Guerrillas in the Jungle. Shaun Clarke

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      ‘If I don’t, I’m sure you’ll tell me in good time. Would you like a mug of hot tea?’

      ‘That sounds wonderful, boss.’

      ‘MARY!’ Pryce-Jones’s drawl had suddenly become an ear-shattering bellow directed at the pretty WRAC corporal seated behind a desk in the adjoining, smaller room.

      ‘Yes, boss!’ she replied, undisturbed.

      ‘A tramp masquerading as an SAS officer has just entered the building, looking unwashed, exhausted and very thirsty. Tea with sugar and milk, thanks. Two of.’

      ‘Yes, boss,’ Mary said, pushing her chair back and disappearing behind the wall separating the offices.

      ‘A sight for sore eyes,’ Callaghan said.

      ‘Bloodshot eyes,’ Major Pryce-Jones corrected him. ‘Christ, you look awful! Your wife would kill me for this.’

      Callaghan grinned, thinking of Jennifer back in their home near Hereford and realizing that he hadn’t actually thought about her for a very long time. ‘Oh, I don’t know, boss. She thinks I’m just a Boy Scout at heart. She got used to it long ago.’

      ‘Not to seeing you in this state,’ Pryce-Jones replied. ‘Pretty rough, was it?’

      Callaghan shrugged. ‘Three months is a long time to travel alone through the jungle. On the other hand, I saw a lot during my travels, so the time wasn’t wasted.’

      ‘I should hope not,’ Pryce-Jones said.

      After spending three months virtually alone in the jungle, living like an animal and trying to avoid the murderous guerrillas, most men would have expected slightly more consideration from their superior officers than Callaghan was getting. But he wasn’t bothered, for this was the SAS way and he certainly had only admiration for his feisty Squadron Commander. For all his urbane ways, Pryce-Jones was a hard-drinking, hard-fighting idealist, a tough character who had won a double blue at Cambridge and given up a commission early in World 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.’

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