Majority of Guns

At Singapore's Bukit Timah race track the British wet their upper lips with gin & bitters and kept them stiff even when Miss Papillon, a 70-1 long shot, romped home in the third race. That was bad, but the news from across the Johore Causeway to the Malayan mainland was worse.

A 100-man green-uniformed rebel band took over the small mining town of Batuarang, just north of the placid Malayan capital of Kuala Lumpur. While some of the rebels pinned the police to their barracks with heavy automatic fire, others expertly sabotaged the coal mine--the only one operating in all Malaya. Shooting up a school bus and murdering a foreman and four workers, 37 of the bandits, including a teen-age girl, swept down on the railway station and held up an incoming train. The rebel leader emptied the railroad cash box, snapped: "We only want European property. We are going to kill every white man in Malaya." As the rebels left, the girl guerrilla took the station first-aid hamper with her.

Boasting of 100,000 followers, mostly Chinese, the rebels challenged the British to "call out all your police and troops for a trial of strength."

The British complied. Rocket-firing Spitfires strafed guerrilla encampments in the north. Plans were made to drop incendiaries on ricefields in upper Pahang state to deprive the rebels of food. Royal Navy ships patrolled the coasts to intercept gunrunning junks from Siam and South China. More than 20,000 Malay and Gurkha troops, together with regular British units, prepared a ground sweep of the peninsula.

In Singapore, Malcolm MacDonald, Governor General of British South-East Asia, charged that the wave of terrorism was "part of a deliberate plan by Malayan Communists to ... capture by force the government of the country." He accused the Reds of attempting to rule "not by a majority of votes, but by a majority of guns."

In London, Tory M.P. Leonard David Gammans put it more bluntly: "This is . . . Moscow-inspired, Communist in origin, and part of a worldwide attack against Great Britain."

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