Disclaimer: I am much more familiar with Malaya than Vietnam, so I hope someone more knowledgeable can contribute more to the Vietnam side of the story.

The failure of the Strategic Hamlet Programme is quite intriguing because the Strategic Hamlets were consciously modelled on the very successful New Villages. In fact, Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam, was advised by a British team headed by Sir Robert Thompson, who had not only been a member of the staff of the Director of Operations during the Malayan Emergency, but had on ground experience leading patrols against the communists (after a long string of incredible adventures during WW2). It was Thompson who designed the plan and the hamlets themselves.

So it actually wasn’t the design of the Hamlets themselves that was the problem. Rather, New Villages were a particularly good solution to the unique circumstances of the Malayan Insurgency, and the British colonial government was uniquely placed to implement them well. Conversely, Strategic Hamlets were not an ideal solution for the problems in Vietnam, and the government of South Vietnam was particularly ill-suited to implementing them anyway. Finally, the British got really lucky, as we shall see later!

Programme aims

The aim of both the Strategic Hamlet Programme and the New Villages was the same - to separate the communist guerillas from the civilians who were supplying them. The guerillas produced almost nothing of their own, especially food, and relied on persuading or intimidating civilians into providing what they needed so they could continue their fight.

By relocating civilians into heavily guarded villages, it was hoped that that communist sympathisers would find it impossible to smuggle items out, and communist guerillas would not be able to get in to threaten and intimidate.

Geographical considerations

Fundamentally, this plan to cut the Malayan Communists off from the civilian population worked very well because the civilian population was almost the only source of food and material available to them. Malaya is a peninsula. The only land border it shares is with Thailand to its north, and Thailand gave no support to the communist guerillas in Malaya.

Vietnam, on the other hand, shared a border in the north with communist China. For China to provide a steady flow of training, weapons and other materials was thus logistically very feasible. To transport such materials further south in relative safety, the communists could move them via Cambodia or Laos, with which Vietnam shared a long, porous border, and where the US military couldn’t legally operate, before transporting them back into Vietnam. So even if the Strategic Hamlet Programme had been successful in cutting the communists off from their civilian support base, that would only have closed off one source of support. Whereas in Malaya, whatever the communists couldn’t get from the civilian population, they pretty much couldn’t get at all.

Matters of size

On top of that, the British had a far more manageable task on their hands as the Malayan Insurgency was never very large.

At its height, The Malayan Communist Party was estimated to have 8,000 to 11,000 members, out of a total population of about 5m. The communists drew their support almost entirely from one ethnic group - the Chinese, who made up about 40% of the population. This made them a minority, for Malaya had 2 other main ethnicities - the Malays, who made up about 50% of the population, and the Indians who made up 10%.

The communists drew their support almost entirely from the Chinese - in 1947, out of an estimated 11,000 members of the Communist Party, there were just 40 Malays.

The Chinese were also mostly concentrated in urban locations, while the communists were scattered throughout the jungles of Malaya and were not strong enough to venture into the towns and cities where police presence was high and surveillance was easy.

Thus, the British really only had to relocate the rural Chinese, who were a minority of a minority, as well as a handful of other vulnerable populations. These Chinese were living on the fringes of the jungle, making them easy targets for communist guerillas. By the end of the Insurgency about half a million people, or about 10% of the population, had been relocated. Contrast this to Vietnam, where the plan was to relocate a staggering 15 million or so people, practically the whole population of South Vietnam, into 12,000 hamlets.

Vietnam was also much more ethnically homogenous than Malaya, and the communists drew support from a much broader swathe of the population. There was no way to focus all efforts on just a small, easily identifiable slice of the population.

Food

Malaya was a net importer of rice. The Japanese Occupation had demonstrated this, as attempts by the Japanese to make the colony self-sufficient in food left the population badly malnourished by 1945.

The Chinese population in Malaya relied especially heavily on imported food. The Chinese were either migrant workers or the descendants of migrant workers who came to work in the tin mines, rubber plantations and towns and cities. Most of them weren't farmers. Of those who were, most were relatively new farmers. Some had left the urban centres during the Depression years of the 1930s to try and grow their own food. They were joined by another wave during the Japanese Occupation (1942 to 1945), when repression in urban centres was brutal and food shortages were acute.

Thus, most Chinese farmers didn't want to be farmers, and here, the British had a colossal stroke of good luck - the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, almost exactly the time that New Villages were conceptualised. The war led to strong demand for tin and rubber (the price of tin doubled between 1950 and 1951, while the price of rubber increased fivefold), which in turn revitalised the tin and rubber industries that had been major sources of employment and economic activity before the Japanese Occupation. Large numbers of Chinese farmers were only too happy to give up farming and go back to work in the tin mines and rubber plantations, which meant that New Villages were actually not producing a lot of their own food.

Instead, most food was imported through a small number of ports. It was thus easy for the British to control food supplies. They could take control of a shipment, parcel it out and transport the requisite amount of rations to a New Village. They could even distribute the food in the New Village on a daily basis, so at any one time, nobody had enough to spare for outsiders. Since most of the men in a village worked in the same mine, eventually the British were able to tighten controls even more, banning people from bringing any form of food out of the Village, not even packed lunches. Instead, the British could have rations distributed to canteens at the mines and plantations where meals could be cooked and distributed on the spot.

While the Malayan New Villages were generally better defended than the Vietnamese Hamlets, the Communists were still able to infiltrate a number of them, especially at the start of the programme. But, as The Rock would say, IT DOESN’T MATTER THAT THEY INFILTRATE THE NEW VILLAGE because there just wasn't any spare food available. The strategy worked - as the number of New Villages increased, the British began hearing stories from surrendered guerillas of food shortages, in some cases even leading to fights.

Contrast this to Vietnam, which was a net exporter of rice. The country produced vast quantities of the stuff, grown by farmers who had farmed the same land for generations. Resettling them basically meant city folk asking them to give up the farmland they were familiar with, where their ancestors were buried, and moving them to some other place that may or may not have been suitable for growing rice.

After resettlement, it was also impossible to control food supplies as the British had been able to do in Malaya. Most villagers were farmers, rice had to move into the village during harvest time and out when being sold. At any one time there was rice stockpiled and available for the Communists.

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