Conflict and Violence In Singapore and Malaysia, 1945-1983 by Richard Clutterbuck

Author:Richard Clutterbuck [Clutterbuck, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Latimer Report

This weakness was analysed in a brilliant debriefing report on Operation HIVE, by a young Military Intelligence Officer attached to Special Branch, Captain H. S. Latimer. This report proposed a pattern of operations which proved in the end, with only minor improvements, to be the battle-winning pattern for the remaining seven years of the Emergency. Some of its proposals, however, such as the central cooking of rice in the villages, were not to be introduced for another three years.

Latimer proposed that operations should be in two phases. In Phase I, to last two to three months,18 Special Branch would make a detailed research and analysis of the records of movements and habits of the guerrillas and of their supporters over the past two years. There would also be a thorough topographical study, and an intense intelligence effort to build up details of the personalities and organization of the guerrillas and their supporters. As the picture took shape, the District War Executive Committee would plan the operations which were to comprise Phase II.

Phase II would begin with a curfew and supply denial scheme, with rationing, restriction of stocks and strict searching of people going out to work. At the same time, food suppliers would be arrested, and, using the mass of information they had built up in Phase I, Special Branch would try to 'turn' some of them into agents.

Hereafter, Latimer proposed tactics which were designed to lead the guerrillas into killing grounds, which were, in fact, the areas of rubber etc. in which prospective agents worked. Everything possible was to be done to drive the guerrillas away from the areas outside these killing grounds, by tightening food control and saturating them with patrols and ambushes. Conversely, inside the killing grounds, there was to be judicious relaxation of food control and other regulations, and troops were to be kept out of them. The guerrillas would thus be able to move freely and to acquire confidence in the suppliers who operated in the killing grounds, including the ones who had been 'turned'. This would lead to 'advance, precise information' on which individual ambushes could be laid.

Latimer's ideas were not fully understood or applied for some years, but to him must go the greatest credit for the solution of the problem of 'digging out the roots'.19

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