Suez to Singapore

ONE of the most forthright and vivid of American international news broadcasters, Cecil Brown packed a vast amount of personal adventure into his experiences in Egypt and Malaya. He interviewed generals and admirals, fought with censors, dived for shelter. when Japanese bombs rained down on Singapore and Batavia. His greatest adventure, and the one which made him internationally known, was going down with the Repulse, one of the two British battleships that were sunk off the Malayan coast in the first days of the Far Eastern war. The pages describing the sinking of the Repulse are the highlight of the book and recall the “magnetic, hypnotic, limit-freezing fascination” of the sight of bombs coming down on the doomed warship.

A historian will perhaps find most interesting Mr. Brown’s scathing and well-documented story of the dry rot and incompetence which prevailed in the higher circles of military and civilian officialdom at Singapore. Mr. Brown shows himself a staunch friend of England and an ardent interventionist before Pearl Harbor. His epitaph on the Singapore mentality before and during the invasion is all the more convincing. W. H. C.