Chapter 3 lifts the unevaluated Fragebogen off the desks of planners in England and delivers it to American, British, French, and Soviet soldiers operating in Germany. It chronincles the implementation of the questionnaire program, beginning in 1945; how the form was distributed, collected, and evaluated, and what role it played in the larger military occupation. Accessing army field reports, military government records, newspapers, and published and unpublished first-hand accounts, a more intimate history of denazification administration is imparted. It is shown that the questionnaire was an indispensable thorn in the side of the military occupiers, one that pained them at every turn. The Allied armies and German commissions who oversaw the program did not have the expertise, resources, or willingness to see it through to completion. Still, denazification was a hollow shell without the Fragebogen. Most of what was visibly achieved—namely, the removal of thousands of incriminated Nazis from influential employment—was due to this screening device. From the moment invasion soldiers entered Germany, no matter what flag they carried, questionnaires were essential to the occupation regimes.

Chapter 3 shows how the loss of China to communism hugely increased the complexity of operating effective media censorship. The colonial government could no longer rely solely on pre-emptive daily vetting to contain undesirable content and comments. During the second half of the twentieth century, political censorship of the media and education sector was facilitated and supplemented by large-scale surveillance operations carried out through a collaborative network of local departments informed by global intelligence collected through London and British embassies around the world. Intelligence collected by this network allowed the colonial government to nip trouble in the bud, and resulted in a number of ‘troublemakers’ (including journalists, editors, publishers, teachers, students and principals) being arrested, detained and even deported without trial without any due regard to whether such actions were lawful. This chapter provides a comprehensive account of such surveillance and censorship operations targeting the media and education sector from the late 1940s to the late 1950s against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions and the new Communist China’s relations with the world.

Over 1953–60 counterinsurgency was optimised, buidling upon the solid foundations of geodemographic control achieved over 1950–2, and of systems optimisation achieved under Templer. Framework operations by units bolted onto localities were continuously refined, as was the use of jungle forts to win over the Orang Asli, and of big combined Special Branch–food control–military operations. Together these sustained an ‘elimination’ rate (kills, surrenders, captures) of about 20 per cent of insurgents a year – that is, until after the MCP attempt to negotiate at Baling in 1955 was rebuffed, and then further negotiation was refused from late 1957. As hope faded insurgent ‘surrenders’ (some induced or duped) snowballed in the face of priority big operations. By now those featured months-long intense controls, each targetting the entire area of one or more MCP committees. That way the MCP would struggle to regenerate afterwards. The collapse of local MCP forces often came as freedoms increased elsewhere, while a big operation clamped down more strongly than ever on the targetted area. In 1958 the MCP decided on a strategy of running down the military campaign, and the Emergency was formally ended on 31 July 1958.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning ‘hearts and minds’. It shows how he increased both punishment and reward, and resettlement amenities and training to secure kills, until late in his term, but above all optimised the government, military and committee system, and the policy towards Orang Asli and the jungle. He created a better system and learning organisation, which in turn started to experiment with the big combined food control–Special Branch–military operations that would start to clear communist committees out of one area after another. The next chapter shows how that learning took off over 1953–4, providing a solution to the problem Briggs had not cracked: how to ‘clear’ areas. Rejecting both hagiographic and hateful accounts of Templer, it reveals the truth about the man, and about the perfecting of Malaya’s counterinsurgency apparatus and the constant refining of its recipe of ingredients.