Word: batavia
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When Dr. van Mook spoke last week in Batavia, it was late in the game for Java, the Indies and the Far Pacific. It was terribly late for the Indies' "Strong Man" to have to speak of wavering uncertainty among his allies. Within a week the Japanese broke through Java's naval line (see p. 18) and set their scores of thousands of invaders upon Java's shores before the few hundred planes, the needed thousands of troops had arrived. The battle for the Indies had come to Java, and it would be won or lost with...
...west, a hop & skip across the Sunda Strait from invaded Sumatra; on the broad, open coasts of Indramayu Bay, 160 miles eastward from Serang; at Rembang, another 225 miles to the east. Thus the Jap with three strokes sliced up the northern Javanese coast, flanked the capital of Batavia, the Army's mountain fortress at Bandung and Java's chief naval base at Surabaya...
...Siege. The Japanese flood rose and widened, flowed inland from Indramayu to the railway between Batavia and Surabaya. Soon, in this central invasion sector, the Japanese were within 30 mountainous miles of Bandung. On the west they pushed inward toward Batavia. The Dutch destroyed everything of military use in Batavia, even though they insisted that the capital itself was not yet in danger. At Tjepu they wrecked the last major oil base left to them in the Indies. Then came an announcement which accented Java's extremity. The United Nations' joint southwest Pacific command in Java no longer...
...From Batavia on the west to Surabaya on the east, Java's excellent highways were thick with armored cars, with the harnessed and ever-useful water buffalo, with pedestrian natives in economically cut trousers and casual skirts. At Bandung, the Army's mountain headquarters and fortress, patrolling aircraft droned in and away...
They did. Across 400 miles of Sumatran jungles the weary party straggled in trucks. From northwest Sumatra to a port of embarkation for Batavia they traveled in pony carts, spurred on by native tomtoms pounding out an air-raid warning. At the port Yates McDaniel saw "the most beautiful sight I ever expect to see a British destroyer hull down on the horizon, steaming full speed toward the harbor." The destroyer carried them to Batavia, where, for the first time in eleven days, Yates McDaniel could file his story, then crawl into...