An extremely unlikely new witness for Sgt Blackman
A distinguished liberal voice backs the Mail’s campaign to win justice for a fellow Royal Marine – with his own haunting account of killing two horribly wounded insurgents
WHEN the sudden, savage firing stopped, a number of bodies lay stretched out in the ‘kill zone’ on the forest floor. On closer inspection, the ambush party from 42 Commando Royal Marines found two of the enemy casualties alive but horribly wounded.
The Scots officer in charge of the soldiers was still a teenager. An Old Etonian and first-class scholar, he should have been at university but instead found himself 6,500 miles away on National Service in the Malayan jungle fighting a communist insurgency. By 1952, frontline action in the tropics had already taught the youth much about life. But this particular incident towards the end of his tour of duty was to provide him with one of the very hardest lessons of war. And it would leave a memory that apparently troubles him to this day.
The two surviving guerrillas had suffered mortal injuries. The location was far from any proper medical facilities and the terrain was savage. At any moment, the ambushers could become the ambushed.
And so it was that Second Lieutenant Neal Ascherson stood over the wounded enemy, who clearly would not survive their injuries, raised his gun and pulled the trigger to put an end to their suffering.
This story — never before told — may come as a surprise to those who know of and admire Ascherson today. Some 65 years after his Malayan experiences, he stands as one of the grand old men of the liberal Left.
Having studied at Cambridge where the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm described him as ‘perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had’, Ascherson enjoyed an outstanding journalistic career, first at The Scotsman and principally as a foreign correspondent for the Observer newspaper.
He is also the author of a number of books, mainly on Eastern Europe, and still lectures on archaeology. He is as far from being a Right-wing reactionary as it is possible to be. No, Ascherson is an archetypal British liberal intellectual.
His participation as a combatant in the Malayan Emergency, one of Britain’s last colonial wars, troubled him even as he was leading his men in jungle sweeps against the largely ethnic Chinese fighters of the Malayan National Liberation Army. It was a gruelling war of shadows in which the opponent was rarely seen.
He has written: ‘The men with whom I had shared dangers in the jungle deserved all my loyalty and affection . . . And yet every month I spent in Malaya confirmed to me that we were defending an empire of injustice.’
MORE recently, though, Ascherson has been contemplating what he feels to be another ‘injustice’. And, as a man of high principle, he has chosen to act upon it. In 13 days the Court of Appeal will begin to reconsider the case of another soldier who served in a foreign war with Ascherson’s old unit, 42 Commando Royal Marines.
On September 15, 2011, a Taliban attack on a British base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, was repulsed when an Apache helicopter strafed the insurgents with cannon fire, mortally wounding one.
Acting Colour Sergeant Alexander Blackman, a veteran of five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a man described as a ‘superb soldier’ by his superiors, killed the wounded Taliban fighter with a bullet to the chest.
The incident was captured on video by one of Blackman’s men. The video subsequently fell into the hands of the British police and Blackman was arrested.
In December 2013, Sgt Blackman was convicted at court martial of murder and jailed for life with a minimum of ten years and dismissed with disgrace from the British Armed Forces.
It is said that some members of the court martial panel saluted him as he left the court. An appeal against conviction in May 2014 served only to reduce the minimum tariff to eight years. Now 42, Blackman remains in HMP Erlestoke in Wiltshire.
But while it was clear that Blackman had done wrong, there was also evidence of a gross miscarriage of justice. He and his men were under intense pressure at the end of a gruelling six-month tour of duty and casualties among close colleagues were increasing.
The Taliban had taken to hanging body parts of dismembered Marines in trees as trophies.
Public outrage at Blackman’s treatment was growing with rallies in his support and an online petition signed by more than 100,000 people. In the autumn of 2015, this newspaper, while recognising Blackman’s culpability, began a campaign to have his case looked at again by the courts and established a fund to pay for a new legal team to secure this.
READERS raised an astonishing £800,000, which underwrote the efforts of leading QC Jonathan Goldberg and his team as they compiled a compelling new case to be put before the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).
In December 2016, the CCRC decided that there were no fewer than three grounds upon which the Blackman case was potentially unsafe and should be referred back to the Court of Appeal.
The first is that new psychiatric evidence shows Blackman was suffering from an ‘adjustment disorder’ which would have sufficed to reduce his crime from murder to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Second, the conduct of Blackman’s defence prior to trial was deficient to the extent that it led to identifiable errors which rendered the trial process unfair.
Third, the Judge Advocate General who sat at the court martial had wrongly failed to leave ‘unlawful act manslaughter’ as an optional verdict for the panel, who were simply asked to decide whether Blackman was innocent or guilty of murder.
The Mail understands Edinburghborn Ascherson shares many of these misgivings. Last week, according to fellow Corps veterans involved in the case, he approached the Blackman campaign offering help. He could, he said, provide his own account of the pressures, complexities and moral iniquities of combat in a nasty little war in an obscure country that was just as unpopular back home as the Afghanistan conflict.
Second Lt Ascherson was a member of the Royal Marines Commando brigade sent from the UK to Malaya in 1951, when the communist insurgency was at its height and appeared to be spinning out of control.
Attacks on the security forces and the largely British-owned rubber plantations and tin mines — their revenues vital for the ailing post-war UK economy — were increasing. Matters came to a head in October that year when a communist ambush on a road near Kuala Lumpur killed the British High Commissioner to Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney.
His replacement turned the tide of the ‘Emergency’ and set the course for an eventual victory over the Communists. While Sir Henry was a career colonial officer, General Sir Gerald Templer was a decorated fighting soldier who established what came to be seen as a model for counter-insurgency.
Templer popularised the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ as an approach to
winning over the civilian population. He also greatly increased the importance of intelligence gathering and could be ruthless in imposing punishments on communities where insurgents operated.
But to win he also had to fight and kill and Lt Ascherson and his colleagues in elite units like the Marines were the cutting edge for this aggression.
Ascherson has previously described to another newspaper how his enthusiasm for the cause diminished. ‘When you do what you are trained to do, this extraordinary experience of shooting at people and being shot at, is a huge high when you are 18 years old,’ he said.
‘But afterwards it dawns on you. You remember the dead bodies and think: “I’m responsible for that.” You reflect, rather self-consciously, why am I not considered worthy to vote in the British election [the voting age was then 21], but I’m not too young to take somebody’s life?’
The year 1952 was pivotal. More communist guerrillas were killed in those 12 months than at any other time in the 12-year Emergency. The security forces suffered 600 casualties, killed and wounded. Some 29 Marines would die in Malaya on active service, mostly in battle.
The horrors of jungle fighting were also brought home to the UK. In April, the Communist Party of Britain’s Daily Worker newspaper published a photograph of a Royal Marine holding the severed heads of two communist guerrillas.
There was an uproar and Parliament was told that the decapitations were carried out for identification purposes by Dayak headhunters who had been acting as jungle guides for the security forces.
After six months in the Kinta Valley. Ascherson’s unit was sent to Selangor state, which is where the ambush took place.
Ascherson has spoken before about one incident during the firefight, without going so far as to describe its controversial aftermath.
After the initial fusillade had mown down members of the guerrilla patrol, one of their comrades ran out of the jungle to try to drag a wounded insurgent to shelter. He, too, was cut down by the Marines.
Ascherson recalled to a fellow veteran that he could not help thinking then of the verse from St John: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lays down his life for his friends.’ By then, Ascherson was writing letters to politicians both in Malaya and at home, questioning the validity of the war and the treatment of the Chinese minority.
After being demobbed, he resumed his academic studies at King’s College, Cambridge where he read history — and was soon graphically reminded of where many on the Left stood on the issue of Malaya. His tutor there and subsequent lifelong friend was the renowned Hobsbawm.
Their relationship had an inauspicious start when, as a new undergraduate, Ascherson attended drinks in the historian’s rooms.
‘Eric inspected me,’ he recalled. ‘“What’s that medal affair you’re wearing?” “It’s my National Service campaign medal. For active service in the Malayan Emergency.”
‘Eric pulled back and took a look at me. Then he said, sharply but without violence: “Malaya? You should be ashamed to be wearing that.”
‘I don’t think I said anything at all,’ Ascherson wrote in his obituary of Hobsbawm. ‘I remember noticing the students around us, round-eyed with shock. Then I left the room, stumbling back down the dusky stairs, and out into the huge court where it was beginning to rain.
‘For a time I walked round the court in the darkness, shedding angry tears. I was drunk and getting wetter, but after a time I felt for the miniature medal, unpinned it and slipped it into the pocket of my jacket. Something had been resolved. I never wore it again.’
What Ascherson, now 84, could not put away for good was his personal knowledge of battle and its impact on those who fight.
Last night Sgt Blackman’s wife, Claire, said: ‘I welcome the support of so distinguished a figure as Neal Ascherson. His own testimony of an incident on a battlefield in many ways resembles that in which my husband found himself in Afghanistan and indeed reflects the stories of so many others who have seen active service.
‘The pressures that our soldiers are under in sustained combat can only be understood by those who have also served.’