Cover to the British Pocket Guide to Malaya
INTRODUCING MALAYA
Malaya, with Singapore at its tip, is like a long arm of Asia dividing India from China and reaching into a vast sea of islands, the East Indies. The map shows how vital it is to control the sea-route through the Malacca Straits, for through them our forces can pour easily into the Sough China Sean and so join in a united push to the final target of this war — Japan. We must occupy the Malay peninsula because it flanks the Malacca Straits and we want Singapore’s famous harbour as a base for further operations eastward. That is the strategic picture, apart from the Allies’ need to lay hands on Malaya’s tin and rubber and so deny these war materials to the enemy.
Of course, there is more to it than that. All the Services have old scores to settle with the Japs for what happened in Malay. We have got to rescue our men and women from the barbarism of prison camps, and in Malaya there are Malays, Chinese, and Indians, whose welfare was our affair and whose liberation is our responsibility.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
You may first drop anchor in the harbour of Penang Island, from whose Peak is a fine view of the mainland, or you may enjoy the run past green islands into the the roadstead of Singapore, a run whose beauty has been compared with entering Rio de Janeiro, Sydney and Hong Kong. Instead, however you may have to calmber ashore up sandy beaches fringed with palms and feathery-leaved casuarians, or wade through muddy, water-logged mangroves that line so much of the west coast are were once perfect hide-outs for pirates. In the west, particularly, a network of tarmac roads carries you past the typical scenes of Malaya — coconut groves, criss-crossed with canals — orderly rubber plantations — the watery hollows of tin mines — rice fields, muddy brown or waving green — stretches of jungle or irritating dense blukar (undergrowth), where the cut-down forest has grown up again. Rivers are plentiful, the land is generally hilly, in parts precipitously mountainous…
much has been said about the Malays running “amuck”. It is true that the parient Malay will hide an insult and long brood on it until a chance slur drives him into a state of frenzy in which he rushes about stabbing an slashing all he meets. But this sort of thing is rare these days, largely because we treated it as a criminal assault with the usual penalties.