The Truth About Malay
Malayan Postscript. By Ian Morrison. (Faber. 8s. 6d.) OVERWHELMED by a spate of war books, posterity is likely to dismiss Malaya's death-throes with some brief epitaph like Field-Marshal Smuts' just comment that after the fall of France and Indo-China the fall of Malaya was inevitable. Yet the lucidity of an austere literary art could immortalise Athenian prisoners of war trapped in the stone- quarries of Syracuse 2,000 years ago, and their Greek general, laconically described as too good a man to have deserved his fate; and a book objective in criticism„unsentimental in outlook and flawless in perspective might transmute the almost physical horror of Malaya's conquest into a tragic drama rising upon broken shards and torn limbs to the immortality of a spiritual triumph, but such a book remains to be written. The last official "God help us" of Sir Shenton Thomas (p. r79), ridiculed by rattled war correspondents as "sheer fatuity," perhaps struck the right note for the whole hopeless Malayan campaign How could there be a battle-cry like "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
And we'll all stay free,"
when there was no ammunition to pass or, to be literal, there were no planes and no tanks. Five hundred planes might have saved Malaya.
Apparently the author's attitude towards Sir Shenton is swayed by popular prejudice. The Governor is blamed - for optimism (p. 157), although apparently General Wavell himself (p. 157) believed that Singapore could hold out for several months. And yet poor Sir Shenton is accused of not being inspirational (to borrow one of Mr. Morrison's own adjectives), while Mr. Duff Cooper, on the contrary, earns a sneer for " Churchillian heroics."
Mr. Morrison's impression of Japanese strategy, which followed a pattern as definite as the squares on a chess-board, is as featureless as the map on his front page. Strategy and maps appear to have little interest for him, or he would hardly have repeated (pages 55,,85) the parrot-cry for an advance to the Isthmus of Kra, which would have left even longer lines of vulnerable coast exposed in our rear, nor could he have imagined (p. Ito) that instead of a map-reader it needed a soldier of the calibre of General Wavell to decide that after the Slim River battle the only course was hasty retreat to the Johore frontier, nor again could it have occurred to him (p. 59) that Admiral Phillips, whatever his shortcomings, could ever have entertained an idea of keeping the'Prince of Wales' and the 'Repulse' anchored in the Straits of Johore.
Mr. Morrison landed at Singapore only two months before the war began, or a trip to Kuantan could have saved him from any surprise (p. 65) that the Japanese did not try to cross the difficult bar and make a frontal attack, easy for a handful of men to repel. Absence of such local knowledge could not be remedied in the field, for (p. 74) it was rare for war correspondents to see military action, and few of them ever caught a glimpse of the opposing infantry. But, perhaps because he has lived in Japan and knows the Japanese, Mr. Morrison has interesting remarks on their art of war. He notes (p. 45) that they learnt their enveloping tactics from the Chinese ; that a people congenitally unable to march in step can keep in step perfectly in the air (p. 89), but inexplicably omitted to bomb roads and bridges to impede our retreat (pp. 94, 112), and that, broadly speaking, they confined their bombing to legitimate military objectives (p. 93). Recent reports seem to bear out his view that the Japanese would treat captives in conformity with international usage (p. 130).
It was Joseph Conrad who noticed that the Malay raja never smiles, and although lacking such knowledge Mr. Morrison mistakes the good manners of Malays and Chinese for indifferent apathy ; yet he is pretty fair to Asiatics (pp. 125, 139, 140), and ascribes reports of Malay Quislings to Japanese wearing Malay dress (p. 79). He rightly describes the Sultan of Johore as a brave man, and gives a convincing picture of his farewell (p. 544) to Major-General Gordon Bennett, but His Highness is wrongly termed anti-British (p. 55), whereas he used to feel himself so British that he had acquired the British habit ot damning the British.
As for the Europeans, Mr. Morrison has defended ,their toughness and courage (p. 189), but while he justly blames Imperial politics for the Malayan tragedy, he does criticise colonial civil servants and business men for lacking "ruthlessness and aggressiveness." He might have chosen less Nazi epithets for the qualities needed to rebuild the brave new empire Mr. Churchill properly desires to maintain. Nor can I _follow Mr. Morrison in his view that tin and rubber must be made "more freely and justly available to the nations that need them" (p. 189), as these commodities were always open to any bidder, irrespective of race, costing a German or a Japanese no more than they cost a Londoner or a New Yorker.
In spite of slips and omissions, Malayan Postscript is the best book that has been written on our temporary loss of Malaya.
R. 0. WINSTEDT.
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