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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...
...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...
Today with Malaya gone and the rubber plantations of Java scorched, the United Nations are faced with a frightening shortage of rubber. Yet over a year and a half ago Jesse Jones was asked to get started on a 130,000-ton synthetic rubber program. A year later he had contracted for only a third of this requirement, and then only on an experimental basis. By 1944 Jones still won't have produced the required amount of rubber. With tin, it's the same story. He knew what the requirements were but never purchased the necessary stockpiles...
While battle flags flew off Java last week (see p. 15), the blue peter fluttered from yardarms at sunny San Diego and Houston, at blustery Halifax, at hot Aruba and Bahrein. The tanker fleets of the United Nations were busy. Even if the Dutch East Indies were lost, the Allies would still control 93% of the world's crude-oil production, 88% of refining facilities, almost 90% of tanker tonnage...