Word: macassar
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...Navy's effective raiding, shelling and torpedoing in Macassar Strait, the Jap pushed on through the Indies. The U.S. and the Dutch together did not have enough warships, planes or troops to meet the invader on all his fronts...
BATAVIA, N.E.I.--Notherlands Indies fliers said today that they sank what apparently was a Japanese battleship with a direct bomb hit amidship in the first day of the now famous battle of Macassar Strait...
Then, for the first time in fair combat, he met the U.S. Navy. Into narrow Macassar Strait, where the warships, transports and screening planes of the Jap's convoy coursed south, steamed destroyers from Admiral Thomas C. Hart's Asiatic Fleet, U.S. cruisers and at least one U.S. submarine followed. Overhead and probably in advance of Admiral Hart's warships, the U.S. Army's Flying Fortresses and Dutch airmen in U.S.-made bombers harried the Jap's protecting planes, destroyers, cruisers...
Three days after the Jap nosed into Macassar Strait, at least eleven of his ships had gone down, 22 more had been damaged. The U.S. at this stage of the action had lost not a single ship, not a single plane...
Before the main naval and air attack developed, the Jap reached his first objective, Balikpapan (where he found the wells, refineries, pipelines in scorched ruins, and Dutch troops ready to battle him ashore). But his convoy losses constituted a real defeat. His cruisers were reported in Macassar Strait only after the battle had well begun; he would scarcely have risked such valuable escorts unless he was hard-pressed. In that sector at least, he was definitely short of fighters to screen his own ships, bombers to attack the U.S. warships...