(See Cover)
Somewhere in eastern Asia, probably at Rangoon, members of the Unified Allied Supreme Command (see p. 17) met this week to make ready an Allied success. There a good man reported to his chief on one of the shortest, strangest and grimmest commands ever held by a British general.
The 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. . . .
The 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 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 on the boat, to give the impression of being on a pleasure cruise. When the British vessel got close by, the Japanese opened fire. Mean while the main Japanese flotilla proceeded 14 miles farther south, landed safely.