Word: straitly
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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...
Just eastward from Java, across a narrow strait, lay the gentle island of Bali. Sturdy, handsome Balinese men and their bare-breasted women labored in the rice fields, or consulted flowers, or did nothing -with patience and thoroughness and devotion to the important business of being alive. War and the Jap were very near, and everyone knew it, but Java and Bali, to the last, clung to the forms of colonial pleasantry, to the ways and the life that were now like a passing dream...
Bali Down. The dream faded fast. At Java's western tip, beyond the Sunda Strait, the Japanese clinched their hold on southern Sumatra, its oil, its tin, and its vantage for assault on Java. To the east, Japanese planes performed their usual preparatory ritual: bombs on Dutch and Portuguese Timor, more bombs on oft-bombed Surabaya's naval base; bombs on Bali; and, to the rear, where Australia juts toward Java, bomb after heavy bomb on the tiny, tinny port of Darwin...
...sweeping review of the war at sea, Alexander disclosed that the battle of Dover Strait may have been a British victory rather than defeat because if the three warships which forced the English Channel are laid up indefinitely, Germany's plans for creating a big surface feet are seriously impaired...
...then on Jan. 23 a great Japanese invasion fleet sailed into the Strait of Macassar...