Word: malayans
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...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...
Mammal Enemy. One cause of the jam, General Pownall reported, was that the Japs were as good as animals in the jungle. They came on in polygenetic clothes: in shorts and sneakers, or Malayan dress, or just their underwear. They forced natives to lead them through tangled byways. They pushed about with high, merry tail, like hunting dogs, sniffing out coveys of defenders. With their bare hands they made rafts of logs and rode down rivers such as the Perak. They stole bicycles, food and shoes from Malayans and Chinese, went forward faster, stronger and better shod than before. They...
Estimates. The enemy had at first been grossly underestimated, not only as to numbers but also as to ability. It had never occurred to the British that little men in shorts and gym shoes could actually filter through Malayan jungles. Japanese forces had apparently made contact all the way across the peninsula: even across the central mountain-spine. The middle jungles had previously been the domain of the dwarfish Sakai, a hairy, blow-gunning people who travelers say are so primitive that they have digits only up to two and count: one, two, many, many-many, many-many-many...
...home to the U.S. last week in dispatches from Chungking and in the deep radio voice of a worn, heavy man named Carroll Alcott. The dispatches indicated that Jap broadcasts from scores of stations in Japan and occupied China were glutting the Asiatic air with "news" in Chinese, Burmese, Malayan and other tongues; that in default of good Allied counter-propaganda the "news" was taking effect. Carroll Alcott, who surely ought to know, had been warning about this for a long time...
...discussion which followed the four-minute talks by each speaker, all agreed that if Japan could take Singapore the attack on Pearl harbor would appear to be very strategic. But they split on the question of whether Japan might be able to take Singapore. Howe said that the thin Malayan peninsula, with its thick jungles, made a successful land attack more improbable than "Hitler taking Europe"; Chamberlin and Reischauer were not in accord with this view, and Chamberlin pointed out that the Japanese had been trained for jungle fighting...