The fall of Java

On 5 March 1942 Japanese troops entered Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. They did not have to take it. The day before – or, according to some accounts, that same day – the colonial authorities had declared Batavia an open city and moved the troops and government offices out to Bandung in the interior of the island, leaving behind only the city guard and the police, who were to hand the city over to the Japanese without a fight. Accounts that speak of the “capture of Batavia” therefore simplify matters: on 5 March the colonial capital changed hands without a shot being fired, and its loss was merely one symptom of the disintegration of the defence of Java. Four days later, on 9 March, the Dutch army on the island capitulated.

Five days after the landings

On the night of 28 February–1 March Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura’s Sixteenth Army landed on Java at three points: in Bantam Bay and near Merak at the western tip of the island, at Eretan Wetan halfway along its north coast, and at Kragan in the east. The fleet that might have prevented this had been destroyed two days earlier in the Battle of the Java Sea, together with Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, and the last surviving cruisers had gone down in the Sunda Strait. The island had already been cut off from Australia, since Bali and Timor had fallen on 19 and 20 February, and General Archibald Wavell’s Allied ABDA command had been dissolved on 25 February. From then on the defence of Java rested with the Dutch: on land it was commanded by Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten, commander of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL).

The first days showed that this defence had nothing to stand on. Japanese aircraft controlled the skies over the island from the first hour, and as early as 1 March the detachment of Colonel Toshinari Shōji, which had landed at Eretan Wetan, seized Kalidjati airfield, a few dozen kilometres from Bandung. Dutch counter-attacks on 2 and 3 March broke down under air attack. In the west Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama’s 2nd Division split into columns: some advanced along the coast towards Batavia, others towards Buitenzorg, the governor-general’s summer residence, to cut the road from Batavia to Bandung. The Dutch blew up the bridge at Leuwiliang, and Brigadier Arthur Blackburn’s Australian Blackforce, reinforced by a Texan artillery battalion, held off attempts to cross and outflank the position there from 2 to 4 March. When the Dutch units on its flanks withdrew, the Australians had to follow suit, falling back through Buitenzorg to Sukabumi. On 4 March Shōji took Purwakarta, and the troops from the Batavia and Buitenzorg area withdrew to the Bandung plateau.

Batavia an open city

The decision to give up the capital without a fight followed the same logic that governed the whole defence. Ter Poorten did not have the strength to defend the long coastline and the large cities, and he decided to concentrate the army in the mountains around Bandung, where the army headquarters, depots, workshops and some government offices had been located since February. Batavia had been bombed by Japanese aircraft since mid-February, and the Governor-General, Alidius Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, had already moved to Bandung. Defending an open, flat city with several hundred thousand inhabitants would have ended in its destruction without any benefit to the defence of the island. Declaring Batavia an open city meant that the army would leave it and its inhabitants would offer no resistance.

The Japanese columns of the 2nd Division, approaching from the west via Tangerang, marched into Batavia on 5 March; Buitenzorg fell in the same days. At the port of Tanjung Priok the Dutch had managed beforehand to destroy the harbour installations and scuttle the ships that could not be taken out to sea. In several towns on Java, including the area around Batavia, shops and the homes of Europeans and Chinese were looted in the days between the departure of the Dutch administration and the arrival of the Japanese; the new authorities restored order only after several weeks. Imamura set up his headquarters in Batavia, and the city’s name itself, dating from the days of the East India Company, survived only a few months: before the end of 1942 the Japanese military authorities restored its old name of Jakarta.

On that same 5 March, according to Dutch studies, the Governor-General handed ter Poorten supreme command of the colony’s armed forces, with the proviso that Bandung, crowded with refugees, should not become a battlefield. Ter Poorten later felt that this was a way of shifting onto him the responsibility for a defeat that everyone had expected. In the east of the island the 48th Division was advancing just as fast: on 5 March it captured the bridge over the Brantas at Kediri, and Major General Shizuo Sakaguchi’s detachment entered Yogyakarta and pushed on towards Tjilatjap (PL), the last port through which people could still be evacuated. Those who could fled Java for Australia by sea and air; some of the aircraft, packed with Dutch refugees, were destroyed by the Japanese on 3 March in the attack on Broome.

The Tjiater Pass

The fate of Bandung was decided by the fighting at the Tjiater Pass. The plateau on which the city stands could be reached from the north only by a few mountain roads, and one of them, leading from Subang past the Tangkuban Perahu volcano, the Dutch had closed with fortifications of trenches, bunkers and barbed wire. The position was commanded by Colonel Willem Johannes de Veer of Major General Jacob Pesman’s Bandung group. On the afternoon of 5 March the leading elements of Shōji’s detachment ran into the first positions and within a few hours had broken into part of the line. On 6 March, supported by almost ceaseless air attacks, light tanks and mortars, the Japanese broke through the defences and outflanked the Dutch positions. De Veer was killed. According to research by the Dutch historian P.C. Boer, some 180 KNIL soldiers died in the fighting for the pass, including about seventy prisoners murdered after the surrounded units had surrendered; only a handful survived the executions, having been left for dead.

By 7 March the pass was in Japanese hands and their troops had reached Lembang, a dozen or so kilometres from Bandung. That day an envoy under a white flag drove out from Bandung to Shōji to discuss the surrender of the city itself. Earlier, on the night of 6–7 March, the last aircraft of the Dutch airline KNILM had left for Australia from a makeshift airstrip on the outskirts, carrying the Lieutenant Governor-General Hubertus van Mook, the air force commander Ludolph van Oyen and a group of officials and officers. Vice Admiral Conrad Helfrich had already flown to Ceylon. The Governor-General decided to stay.

Kalidjati

On the morning of 8 March Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer and ter Poorten, summoned by the Japanese, drove to Kalidjati airfield, where Imamura had arrived from Batavia. The Japanese commander demanded the unconditional surrender of all armed forces in the Dutch East Indies. The Governor-General replied that he no longer had authority over the army and could discuss only matters of civil administration; Imamura therefore sent him out of the room and turned to ter Poorten. The Dutch general tried to limit the capitulation to Bandung and its surroundings. Imamura refused, threatened to fight on until the KNIL was destroyed and announced that Bandung would be bombed. Accounts differ on how long he gave for an answer, from a few minutes to the following day, but they agree on the outcome: ter Poorten accepted the Japanese terms. These provided for an immediate end to the fighting, the disarming of all units by noon on 9 March, a ban on destroying military installations and the severing of communications with the outside world. In the evening ter Poorten informed the British command by telephone that the Dutch army was capitulating.

That same day the Japanese were already in Surabaya, the main base of the Dutch fleet, and in Tjilatjap. On the evening of 8 March the Dutch broadcaster NIROM ended its last free broadcast. The announcer, Bert Garthoff, took leave of the listeners with the words: “We are closing down, listeners. Farewell, until better times. Long live the fatherland, long live the Queen!” Taken over by the Japanese, the station went on broadcasting for a few more days, and its staff, to the astonishment of listeners, ended the programme with the Wilhelmus. When the Japanese realised what the music was, three of them – according to Dutch accounts, the director and two technicians – were executed.

On the morning of 9 March the radio broadcast the announcement of the capitulation: the Japanese had broken through the defences and forced their way onto the Bandung plateau, they controlled the air, and further resistance was pointless. The KNIL units were to lay down their arms. Shōji’s detachment entered Bandung. Nine days had passed since the landings on Java.

The surrender of the Allies

The British and Australians were not consulted. Major General Hervey Sitwell, commander of the British forces, and Blackburn led their troops south of Bandung to the area of Garut, intending to fight on in the mountains. It soon became clear that this was unrealistic: they had no supplies, no support from the population and no communications, and doctors warned Blackburn that in the rainy season tropical diseases would finish off the men within a few weeks. The terms accepted by ter Poorten, moreover, covered all troops on the island. Blackforce laid down its arms on 11 March, and on 12 March the Allied commanders signed a formal capitulation at the Japanese headquarters in Bandung. According to Australian figures, 36 Australians were killed and 60 wounded in the fighting on Java. The Texan gunners, 534 men, also went into captivity; they later became known as the “Lost Battalion”, because in the United States nothing was known of their fate until the autumn of 1944.

The fighting in the archipelago did not end everywhere at the same time: in northern Sumatra Dutch units held out until 28 March, and on Timor Australian commandos waged a guerrilla war throughout the following year. On Java, however, the war was over. According to a tally cited in the literature, the Japanese took 82,618 Allied servicemen prisoner across the archipelago: 66,219 from the KNIL, 10,626 British, 4,890 Australians and 883 Americans. Ter Poorten, Pesman, Sitwell and Blackburn also went into captivity, as did the Governor-General, who refused special treatment. Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer and ter Poorten eventually ended up, by way of a succession of camps, in a camp for the most senior prisoners in Manchuria, where they were freed in August 1945.

Occupation instead of a colony

Imamura governed Java and Madura as commander of the Sixteenth Army and head of the military administration, with his seat in Batavia, now renamed Jakarta. Sumatra was placed under the Twenty-Fifth Army in Singapore, and Borneo and the eastern islands under the Japanese navy. At first Imamura pursued a milder policy than his superiors at Southern Army headquarters and in Tokyo expected: he sent many Indonesian KNIL soldiers home, courted the cooperation of local elites and allowed a certain freedom of public life. Some Indonesians welcomed the Japanese as liberators from Dutch rule, and the slogan “Asia for the Asians” fell on fertile ground. In the summer of 1942 the Japanese brought the nationalist leader Sukarno back from Sumatra and, together with Mohammad Hatta, drew him into collaboration.

For Europeans the occupation meant camps from the very beginning. The Dutch, most of whom had not left in the expectation that the Japanese would need them to run the colony, were removed from their posts; prisoners of war were locked up in military camps, and civilians – some hundred thousand men, women and children in all – were interned over the following months in camps in which, according to Dutch estimates, more than ten thousand people died. The Dutch language disappeared from offices and schools. Prisoners from Java were later sent to build the Burma Railway and to mines and shipyards in Japan; many died aboard transports that were sunk.

The highest price, however, was paid by the island’s own inhabitants. Java’s economy was subordinated to the needs of the war, rice was requisitioned, and hundreds of thousands of people – between 200,000 and 500,000 according to different estimates – were conscripted as forced labourers, romusha, to work on Java and across South-East Asia. Women were forced into sexual slavery in military brothels. In the last years of the occupation the island was struck by famine. A later UN report spoke of four million victims of famine and forced labour across Indonesia; historians treat the figure as an estimate that cannot be verified precisely. Imamura did not see those years on Java: in November 1942 he took command of the Eighth Area Army at Rabaul.

Its place in the war

The fall of Java brought to an end the campaign in the Dutch East Indies and the whole of the first, southern phase of the Japanese offensive. Within three months of the outbreak of the Pacific War Japan had taken Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and most of the Philippines, and the first joint Allied command, set up at the Arcadia Conference, had ended in defeat. Japan had won the oil, rubber and tin for which it had gone to war, and once the wrecked wells and refineries had been rebuilt, oil from the archipelago fuelled its fleet until American submarines cut the shipping lanes. The limit of the Japanese sphere now reached the Timor Sea and the Indian Ocean, and in Australia an invasion was feared. The defence shifted to New Guinea and the Indian Ocean, and soon General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia from the Philippines to lead a counter-offensive from there. The Allies did not retake Java itself before the end of the war; the Japanese gave it up only after their surrender in September 1945.

For the Netherlands and Queen Wilhelmina’s government in London, the loss of Java was the loss of its most valuable possession and of the source of revenue that for three centuries had determined the country’s standing in the world. In December 1942 the Queen promised in a radio broadcast that relations with the colonies would be rebuilt after the war, but it was already too late. The swift Dutch defeat shattered the myth of the invincibility of the white rulers, and the Japanese occupation, cruel as it was, gave Indonesian leaders organisation, propaganda and their first armed units. On 17 August 1945, two days after Japan announced its surrender, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesian independence in Jakarta. The Dutch returned, but after four years of fighting and negotiation they recognised the sovereignty of the new state in December 1949. March 1942 proved to be the end of the Dutch East Indies.