Word: java
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...last days were black and sickening. At the mercy of unopposed Jap fighters, angry U.S. bomber crews had to take their few remaining Flying Fortresses from Javanese airdromes and flee to Australia. British fighter pilots followed; they had no more fighters to fly. Some of Java's high officialdom also fled; Lieut. Governor General Hubertus van Mook appeared in Adelaide, Australia, after the last hope was gone...
Behind, they left perhaps 3,500 British, Australian and U.S. troops, fighting with Java's under-equipped Army of 75,000-odd under Major General Heinter Poorten. Aneta, the official Dutch news agency, cabled a last, bitter account of a country lost for want of a few ships, a few hundred planes, a few thousand well-armed troops. A Dutch dispatcher, radiophoning commercial messages (in English) to RCA. spoke the last word from Java: "We are shutting down now. Good-by till better times. Long live the Queen...
...Japanese still had to mop up. In Sumatra, and other outlying Indies islands, they might have to wage a long and tough guerrilla campaign against unsubjected Dutchmen and hardy natives. But for all the purposes of war and conquest, the Japanese had Java. They had the Indies, their oil and rubber and tin, their "strategic island wall across the southwest Pacific. They had still to fight the battle of India and the battle of Australia. But they had won the battle of the Pacific...
Tokyo claimed last week that Japanese aircraft had bombed and seriously damaged "a specially converted aircraft carrier" in Java waters. If U.S. aircraft carriers or converted transports had entered the Japanese-dominated Indies waters, then the U.S. had taken substantial risks to succor Java...
...area, conferred with his Executive Council, talked with his private secretary Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, fed worms to his pet turtle, Jonah, whom Mohandas Gandhi once asked especially to see. Like the rest of India's millions, the Viceroy was waiting in the heat, waiting while the Japanese won Java and Rangoon, waiting to see whether, among other things, he would keep his post-waiting for London to make up its mind...