Word: malayas
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...Templer! Malaya...
There had been a council of war at Rideau Hall over Commonwealth defenses. Most urgent subject: the 3½-year "state of emergency" in Malaya, where Communist terrorists 1) had taken more than 3,000 lives; 2) were costing $150,000 a day to combat; 3) threatened tin and rubber production, Britain's best dollar earners. A few months before, Communists had ambushed and killed High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney, the topflight colonial administrator who had been sent out to put order into Malaya's civil service. Said the London Daily Telegraph: "The trouble [has been] not only...
...broad finger down Britain's army list and halted at the fifth name: General Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer, K.C.B., K.B.E., C.M.G., D.S.O. A message to Cobham, Surrey brought 54-year-old General Templer flying to the banquet room in Ottawa. Three weeks later he was in Malaya, with such military and political powers in his kit bag as no British soldier had had since Cromwell...
...Neutral Jungle. The basic fact about the war in Malaya is the jungle. "The 'thing that astonished me most," writes Colonel F. Spencer . Chapman, an Englishman who spent three years there in World War II behind the Japanese lines, "was the absolute straightness, the perfect symmetry of the tree trunks, like the pillars of a dark and limitless cathedral. The ground itself was covered with a thick carpet of dead leaves and seedling trees. There was practically no earth visible, and certainly no grass or flowers. Up to a height of ten feet or so, a dense undergrowth...
Four-fifths of Malaya-a country about the size of Florida-is tropical forest covering mountains up to 7,000 feet high. In this jungle, inhabited by tigers, elephants, bison, monkeys, gibbons, deer and bear, alive with all manner of insects, including malaria-bearing mosquitoes, bloodsucking leeches, pythons and multicolored birds, where orchids and rhododendron flourish, there is hidden an army of about 5,000 Communist guerrillas...