Word: java
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...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...
...this week faces its bitterest defeat since 1814: the loss of all the southwest Pacific except Australia. And Australia is in peril. If Java falls, if the United Nations lose their last bases within striking distance of the Japanese, what kind of war can the U.S. then wage in the Pacific...
Attack from the South. If Java falls, Australia will thus remain an all-essential base for present operations in the far Pacific. Desolate, vulnerable northern Australia would be hard to defend against determined Japanese attack. But Australia's Prime Minister John Curtin was speaking for as well as to the U.S. last week when he said that southern Australia must be held. There the U.S. can amass land and air forces; there it can base the naval forces necessary for an attempt to recapture the Indies and drive on toward Malaya and Japan from the south...