Word: malaya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...good man was General Sir Henry Royds Pownall, who only a fortnight earlier had become Britain's Far Eastern Commander. The shortness was no fault of his: he was promoted to be Chief of Staff in the Supreme Command. The grimness was Malaya's: half its tin mines in the hands of the Japs, one-sixth of its rubber plantations lost, Singapore threatened, all of its strategic and material riches poised as if under an auctioneer's mallet: going . . . going...
...Supreme Command's first responsibility to the Allies would be to repair the Malayan damage and save Singapore. General Pownall's first responsibility to the Supreme Command was to describe Malaya's peril, with which he had had brief but concentrated acquaintance, and to recommend steps to be taken. The steps would have to be taken in haste, for the situation as he described it was alarming: on the west coast the Japanese were within 270 miles of Singapore, on the east coast within 175 miles...
Three-Ply Weakness. But most of the causes of Britain's difficulty in Malaya did not stem from the enemy. They lay, deep as marrow, within Britain...
...Weakness. The result was that the Japanese quickly got command of the air over Malaya, and the defenders were now badly in need of air power to help land power defend sea power. Last week the Japanese bombed, not only the forward posts of land power, but the base of sea power, Singapore...
...City. General Pownall must have reported that his greatest disappointment, in his brief eye-opener in Malaya, was his discovery of the Singapore spirit. For what he found was not the old robust, acquisitive East, but an effete, tired, hypercivilized society...