Word: sarawak
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They landed first at Miri, the center of Sarawak's oil fields, which British sappers blew up. Then they landed at Kuching, the capital. They landed unresisted by so much as a British frigate...
These words were almost a century old last week, and almost a hundred times as ironic as their author, Sir James Brooke, the first swashbuckling white Raja of Sarawak in Borneo, thought they ever would be. For last week evildoers with scant respect for the English union jack descended on his Sarawak...
Jamie Brooke's grandnephew, Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, now Raja of Sarawak, said some bitter words on this matter in Australia, in ironic counterpoint to Grand-uncle Jamie's complacency: "Brass hats . . . lah-di-dah old-school-tie incompetents, who are responsible for the fantastic position in Malaya, should be sacked immediately. When I left, I was given to understand that, should Sarawak be attacked, it would receive air support. The only protection over Sarawak today is Dutch...
...naval ships to Singapore. Dutch submarines harassed the Japanese supply lines for the assault on Malaya. Dutch planes attacked the Japanese attackers of Mindanao, the southernmost major Philippine Island. Dutch planes and submarines played a doomful tune on the hulls of Japanese ships heading for Raja Brooke's Sarawak...
...Japanese had an easy time in Malaya, if they took the Philippines, then the Dutch islands of Borneo, Java, Sumatra would be next on the list of the Mikado's Lord High Executioner. And first to fall would probably be Borneo, of which the Brookes' Sarawak is a small part...