Word: sumatra
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...Prong. The Japanese chose their first landings well (see map): near Serang in the west, a hop & skip across the Sunda Strait from invaded Sumatra; on the broad, open coasts of Indramayu Bay, 160 miles eastward from Serang; at Rembang, another 225 miles to the east. Thus the Jap with three strokes sliced up the northern Javanese coast, flanked the capital of Batavia, the Army's mountain fortress at Bandung and Java's chief naval base at Surabaya...
Then the Allies hit hard: U.S. sea attack, Dutch and U.S. air attack ravaged the Japs' warships and transports. But, if it had ever been early enough, it was now too late. The Japanese secured their bases in lower Borneo, in Sumatra on Java's western flank, in the Guineas, in Amboina and elsewhere in the east...
...impossible task. Admiral Helfrich had to be prepared for invasion convoys on his left (Sumatra), at his center (Borneo), from his right (Bali). Exactly what he had long dreaded, what he had long planned to prevent, had now come to pass: the Japs were too many and too close...
...that Sunday night General Gordon Bennett's sampan had bumped into a seagoing junk carrying six British officers. The General's party switched to the larger vessel, set an uncertain course for Sumatra. The torn page of an atlas was their only chart. Dawn found them in waters a scant half-mile from a Japanese-held island. Their food and water were nearly gone when an Allied launch picked them...
...Nazis in Norway and Crete, the Japs at Sumatra have shown what air transports can do in modern war. In that department the U.S. Army has not been overly well supplied. Before World War II broke out, the Army laid claim to 42 Douglas transports. Since then it has been snatching planes off Douglas and Lockheed assembly lines as fast as they were built. It has also grabbed eagerly at the ships of commercial airlines; it bagged 120 of them before Pearl Harbor. Last week it added 25 urgently needed commercial planes to its stock. How many...