Extracted from the soon to be published Bren Gun book. Enjoy...........
Please don't lift and reproduce anywhere else. It's from the publishers manuscript and here for you Milsurps forumers only. Thanks
We were patrolling in the eastern sector of the main pan-Malaya road, deep into jungle, well beyond the paddi and rubber plantations in an area known to us as ‘black’. Johore was a known bandit country and being a young national serviceman (a conscript) on only my second operation, I was a bit twichy. The omens were not good and I remember that it was during the monsoon season even though it was wet and sticky with constant rain, I had a dry throat. We’d headed slightly south to skirt a local village track when the birds and jungle wildlife started to squawk. The omens definitely weren’t good! After a few more minutes the patrol went down into some stinking smelly mangrove swamp and moved slowly along the edge. I was the biggest in the section and was second from last, carrying the Bren. It was heavy but because I had the Bren, some of my heavy load was taken from me by the rest of the section. It didn’t help much as I was slipping in the mud and sea water silt. All of a sudden the leading scout, an Iban tracker we called ‘delli’, armed with a big pump-action shotgun opened fire with two shots at a figure crouching over a tin pot at a shallow part of the swamp to our left. The first shot simply knocked him to Valhalla and I remember seeing the tin pot flying through the air. Baxter, behind me had an Owen gun and the radio and stumbled into me, pushing me over and I fell into the water. It felt like falling into thick custard for what felt like minutes but it was milli-seconds. I scrambled up and there was the start of a gun battle going on. Johnny Baker our national service corporal was yelling orders but no-one seemed to be taking notice until I heard him shout to me and I instinctively opened up, firing the Bren from the waist to where he was pointing. Our lieutenant had a shotgun too and was scrambling up the bank shouting to Steve Hickson a great pal from Leicester, ‘…cover my arse…’. In the meantime I poured a few single shots over towards Johnny Baker who had opened fire at a clearing. He was right … …, all of a sudden, three bandits ran across the clearing, about 20 yards away. I changed to AUTOMATIC and fired a long burst of fire. To my horror, the whole of the gun was clouded in fog and I couldn’t see a bloody thing. The water and silt that remained in the barrel and gas cylinder had started to boil! I can’t tell you what I said, but it wasn’t very polite! I just aimed off a bit to the right instinctively to clear Baker, then fired the rest of the magazine using the tracer to block off the right side of the area. Two fell to the machine gun fire. One other escaped with his life as a few rifle bullets followed him into the jungle. I put a few more magazines down but the rain and drizzle that penetrated the jungle started to sizzle and steam off the gun. We were all very twichy but our battle drills were well practiced. The whole event seemed to last for hours but it was over in minutes. Baxter got hit with shotgun fire and Matt Hutton was shot in the arm and chest but wasn’t in any real danger once we’d been reinforced and got him to the big hospital in Singapore. The Intelligence people said that the group we’d surprised were a good organising and courier team. They took 3 dead and 1 possible, who’d lost a lot of blood and been hit by shotgun fire from our Lieutenant Tony Dyer. We did get a lot of good intelligence they’d left behind because once I’d blocked off the clearing with machine gun fire, they couldn’t get back to get it. Two tried, but paid the price. We were told that the bandits were lice infested and thin because they didn’t get fed properly but these were certainly well fed and looked healthy enough. They had plenty of food that we captured including some ‘Carnation’ tinned milk and some Cadbury’s chocolate bars in their pack. I’ll always remember one of their names for as long as I live. It was Gan Kim Bok and he had a little American M1 carbine. I tell you this because it always amazed me afterwards, whenever I think about it, that even after being soaking wet through and pushed into the mud and seawater silt, that old Bren fired first time and never stopped during the whole gun battle. We were feted for many weeks afterwards and I heard that the Regiment made some financial provision for the Iban trackers who worked for us after we left Malaya.
They were stirring times for a 20 year old I can tell you. England was pretty tame after our trip to Malaya.
