Sarawak, January 1964
‘You may be intrigued to hear that we have got our first Armalite rifle in Sarawak—captured from the Indos yesterday’, an officer of the British Far East Land Forces stationed in Singapore wrote to his colleague in Whitehall. ‘This may act as a suitable incentive to hasten our own.’1 In the context of the broader correspondence between these officers, preserved in the National Archives, the ironic tone becomes clear—a barely concealed frustration with the sluggish procurement bureaucracy in London, expressed through studied understatement.
Indeed, British troops fighting since 1963 in an undeclared war against Indonesian guerrillas in the jungles of Borneo felt abandoned by their leadership. While their own long, heavy rifles, designed for conventional warfare against Soviet troops, were of little use in the dense jungle, their opponents carried brand-new American weapons with which they could execute rapid raids from the undergrowth. Attempts to obtain such rifles themselves led to what amounted to organized looting expeditions; the British government could only gradually procure these still barely known weapons, today familiar under the name AR-15 and primarily known for horrific mass shootings and as an identity symbol of American gun culture.
Continue reading The Enemy’s Weapon: Learning Guerrilla Warfare Through an American Rifle- J. F. Kenyon to T. J. Richardson, 6 Jan. 1964. The UK National Archives (hereafter TNA), DEFE 24/644. [↩]
