun would be a last resort. If it all went belly up, and we were forced to fight our way out, we would have the needed firepower. Our weapons were sealed inside a watertight, buoyant carrier on a tow line.

I anticipated that the oxygen rebreathers would last us