Word: padang
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Government troops at dawn scrambled from transports into lifeboats and landing craft, surged onto the beaches north of Padang, the rebel nerve center. A spearhead of Indonesian marines had already pushed inland against light resistance. At the Padang airfield, eight miles north of town, government planes strafed gun positions while 200 paratroopers drifted down at the field's edge. Within twelve hours, the rebel defenders were in flight along the road to Bukittinggi, 58 miles away, and Padang was firmly in the control of Djakarta's Colonel Achmad Jani, who had learned his lessons well...
Miscalculations. In Red China the Peking People's Daily crowed that "the liberation of Padang is a victory of the Indonesian people in their fight against colonialism and for peace. The U.S. was directly behind the Sumatran rebellion and gave much aid to the rebels...
...Padang's rebellion floundered, seemed perilously near collapse. The rebel communiqués continued to report bloody battles all along the shrinking perimeter of rebel territory in Central Sumatra, but newsmen searching for these savage conflicts were finding little but bad roads, torrential rains and, occasionally, friendly government troops. "It's an accident when they fight-like two people bumping into each other in the dark," said one Western observer...
...government's blockade, deprived of its revenues by government seizures of its oilfields, Padang had few resources left. The rebel capital of Bukittinggi was preparing for the defeat. Its population of some 120,000 has been halved as residents moved out to the hills...
...ancient taxis. When they did find something to write about, they had the problem of getting it to Singapore. The Chicago Daily News's Keyes Beech finally had to send one dispatch by ship, a two-day trip. Luckier newsmen used the rebels' clandestine radio transmitter in Padang, sent out hand-tapped signals that were monitored by the news agencies in Singapore, 300 miles away...