Is there a typo somewhere in there?
Shouldn’t eleven battalions be more than 5,000 British troops opposing 5,000 CT’s?
Eleven Australian battalions would be around 9,000 men at that time.
No, it’s correct! 
Interesting.
In a former existence I was an in-house lawyer for an insurance company (life insurance - much superior to the grubs who dealt in general insurance although we had to understand what they did as well as our more refined market, which specialised in denying benefits to widows and orphans and other underserving beneficiaries of the recently deceased 
)
I’m surprised that riot and civil commotion in an emergency were covered, as they’re usually excluded, along with just about everything else that might actually require the insurer to pay anybody for anything.
I gather from your quoted comment that there was a special cover for an emergency, but not a civil war. It’s a tribute to whoever negotiated that cover that they managed it at all, regardless of the rate they got.
I’m confused.
While confusion is my normal state and nothing to worry about , I’m particularly confused by the numbers.
Did 11 British battalions amount to less than the 5,000 CT’s facing them?
How many in a battalion?
Just teasing/testing - I knew you’d pick up on it.
The apparent superiority of the British forces, was a paper one. At the beginning of the war the guerillas outnumbered the actual fighting men of the army, noted above, in Malaya. Each of the eleven battalions were understrength, and numbered approx. nine hundred men. Of those, five hundred were required to put the other four hundred with rifles into the Ulu; so that the 5,000 battle-trained and jungle experienced C.T.'s faced about 4,000 British and Malay fighting men, few of whom had any jungle experience.
Now I can go to bed, secure in the knowledge that I haven’t stripped a mental cog.
After the independance of India, Malaya was generating more income than all of the other colonies combined (through rubber and tin), which may have something to do with it. Also, the larger, rubber estates were owned by heavyweights such as Dunlop and Goodyear, so, presumably, they had some pretty hot negotiators.
Malaya was pear-shaped pendant, five hundred miles long from its border with Thailand in the north, to the Singapore straights at its southernmost tip. It was a little larger than England without Wales or a little smaller than the state of Florida, depending on from where one draws geographical references of scale. To the West lies the calm but warm waters of the Indian Ocean which stretch across to Africa; to the east the China Sea reaches to the Philippines and the Pacific, and northwards to the shores of Cambodia, Vietnam and onward to Hong, China, Korea and Japan.
In 1948, Malaya was also a place of tropical lushness. Of its 50,850 square miles, 40,000 of them (roughly 80%) were covered in rainforest, its jungle. The trees were tall with their barks of many hues, ranging from the palest white to scaly greens and reds, thrusting their way upwards, quite often to heights of over two hundred feet. Its high canopy permitted only minimal light to enter and practically no breeze of any kind. When the rains came, they fell as if from punctured skies which unleashed torrents upon the forest’s floor. When the rain ceased above the jungle, it persisted for some considerable time below the level of the canopy until that which remained on the leaves had evaporated creating a humidity that can only be compared with a steam bath. From above, the jungle resembled a large, green, undulating carpet which had been spread unevenly across the ground as it rose up to the mountain ridges then plunged into steep-sided valleys, separated in parts by slithering rivers that meandered here and thre around mountain prominences such as spurs and re-entrant until they found the flat lands and the swampy deltas.
Away from the mountains, the jungle often transformed into marsh and thick mangrove swamp. In the middle of the country the enormous trees coverd the great spine of the north-south mountain ranges that rose to 7,000 feet, virtually bisecting Malaya from north to south. It was an evergreen universe roamed by elephants, tigers, bears, deer and wild pigs. In the high places of the canopy, it was inhabited by flying foxes, monkeys and parrots, and its swamps are guarded by crocodiles. Everywhere there were snakes and, of course, the ever present leaches. The air itself pulsated with the criss-crossing of mosquitoes and numerous other flying insects. The bush accommodated myriad spiders, ants, and other beasts of the slithering and creepy-crawling type, each of which added their own little ensemble to the screeching and howling cacophony of the forest.
What resistance to movement there was for man, depended hugely on the type of forest he was moving through: Primary, or Virgin, jungle was characterized by the lofty, aforementioned trees, which as they allowed little light to penetrate, had little undergrowth, and man could move through this relatively easily (however, there was always the Rotan from which cane is harvested. This grew long, thin, tentacle-like creepers reaching to affix themselves onto leaves and branches by way of dozens of small barbed hooks along their length. Any person wandering into this would have to stop to disentangle themselves, hence their nickname ‘wait-a-while’.
The Secondary jungle was usually formed as a result of previous slash-and-burn subsistence farming. As the natives which had practised this moved on the jungle began to recover. The sun being able to reach the forest floor encouraged new growth which in its early years became almost impenetrable entanglements of bush sometimes giving way to large fern growing up to eight feet in height ‘Beluka’. Then there was the rubber plantations, where the forest had been cleared and the rubber trees planted in uniform rows, the undergrowth kept clear in order to allow access to the ‘tappers’. One of the by-products of the rubber trees was arsenic trioxide, which polluted the streams running through the plantations - not a good place from which to draw water.