The British Malayan headhunting scandal of 1952 was a political scandal involving senior British politicians, military leaders, and activists.
The scandal
editThe scandal was sparked by the Daily Worker's publication of photographs depicting British soldiers fighting in the Malayan Emergency posing with the decapitated head of suspected anti-colonial guerrillas belonging to the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).[1]
The decapitation of suspected MNLA members was subsequently found to have been a common and widespread pracice by British troops in Malaya that had been sanctioned by Gerald Templer. It was also found that the British military had hired over 1,000 mercenaries from Iban headhunting tribes in Borneo to fight in Malaya with the promise they could keep the scalps of the people they killed.[2]
Government response
editThe British government and military initially denied that the Daily Worker's first headhunting photograph was genuine. The Daily Worker responded by publishing another photograph of the same incident and multiple eyewitness testimonies from British soldiers who witnessed British and Commonwealth troops collecting the heads and scalps of their enemies as trophies. Later they published a number of new headhunting photographs. This led to the British government's foreign secretary Oliver Lyttelton to openly confess in the House of Commons that the Daily Worker's headhunting photographed were genuine.[3]
In response to the scandal, Winston Churchill and his cabinet agreed to order British forces to stop the practice of decapitating guerrillas in malaya. Churchill's order was widely ignored by British troops who continued to decapitate corpses. The issue of the photographs were raised in the House of Commons multiple times, until June when the British government declared that no British troops would be punished.[4] Privately commenting on the Daily Worker photographs, the Colonial Office noted that "there is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime".[5][6]
Scandal Timeline
editThe timeline was as follows:[7]
April 1952
- 28 April: The Daily Worker publishes their frontpage article "This is the war in Malaya" showing British Royal Marines of the 40 Commando posing with a decapitated head of a person they killed in Malaya (modern Malaysia).
- 29 April: A spokesperson for the Royal Navy claims the photograph is fake. Behind the scenes British agents had already identified both the photographer and the man in the photograph holding the head.
- 30 April: The Daily Worker responds to claims their photograph is fake by publishing a second photograph of the same incident.
May 1952
- 6 May: British officials deny requests by the Daily Worker to coment on the authenticity of their headhunting photographs.
- 7 May: Colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton confirms in the House of Commons that the Daily Worker photographs are genuine.
- 8 May: The Daily Worker's editor J.R. Campbell sends photographs of headhunting and scalping by British forces and their alleis in Malaya to Winston Churchill, religious leaders, politicians, and newspaper editors.
- 10 May: The Daily Worker publishes 4 new headhunting photographs depicting a Royal Marine posing with two decapitated heads and an Iban headhunter wearing a Royal Marine beret preparing a scalp above baskets of human limbs. These images are described as some of the most graphically violent images of the war ever published.
- 21 May: British government declares it will not punish British soldiers who partoon in headhunting in Malaya.
Comments by historians and academics
editKarl Hack, a history professor and expert on the Malayan Emergency, wrote several pages on the scandal for his work The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire.[8]
Erik Linstrum, a history professor and expert on media in the British Empire, used the Daily Worker headhunting scandal as a case study in his research into British media and Britian's post-WWII counterinsurgencies.[9]
Simon Harrison, a University of Ulster professor of Anthropology, approached the scandal from an anthropological viewpoint in his book Dark Trophies.[10]
Wen-Qing Ngoei, a history professor whose research focuses on anti-communism in Asia, attributed the practice of headhunting to racism and Lyttleton's public relations spin among other factors as successfully "drowning popular aversion to beheading communists with yellow faces"[11]
In 2023 a history of the scandal was published titled Head Hunters in the Malayan Emergency: The Atrocity and Cover-up.[2]
References
edit- ^ Creech, Maria (December 2021). "All Too Graphic: Leaked photographs of colonial atrocities during the Malayan 'Emergency' shocked postwar Britain". History Today. 71 (12).
- ^ a b Colonialism, The Museum of British (2023-10-26). "Paper Trails: Dan Poole". MBC. Retrieved 2024-08-16.
- ^ Hack, Karl (2021-12-16). The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire. Cambridge University Press. p. 318. ISBN 978-1-009-23414-6.
- ^ Poole, Dan (2023). Head Hunters in the Malayan Emergency: The Atrocity and Cover-Up. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military. p. 20-23. ISBN 978-1-39905-741-7.
- ^ Fujio Hara (December 2002). Malaysian Chinese & China: Conversion in Identity Consciousness, 1945–1957. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 61–65.
- ^ Mark Curtis (15 August 1995). The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945. pp. 61–71.
- ^ Poole, Dan (2023). Head Hunters in the Malayan Emergency: The atrocity and Cover-up. Pen & Sword Military (published 3 October 2023). pp. viii–ix. ISBN 978-1399057417.
- ^ Hack, Karl (2022). The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire. Cambridge University Press. pp. 315–319.
- ^ Linstrum, Erik (Autumn 2017). "Facts about Atrocity: Reporting Colonial Violence in Postwar Britain". History Workshop Journal. 84: 15.
- ^ Harrison, Simon (2012). Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War. Berghahn Books. pp. 156–160. ISBN 0857454986.
- ^ Ngoei, Wen-Qing (2019). Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia. Cornell University Press. p. 89.