THE OTHER SIDE OF MALAYAN CAMPAIGN

Grey River Argus, 19 February 1949, Page 3

THE OTHER SIDE OF MALAYAN CAMPAIGN

General Percival Nails Down Some Falsehoods

LONDON, Feb. 15.

Lieutenant-General Percival, who was at the time British Commander-in-Chief in Malaya, contradicts flatly a statement made by Field-Mar-shall Lord Wavell in a forevyard he contributed to “The Jungle is Neutral,” a book on the Malayan campaign by a former British commando leader, Colonel Spencer Chapman, alleging that the Malayan Command did not believe in the ability of the Japanese to invade Malaya by the overland route.

General Percival, in a lettet to the ’’Daily Telegraph” says:—“The statement is simply not true. If FieldMarshall Wavell will re-read paragraph 21 of my dispatch on the Malayan operations, he will see that as long ago as 1937 I had predicted, with considerable accuracy, in an official document, how the Japanese would invade Malaya. Neither the general officers commanding who preceded me, nor I myself, nor our hardworked staffs, had any illusions on the subject. The trouble was, there were some who would not believe us.” General Percival also contraducts a number of statements made by Colonel Chapman in the course of his book, which has received extensive and favourable reviews in Britain. He denies, for instance, that there were not tanks in Malaya, because, as claimed by Chapman, some “experts” had said they could not be used there. “Both my predecessor and I had for tanks”, states Lieu-tenant-General Percival. “I imagine that the only reason was that there were none to send”.

He describes as “cheap,” a reference by Colonel Chapman to staff officers riding in motor-cars and denies Colonel Chapman’s claim that the possibility of having to tight in the jungle did not appear to have been taken seriously by the Malayan Command. Tests conducted as Tar back as 1937 had shown that most of the jungle could be penetrated by infantry,’ he states, and he asserts that headquarters of the Malayan Command had no illusions on the point.

The General, replying to Colonel Chapman’s charges that the Malayan Command did not co-operate with parties of commandos and guerrillas behind the Japanese lines, states that ho had no knowledge of these operations because they wore secretly directed by the Ministry of Economic Warfare outside his command. He also denied that the Malayan Command had refused to arm any Chinese because it was believed that many of them were Communists. “There were, in joint of fact, no weapons with which to ram new Chinese units before the war broke out, even if we had wished to do so”, he states. “If there was some reluctance at first to raise and arm a Chinese Communist unit, our reasons will perhaps be better understood now than they were then.” The Mancheser Guardian, marking the seventh anniversary of the surrender of Singapore, publishes an article by a former British artillery officer, who was among the forces defending Singapore Island, This concludes: “Did we surrender to save the civilians or our own skins, or because very soon it would have become impossible to maintain any semblance of order in our little world of chaos. Lieutenant-General Percival had no doubt that he was right to yield. General Yamashita, in pamph • lets urging our capitulation, which were dropped over our lines, stated that any further resistance was useless and that we had fought gallantly and well. But did the men who had opposed Yamashita really believe they had fought gallantly and well? “I can only answer that in our prison camps the first question with which any newcomer from the outside world was assailed was: “What did they think of us when Singapore fell?” It was not a question that need be asked by men whose consciences were clear.”