Conference files, lot 60 D 627, CF 287
Memorandum by the Special Adviser to the United States Delegation (MacArthur) to the Secretary of State
Sir Harold Caccia dropped in to see me this evening. He referred to your conversation with Mr. Eden on Sunday night1 regarding the situation in Malaya and showed me a brief memorandum dealing with the Civil Security Administration. In essence he said that, aside from the 22 battalions which the British have there, they also have 25,000 constables, 40,000 special police, and 200,000 home guards. He said that as a result of the progress they have made in cleaning up the situation in Malaya, during the past few months they have been able to lift restrictions in four areas so conditions are very much as normal. He also showed me a tabulated list of the number of incidents, security police killed, and Communists killed, over the past two years. These figures indicated there had been a very substantial decrease in the number of security police killed and an increase in the number of Communists which [sic] had been liquidated and a reduction in the overall number of incidents. In conclusion he said that while the situation [Page 590] in Malaya was by no means cleaned up, very substantial progress had been made and should Indochina collapse, the British felt that they had the internal situation in Malaya pretty well in hand and did not believe that any large scale successful uprising could be staged.
Caccia then asked me whether we planned to respond favorably to Eden’s suggestion for secret US–UK talks on the defense of Southeast Asia. The British proposal was that we exclude Indochina from this study exercise. I replied that the British proposal seemed to have virtually nothing in it to appeal to the French and seemed to be based on the assumption that Indochina was already finished. Caccia replied that the British hoped very much that the French would not give up in Indochina, but if they did, a study of the kind proposed by Eden would enable us to have some plans which could perhaps be implemented rapidly when and if the Indochina collapse came. I believe that the prime purpose of Caccia’s visit was to talk about this, rather than to show me the memorandum on Malaya which to me was a flimsy pretext.