Word: command
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...good man was General Sir Henry Royds Pownall, who only a fortnight earlier had become Britain's Far Eastern Commander. The shortness was no fault of his: he was promoted to be Chief of Staff in the Supreme Command. The grimness was Malaya's: half its tin mines in the hands of the Japs, one-sixth of its rubber plantations lost, Singapore threatened, all of its strategic and material riches poised as if under an auctioneer's mallet: going . . . going...
...Supreme Command's first responsibility to the Allies would be to repair the Malayan damage and save Singapore. General Pownall's first responsibility to the Supreme Command was to describe Malaya's peril, with which he had had brief but concentrated acquaintance, and to recommend steps to be taken. The steps would have to be taken in haste, for the situation as he described it was alarming: on the west coast the Japanese were within 270 miles of Singapore, on the east coast within 175 miles...
...tradition, was unable to see why it should not have supreme charge of defending Singapore, the greatest naval base in the Far East. Wiser heads in London knew that the real dangers were by land and sky. They put an airman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, in command of all three services. At once the Army began to needle the R.A.F., the Navy to needle both...
...Weakness. The result was that the Japanese quickly got command of the air over Malaya, and the defenders were now badly in need of air power to help land power defend sea power. Last week the Japanese bombed, not only the forward posts of land power, but the base of sea power, Singapore...
...that he is a good fighting general. He is young-54. His superiors think him bright: he first came to public view in 1938 when he jumped 100 seniority places to become Director of Military Operations and Intelligence. He looks and sounds like a man with the juice of command in him: short, stocky, broad-shouldered, spruce, calm-voiced, neat, a pipe-smoker. He is a man of few words-"a most precise fellow," says a colleague-but the words are peppery and to the point; he once reported a three-hour Imperial war conference in eight lines...