To U.S. homebodies, the field where U.S. soldiers were giving their lives (see p. 16) seemed the most urgent. But to the Allied strategists, there was no more important battlefield than Malaya. On that battlefield Singapore was at stake. At Singapore the future of the Allies in Asia was at stake.
As everywhere, the Japanese made a spectacular beginning in Malaya. Their plan was shrewdly devised and fanatically attempted. It was defined by nature as much as by man.
East Side, West Side. Malaya (see map p. 20) is divided by a great watershed. To the east is an inhospitable land. Its beaches are broad, but they lie behind treacherous offshore ledges, riparian sandbars and extended shallows, which soon will be pounded by the terrible surf of the northeasterly monsoon. Behind the beaches, beyond a fringe of graceful, feathery casuarina trees, lie the swamps—great stinking pestholes which house most of nature's nightmares: crocodiles, pythons, cobras, and the nasty little Anopheles, the mosquito of malaria. Behind the swamps lie jungles which are almost airtight, home of adders, tigers and other Japanophobes.
Paradise lies to the west. Across the mountains there is a rolling country of bamboo, rubber plantations, tin mines: a country divided by a network of good roads, cut up by rice paddies, full of people and not beasts. It is washed by the quiet Malacca Strait, sheltered by the long Island of Sumatra.
There are two seasons in Malaya: the wet season and the wetter season. The latter, which is about to begin, makes the east side of Malaya an unbearable windswept sponge land. Landings off the coast in support of beachheads would be all but impossible. The only two motor roads on the east side are often broken by floods.
And so an attack on Malaya from the East, the natural approach for the Japanese, was bound to be extremely hazardous, especially because the British expected it. The only possible strategy would be somehow to get at and on the west coast.
This the Japanese did.
East Try, West Try. First they attacked Malaya's east coast. This attack had just two foci and two aims. Beachheads were established at Kota Bahru, in the extreme northeast, and at Kuantan, about 200 miles north of Singapore. These two places are the keys to east coast transportation, Kota Bahru being the only rail-sea junction along the whole coast, Kuantan the only highway-sea junction, except in the extreme south.
But the two main aims in these landings were not transportation. They were: 1) to reduce the principal British airdrome on the east coast and get a foothold for air attack; 2) to draw as much British defensive strength as possible to the east. At least at Kota Bahru the first aim was achieved. By this week the Kuantan landing had not yet amounted to much. It was not clear how far the British let themselves be sucked in by the second aim.
After these first landings, far greater forces (estimated at 15,000 men) landed unopposed on the neck of Thailand, at Cape Patani and Singora. From there they hurried hellbent, by rail and road, with artillery, tanks and dive-bombers, due south toward Alor Star on the west coast. The British admitted falling back in the face of this heavier assault.