Word: java
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From Batavia on the west to Surabaya on the east, Java's excellent highways were thick with armored cars, with the harnessed and ever-useful water buffalo, with pedestrian natives in economically cut trousers and casual skirts. At Bandung, the Army's mountain headquarters and fortress, patrolling aircraft droned in and away...
...Major General Hein ter Poorten, the U.S. Air Forces' Major General Lewis Hyde Brereton, the Allied Navies' Vice Admiral Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich huddled in a swirl of blue and khaki staffers. In view through the windows of their three-storied headquarters, the mountains and volcanoes of Java dreamed in the sun and rain...
Just eastward from Java, across a narrow strait, lay the gentle island of Bali. Sturdy, handsome Balinese men and their bare-breasted women labored in the rice fields, or consulted flowers, or did nothing -with patience and thoroughness and devotion to the important business of being alive. War and the Jap were very near, and everyone knew it, but Java and Bali, to the last, clung to the forms of colonial pleasantry, to the ways and the life that were now like a passing dream...
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...