The briefest mention of South East Asian communism unerringly swirls the mind to Vietnam, a place where screaming jet-fighters, Napalm and Agent Orange were defeated by steely resolve. A war bogged down in impossible rainforests, tenacious villagers in straw hats inflicted a humbling defeat on the greatest military power the world had ever known. Before Vietnam erupted, however, there had already been a war between the West and Asian communism. The place was Malaya, where between 1948 and 1960 a long and bitter war was fought in South East Asia’s jungles for the wealthiest of colonies. How then, did Britain and her Commonwealth allies silently defeat Malaya’s communists? It was to this little known battlefield that Major John McCawley of the British Special Operations Executive shifted his focus before Hiroshima’s atomic fallout had settled. Leaving Brisbane behind, from where he had thought and planned for his parties of stay-behind commandoes in Japanese occupied Malaya, he would now battle and scheme to outwit the Communist Party of Malaya. Carrying the fight to the Communist Tigers as Malaya tore herself apart, John McCawley could have had no idea of the dreadful consequences that would befall both friend and foe, those he loved and those he loathed.
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