Word: java
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...They juggled rifle parts to fit their ammunition supply. For armored cars, they walled trucks with double sheets of boiler plate. The first layer took the zing out of armor-piercing bullets, the second stopped them. The improvised cars with their mounted machine guns roared over the narrow, metalized Java highways, barking at advance parties of Jap bicyclists and rushing defenders to threatened points...
...mountainous interior, the Dutch had planted explosives in the sides of every pass, every cut through which key highways and railways threaded. Successively, as the invader advanced, Java's arteries could thus be blocked to anything on wheels. Mined passes commanded every approach to the Bandung fortress, and at the worst Java's Army was prepared to withstand a siege there comparable to Douglas MacArthur's on Bataan. -Dutch, British and U.S. aircraft rose incessantly from interior airdromes, met the invader in the air and strafed him on the ground, returned, reloaded and refueled, took off again...
...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 existed. Britain's Sir Archibald Wavell, the Supreme Allied Commander, had surrendered his command and the responsibility for Java's defense, returned to his old post at the head of British forces...
...Java was not yet lost. It could still be reinforced, although only at the risk of increasing air attack from captured Javanese bases. But the battle of Java in its first days rapidly became a series of Allied withdrawals and sieges. If Java was not yet lost to the Dutch, it was lost to the Allies as a Pacific bastion. It would be lost until the last Japanese was driven...