FAR EAST BLUNDERS

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 March 1943, Page 2

FAR EAST BLUNDERS

WHY JAPS PROGRESSED Reviewing “Retreat In the East,” by O. D. Gallagher, the “Sydney Morning Herald” states:— Mr Gallagher arrived in the Straits Settlements as wax’ correspondent of the London “Daily Express” three months before the Japanese attacked, he reached India via Burma aftei’ accompanying the tiny British army through one of the most stubborn and successful delaying campaigns of the war. His despatch on the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales was the first survivor’s account to reach the ears of an incredulous British public. He was an indefatigable notetaker. He quotes Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham as'having told war correspondents in Singapore on December’ 3, 1941: “There are cleai’ indications that Japan does not know which way to turn. Tojo is scratching his head. There is a reassuring state of uncertainty in Japan.” As proof that Japan was “assuming defensive positions, which is a good sign,” Sir Robert disclosed that two Japanese aircraft-carriers had been seen exercising off Japanese mandated islands in the Pacific. “You do not send fighter aircraft into the middle ot the Pacific if you intend launching an attack,” was his highly original interpretation. But when Japan attacked, the “impregnable fortress” was taken unawares. Mr Gallagher records that the street lights of Singapore blazed throughout the first bombing raid, the small British Army defending the oft-publicised .“impenetrable jungles ’ possessed no tanks, and at the advanced air base at Khota Baru the only force available was one squadron of Hudsons manned by Australians. In Singapore “there were still dances and ‘pahit’ parties right up to the time when the Japanese had pushed down to Ipoh . . . The newspapers committed the most extraordinary breaches of security . . . Japanese spies were allowed to go about theii’ business without undue interference right up to the last day.” DIGNITY AND COURAGE

Against this depressing background: “During the withdrawal into the island there occurred one of those typically British actions in which all theiir dignity, courage, and determination is revealed. There was no secret scurrying across the causeway in the dead of night. None of that. The remnants of the heroic, fightingmad Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Battalion crossed the causeway into the island—on theii’ way to their last fight, in which they died almost to the last man—with a magnificent flourish behind their pipers, who played, “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.” There is some fresh and illuminating material on. the Burma campaign, including a startling picture of the collapse of the Rangoon civil government. Mr Gallagher says that Lease-Lend material, urgently needed by the hard-pressed British forces, lay unloaded in. the Rangoon River foi’ weeks. Rangoon Radio closed down for three public holidays, enabling Tokio to usurp the wave length with Burmese propaganda undermining the white population. The sanitary services broke down. “Rangoon presented scenes of disorder xnore ghastly than I had seen in wax’ cities in Abyssinia, both sides in.the Spanish war, Shanghai in 1937, France in 1940, ox’ the Middle East.” The trouble in Burma, he declares, was that the British Army (only three and a-half brigades) was too small and it had insufficient weapons. “I couldn’t believe it,” said an American. “I was with some of youi’ British troops and showed them my tommygun. Thsy said, ‘Oh, so that’s a tommy-gun, is it?’ They hadn’t seen one before and there they were fighting the Japs!” Mi- Gallagher’s picture of the Burma campaign is a canvas of ugly contrasts, of heroic soldiers, weak and vacillating civilians. The morale of many of the civilians “was as flat as a punctured tyre.” And against this was “magnificent, unforgettable courage” of the British and Indian soldiers, “men of a scratch army who stood up to Un infinitely more dangerous enemy, an enemy superior in everything except courage, and made him pay in blood for every advance he made. They tried to hold the fort. They died lor it.”