Thomas Probert
Introduction
As the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) was ongoing, a number of military memoirs were published which gave some insight into its prosecution on the ground. These included Anthony Crockett, Green Beret, Red Star (1954); M.C.A. Henniker, Red Shadow Over Malaya (1955); Oliver Crawford, The Door Marked Malaya (1958); Richard Miers, Shoot to Kill (1959) and J.W.G. Moran, Spearhead in Malaya (1959). In his paper ‘The Military Memoir in British Imperial Culture: The Case of Malaya’ (1994), John Newsinger wrote: ‘Inevitably, a number of these accounts explicitly portray the conflict as a hunt for a particularly dangerous kind of game.’1 He argues that: ‘These hunting analogies obviously derive from the importance of blood sports within British upper-class culture both at home and throughout the Empire.’2 And that: ‘They also reflect the disparity between the two sides in the conflict, the inability of the guerillas to hit back effectively against British troops except under the most favorable conditions.’3
In Terrorism, InsurDarwinism, dian-English Literature, 1830-1947, (2013), Alex Tickell noted that the blood sports narrative had long been associated with the practice of counterinsurgency, being evidenced in India a century earlier as the British suppressed rebellion there.4 Robert H. MacDonald, in The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880-1918 (1994), linked the hunting metaphor to imperial narratives of warfare through training, suggesting it was the natural way for British officers to conceptualize the small wars of Empire: ‘To officers encouraged to believe that the best training for war was the field, the story of the hunt was a natural analogue.’5 John M. Mackenzie (1989) has argued that Scouting for Boys, by Robert Baden-Powell, employed hunting terminology to socialize Britain’s youth for its imperial enterprise.6 He goes on to argue that the hunt itself played into ideas about Social Darwinism, ‘the fittest were created through the rugged individualism of the Hunt.’7
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