Templer of Malaya
General Sir Gerald Templer's informal progress repoit on Malaya, made at a Press conference on Monday, was im- pressive. Both as a commander and as an administrator, he has that extra ounce of drive which is the nearest a British officer gets to being ruthless; and it is our almost constitu- tional inability to be ruthless which is always one of our main handicaps in conducting operations such as those to which the security forces in Malaya are committed.. Of the statistics he quoted—all encouraging—the most interesting concerned the Special Operations Volunteer Force, in which renegade Communists, at present numbering 180, have undertaken to do an initial period of eighteen months' service. Their training in small units has already begun; they will not, at first, be issued with personal arms until they actually go on operations. The idea of men who have surrendered being ready to seek out and destroy their late comrades, though foreign and repugnant to people in this country, is nothing out of the ordinary in Asia. In China civil wars have often been shortened by the, readiness of commanders on what looks like the losing side to turn round and fight against it on behalf of the stronger side; this hap- pened on so large a scale when the Communists overran Nationalist China a few years ago that, except in the initial stages, there was virtually no fighting at all. General Templer made it clear that the hard core of Communist resistance, though its small but readily expandable forces had been with- drawn deep into the jungle, was still very much in being, and he committed himself, wisely, to no forecast of the date at which the emergency might be brought to an end.
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