Make for the Hills: The Autobiography of the World's Leading Counter Insurgency Expert

By Robert Thompson

When Robert Thompson left Cambridge to join the Malayan Civil Service in 1938 the sun still shone on the British Empire for 24 hours a day. The outbreak of war in the Pacific found him in Hong Kong from which he was obliged to make a hurried and dramatic exit. From that point most of his working life was spent in military and political circles as one of the world's leading experts on counterinsurgency measures, on which subject he has written a number of highly regarded works. Now, with wit and modesty, he tells the story of his own eventful life, After the war, during which he served in both operations in Burma, he returned to Malaya and it was there, during the Emergency, that he gained the experience in anti-terrorist operations which was eventually to lead him, as special adviser, to Vietnam and on to Washington. En route he was privileged to meet many of the most influential and controversial figures of his time from Wingate and Templer to Kennedy, Nixon and Kissinger. His comments on these and many others, are candid and revealing. Make for the Hills is both a fascinating autobiography and an important addition to the history of the post-war world, especially that of South-East Asia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 1, 1989
• ISBN: 9781473816114

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Hong Kong

At dawn on the morning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor I went up on to the deck of the Tai Shan, the largest of the Hong Kong–Macao–Canton river steamers, and joined Captain Muir on the bridge as we entered Hong Kong harbour. It was in fact a few hours after Pearl Harbor had been bombed and, because of the date line, was Monday, 8 December. The harbour, which was the fourth busiest in the world, was empty and Captain Muir told me that everything that could get up steam had left the day before and that the volunteers had been mobilized. While we were talking we heard the drone of aircraft and the first Japanese bombs began to fall on Hong Kong. Having originally prepared for an air war against Germany, I was about to become involved in a ground war against Japan.

While at Cambridge University I had joined the University Air Squadron and in 1936 had been commissioned in the Reserve of Air Force Officers. Many hours were spent in the air learning the geography of southern England where most of us expected the major battles of the air war with Germany to be fought. I had been tempted to apply for a regular RAF commission with eighteen months seniority for my honours degree in history but stuck to my earlier intention, formed while at school at Marlborough, of joining the Colonial Service. I was selected for the Malayan Civil Service and was sent on a year’s Colonial Service course at Oxford University. On arrival in Malaya in 1938 I was initially stationed in Ipoh, the centre of the tin mining industry, before being sent to Macao, a small Portuguese colony forty miles south of Hong Kong in the Pearl River estuary, to learn Chinese (Cantonese). Here I rejoined Ronnie Holmes and Eddie Teesdale, two Hong Kong cadets, who had earlier come out with me on the P&O ss Carthage from England.

On the outbreak of war with Germany I was called up to the RAF in Singapore but in early 1940, after a few months of the phoney war, was demobilized again at the request of the Malayan Government and returned to Macao. On the way back by ship I passed through Saigon, then a peaceful French town, which I was to see again twenty years later in very different circumstances. On the fall of France in 1940 it was considered safer to move all the Colonial Service cadets learning Chinese to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s defences against a Japanese attack were being steadily improved and I was invited to join a group, with Ronnie and Eddie, which was to operate as a left-behind party in the New Territories if and when the Japanese advanced. We spent most weekends exploring the hills of the New Territories and learning the tracks. During the week I used to fly members of the party over the same ground in an old Hornet Moth belonging to the Hong Kong Flying Club at Kai Tak, then a grassy circular field roughly where the airport buildings and apron are now. We naturally concentrated our attention on the hills covering the likely route of a Japanese advance from the border to Tai Po, thence to Sha Tin and Shing Mun reservoir, where the government bungalow was allocated to us and became our training HQ. Dumps of supplies (food, ammunition and explosives) were laid for us by the Kumaon Rifles. The whole area of each dump was first cleared of Chinese woodcutters and the supplies were brought in by mules. The most important (No. 2) was built into a cave under rocks in a stream bed in the valley between Shing Mun reservoir and the crest of Tai Mo Shan. Another (No. 4) was in a disused shaft of the wolfram mine at Lin Ma Hang, looking right down on the border with China.

The leader of the left-behind party was a great character, Mike Kendall, a stocky Canadian mining engineer, which made him an expert with explosive and in 1941 some of the new gadgetry from the UK arrived including limpet mines, time-pencils and all sorts of booby traps. Major-General A. E. Grasett, himself a Canadian, then commanding Hong Kong, invited Mike and myself to a demonstration. When we arrived in shirt and shorts he was standing on a small mound surrounded by a ‘Yes’ of smart staff officers. He greeted Mike.

‘Ah, Kendall, just the chap we need to go up close to these things and see what they’re like when they go off.’

Without pausing for breath Mike came straight back, ‘Well, sir, I wouldn’t mind if I had a skin as thick as yours.’ The faces of the staff officers were a treat, but the General gracefully accepted such a riposte from a fellow Canadian.

All the time we watched the Japanese across the border, notably where it ran down the centre of the main street of Sha Tau Kok. Here British and Japanese troops were literally face to face. Locally it was quite impossible to tell when the invasion might come as everything had been ready for months. Unless there was warning from elsewhere it was bound to be a surprise. For some unfathomable reason at the beginning of November, 1941, the Malayan Government allowed the Malayan cadets to return to Macao. This suited me as I was within two months of taking my final Cantonese examination and needed a concentrated finish. On Sunday afternoon, 7 December, while skeet-shooting on Macao racecourse, the Consul brought me a message from Mike to get back to Hong Kong immediately. There was no rush as the Tai Shan could not sail until 3 a.m. because ships were not permitted to enter Hong Kong in darkness. It was a four-hour trip and to this day I do not understand why we were not captured or sunk by the Japanese on the way.

The Tai Shan docked as usual in the centre of the waterfront and I walked up to the Hong Kong Hotel. There seemed to be no undue panic and I deposited my luggage, including my shotgun which I had unfortunately brought over with me – not to be seen again. I rang Eddie Teesdale out at Shingmun and had a good breakfast in the hotel. Mike arrived and told me that the Japs had crossed the border and that we must be ready at Shingmun by nightfall to go up to No. 2. There was a lot of stuff to take out there, including the wireless set and a telephone. We had also been allocated an additional four members from the Volunteers – Wattie Gardner, Corky Cormick, Doc Parsons and Ginger Day – and they would need shepherding.

While at May Road during the previous year I had the wireless set in the flat and was taught its use and the Morse code by an Army signaller. The main trouble was that there were no light mobile sets in those days, at least not in Hong Kong. This one was very cumbersome and difficult to pack and carry with its batteries. The telephone was needed to plug in to the underground line on the Kowloon–Canton railway which we did not think would be cut.

It was a busy day. There were some more air raids. I went out to Shingmun first by taxi and brought a car back for the final journey. On my return in the evening I was stopped at a Volunteer post in Tsun Wan and informed that there was now nothing ahead but Japs who had last been reported at Castle Peak. However, the Shingmun turnoff was not very far and I was let through. We were all gathered at the bungalow (now over forty years later a very pleasant rural retreat surrounded by trees) and, as soon as it was dark, started the slow ascent up the trail to No. 2 below Tai Mo Shan. About halfway up I dropped the wireless set.

At No. 2 there was a huge rock with a cave beneath, not easily visible from the outside, in which about eight of us could sleep. It was cold at night and we each had a canvas sleeping bag with a blanket inside which was heavy by modern standards. The supply dump was in another cave about fifty feet further up the side stream with one small well-camouflaged entrance. It had enough stuff to last ten of us at least a month. The main snag of the position was that the slopes beside and above the stream bed were very open and obscured the view of the surrounding hills. Except for rocky outcrops, these hills had no cover at all on them. Even long dry grass had been cut by woodcutters for fuel. Only in the stream beds did some grass and shrubs remain, but they were too precipitous for movement. A further limitation was going to be that our new recruits had no knowledge of the tracks.

Later that night we could hear shelling and it was obvious that the Japanese were on the spur above us leading down from Tai Mo Shan to Shingmun. At dawn I crawled up the side stream to get a better view. Fortunately there was some mist and low cloud, otherwise I would have been as visible as a fly crawling up a window-pane. I could hear the Japs on the ridge above, but could not see across towards Leadmine Pass and Needle Hill. During the day several aircraft flew back from bombing Hong Kong only just above us and the pilots’ heads could be clearly seen. We realized we could not move in daylight until the Japs had passed through and without the wireless set we could not report the situation. It was decided therefore that that night (9th) Mike Kendall, Colin McEwan and ‘Big’ Lei (a Chinese from Wei Hai Wei in Shantung province – hence his larger size – who had worked with Mike for some years) should make contact with the Royal Scots in the Shingmun redoubt and rejoin us the following night.

They reached the redoubt just as the Japanese attack on it started. They were lucky to get through on a trail the Japs were not using. The redoubt fell during the next day so Mike and party were unable to rejoin us and we did not see them again for a long time.

One effect of the redoubt’s fall was that there were less Japanese on the hilltops around us, but they were not entirely gone. One day before dawn I went round alone to the slope above Leadmine Pass and found a position with a large rock behind me where I could see the pass and some of the track from it to Shingmun, also the Needle Hill area and Hong Kong island in the distance. I had just settled down for the day when I heard movement behind me. Looking carefully round the rock, I saw a Japanese section take up position in some rocks about thirty yards behind, across a slight dip in the ground. We were both doing the same thing. I cannot remember all the thoughts that must have gone through my head but it was a very long day. A pack train went through the pass – the Japanese used a lot of Mongolian ponies rather than mules – and there was another observation post on Needle Hill. For lunch I had brought a tin of peaches, because I always found the juice very refreshing, but had forgotten an opener. However, I managed to pierce the top of the tin with the firing-pin of my revolver! I was worried that one of the section wanting to relieve himself might come round my rock. If I shot him and had to run there was no cover for hundreds of yards and even then it was too limited. Very slowly, or so it seemed to me, darkness began to fall and, having heard nothing for some time, I got up, moved out from behind the rock and froze. The whole section was still there standing up and about to move off, but no one saw me. I gave them twenty minutes’ start.

We laid some booby traps on either side of Leadmine Pass, leaving a gap across the side spurs for ourselves because it was our best route to the Tai Po road. When Eddie and I went to use the railway telephone the whole of the pass area had been burnt off, so some of the traps must have worked. But when we plugged the phone in there was no answer and we realized that the Japanese were in control of Kowloon and that the line had not been extended to Hong Kong Island. The trip took us two nights and was a useful recce. Meanwhile, we could hear the battle for Hong Kong raging, but could see nothing of it.

It was clear that the only possible targets for us would be on the Tai Po–Sha Tin road. This should have been severely obstructed by the explosive charges laid before the invasion both to blow up culverts and to bring cliffs down on to the road, but I am not sure that many of them were fired. Corky and I therefore went over there one night with about 10lbs of plastic. We chose a point where there was a twisty uphill stretch and were rewarded by seeing a long Japanese lorry convoy go through at a snail’s pace towards Kowloon. The next night we planted the explosive on the edge of the road and used an overhead wire across the road high enough to need a lorry to trigger it. We hoped that it would get the first lorry in the convoy which would block the rest, especially if it carried ammunition. Just as we had the whole thing set we heard a lorry coming but from the wrong direction, downhill and empty. We only had time to duck on the other side of the road. There was a terrific bang, the lorry lurched across the road but continued on its way to Tai Po. It taught me Murphy’s law that if something can go wrong it will.

Eddie was more successful. He had taken several small limpet mines with one-hour time-pencils in them and gone to a point where there was a large area of flat land between the road and the sea (about where the Chinese University is now). Here there was a villa with a courtyard and garden which was being used as a lorry park. He crossed the road, skirted round the house which the Japanese were using as a mess, dodged a sentry and got under the nearest lorry. Slowly he worked down the line sticking a limpet on the sump of about six lorries. The sentry was walking up and down (they still do!) and was easy to avoid. But it was time for Eddie to get moving before the limpets started to go off. He reached the house, but the moon was out and people were moving about. He stopped in the shadow of the balcony. An officer came out onto it and pee’d on him. When the moon went behind a cloud he moved out and slipped over the road. He had the great satisfaction of sitting on the hillside and watching the flames and confusion when the limpets went off.

We knew that at some time we would have to move to No. 4 on the Chinese border. Ronnie volunteered to go alone to check that it was still there undisturbed. He made it there and back, every bit of twenty miles each way at night through well-populated but hilly territory with two enemy-patrolled roads to cross, in two nights, a remarkable achievement.

One interesting point at this stage was that we saw practically no Chinese villagers either by day on the hillsides or even at night in their villages. They had very wisely gone to ground. We were worried at first going close to or through a village at night, because the dogs barked, but we soon learnt that dogs always bark and that no one takes any notice of them. The greater menace on the terraced hillsides was stepping from one rice-field to the next without realizing there was a three-foot drop between them. A twisted ankle would have been a disastrous handicap. Eddie, Ronnie and I wore heavy leather chupleys, with a good foldover in front to protect the toes, and grey army socks. If your feet got wet everything dried off fairly quickly. We were of course operating in the dry sunny Hong Kong winter.

Almost before we realized it Christmas Day had arrived and everything on Hong Kong Island went ominously quiet. Ronnie returned from a daylight recce along the Tai Mo Shan ridge to report that a Japanese destroyer had sailed up the harbour. Hong Kong had fallen.

A good account of the battle for Hong Kong was not written until The Lasting Honour by Oliver Lindsay in 1978, nor have I read any account which suggests the outcome would have been otherwise. There was never any chance of rescue or reinforcement. The Chinese alone were in a position to intervene, but, after ten years of war, there was no question of their being able to mount an offensive operation in the rear of the Japanese – as we were soon to see. Thinking about it later in the light of what happened in the Philippines, I suppose a longer defence might have been put up if Lantao Island had been fortified and held, with Hong Kong declared an open city. There was plenty of water on Lantao and only about seven thousand people. Guns would have covered not only Hong Kong harbour but the Pearl River estuary leading to Canton. It could have been another Corregidor. Certainly Hong Kong showed that it was impossible to hold a large Asian city with all the problems of health and water without enormous casualties to the civilian population. Another lesson to me now is the great advantage that lies with the attacker when there is choice as to the point of attack. There is much ill-informed bland acceptance of the argument that the attacker needs three times the strength of the defender. That is rubbish. All he needs, given the advantage of deciding where and when, is three times at the point of attack. The defensive positions, even of a defender superior in numbers, are then turned and the defence begins to crumble, as at Shingmun.

This did not concern us on Christmas Day, 1941, when we discussed what to do. No real plans had.been made about escaping into China and we did not even have any maps of the area across the border. Ronnie, Eddie and I did, however, have Chinese passes signed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek’s private office ordering Chinese forces to give us every assistance. We also spoke Cantonese fairly fluently. The four Volunteers realized that they had been a handicap to us and might reduce our chances of getting away. They courageously decided that they would go back into Kowloon and give themselves up. We loaded them with all the supplies they could carry and, in view of what happened to others, they were lucky. A sentry accepted their surrender and they all survived imprisonment. But it was a bad mistake on their part and ours. We had overestimated the difficulty of getting them out.

The next night we went down to the bungalow which was unoccupied. It had had a shell through the roof and had been looted, but we found an old school atlas with a map of China. At least it gave us the rough bearing to work on to skirt Canton. The obvious thing to do was to move to No. 4 on the border, so we packed up and hid what remained at No. 2. We carried only sidearms, clothing, minimum rations and our sleeping bags and set off with Ronnie in the lead.

The main trail down from Tai Mo Shan into the Lam Tsuen valley was paved with large stepping stones (as were most major hill paths in China – and some near my home at Charlwood in Surrey where my father was rector). There was no road up the valley as there is now and we kept to the foot trail through villages until we crossed the main road and railway about two miles beyond Tai Po. We had just got into the rice fields (stubble) on the other side when a lorry convoy from the border arrived with lights blazing and stopped opposite us. Everyone got out to relieve themselves while we lay flat behind a bund twenty yards away, hoping that no one with modesty would want to venture further.

All was well and we moved on through a small pass (there are now roads and small reservoirs) down to Hok Tau village and across the Sha Tau Kok road. It was nearing dawn when we reached the top of Robin’s Nest and found the mine shaft at Lin Ma Hang which held No. 4. There was a path running past the entrance and a stream beside it. We soon had supplies unpacked onto shelves inside the shaft but left the pile of rocks inside the entrance which was meant to give the impression that the shaft was blocked. Recce showed that the mine buildings below were occupied by a Japanese platoon but otherwise there was very little movement.

We found a trail down the spur beside the mine and could see the path on the other side of the border leading up to the pass below Ng Tung Shan, which looked higher than Tai Mo Shan. Beyond that we had not a clue. The only thing to do was to find out. I did a ‘brilliant’ intelligence appreciation. If you were a Japanese and had just captured Hong Kong where would you be? Answer, in Hong Kong. Therefore there would be very few left across the border. We reached the pass before dawn and found an excellent observation point in the hills beyond it, well off the track where we spent the day. We could see the valley through which ran the Sam Chun to Tam Shui road. It was decided that Eddie and Ronnie would recce forward that night and return on the following night and that I would return alone to No. 4. They left before dusk as it was a long way to go down the hill and no one was to be seen moving about. I got back to No. 4 about midnight and as I came down from the top of the spur I suddenly saw something white on the path by the entrance. I lay absolutely still for about half an hour but could hear or see nothing. I then slipped down onto the path. It was one of our handkerchiefs. No. 4 had been cleaned right out. There was nothing left except my sleeping bag.

I collected this and climbed up onto Robin’s Nest. It could not have been the Japanese as they would have set an ambush. A Chinese villager must have seen us and a party must have waited until we left. They had done a pretty good job in the time without the Japanese finding out. I left Robin’s Nest about 2 a.m., crossed the border, found a dry ditch a bit off the track, curled up in the sleeping bag and slept for about three hours. My subconscious alarm clock must have worked because I was up, through the pass and making for the hills before dawn. It was vital to cut Ronnie and Eddie off and to stop them returning to No. 4.

I expected them the following night but there was no certainty. It was a long lonely hungry day at our previous observation point. I recovered a few cigarette ends and smoked them in the last of my loo paper. If nothing else, it was something to do. After all, my whole world had evaporated and my last two companions might not return. As it got dark I moved down the track to a corner where there were plenty of stepping stones so that it would be easy to hear anyone coming up. Fortunately for my peace of mind I heard their chupleys on the stones quite early in the night and gave our recognition whistle.

Ronnie gave me a cigarette and some chocolate. For their trip they had been carrying more rations than I had. They had been able to go well forward across the valley road but on the way back had run into a sentry on the road, whom Eddie had shot. They were hopeful that we could get quite a long way into China before having to surface. But now we had no rations except way back at No. 2. Lured by these, we decided to go back over Robin’s Nest into the New Territories and try our luck in a Chinese village. We selected Hok Tau across the Sha Tau Kok road. There was no road to it then – that was part of its post-war reward. We got there at dawn to find only women and children. The men were all sleeping up the hillside to avoid being conscripted for work by the Japanese. Tang Hing Yuen, one of the elders of the village, hustled us up the hillside to a well-shaded stream bed and we were soon tucking into a large pot of rice.

As soon as we had rested and taken stock, we decided to return to No. 2 with one or two of the villagers, to help carry as much as we could to Hok Tau, and to plan our escape into China from there. We turned down an offer by our hosts to keep us in the Pat Sin range east of Hok Tau, near the present Plover Cove reservoir, for the rest of the war, possibly not such a wild and impossible idea as it appeared to us at the time. The trip proved uneventful and we returned to Hok Tau with plenty of supplies, which were supplemented by rice and nearly green tomatoes brought to us every day by Tang’s younger brother, whom we christened Ganymede. We now had a good stock of tinned cigarettes which proved to be a most acceptable reward for any services rendered. Besides, Tang and his cronies were constantly slipping up for a conspiratorial chat, a cup of tea and a cigarette.

They found a guide for us called Ah Lee, who was an opium addict and ex-smuggler. For HK $1,000 he agreed to take us round Sha Tau Kok and eventually to Wai Chow, the capital of the District behind Hong Kong still believed to be in Chinese hands. We could only give a small deposit but signed for the remainder to be paid for by a future British administration about which no one had any doubt. It was all paid after the war and the villagers of Hok Tau were well rewarded. I visited it with Ronnie who kept a fatherly eye on it, and again forty years later with Murray MacLehose when he was Governor of Hong Kong. Before we left we also gave Hok Tau our Bren gun and other goodies, which Eddie authorized as ‘Commander of British Forces in the New Territories’. It was befitting that he, as a future Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, should have done it.

We finally left the New Territories on 29 January, 1942, more than a month after the fall of Hong Kong. We did not have any real news about what was happening there. Hok Tau was remote from the main traffic routes and people were still keeping their heads down. On the first night we skirted Sha Tau Kok and walked several miles along the shore of Mirs Bay before making into the hills up a well-worn path. We spent the day in a stream bed about one hundred yards off the path – there was never any problem about drinking good clear hill water. The following night we reached the lower slopes overlooking the Sam Chun–Tarn Shui valley near its eastern end and decided to let Ah Lee scout ahead across the valley road during the day. We took the precaution of changing our position so that we could see whether he was alone on his return. During the early afternoon he came back with a man in a blue tunic who was head of a village across the valley road. He brought us a cold chicken and news that there were no Japanese except for an occasional truck. They were indeed all in Hong Kong. We set off at once and reached his village by nightfall. We celebrated with an enormous meal, but our troubles were not quite over.

We were put on the main