Word: java
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bali Down. The dream faded fast. At Java's western tip, beyond the Sunda Strait, the Japanese clinched their hold on southern Sumatra, its oil, its tin, and its vantage for assault on Java. To the east, Japanese planes performed their usual preparatory ritual: bombs on Dutch and Portuguese Timor, more bombs on oft-bombed Surabaya's naval base; bombs on Bali; and, to the rear, where Australia juts toward Java, bomb after heavy bomb on the tiny, tinny port of Darwin...
Then, in ships and barges, the Jap troops came. They were not quite ready for Java proper. They swarmed into Timor, where insufficient Dutch and Australian troops had moved in with the slender garrison in Portugal's half of the island. They pushed into Bali's dozing harbors, on to the palm-fringed shores...
...Battle for Java was on: Timor and Bali were necessary approaches to Java. So the Dutch fought fiercely on land; Dutch, U.S. and British aircraft concentrated over the Jap convoys. Admiral Helfrich's Dutch and U.S. cruisers, destroyers and naval aircraft opened up with everything they had on the Jap's naval and transport shipping. Soon, in the Java Sea, the biggest air and naval battles of the Indies campaign were raging...
...took his losses, secured his landings on Bali and Timor. With Bali, he won a foothold at Java's very edge on the east, to match his Sumatra springboard on the west. With Timor, he won another eastern approach and control of an essential waypoint on the route by which sorely needed fighter planes were flown from Australia to Java. And now he was probably near enough to Surabaya to immobilize that last, vital naval base even before he sent his troops against...
...both Australian and U.S. aid was arriving in Java. In addition to the new U.S. planes, a few U.S. troops had landed -just enough, said the Dutch, to hearten them, but not enough to give much help in the developing Battle for Java. More help was certainly on the way; much more was needed. Java, with its Dutch army of some 100,000 brown and white soldiers, would be no pushover. The Jap had to hurry if he was to complete his conquest of the Indies, his advance toward Australia, and his choking hold on the Indian Ocean...