Word: siam
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Bedizened with flags and bunting, the dredge Manhattan, a $600,000 gift to Siam from the ECA, last week lay alongside a Bangkok wharf. After yellow-robed Buddhist priests chanted prayers, Siam's Premier Phibun Songgram, clad in gleaming white, made a formal speech accepting the dredge from the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires. Grouped around Phibun were the fashionably dressed ladies & gentlemen of Bangkok's diplomatic corps. The first inkling of trouble came when a fluttery British lady in long gloves and a floppy picture hat was approached by a smooth-shaven young Siamese marine...
...lady stepped nimbly aside as a squad of ten heavily armed marines followed the first one up the gangplank. An ECA official who also got in the way was peremptorily brushed aside. A moment later, before anybody fully realized what had happened, Siam's Premier, waving a cordial farewell to his erstwhile guests, was whisked away upriver in a navy landing craft. A fusillade of gunfire splattered over the heads of the crowd, and the elegantly garbed guests on the dredge dived for the deck like well-trained rangers...
Army v. Navy. Unification of the armed services has made even less progress in Siam than in the U.S. In the two decades since Siam became a constitutional monarchy, political control has oscillated violently between the champions of either its army or its navy. The last successful Siamese coup in 1947 jolted navy-backed Premier Pridhi Banomyong, leader of Siam's pro-allied underground during World War II, out of power, and supplanted him with Army Man Phibun, a wartime Japanese collaborationist who is now an ardent friend of the West. Last week, with Phibun held prisoner...
...there have been six since 1932), in which practically nobody gets hurt, last week's battling piled up a casualty list well into the hundreds. Like most Siamese squalls, it was a private fight, apparently unconnected with the worldwide struggle between East and West. Foreigners, who feel that Siam is gravely threatened from Red China, could not help feeling that the Siamese were lighting matches in a tinder-dry hay barn. Local observers, on the other hand, felt that the coup had served a useful purpose. They pointed out that the navy, rated before the coup as the weakest...
Recently, Weyman applied for a job as press-relations officer with the Siam delegation, wrote to the State Department to find out what diplomatic immunities that job would give him. The State Department, which had had Weyman in its sights for some time, now released some facts...