Robert Thompson

Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson (12 April 1916 - 16 May 1992) was 'the British expert on guerrilla warfare who advised Richard Nixon' and 'was military adviser to [Nguyen Van] Thieu in Vietnam' (Nguyen Van Thieu -- Served as president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1973, fleeing Saigon just before it fell April 30, 1975.) On his death his obituary noted he 'was one of the most renowned, and sometimes influential, advisers in [Counterinsurgency]. He had 27 years' almost uninterrupted military, political, and advisory service in southeast Asia'.

Biography

Early life and education

Thompson was born on 12 April 1916 the son of a Surrey clergyman called Canon W. G. Thompson. He attended Marlborough College (a private school founded in 1843 for the education of the sons of Anglican clergymen) and then attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

In Malaya

After university Thompson joined the Malayan civil service. He served in the RAF during the Second World War. In 1946 he rejoined the Malayan civil service and in 1950, after training in England, he was recruited to assist in what is conventionally called the ‘Malayan Emergency’. The 'emergency' was essentially a revolt against British rule by the poor and politically alienated Malayan Chinese population, who had previously been funded and armed by Britain in its fight against Japanese occupation. The ‘counterinsurgency’ operation, of which Thompson was an integral part was, the Foreign Office conceded in a secret file, ‘very much a war in defence of [the] rubber industry’, which was an important source of wealth for Britain.

Thompson joined the staff of Lieutenant-general Sir Harold Briggs, who was directing operations under the leadership of the High Commissioner Gerald Templer. Britain conducted 4,500 airstirkes in the first five years of the Malayan war, and detained 34,000 people during the first eight years. These detainees were, according to the Foreign Office, people ‘who are a menace to public security but who cannot, because of insufficient evidence, be brought to trial’.

An integral part of Britain's repressive operation was Harold Briggs’s ‘Brigg’s Plan’, which began in 1950 and targeted Malaya’s Chinese population through a ‘resettlement’ programme:

A community of squatters would be surrounded in their huts at dawn, when they were all asleep, forced into lorries and settle in a new village encircled by barbed wire with searchlights round the periphery to prevent movement at night. Before the ‘new villagers’ were let out in the mornings to go to work in the paddy fields, soldiers or police searched them for rice, clothes, weapons or messages.

Thompson himself recalled one such village clearance as follows:

Just as an example of a ruthless measure, I quote the case of a village in Malaya (Jenderam) of about three thousand inhabitants. This was a very bad area and the village itself was a centre of support and supply for a large unit of communist terrorists when most of the other areas around it had been cleared. Having given the inhabitants a choice between the Government and the communists and having failed to make any headway by appealing to or persuading them to cooperate we moved in several battalions at dawn one morning and moved the whole village out. Everyone in it, men, women and children, went into detention for two years. All the houses were razed to the ground. Surprisingly, this did not cause a public outcry and the effectiveness of the result, by leading to the elimination of the communist terrorist unit concerned, silenced all criticism.

In Vietnam

Thompson was Head of the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam from 1961 to 1965. His appointment was recommended by the British military commander Gerald Templer, who had worked closely with Thompson in Malaya:

Gerald Templer was the intellectual and administrative father of the Vietnam war. While the French were going down to defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and the Americans leading a UN crusade to stop Communism in South Korea, Gerald Templer was coining the phrase 'hearts and minds' to wage a successful counter-revolutionary war in Malaya. He combined a sophisticated propaganda campaign, social welfare programme, large - scale deportations, village re-location schemes, and jungle trained troops given helicopter mobility to contain, isolate, and then defeat the 5,000 or so Communist guerrillas.

Templer's success was hailed on the front covers of Time and Look magazine, promoted him to Chief of Staff and Field Marshal, and took him in 1960 to the palace of Prime Minister Diem of Vietnam, where he gave the Americans' first strong man in Saigon an intensive tutorial in how to apply the lessons of Malaya to the war against the Vietcong.

Back in London, Templer recommended a more permanent British involvement in the war, which led to the dispatch of Sir Robert Thompson's British Advisory Mission to Saigon from 1961 to 65.

Counterinsurgency Expert

Drawing on his experience in and reputation from Malaya and Vietnam, Thompson became a prominent counterinsurgency expert. In 1970 he became involved in the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), a London based right-wing think-tank with links to the CIA and British intelligence. Thompson was reportedly involved in the group from the offset, and along with Fergus Ling became the group's chief fundraiser.

Publications

• Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, 1966
• Robert Thompson, The Royal Flying Corps, 1968
• Robert Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam, 1969
• Robert Thompson, Revolutionary War in World Strategy, 1945–1969, 1970
• Robert Thompson, Peace Is Not At Hand, 1974
• Robert Thompson (ed), War in Peace: an analysis of warfare since 1945, 1981
• Robert Thompson, Make for the Hills, 1989

Martin Walker reviewed Thompsons 1981 book on Vietnam as follows:

A RESURGENT conservatism in Britain and the US, fresh from monetarist triumphs in the economy, is turning its confident attention to foreign affairs. Its new theory about the Vietnam War, adopting a previously fashionable model for the French defeat in Algeria, states that the Vietcong were militarily defeated after the Tet offensive and that the check to the North Vietnamese invasion of 1972 showed that the war was still "winnable" with US air support... This book has all the competence and clarity of articles in a weekly news magazine yet remains as glib. The authors are drawn, over-whelmingly, from the teaching staff at Sandhurst and from that highly controversial body, the Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Publications, links and Notes

Publications

An advert in The Times for Thompson's 1966 book Defeating Communist Insurgency , with a recommendation from Leonard Beaton

• "Judgement on Major General O C Wingate, DSO", written on behalf of the Chindits Old Comrades Association in collaboration with Brigadier P. W. Mead (Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives)
• "Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences in Malaya and Vietnam (Study in International Security)", Chatto & Widus, 1966, ISBN 0-7011-1133-X
• "America fights the wrong war", The Spectator, 12 August 1966
• "Royal Flying Corps (Famous Regts. S)",L Cooper, 1968, ISBN 0-85052-010-X
• "Squaring the Error" in Foreign Affairs April 1968. (An issue with 4 articles on Vietnam the other three authors were by Roger Hilsman, Chester L. Cooper and Hamilton Fish Armstrong).
• No Exit From Vietnam, David McKay company, Inc., New York, 1969 ,ISBN 0-7011-1494-0
• Interviewed by Frank Reynolds on ABC-TV December 17 1969
• Revolutionary Warfare in World Strategy, Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970
• "Peace Is Not At Hand" New York: David McKay,London: Chatto and Windus, 1974, ISBN 0-7011-2057-6
• Chapter "Read Bases and Sanctuaries" in "Lessons of Vietnam", editors Thompson, W. Scott and Donaldson D. Frizzell, Pub Taylor & Francis, Incorporated, 1977
• "War in Peace: An Analysis of Warfare Since 1945",(consultant editor) 1981, ISBN 0-85613-341-8 by Sir Robert Thompson et al (Orbis, £9.95).Octopuss Publishing Limited, London.
• "Make for the Hills", an autobiography, London, Pen & Sword Books/Leo Cooper, 1989, ISBN 0-85052-761-9

Links

• Chapter IV: Sir Robert Thompson's Counterinsurgency ConceptsPDF is an analysis of his "Defeating Communist Insurgency"
• King's College London Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives reference to some newspaper articles published by Sir Robert Thompson.
• British resettlement village model during the Malayan Emergency, and early American involvement in Vietnam Relies heavily on Sir Robert Thompson's analysis
• Report on the Republic of Vietnam National Police, by Sir Robert Thompson et al, 1971
• Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies by I. F. W. Beckett, ebrary, Inc