Gerald Templer

Gerald Templer ran the Malayan Emergency for two years and is the reason it is the one counter-insurgency campaign of the period that the losing side did not win. He had commanded a division in Italy at forty-four, the youngest lieutenant-general in the British army, and was invalided out of the war by a landmine that threw a piano into his back. Sent to Malaya in 1952 after the murder of the previous High Commissioner, he was given both the civil and the military authority, which no British official had held together before. What he did was less a military campaign than an administrative one. He accelerated the resettlement of half a million Chinese squatters into fortified New Villages with land title, schools and clinics, offered citizenship to Chinese Malayans who had been excluded from it, promised independence explicitly and set a date-bearing process moving towards it, and reorganised intelligence under a single director. He also used collective punishment - curfews, ration cuts and the notorious twenty-two-day house arrest of the whole town of Tanjong Malim - and the resettlement itself was compulsory and often brutal. The phrase about hearts and minds is his, and he disliked it, saying the answer lay in the people and not in pouring more soldiers into the jungle. He left in 1954 with the insurgency broken, was CIGS from 1955 to 1958, and spent his retirement founding the National Army Museum. Malaya became independent in 1957 and the emergency was declared over in 1960. The campaign has been studied ever since as the model counter-insurgency, usually by people looking for a method they can export. What actually distinguished it was that Britain was leaving anyway and could promise so credibly, which is not a technique.

• Lived: 1898 CE – 1979 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: military_leader