Creation
The FESR originated from a June 1953 letter from Harold Alexander, the British Minister of Defence, to Philip McBride and Thomas Lachlan MacDonald, his equivalents in Australia and New Zealand, respectively. The letter suggested the creation of a joint military force based in South-East Asia and tasked with protecting strategically important Commonwealth interests in the region, such as Malaya, Sarawak, North Borneo (the three nations later combining to become Malaysia), and Singapore, from the threat of attack by communist forces. The freeing up of military resources following the end of the Korean War was another factor.
Correspondence between the defence ministers of the three nations and their subordinates led to a meeting in Melbourne, Australia during October 1953. From this meeting, it was decided to create the FESR: a multinational force consisting of Army, Navy, and Air Force units from the three nations' armed forces. It was not until 1955 that the Reserve was established.
Read more about this topic: Far East Strategic Reserve
Famous quotes containing the word creation:
“As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: “Byron is dead!””
—Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)
“As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)