End of a Dream

On the terrace of the Hotel des Indes in Batavia, the brown men in white coats were as quiet and wonderful and attentive as ever. They padded softly, bearing long cool drinks to the linened Dutch civilians, the officers in Dutch, U.S. and British khaki, white and blue. In the crowded, varied city itself, tropic life went on: in the shops of Chinese, impenetrable behind their prayerful squints; in murky canals thick with scum and bathing Indonesians; in streets hot and sunny between the frequent rains, pocked here & there by a Japanese bomb, but still busy with the traffic of a colonial capital.

From Batavia on the west to Surabaya on the east, Java's excellent highways were thick with armored cars, with the harnessed and ever-useful water buffalo, with pedestrian natives in economically cut trousers and casual skirts. At Bandung, the Army's mountain headquarters and fortress, patrolling aircraft droned in and away.

Britain's General Sir Archibald Wavell, the U.S. Army's Lieut. General George H. Brett, the Dutch Army's Major General Hein ter Poorten, the U.S. Air Forces' Major General Lewis Hyde Brereton, the Allied Navies' Vice Admiral Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich huddled in a swirl of blue and khaki staffers. In view through the windows of their three-storied headquarters, the mountains and volcanoes of Java dreamed in the sun and rain.

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.

Then, in ships and barges, the Jap troops came. They were not quite ready for Java proper. They swarmed into Timor, where insufficient Dutch and Australian troops had moved in with the slender garrison in Portugal's half of the island. They pushed into Bali's dozing harbors, on to the palm-fringed shores.

The Battle for Java was on: Timor and Bali were necessary approaches to Java. So the Dutch fought fiercely on land; Dutch, U.S. and British aircraft concentrated over the Jap convoys. Admiral Helfrich's Dutch and U.S. cruisers, destroyers and naval aircraft opened up with everything they had on the Jap's naval and transport shipping. Soon, in the Java Sea, the biggest air and naval battles of the Indies campaign were raging.

A few of the U.S. Army's new dive-bombers-low-winged, fast Douglas A245 -roared down at Jap ships and troop barges. Flying Fortresses, Tomahawks, PBYs, R.A.F. Hurricanes and the Dutch U.S.-made Lockheed Hudsons massed for the defense. A Jap cruiser seemed to disintegrate under U.S. bombs. One or more Jap destroyers went down. Confused though the communiques were, it was clear that the Jap lost heavily in warships, transports and troops.

But the Jap took his losses, secured his landings on Bali and Timor. With Bali, he won a foothold at Java's very edge on the east, to match his Sumatra springboard on the west. With Timor, he won another eastern approach and control of an essential waypoint on the route by which sorely needed fighter planes were flown from Australia to Java. And now he was probably near enough to Surabaya to immobilize that last, vital naval base even before he sent his troops against it.

But both Australian and U.S. aid was arriving in Java. In addition to the new U.S. planes, a few U.S. troops had landed -just enough, said the Dutch, to hearten them, but not enough to give much help in the developing Battle for Java. More help was certainly on the way; much more was needed. Java, with its Dutch army of some 100,000 brown and white soldiers, would be no pushover. The Jap had to hurry if he was to complete his conquest of the Indies, his advance toward Australia, and his choking hold on the Indian Ocean's eastern trade routes. He hurried.

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