FOR the veterans who served their country in the sweltering heat of the Malayan jungle it is the forgotten war. Soldiers from the Royal Hampshire Regiment – many on National Service – were sent to the British colony to defeat Communist terrorists in December 1953.
For the next two and a half years they were killed and maimed by a ruthless enemy with local knowledge on their side. The Communist bandits knew every twist and turn of the unforgiving landscape.
As well as enemy bullets, about 1,500 Hampshire troops and their fellow soldiers from more than 100 regiments nationwide had to avoid impaling themselves on sharp bamboo shoots cut into spikes.
Now these veterans – alongside all surviving soldiers who served from 1948 until independence in August 1957 – are appealing for recognition.
They have started a petition calling on the Government to give each of the veterans who took part in the conflict, known as The Malayan Emergency, a rosette to be attached to their General Service Medals.
Soldiers who fought in the conflict after Malaya’s independence have already been given a Pingat Jasa Malaysia Medal by the Malaysian government. But it has told veterans who fought before then that it cannot give out medals from before the Malaya nation was formed.
Veteran Tony Hamilton, 73, chairman of the Royal Hampshire Regiment’s Malaya and Borneo Veterans said: “There were more casualties before independence. If it wasn’t for us it wouldn’t have become independent – it’d be under the Chinese.”
Today he will unveil a plaque at Winchester Cathedral dedicated to members of the regiment who served in Malaya from 1954 until 1956 and Borneo in 1961.
Captain Mike Stephens, Regimental Secretary of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, said: “The campaign fought during the emergency brought stability to Malaya and helped it to become independent.”
The conflict began in 1948 when the Malayan People’s British Army began their guerilla war for independence.
The country’s rubber plantations and tin mining industries had lobbied the British colonial government to call it an emergency because they couldn’t claim insurance during a war.
The Daily Echo reported how the 1st Battalion of The Royal Hampshire Regiment – known as The Tigers – sailed on December 18, 1953, from Southampton to Malaya on board the troopship Dunera.
Hundreds of relatives and friends bid farewell from the quayside with a banner in the regimental colours of black and amber stating ‘Goodbye Hampshires – best of luck’.
In June 1954, the Daily Echo reported on how Hampshire’s soldiers were coping.
“It is a far cry from the friendly country lanes and woods of Hampshire to the dense and matted undergrowth of the Malayan jungle; but to the men, the change is all in a day’s work… “Jungle operations are not easy. They call for tough physical endurance, an ability to keep going after exhaustion point has been reached, to climb and descend through creeper-matted jungle – cutting every yard of the way, and travelling on a compass course.
“Very often it is ankle deep in swamp underfoot. At night it means keeping quiet – sometimes wet through – and listening to the jungle move all around, while the leeches and malarious mosquitoes attack.”
In December 1955, the Echo reported how young National Servicemen crept up on a terrorist camp in thick jungle to kill 11 terrorists in an action described by the High Commissioner as “the most successful” in Malaya in four years.
The Daily Echo described how the “men of the Hampshires crawled for three and a half hours to surround the camp.
“They then opened up with a hail of fire, sweeping the clearing and the huts in which terrorists were resting.”
Towards the end of their service the Daily Echo told how Col P H Man said the battalion had a fine record in Malaya, killing or capturing 65 terrorists – the highest of any battalion in the federation.
A total of 510 British soldiers died between 1948 and 1960, including 13 from the Royal Hampshire Regiment.
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