The Invasion of the Dutch East Indies transed. by Willem Remmelink (review)

The island of Java, a penny-pinching Dutch Minister of Colonies, Jean Chretien Baud, reminded Governor-General Pieter Merkus in 1842, was “the cork on which the Netherlands floats.”¹ And so it remained for many years. Between 1851–66, remittances from Java were responsible for about one-third of Dutch state revenues.² Late in the nineteenth century, the Dutch began to expand their beachheads in the Outer Islands. That paved the way for still greater revenues—from oil, tin, rubber and other plantation crops. By any measure, the Netherlands East Indies was a prize of inestimable value. Before long, however, the Dutch had grounds for concern. There were threats from both within and without. Japan, which had astonished the world when it defeated the Far Eastern forces of Imperial Russia in 1905, and which had succeeded in gaining control of Korea and Taiwan, was casting a covetous eye on the East Indies. The Dutch, a senior British diplomat noted in 1921, had been “in terror of Japan” during World War I, fearing that Tokyo would ignore the Netherlands’s neutrality and make a lunge for its lucrative and lightly defended tropical possession.³ Although such an attack never occurred, Dutch fear of Japan remained. Nor were those fears unfounded. The Japanese, the British official added, were

… obsessed by the idea that their country is one day destined to be the mistress of the Pacific and of its islands. They regard Holland as a very weak power, and her colonial empire as doomed to disruption. Japan must have a say in the disposal of this rich empire. So she is steadily increasing her knowledge of the country, her vested interests therein, and the numbers of her merchants and colonists.⁴

Despite their fears, the Dutch were guilty of extraordinary complacency. For many years they clung to the principle of strict neutrality while privately believing, or at least hoping, that the British and Americans would never allow the rich East Indies to fall under enemy—by which they meant Japanese—control. A large-scale attack was nearly impossible, they believed, because any hostile Japanese force would have to pass French, American, and British possessions. Britain ruled the waves; Singapore was invincible.⁵ The most likely threat, they felt, was a coup de main, a swift but essentially limited surprise attack aimed at seizing critical points (kwetsbare punten) in the Outer Islands: the oilfields at Tarakan or Balikpapan, perhaps, or the air and naval base at Ambon.⁶ This, the Dutch planners persuaded themselves, just a little too conveniently, would involve a force of no more than four thousand men, put ashore from a fast cruiser squadron with no accompanying troop carriers.⁷ In the mid-1930s, with the worst of the Great Depression behind them, the Dutch began to bolster their defenses in the East Indies. It was a case of too little, too late.

On Sunday, January 11, 1942, five weeks to the day after its attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan struck. Before dawn, a naval landing force went ashore at Menado and Kema in North Sulawesi (Celebes). On the same day, other Japanese units landed at the East Kalimantan (Borneo) oil port of Tarakan; the defending Royal Netherlands Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands-Indisch Leger, KNIL) garrison capitulated twenty-four hours later. One Japanese force went on to seize all of eastern Kalimantan. A second swept down through Sulawesi, while subsidiary units captured Ambon and Kupang. A third was standing by to take the most productive oilfields in the Netherlands East Indies, at Palembang in south Sumatra. (In the arresting words of the War History, “it is no exaggeration to say that the Greater East Asian War was launched for the oil in Palembang,” page 269). In the face of these attacks, outlying KNIL detachments wilted.

The great British naval base at Singapore fell on February 15, attacked...