Emergency and confrontation: Australian military operations in Malaya & Borneo 1950-1966

Scarce Australian military item. During the 1950s and 1960s Australian military affairs were distinguished by the doctrine of ‘forward defence’: the assumption that it was preferable to defend Australia as far from Australia’s shores as possible.Emergency And Confrontationis the first sustained and scholarly account of Australia’s military involvement in the Malayan Emergency, waged against the armed forces of the Malayan Communist Party between 1948 and 1960, and in Confrontation, an undeclared war initiated by Indonesia to destabilise the emergent Federation of Malaysia and fought largely along the common border in the northern part of Borneo between 1962 and 1966. In each case the conflict was determined by the wider movement for decolonisation in Asia, and by the context of Cold War competition which saw Western forces pitted against Communist, or Communist-backed, movements.As part of the British Commonwealth Far East Strategic Reserve, Australian soldiers engaged in protracted operations in norther Malaya and along the Thai border, while Australian airmen flew bombing sorties against suspected enemy concentrations, usually in deep jungle. With the Emergency concluded, Australian forces saw service again in the 1960s as part of a Commonwealth force in Borneo. Operations in both campaigns were gruelling, drawn-out, and often inconclusive, but their overall success helped to protect the emergent democracy of post-colonial Malaysia, while they also provided valuable experience for Australian soldiers in the skills of jungle warfare, counter-insurgency and small unit action.Australia’s involvement in the Emergency and Confrontation form part of the prologue to the more assertive and self-reliant engagement with its region which has come to characterise Australian policy in southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s.(NOT EX-LIBRARY.)