ABSTRACT
The British Army fought irregulars in ten countries between 1944 and 1952, and this period was crucial to its development of ‘modern counter-guerrilla warfare’. As the first postwar insurgency broke out in the autumn of 1945 in the United Nations Mandate of Palestine, Britain’s traditional search-and-arrest cordons, curfews and column patrols proved woefully inadequate for dealing with Zionist urban terrorism and modern guerrilla warfare. Although it is likely that such innovative counter-guerrilla thinking was not widely espoused in Britain in 1944, not least because of the Army’s more pressing wartime duties, some War Office personnel shared the view that changes in counter-guerrilla methods were overdue. During the summer of 1948 the Malaya HQ in fact contemplated an experiment in extended patrolling, which would have been a major advance towards modern counter-guerrilla patrolling by the British Army.
