More than 70 years later, though, the Batang Kali massacre remains an obscure historical event in the eyes of the Malaysian public.

And none of those responsible for the killings has ever been properly brought to justice for their crimes.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the massacre, FMT spoke to Christopher Hale, a British historian who has written about the Batang Kali incident.

His 2013 book, Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai, is one of few works that discuss in detail the killings and subsequent miscarriage of justice.

Hale told FMT that the Batang Kali incident took place at the start of the Emergency, which saw the British authorities clashing with communist guerrillas.

In 1948, he said, communist activity was reported in the area around Batang Kali.

“When I visited in 2012, the graves of the men killed in the massacre could still be seen,” he said.

The soldiers who would leave with bloodied hands were members of the Scots Guards, a regiment in the British army.

Much of what is known about the Batang Kali massacre is based on the confession of one of its members, William Cootes.

“On the morning of Dec 11, Cootes joined a platoon that had been ordered to a small settlement of Chinese rubber tappers on the Sungei Remok estate close to Batang Kali,” said Hale.

Cootes later claimed that a regimental officer was given explicit orders to “wipe out anybody they found there”.

The confession delivered by Cootes is disturbing to read even today, describing the summary execution of a boy by his sergeant.

What was his crime? “Grinning in an insolent way.”

Cootes described how the sergeant shot the boy in the stomach and, upon realising he was still alive, in the head as well.

The next day, according to Cootes, groups of male villagers were led to a nearby river bank and gunned down, with only one survivor escaping.

“Once we started firing, we seemed to go mad… I remember the water turned red with their blood,” Cootes recalled.

Hale told FMT that in truth, the British had no evidence that those killed were communists at all.

“And even if they had (proof), they were not combatants.”

It would take decades before the quest for justice would go anywhere, with Malaysian lawyer Quek Ngee Meng bringing up the case against the British government in 2012.

Hale met Quek, whose father was a frequent visitor to Batang Kali and learnt of the trauma left in the wake of the killings.

Hale also listened to eyewitness accounts, with survivors speaking of how their relatives were taken from them and how they were left to bury badly decomposed bodies.

All these experiences piqued Hale’s interest in the subject. The fact that the survivors’ legal claims were ultimately unsuccessful led him to compile available information on the massacre.

Hale said what complicated matters was the fact that all British documents about the massacre were destroyed post-independence.

Hale previously compared the Batang Kali massacre to the infamous My Lai massacre in which 300 to 500 civilians were believed killed by Americans during the Vietnam War in 1968.

He said the comparison was apt, adding that British methods of war during the Emergency influenced the Americans in their later war.

“The big problem the British, and then the Americans, confronted was that it was very difficult to distinguish counter-insurgents from ordinary civilians,” he said.

“The consequence was that, in many situations, completely innocent individuals became casualties of the military – just as they are in Gaza right now.”

Unlike My Lai, where the perpetrators were eventually prosecuted and punished, those responsible for Batang Kali never were.

“Yes, it was a miscarriage of justice – which can no longer be rectified except by memorialising the innocent victims of the British military action.”

Hale’s book is one means of drawing attention to the forgotten massacre and dispelling the myth of the British being “exemplary” in their defeat of the insurgency.

“Viewed through the lens of that tragedy, the entire history of British rule in Malaya, both direct and indirect, is thrown into sharp relief as a long and troubling chronicle of slaughter and deception,” he said.