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In his posthumously published memoirs he misguidedly described Ram as his trusted comrade, ‘who secretly passed messages to comrades in India’ against the British.⁴²

      FORCE 136: THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE

      At the same time that Britain’s intelligence services were running double-cross agents like Silver in India, its special forces were also actively thwarting Axis plots in the empire. British territories in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, occupy as important a place in the history of British irregular warfare as they do in that of British strategic deception. As with modern strategic deception, the Middle East was the birthplace of Britain’s modern special forces. Dudley Clarke, the founding father of strategic deception, was also one of the founders of the modern British special forces. In 1940 he was instrumental in setting up a self-sufficient and highly mobile new unit which he termed the commandos, and in July 1941 he helped to establish one of the most famous of all special forces units: the Special Air Service (SAS). The SAS was founded in Egypt by Colonel David Stirling, under the British Commander in Chief of the Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, but Clarke provided valuable input to the new regiment: he explained to its leaders the benefits of strategic deception, as he had done to the LCS, and he even helped to create its emblem, featuring the sword of Damocles, which it retains to the present day. During the war the SAS successfully used groups of men and jeeps, known as Long Range Desert Groups, to harry German forces, and after the war it would perform a valuable role in anti-colonial revolts, or ‘Emergencies’ as they were termed, in various parts of the globe.

      Along with the commandos and the SAS, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) also conducted sabotage operations against the Axis Powers in various parts of the British empire. SOE is commonly associated with Europe, but in fact it was an empire-wide service, operating in the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. It was very much the stuff of ‘Boy’s Own’ adventure stories. Strictly speaking, in the British tradition at least, it was not an intelligence agency at all, but a paramilitary organisation, established in July 1940 with the aim of waging a supposedly ‘new’ type of irregular warfare against the Axis Powers – apparently the lessons of guerrilla warfare that existed from Lawrence of Arabia’s days had been forgotten by the Chiefs of Staff in London. SOE picked up where Lawrence had left off. Its remit was, to use Churchill’s famous phrase, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. Its headquarters in Electra House, Baker Street – earning its personnel the nickname ‘the Baker Street Irregulars’ – were inconspicuously identified by a brass plate on the front door that merely read ‘Inter-Services Research Bureau’. From there SOE organised paramilitary and sabotage operations in enemy-occupied territories in Europe and further afield, as well as establishing communications networks in those countries and arranging escape routes from them. In total, during the war it probably employed close to 10,000 men and 3,000 women across the globe.⁴³

      At first SOE’s operations in the Far East were run out of Singapore, but with the Japanese advance in late 1941 and early 1942, its headquarters were moved first to India, where it was known as the ‘India Mission’. From mid-1942 onwards overall control for its operations in Malaya and Burma was switched to new headquarters in Ceylon, where SOE adopted the cover name ‘Force 136’. Force 136 was led throughout the war by Colin Mackenzie, a former Scots Guards officer with a razor-sharp intellect (he was a student of John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge) who had been badly injured during the First World War. Its operations in the Far East, like broader British interests there, were totally transformed by the rapid advance of Japanese forces through British territories: Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day 1941, Malaya and Burma in early 1942, followed by the catastrophic surrender of the city of Singapore on 15 February. The capitulation of Singapore has rightly earned a place among the worst defeats in modern British military history, and we can now see that it was the result of a massive intelligence failure on the part of the British. Although it is a myth that the enormous guns protecting the city were facing the wrong way when the Japanese attacked, British forces were supplied with the wrong type of ammunition, and they had also been provided with little accurate intelligence from MI5 or SIS warning when and from which direction the Japanese forces would arrive – in fact, they unexpectedly came by land, hiking through the thick Malayan jungles, and not by sea, as expected.

      In the immediate pre-war years SIS’s operations in the Far East had been centred on a single officer, Harry Steptoe. No matter how good Steptoe might have been – and many commentators have followed Kim Philby in considering him totally incompetent, a ‘near mental case’ who cooked his own goose – clearly the task of gathering intelligence on imperial Japan was greater than the resources that SIS devoted to it. Once Japanese forces had captured Malaya and Singapore there followed a mass evacuation of Force 136 and other service personnel from the city, with some Force 136 officers, such as Eric Battersby, only reaching safety after a gruelling hike from Malaya to Siam (Thailand). Other Force 136 members, such as John Davis and Richard Broome, escaped from Singapore on Mackenzie’s personal orders in a small vessel from Malaya to Ceylon, where they arrived after a horrendous thirty-two-day journey, with only a tiny amount of food and clean water. An even smaller minority, including Lt. Col. Freddie Spencer Chapman of Force 136 and Captain (known as ‘Major’) Louis Cauvin of SIS, remained in Malaya to fight an extremely lonely war, operating deep in the jungle, where they suffered from malaria and were often near to starvation while they waited for supplies and reinforcements to arrive, and for broken communications to be reinstalled with Force 136’s headquarters in Ceylon. Only forty or so of the stay-behind forces in Malaya avoided death or capture by the Japanese.⁴⁴

      Help eventually arrived when John Davis smuggled a group of Chinese agents into Malaya by submarine in May 1943. Thereafter he dramatically zig-zagged around the Indian Ocean by submarine, landing in the Malacca Straits in August 1943. He was soon joined by Richard Broome, and together they set about trying to track down any survivors of the stay-behind forces. They finally located Chapman, who had been training Malayan guerrilla fighters deep in the jungle, on Christmas Day 1943. On 31 December at Blantan Davis signed an agreement (written on a page torn from an exercise book) on behalf of the Allied Supreme Commander for South-East Asia, Lord Louis Mountbatten, with the leader of the guerrillas fighting the Japanese in Malaya, the so-called ‘Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army’, a communist named Chin Peng. Davis was empowered by Mountbatten to ‘aid and strengthen’ the guerrilla forces in Malaya, and Force 136 provided arms, supplies and money in return for Chin Peng’s guerrillas stirring up labour disputes against the Japanese occupiers and sabotaging Japanese shipping.⁴⁵

      Force 136 supplied Chin Peng’s fighters with large amounts of equipment, or ‘toys’, to use the vernacular of Force 136’s Quartermaster of Operations (Q-Ops), who was responsible for them. These ‘weapons of minor destruction’, as one MI5 report described them, included Chinese stone carvings with hidden compartments for explosives; Balinese carvings made of high explosives, finished to look like wood, sandstone or porcelain; tins of kerosene disguised as soya sauce; ammunition hidden in cigarette packs; sten guns; and wireless transmitters. Despite the best efforts of Q-Ops to make such ‘toys’ safe, there were inevitable risks. One SOE operator, David Smiley, was injured (in Europe, not the Far East) when a briefcase loaded with explosives went off prematurely. Largely in response to the difficulties of hauling unwieldy wireless transmitter sets (‘W/T’ for short) weighing up to four hundred pounds through the jungles of Malaya, by 1942 SOE had developed lighter and more portable models, codenamed BI and BII – but at fifty pounds they were still heavy, and could not be fitted easily into a suitcase. The RAF also dropped food supplies and ammunition to guerrilla forces in the jungle.⁴⁶

      As well as its paramilitary activities, SOE, including Force 136, seems to have been involved in undercover political activities in the empire. It is known that it was responsible for distributing funds to bribe political groups in the Middle East to buy support for the British war effort, and the same appears to have occurred in the Far East. Force 136’s operations expanded so rapidly that by 1943 it had a total staff of 680 in Ceylon, the India Mission deployed 450 agents throughout South-East Asia, and by 15 August 1945 there were 308 SOE personnel, five Gurkha support groups and forty-six W/T sets in the field in Malaya – by any standards, a significant number. As the war progressed, Force 136 developed more elaborate strategies.

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