Robert Thompson

Sir Robert Thompson is 'the British expert on guerrilla warfare who advised Richard Nixon' and 'was military adviser to Thieu in Vietnam and still sees him occasionally' (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'.

Career

Robert Grainger Kerr Thompson was the son of a clergyman, and in 1938, after Marlborough and Cambridge, joined the Malayan civil service. He was learning Chinese in Macao when the Japanese struck in 1941 and he returned to Hong Kong, only to be ordered out again to liaise with the Chinese Nationalists. The latter proved too cautious for Thompson's liking and he filled a suitcase with banknotes and, living on the contents and his wits, made his way back through Burma to India.

There he was grabbed by the RAF, having joined the Reserve at Cambridge, but SOE influence determined that his recent experiences should be put to use and he became a liaison officer with Wingate's Chindits, Allied soldiers trained to operate behind the Japanese lines. He took part in both their 1943 and 1944 operations, rising to the rank of wing commander, and distinguished himself both in the air, flying a Hurricane, and on the ground, where he won the DSO and, most unusually for an airman, the MC.

In 1946 he, rejoined the Malayan civil service and in 1950, after staff training in England, joined the staff of Lieutenant-general Sir Harold Briggs, who was directing operations against Community terrorists in Malaya. By 1955 that insurgency had been effectively contained and by 1960 largely eradicated a clear-cut victory over "world Communism" that was much advertised at the time and for which Thompson, to his embarrassment, was given much personal credit

A key feature of the operations blueprint, the so-called Briggs Plan, was the resettlement of thousands of Chinese squatters, the terrorists' main recruits, into newly-built, well-defended villages. But that tactic was successful only because many of the squatters, hitherto eking out a very marginal existence, quite welcomed the relocation, and because those others who had become terrorists had never been able to establish any real political links with the settled, non-squatter population, who merely resented the disruption of the river plantations that provided their livelihood.

Nevertheless, Thompson came to be regarded as a counter-insurgency expert and as Tungku Abdul Rahman's permanent secretary for defence, in 1960 was asked by President Diem of South Vietnam to advise on the deteriorating situation there. He continued to advise the Vietnamese and later the Americans (President Nixon was a particular admirer) right up until the American withdrawal in 1975.

Much of his advice was sound common sense, notably his insistence that the massive American firepower was simply not relevant in that type of conflict where doubling material might serve only to "square the error". He was, however, too ready to see the "strategic hamlets" programme in Vietnam as a viable equivalent of squatter resettlement in Malaya, losing sight of the much greater attachment of the Vietnamese to the villages they were forced to abandon or to see half-demolished to make them "defensible".

In Vietnam

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.

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.

Affiliations

• Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism

Publications and Notes

Publications

• WAR IN PEACE: CONVENTIONAL AND GUERRILLA WARFARE SINCE 1945, by Sir Robert Thompson et al (Orbis, £9.95).