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The Americans brought as many Dutch pilots as they could out of Java. One pilot loaded 35 men, Americans and Dutchmen, into his four-motored bomber and took off at the beach at 2 a.m. Says he: "Something besides engines lifted that plane off the ground that night." Most Dutch pilots have had four years of training and they can fly anything. You see them all over Australia, in small, morose, green uniformed groups. Most of them left everything they loved in Java. They ask in anguish: "When do we get something to fly?" One day last week I had lunch with some Australian officers at an airdrome. All they talked about was the Flying Fortress full of Dutchmen who had landed that morning. Long after the Battle of Java, they had patched up a ship which Americans had been forced to abandon because of engine trouble, and managed to get it out. As they landed, one jumped out and said to the Australians and Americans: "Can you paint the Dutch flag on this ship and let us have some bombs and gasoline? We're going back to Java."
That night I met a young lieutenant of the Dutch Navy in a downtown hotel. He limped badly from a piece of shrapnel in his thigh, a souvenir of the Battle of the Java Sea. The doctor had forbidden him to leave the ship, but he hadn't been ashore for nine months. After a couple of highballs he had to leave because the leg hurt so badly, but before leaving he told his story: since the war started in '39, he had had seven ships shot out from under him, and the last time only 40 of his 300-man crew got away. As he started to go, with pain written deeply in his face, I asked him where his home in The Netherlands was. "In Rotterdam, sir," he said.