Word: java
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Allies Paid. A lone Dutch destroyer attacked two Japanese cruisers, kept her guns going until she ran aground. In the night, when the Japanese were converging on central Java from east and west, two Dutch cruisers ran straight into an enemy fleet. Both cruisers sank, apparently torpedoed. Two Allied destroyers went down; since Batavia did not say they were Dutch, they were probably U.S. ships. Tokyo boasted that the Japanese had sunk eleven Allied warships, but clouded its claims by ignoring known Japanese losses...
Outnumbered, outgunned, sorely in need of heavy cruisers to bolster their light naval units, the Allies took a beating off Java. The Dutch had started the war with five cruisers: the loss was a severe blow to total cruiser strength in the Indies. For his losses, the Jap got his landings on Java (see p. 16). For the Allies, graver than their total loss in ships was the immediate threat to their last naval base in the Indies...
These things the stolid, seawise commander of the Allied fleets in the Indies weighed at his headquarters in Java. When events go badly for Vice Admiral Helfrich, he does not rant or snarl or gloom. He goes grim. This week he was very grim...
...Java. Only to a Dutchman in the Dutch East Indies could the certainty that the Japs were coming mean what it meant to Conrad Helfrich. For, if the Japs were coming to the Indies, they were coming to his home. They were coming to Semarang, the town on the Java coast where his father practiced medicine and where he was born 55 years ago. They were coming to the cool, ugly house in Batavia where he lived with his wife, his twin sons, his two daughters. The Japs were coming to the quiet inland kampongs, where Conrad Helfrich had many...
...rubber plantations where for money and empire many a Dutchman had sweated out his life. To Conrad Helfrich, as to all true colonial Dutchmen, these islands were home in a sense that Holland never could be. Now Hitler had Holland, and the Indies was their only home, and Java was all they had left of the Indies. They had no other place...