Word: penang
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Vast storehouses of food were left untouched for the Japanese. Sampans, boats, barges, and even steamers were undamaged. At Penang the British military authorities ordered the evacuation without consulting the Government. They refused to evacuate anyone except Europeans. All Chinese, Malays and Indians were left to their fate. That was the beginning of considerable difficulties with the natives in Malaya...
...Hope. The execution of the decision began with disgrace. At Penang, the British left behind them almost undamaged port facilities and public utilities, tin and rubber stockpiles, 15 crated Spitfires at wharfside...
...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 grabbed barges at Penang, skimmed the coast and tried to make landings below British positions. They climbed in the trees and dropped, like monkeys, on passing patrols. Every hardship which a hungry animal could tolerate and many an in genuity it could not conceive, they experienced and used...
Typical of their desperate opportunism were the landings they made below British lines on the west coast-in waters which ought to have been British right to the bottom. When they took Penang intact, they gathered all the barges, junks, launches, yachts and sampans in sight and set off, like a Japanese print of a Strength Through Joy outing, down the coast. At the mouth of the Perak, near Telok Anson, they sent a large launch as a kind of decoy into the estuary. A British patrol boat approached to investigate. The Japanese strung a line of laundry...
Said the liberal, keen New-Statesman and Nation: "At this point we face something even more unpleasant than incompetence. No one will complain that Penang was deliberately evacuated while there was time to withdraw its white inhabitants. But reports insist that its docks and its electric power station were left intact for the enemy's use [see p. 21] and subsequent denials only cover half the charges...