Malaya vets campaign on ‘war service’

The men of Rifle Company Butterworth are fighting to have their deployment and its risks recognised as a warlike service.

‘We were put into harm’s way’: Ray Fulcher served in the Second Malayan Emergency. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

The year is 1972 and Gough Whitlam is fulfilling an election pledge to bring home Australian troops from Vietnam, formally ending years of armed conflict with communist­ insurgents across Southeast Asia.

In northern Malaysia at the Butterworth Air Base, a small contingent of Australian servicemen still carry live rounds and pat­rol for communist guerillas they occasionally spy peering from jungles nearby.

“There was a Rifle Company Butterworth patrol that encountered a group of communist terrorists,’’ Ray Fulcher, chairman of the RCB review group, tells The Australian. “They went to ground but there was no shots fired.’’

Nearly 50 years on and the men of Rifle Company Butterworth are fighting to have their deployment and its risks recognised as a warlike service.

It has been a long, friendless fight. Official reviews have declined to upgrade their service, a move that would entitle them to a richer array of veterans’ benefits, including a much-prized Gold Card entitling them to a range of public and private healthcare services. It would also clear the way for RCB veterans to get the Aust­ralian Active Service Medal, the badge of honour bestowed upon all Australian personnel who served in “warlike’’ theatres.

Now they are passing the hat around to fund a Federal Court challenge they hope will see their status formally changed. To Mr Fulcher, as well as to other members of the RCB veterans’ community, it is a question of fairness.

“We were put into harm’s way to counter a threat in Malaysia and support them in their operations against communist terrorists,’’ Mr Fulcher said.

“They cannot renege now on their responsibilities, which is what they’re trying to do.’’

In nearly 20 years of service, RCB members never fired a shot in anger or had one fired at them. They suffered no combat casualties. The RAAF base they were sent to guard was never attacked. The base itself was a hangover from World War II.

So it is not hard to see why the Australian Defence Force has consistently refused to recognise deployment to Butterworth as warlike.

Yet the official designation of peacetime service doesn’t quite fit either. Soldiers on training deploy­ments — notionally the reason the RCB was sent to Malaya­ — don’t pack live rounds. Nor was any training done.

“The government’s big thing is that we were training with the Malaysians,’’ Mr Fulcher said. “There were one or two who did, but that was later.

“There was no way we could train with the Mal­aysians — they were busy with their war.’’ That “war’’ was the decades-long conflict­ waged between the official­ly recognised government of Malays­ia and the Malaysian Communist Party.

It was a simmering insurgency identical in type, if not in scale, to conflicts fought in Vietnam, Laos and Cam­bodia. Fifteen Australians died fighting in the First Malayan Emergency and 24 more were killed on active service.

By 1968, the communists had regrouped and launched a fresh offensive. The base at Butterworth, which had been transferred by the British to Australia in 1957, became a strategic outpost, a means by which Australia could project force into an increasin­gly unstable region.

Butterworth was the only airbase outside Australia where the RAAF maintained a permanent offensive presence.

Even now, Australian troops still rotate regularly through it. During the takeover by Islamic State of Marawi in the southern Philippines, the RAAF used ­Butterworth to send P-3 Orion spy planes to surveil the group.

In 2018, the government announc­ed it would upgrade Butterwort­h to accommodate the new fleet of F-35 fighter planes.

During the 1960s, it served as a deterrent and a backstop to the Malaysian government. For this reason, Mr Fulcher thinks the 9000-odd servicemen who ­rotat­ed through Butterworth from 1970-89 deserve recognition: “If the government sends people into harm’s way, that’s warlike service. If you send them somewhere where there’s a possibility they’ll be shot at, you owe them.’’

Mr Fulcher was there in 1979 when it was a fully fledged operating base, and a staging post for air combat missions flown by Malaysians against the communists.