The platoon in C Coy 1st

Phil could end up with a monkey on his head!

Tour guidesand he took the group on a three hour tunnel tour of the Second War World Tunnels. For some it was their fi rst excursion inside the rock. There is over 35 miles of roads insidethe tunnels 16,000 troops could have been accommodated within the Rock during World War 2. Most of the infrastructure,cookhouses, hospitals, accommodation and command centres can still be seen today, it is amazing. Unfortunately Monday came too soon and somehow Easy Jet had split the group on two fl ights. For some it was a leisurely Breakfast then off to the Airport. Others had time for a Cable Car Trip to The Top of The Rock to see the brilliant views across Spain and Morocco and then lunch before the short transfer to the Airport.

An excellent time was had over the long weekend visiting old haunts and seeing the development of Gibraltar. A number couples are already planning a return visit in October 2014.

The platoon in C Coy 1st Green Jackets that went chasing pirates in 1963

The article explains how a platoon of rifl emen ended up chasing pirates in the South China sea.

A year ago, in December 2012, around 60 old rifl emen from the 1st Bn gathered to commemorate the fi ftieth anniversary of the deployment from Penang to Borneo during the Brunei revolt, and the following two years we spent facing off the Indonesian ‘Confrontation’. We’d gathered together many old photos of our younger (and slimmer) selves, covering a wide range of locations in Borneo and the various operations we’d been involved in. But one period of those

years was missing from the faded snapshots, probably because only a tiny group of us had taken part in it. But it was the most memorable few months in my service and when I’ve occasionally mentioned it to people, you can sense them thinking “oh yeah, another old war story, swing the lamp, somebody”. But it was true.

In the aftermath of Sheik Azahari’s revolt in December 1962, it was clear to both British and Malayan Governments that Indonesian leader Sukarno was determined to prevent the bringing together of the remaining two British colonies and one protectorate in Borneo with Malaya, to form Malaysia. What was less clear was what form that opposition would take. As by that stage there were a considerable number of British and Gurkha infantry plus supporting arms in Borneo, rather than hauling them all back to Malaya again, it made sense to spread them out across Brunei, Sarawak and what had been British North Borneo but was becoming Sabah. That way they were on the spot if and when trouble broke out again, and it gave them a familiarity with the ground and the problems of fi ghting in mountainous rain forests and coastal mangrove swamps.

1st Greenjackets got the Sabah option, with rifl e companies being deployed to the larger towns. At the time, there were almost no roads in the interior, and those that existed were land-rover tracks impassable for much of the year. In Borneo, people travelled by boat or they walked. So the towns were on the coast, usually at the mouth of the large rivers that were the route into the hinterland. C Coy found itself in Sandakan, on the north east coast, and although it was a small place, it had a long history as a trading port, with the faded set of buildings that the British Empire built to administer their far-fl ung possessions. There had recently been the most devastating fl oods with many lives lost and within days of our arrival a kampong on the outskirts of Sandakan was swept away by a mudslide. Together with local people we dug frantically, unearthing the tragedies of whole families that had died together, but not fi nding a single survivor. The aftermath of the fl oods were evident for the next couple of weeks of patrolling, as the debris of ruined villages, with drowned people and livestock, came swirling down the muddy currents.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum … Early in 1963, a short while after C Coy arrived in Sandakan in Sabah, my platoon was told we were being moved to Kudat, an even smaller town on the northern tip of Borneo where there had been an increase in pirate raids on isolated villages. Sea raiding had been a way of life for the people of this part of the world for centuries and during the early part of the 19th century, fl otillas of dozens of galleys, rowed by slaves and with hundreds of fi ghting men on board, regularly seized large merchant ships, usually killing the offi cers and enslaving the crew. British and American warships had broken the power of the largest pirate clans by the 1850s but old habits die hard and pirate boats continued to raid down the archipelago from the southern Philippines to north Borneo. Under Spanish rule most of the people of the Philippines had adopted Catholicism, but the people of the southern Sulu Islands, under the Sultan of Jolo, remained Muslim, and were known to the Spanish as Moros or Moors, although they were many thousands of miles from Morocco. Neither the Spanish nor the Americans, after they seized the Philippines, were ever able to really control those islands and the Philippines Government still struggles today..

After WWII, the spread of powerful outboard engines gave a new lease of life to inter-island travel, whether for trading, smuggling or straightforward pirate raids. By the early 1960’s, the combination of the Brunei revolt and the move towards the setting up of Malaysia accompanied as it was by Philippine claims to parts of Sabah and the hostility of Indonesia towards the whole idea, created a degree of uncertainty that the Sulu pirates took advantage of. The model was simple: a streamlined boat typically 10 metres long, with twin outboards and a crew of up to twenty men armed with war surplus US army weapons (in a few cases including a .50 Browning machine gun) would approach a small coastal village at high speed. They’d loot the shop if there was one, rape any young women who hadn’t had time to escape into the hills, take anything they fancied from the village, shoot the headman or anyone else who was foolish enough to get in their way, and then take off at speed. Many of the shops were run by Chinese traders and they got a particularly hard time at the hands of the raiders.

As the raids escalated, an effective response was diffi cult. Some smaller Royal Navy vessels were diverted into patrolling the islands but there were many shallow inlets that were impossible to navigate, and the small, fast pirate craft could hide amongst the hundreds of small islands. But the matelots tried – that Spring, the destroyer HMS Barrosa intercepted a suspected pirate vessel and launched her whale boats to pursue the raider amongst the atolls. The pirate crew opened fi re and killed a sailor - it is not thought that any pirates survived the follow-up. The brains at GHQ came up with a new idea – stick a few squaddies in a local craft and send it trolling round the islands, as a visual deterrent and to show the fl ag. Enter C Coy, grumbling …

Kudat was a nice little town. It had a few bars, street vendors that sold the best Satay I’ve ever eaten and our quarters were a row of wooden bungalows along the beach, surrounded by trees laden with papaya. We’d sailed from Sandakan on a Clyde-built (circa 1890 I think) steamer that although sadly weather-beaten, had once been part of the fabric of the Empire. Even at the time, we realised that we were on a ship that had probably carried British North Borneo Police Field Force contingents on similar missions 50 years before. Once we’d settled in our fi rst mission was to confi scate fi rearms held by civilians. Out in he jungle were many logging companies, with much of the labour drawn from Kalimantan, the Indonesian half of Borneo, and it was suspected that amongst them were agent provocateurs waiting for a signal to start an uprising.

So off we went to the kampongs around Kudat, picking up an assortment of rusty single barrel shotguns and Japanese rifl es ‘acquired’ as the war came to an end. The most memorable trip was to the house of an elderly Englishman who’d been a District Offi cer in the 1930’s. When the Japanese invaded he took to the ulu and raised a force of tribal guerrillas who harassed the Japanese throughout the occupation. He was by this time a little the worse for wear and clearly liked a drink. He had an extremely beautiful young companion who seemed to have invited her friends and family to share the house so there were a large bunch of rather surly young men who were playing billiards on a full size table that had suffered from damp and termites. But he had a very fi ne hunting rifl e, a pair of what had been high quality shotguns, a .38 revolver and a Colt .45 automatic. He wasn’t really clear why we were taking them, but we dutifully followed orders. I have wondered what happened to him, with his curious ménage.

But within a week my Section was despatched on our main mission, to discourage piracy. A patrol base had been established on Banggi, a large island at the very tip of British/Malaysian waters, and separated by a few miles of sea from the most southern Philippine island of Balabac. The plan was that each rifl e section would do a stint on Banggi then rotate back to Kudat, and our transport and the method by which we would patrol was a kumpit, a local boat developed to handle inter-island trading. It was around 7 metres long, with a small hold below the deck and a cabin superstructure. Broad in the beam and with a relatively shallow draft it was ideal for inter-island trips but not so good for deep sea work. Ours had an elderly diesel engine with a top speed of maybe 7 knots. It had a crew of three and with a rifl e section of seven or eight, he cabin was ‘cosy’ on the nights we spent aboard.

But of course the idea was that we didn’t spend night aboard, but rather patrolled slowly round the islands, stopping at coastal kampongs to show the fl ag and win hearts and minds. This wasn’t too hard actually as it seems that British colonial administration had been popular and everyone was scared stiff of the Sulu pirates. Our crew were good guys and between us we had enough Malay to communicate and on most trips we had a local policeman along as well. Our base was a tiny hamlet with a general store run by a pleasant young Chinese couple, who had themselves been victims of a raid a few months before. A long bamboo jetty rang out across a sandy bay and completely clear blue sea. In every direction there were small islands fringed with coconut palms – it was a tropical paradise, although as the village WC was a shack halfway along the jetty, it was advisable to swim up current. We towed lines with large hooks behind the boat and large fi sh queued up to impale themselves. Flying fi sh rose from under the bow, and dugongs and turtles were commonplace. In the days before carcinoma had been heard of, most of us had amazing tans, to the annoyance of our Section lancejack, Eddie Bright, who being very fair-skinned with nearly white blond hair, had to keep his shirt on..

Initially excitement was pretty low key. The island was home to a range of monitor lizards, ranging from the length of your forearm to nearly two metres. The smaller ones lived in the attap roofs of our huts which didn’t bother anyone – except our cook. One evening sitting in the shop in the glow of a tilley lamp, drinking pints bottles of Anchor beer, our tranquillity was abruptly broken by several long bursts of automatic fi re. After the confusion died down, it turned out that Noddy the cook had gone to bed after a few beers and decided he’d had enough of the resident lizards and opened up on them with his SMG. He missed of course.

A few days later, while we were sat by the sea cleaning our weapons, we saw what seemed to be a very large warship emerge from behind one island and a few minutes later disappear behind another. No fl ags or identifi cation were visible and in high excitement we radioed the mainland and reported this. In reply to our queries about what navy this might belong to, some joker told us to consult Janes Fighting Ships and further instructed us not to engage it. As our best piece of ordnance was a 2” mortar, this seemed like good advice.

It was probably on our next spell out on Banggi that we were told that it was thought that there might be raiders moving down the islands in our direction and therefore to be on high alert. Sure enough, the day after, while we were crossing a wider stretch of water between islands, our crew became excited and pointed out a boat a couple of miles away that was moving towards us at considerable speed. We weren’t about to out-run it so we chugged along towards our next landfall, with most of us in the cabin or lying down behind the low bulwarks. As we were wearing either shorts or sarongs, it was our numbers rather than our appearance that would have alerted the approaching vessel to the fact that there was something unusual about us.

It looked as if the visitor was steering to cut close across our bows and at around 100 metres we could see that there were a number of men on her deck, some carrying fi rearms. At this point our Bren-gunner (Barney Green I think) popped up from behind the bulwark near the bow, plonked his bi-pod on the rail and fi red a longish burst into the sea immediately in front of what we were now sure was a pirate. I think their boat sailed into the last round or two but in any case the effect was amazing as they performed the maritime equivalent of a handbrake turn

and set off in the opposite direction at an even faster speed than their approach. Our crew were clearly elated though they indicated that we should have fi red everything we had into the pirate. On our onward voyage we debated this over and over but the reality was that they hadn’t been fl ying a skull and crossbones or whatever Moro pirates fl ew, and they hadn’t fi red on us. It might, someone said, have been a Philippine Government fi sheries protection vessel and that would have been embarrassing.

We were destined to have one more and even closer encounter before we had to leave our little bit of south seas paradise. We were at the end of an island patrol lasting several days and had stayed in a particularly friendly village, where the meal that was cooked for us had gone on late. Some of us had stayed in the village and others were sleeping back on the boat but in the morning we were up, dipping in the sea and making tea when one of the village leaders came up at a trot and spoke urgently to our policeman in a mixture of Malay and a local language. It was a kind of action replay of our pirate incident of a week or two previously and presumably something that was all too familiar to fi shing villages along those coasts. Far out to sea but with a wake you could see even at that distance, a black painted boat was heading for the village at a rate of knots.

We’d rehearsed how we would handle such an event based on our last experience, so we piled onto our boat and tucked ourselves into the best cover we could fi nd. I noticed the villagers getting off the beach and into the trees as fast as they could so it was clear that they had no illusions about fi sheries protection vessels. There was a realisation that on this occasion we couldn’t make them sheer off by a short burst as they were going to be arriving on the other side of a fairly narrow jetty. I couldn’t see the approaching boat but I could hear its engines throttling down and then going into neutral and the excited voices of the crew, seeming very close indeed.

Then Eddie said ‘now’ and we all stood up with our weapons in the fi ring position. It took maybe a second to see the man nearest to me on the other boat and I focused my aim on him, at the back of my mind hoping that everyone else had found someone different to aim at. He was maybe three or four metres away, across the width of the jetty, standing on what look like the hatch to the boat’s hold. It’s still very clear in my mind now – he stood sideways on but his face had turned towards me. He wore jeans and a yellow T shirt with some sort of advert on it, a red baseball cap and a very straggly moustache. He wore a side arm in an open holster. We stood in this sort of frozen tableau for what seemed like 10 minutes but probably was 10 seconds, looking at each other. There were faint background noises but I could only clearly hear my own breathing and it seemed like I could hear his as well. Then the background noise came into focus and I realised our copper was shouting nearly hysterically at the pirates, and real time resumed – my man put his hands up and I saw another man standing close to him that I’d not really noticed let go of a US M1 carbine that he had been holding in the ‘order arms’ positions and it fell to the deck. I remember thinking that it couldn’t have been cocked or it would have gone off.

And that was it really. We radioed Kudat and within a day police reinforcements arrived and took the pirates into custody. While we waited, guarding the fourteen or fi fteen prisoners, we searched the boat and discovered that aside from piracy, they seem to make their living smuggling. The holds were stacked with tens of thousands of cigarettes and from their cartons, originally from an American PX. There was a fair amount of liquor and much more mundane things like soap and shampoo. Our policeman was sure there would be gold aboard but we couldn’t fi nd it. We gave the villagers anything they wanted and I think that a few handguns may have gone awol as well. I’ve spent 50 years wondering if he’d put his hand on his pistol would I have opened fi re? The answer is probably but actually at that moment, the real risk he faced was if another of his party had decided to make a fi ght of it. I was convinced that someone else would open fi re and when that happened I knew I was going to start fi ring at once. But they didn’t so neither did I.

Footnote: Banggi Island is now on the international tourist map as a diving centre, with boutique lodges to stay in. But I’m sure its not the same anymore so I think I’ll hang on to my memories.

Dick Muskett 1 GJ/1 RGJ 1962-68

Malaysia is a federaƟ on of 13 states and three federal territories. These are divided between two regions, with 11 states and two federal territories on Peninsular Malaysia and the other two states and one federal territory in East Malaysia. Governance of the states is divided between the federal and the state governments, and the Federal government has direct administraƟ on of the federal territories. The 13 states are based on historical Malay kingdoms, and 9 of the 11 Peninsular states, known as the Malay states, retain their royal families. The King is elected by and from the nine rulers to serve a fi ve-year term. Each state has a unicameral legislature known as the State LegislaƟ ve Assembly. Each state is further divided into districts, which are then divided into mukim. In Sabah and Sarawak districts are grouped into divisions. Sabah and Sarawak have considerably more autonomy than the other states, most notably having separate immigraƟ on policies and controls, and a unique residency status.

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