Britain easily could have eliminated the EOKA,but chosed to give up Cyprus.
You think? I will type this slowly so you can understand. Regular troops will never ever beat terrorist's on home ground. The problem is peace keeping troops have to abide by certain rules. Britain never gave up Cyprus, there are still two air bases there. I know I served on one.
The same was possible in Northern Ireland.)
I am really trying not to be insulting here. What absolute bollocks. Obviously you have never served in Northern Ireland o even spoken to people who were there. Lets look at the options open to the British.
(1) Pull out of Northern Ireland. The loyalist would scream "You have left us in the crap". Then begins bombing campaign of British main land
(2) Stay in Northern Ireland with the Republicans screaming, "British Army, an Army of occupation." Carries on with bombing of British mainland
(3) Shoot the crap out of all sides, adapt SS and Gestapo tactics. Not acceptable to the rest of the world or indeed Britain. Both sides join forces to bomb the British mainland
Britain was in a no win situation. The ONLY solution was a negotiated peace deal, which by the way is still very fragile.
The same was done in South Africa .
Oh my (takes deep breaths). How did Britain finally beat the Boers?
The Boer War was a watershed event for the British Army, the Boers employed hit-and-run tactics that not only caused losses the British could not afford, they did not conform to the usual "gentlemanly" rules of war.
The British Army started off with 12,546 men in South Africa when the war began, but the number of officers and men actually employed from first to last, during the war, was officially given as 448,435, against 27,000 Boers!
It became clear to the British that they had to adopt new tactics to defeat the Boers. They needed to fight a series of battles over a long period of time covering wide areas of ground, this involved marching in long columns for days at a time across the vast plains or "veldt", often without proper uniforms or rations. The weather caused problems, with freezing temperatures and storms in the winter and very hot summers.
The Boer War, according to Rudyard Kipling, taught the British "no end of a lesson".. over 20,000 British Troops were laid to rest in the heat and dust of the South African veldt, with another 22,829 being wounded.
General Haig threw away thousands of British lives by his out of date tactics. Haig used the same type of tactics during WW1, full frontal attacks against well dug in Boers. He never did learn his lesson in South Africa. Haig was warned to change his tactics near the end of WW1 as Britain was running out of men.
"Peace only came about because of peace negociations" :wrong;there were no peace negociations in Malaya, in Cyprus :the winner never will negociate with the looser .
I love this one "secure locations":very PC,but a good translation would be concentration camps (as in Algeria,Cuba,South Africa)
Concentration camps? You really are an idiot, do you honestly think the British public or indeed the rest of the world would stand for concentrations camps, especially after WW2?. Also I never said the war in Malaya came to an end through negotiations. Read my post again. The secure villages in Malaya were not concentrations camps, they were secured by denying terrorists forcing aid from local villagers with threats of death. It was a "Hearts and Minds" campaign by British forces, a text book campaign still referred to today.
The Malayan Emergency as a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, from 1948 to 1960.
The initial government strategy was primarily to guard important economic targets such as mines and plantation estates. Subsequently, General Sir Harold Briggs, the British Army's Director of Operations in Malaya, developed an overall strategy known as the Briggs Plan. Its central tenet was that the best way to defeat an insurgency such as the government was facing was to cut the insurgents off from their supporters amongst the population.
The Briggs Plan was multi-faceted. However one aspect of it has become particularly well known: this was the forced relocation of some 500,000 rural Malayans, including 400,000 Chinese, from squatter communities on the fringes of the forests into guarded camps called New Villages. These villages were newly constructed in most cases, and were surrounded by barbed wire, police posts and floodlit areas, the purpose of which was both to keep the inhabitants in and the guerrillas out. People resented this at first, but some soon became content with the better living standards in the villages. They were given money and ownership of the land they lived on.
Removing a population which might be sympathetic to guerrillas was a counter-insurgency technique which the British had used before, notably against the Boer Commandos in the Second Boer War*(1899–1902), although in Malaya, the operation was more humanely and efficiently conducted.
At the start of the Emergency, the British had a total of 13 infantry battalions in Malaya, including seven partly formed*Gurkha*battalions, three British battalions, two battalions of the*Royal Malay Regiment*and a British*Royal Artillery*Regiment being utilised as infantry.*This force was too small to effectively meet the threat of the "communist terrorists" or "bandits", and more infantry battalions were needed in Malaya. The British brought in soldiers from units such as the Royal Marines and King's African Rifles. Another effort was a re-formation of the Special Air Service in 1950 as a specialised reconnaissance, raiding and counter-insurgency unit.
The Permanent Secretary of Defence for*Malaya, Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson, had served in the Chindits in Burma*during World War II. His vast experience in jungle warfare proved valuable during this period as he was able to build effective civil-military relations and was one of the chief architects of the counter-insurgency plan in Malaya.
In 1951, some British army units began a "hearts and minds*campaign" by giving medical and food aid to Malays and indigenous tribes. At the same time, they put pressure on MNLA by patrolling the jungle. The MNLA guerrillas were driven deeper into the jungle and denied resources. The MRLA extorted food from the Sakai and earned their enmity. Many of the captured guerrillas changed sides. In comparison, the MRLA never released any Britons alive.
In the end the conflict involved a maximum of 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist guerrillas.
I personally served in the Far East from 1967 until 1970, although I was one of the Brycreem boys, I also took part in exercises "up country."
