Word: sumatra
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Colonel Simbolon, who marched off with one battalion to take command of the rebel forces in North Sumatra, last week was back in Bukittinggi without 1) his troops, 2) report of victory. In the eastern foothills of the Sumatra mountains, government troops from the oil center of Pakanbaru had pushed the rebels back within 70 miles of Bukittinggi. To the south, the government's hard-working paratroopers were inching through the jungle to cut the last rebel artery to the outside-the potholed road that leads to Palembang in South Sumatra...
Truth was that the rebels' only chance of success was the expectation that other areas all over Indonesia would unite with them in massive opposition to President Sukarno. The other areas held back. Even Sumatra itself proved no more united as an island than Indonesia is as a country...
...Djakarta, President Sukarno made the most of the rebels' failure to rally others to their cause. The government invasion of Sumatra was not a "military" effort, he said, but a "police action against a group of political and military adventurers" who "want to drag us into one of the world blocs." From combat accounts, a police action is what it appeared...
...correspondents covering the Indonesian civil war, the main problem has been to find the war. With no defined front line in vast Sumatra-more than twice the size of Korea-most of the skirmishes between the rebels and President Sukarno's government have been as haphazard as blind man's buff...
When another hardy group of correspondents rushed to find out how U.S. Caltex employees were faring in Rumbai, a town in contested Central Sumatra, they found a scene that made a novel page in war correspondence. Reported the New York Times's Bernard Kalb: U.S. kids were playing tag on a paved street, an American woman dived into a glittering pool, and "a couple of American men, sipping ice cream sodas to the tune of jukebox music, were chatting about what kind of season the Yankees would have...