SIR,—Torture is a necessary part of war, particularly the kind
of war we fought in Malaya and Cyprus.
When I was a National Service infantry officer in Malaya fourteen years ago, the policy was to torture captured bandits until they talked. On capture a bandit would be offered the possibility of imprison- ment instead of the death sentence he had earned, if he talked. Hard-core bandits would not agree to this and were tortured by Chinese detectives under the supervision of a British police officer. The police officer with whom we worked told me he was always amazed at the amount of torture the Chinese could take. He admired their courage and said bandits under torture had sometimes begged him to shoot them.
Those who think torture was unnecessary in Malaya perhaps do not realise the extent of the Malayan jungle. Bandits were only caught there by surprise. Surprise was only possible when the army patrol was acting on first-class police information. The best information came from captured bandits.
But if torture was necessary, the gruesome busi- ness of mutilating the bodies of shot bandits was not. This arose from an order in my regiment (and others) that if it were impractical to bring home the body of a shot bandit, then his head and hands were to be removed and brought back in a sack for identification by the police.
I queried this order while attending the Jungle Warfare School at Johore Bahru. The result was the immediate dispatch of a GHQ Command forbid- ding the practice. I have always felt proud about this. In a way it was a military break-through. For from then on we could use a camera instead of a knife.
CFIARLES ADEANE
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