Firm Appointment

As a battlefield, Malaya is small compared to Korea or Indo-China, but it boasts one of the dirtiest guerrilla wars onstage today. For close to four years, a handful of Communist-led bandits lurking in Malaya's jungles have terrorized the country, kept an army of British regulars and natives (140,000 at present) on the alert, and cost the government some $140 million a year. The cost to the world in lost Malayan rubber and tin may have been far more.

Four months ago Sir Henry Gurney, Britain's High Commissioner in Malaya, was murdered by jungle Communists. Last week the British appointed a new High Commissioner to take his place: tall, lean, Anglo-Irish Sir Gerald Templer, one of the scrappiest fighters and toughest administrators in the British army. Winston Churchill had him fly the Atlantic to be looked over before being given a job which will require tact as well as toughness.

Piano Casualty. A brusque soldier who likes to raise his voice in regimental song, 53-year-old Gerald Templer began his fighting career on the Western Front in 1916. Since then, he has generally been found in the thick of things wherever & whenever Britain had a war or her hands: in the Caucasus against the Bolsheviks in 1919, in Palestine in 1935, at Dunkirk in 1940. In 1942 Gerald Templer became the youngest general in the British army, and probably the only one who was ever wounded by a grand piano. On Anzio Beach a truck loaded with loot ran into his jeep and dropped its biggest prize on the general's neck. The mishap put him in the hospital for weeks and out of active fighting for good, but Templer soon talked his way into other jobs just as suited to his toughness.

As Britain's military governor in occupied Germany, he was a model of soldierly efficiency. "We must be firm to the point of ruthlessness," he declared. "If accomodation is urgently needed for a large group of D.P.s, the local mayor is given a curt order to clear the needed dwellings, the inhabitants being given five minutes to get out." Once, when cynical British army clerks in Brussels expressed doubt over the authenticity of atrocity stories about Belsen, Templer sent them over to the horror camp in trucks and made them shovel corpses as an object lesson.

Extra Authority. Such forthright methods should go far toward bringing order out of the chaos in Malaya's jungles. Some Britons, questioning Templer's appointment, last week wondered whether his methods would be as effective in soothing Malaya's populace, which, like all Eastern peoples, bristles with nationalistic pride and racial jealousies. Chief problem: winning over the 2,000,000 Chinese in Malaya, who control much of the colony's business but are denied political equality. Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton, recently returned from Malaya, says: "You cannot expect to overcome the emergency without the help of the civilian population [but] you cannot get the help of the civilian population without beginning to win the war." Gerald Templer, emphatically briefed by Churchill and Lyttelton on the political as well as the military hazards, will go to Malaya with more authority than any of his predecessors to do what he thinks right.

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