The Japanese invasion of Java

On the evening of 28 February 1942, shortly after ten, Japanese transports began entering Bantam Bay at the north-western tip of Java. They carried the headquarters of Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura’s Sixteenth Army and tens of thousands of soldiers who were to capture the last large island of the Dutch East Indies still in Allied hands. At the same time, entirely by chance, two Allied cruisers that had survived the defeat in the Java Sea the day before were passing the entrance to the bay. A few hours later both lay on the bottom, and Japanese infantry was coming ashore on the beaches of Java at three points. The last act had begun of the campaign in which Japan seized the oil and raw materials for which it had gone to war.

Chronologies record the invasion under 28 February, and that date is largely justified: that evening the convoys dropped anchor off the coast, and the Battle of the Sunda Strait began before midnight. The landings themselves, however, took place after midnight, in the first hours of 1 March, which is why most studies, Dutch ones included, date the start of the fighting on Java to the night of 28 February–1 March or to 1 March itself.

The last island of the Malay Barrier

Java was the heart of the Dutch colony. More than 40 million people lived on an island smaller than Poland; the Governor-General, Alidius Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, resided in Batavia, and Bandung housed the headquarters, depots and workshops of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL). From mid-January the Allied ABDA Command of General Archibald Wavell had also been based at Lembang near Bandung, charged with defending the so-called Malay Barrier, the chain of islands from Malaya to Timor.

In February that barrier fell apart link by link. After the landings on Tarakan and Celebes the Japanese advanced in bounds, and each airfield they captured brought their aircraft closer to Java. As early as 3 February their bombers struck Surabaya and the airfields of eastern Java for the first time. On 14 February paratroops landed near Palembang on Sumatra, and the next day Singapore surrendered. On 19 and 20 February Bali and Timor fell, cutting Java off from the air ferry route from Australia, and on 19 February Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin. Java was surrounded on the west, north and east.

The British and Americans then concluded that the island could not be held and had no intention of sending fresh troops there. The Australian government of John Curtin demanded that the divisions returning from the Middle East, some of which had originally been destined for Java and Sumatra, be brought home. On 25 February Wavell, on the instructions of London and Washington, flew to India, and ABDA Command ceased to exist. The Dutch took over the defence: Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten on land and Vice-Admiral Conrad Helfrich at sea. They were determined to fight, although they knew no help would come.

The defenders’ forces

On paper the defenders were not few. According to Dutch studies, ter Poorten had on Java some 25,000 regular KNIL troops, organised into three weak divisions, and several tens of thousands of men from the militia, the town guards and other auxiliary formations, poorly armed and almost untrained. Most KNIL soldiers were Javanese, Ambonese, Menadonese and other inhabitants of the archipelago; many of them had no reason to die for the colonial authorities.

Alongside them stood Allied units, most of them a random assortment. Major General Hervey Sitwell’s British, some 5,500 men, were mainly anti-aircraft artillery and RAF ground staff evacuated from Malaya and Sumatra, reinforced by a squadron of light tanks. Brigadier Arthur Blackburn’s Australians, about 3,000 men according to various sources, known after their commander as Blackforce, had been formed from a machine-gun battalion, a pioneer battalion and stragglers from Singapore. The only American ground unit was the 2nd Battalion of the 131st Field Artillery Regiment from the Texas National Guard, originally bound for the Philippines.

The situation was worst in what decided everything in this war: air power and sea power. After weeks of air fighting over Sumatra and Java, the Allied air forces on the island were down to a few dozen serviceable aircraft. Reinforcements did not arrive. On 27 February Japanese bombers sank the old Langley south of Java, carrying 32 ready-to-fly P-40 fighters to the island, and the crates holding another 27 fighters that the American freighter Sea Witch unloaded at the port of Tjilatjap (PL) on 28 February were destroyed soon afterwards, before anyone had time to assemble them.

Two convoys

The Japanese plan was simple and based on superiority. The Sixteenth Army was to strike from two directions at once, so that the defenders would have to divide their forces. The western convoy, 56 transports, left Cam Ranh Bay in Indochina on 18 February. It carried Imamura’s headquarters, Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama’s 2nd Division and Colonel Toshinari Shōji’s detachment, drawn from the 38th Division, the same that had taken Hong Kong in December. It was covered by Rear Admiral Kenzaburō Hara’s destroyer flotilla with the light cruiser Natori and by the heavy cruisers of Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita. The eastern convoy, some 40 ships carrying Lieutenant General Yuitsu Tsuchihashi’s 48th Division and Major General Shizuo Sakaguchi’s detachment, sailed from the Philippines through the Makassar Strait towards the north coast of eastern Java.

Helfrich threw everything he had against the eastern convoy. The Combined Striking Force was commanded by the Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman. On 27 February his ships clashed with the convoy’s escort in the Battle of the Java Sea. In the night action Doorman was killed, and with him the cruisers De Ruyter and Java and three destroyers were lost. The Japanese did not lose a single transport, and their landing was delayed by only a day. Among the survivors of the Allied force were the American heavy cruiser Houston and the Australian light cruiser Perth, which put into Tanjung Priok, the port of Batavia, on the afternoon of 28 February.

The Battle of the Sunda Strait

There was little fuel or ammunition at Tanjung Priok. On the evening of 28 February both cruisers were ordered to pass through the Sunda Strait to Tjilatjap on the south coast, and from there possibly on into the Indian Ocean. The senior officer, Captain Hector Waller of Perth, was in command; Houston was commanded by Captain Albert Rooks. Reconnaissance reported the way clear; at most, Australian corvettes were expected. The Dutch destroyer Evertsen, which was to accompany them, left port two hours later.

At about 11 p.m., off Bantam Bay, Perth sighted the silhouette of a ship, which was at first taken for one of their own corvettes. It was a Japanese destroyer. The cruisers had run straight into the western convoy, which was in the middle of landing troops. In the Battle of the Sunda Strait they shelled the transports and fought off destroyer attacks for more than an hour, until the heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma joined the action. The Japanese fired dozens of long-range Type 93 torpedoes. Just after midnight, now 1 March, Perth sank after being hit by several torpedoes, and Houston soon afterwards. Both captains were killed. According to the most commonly cited figures, about 690 men from Houston were killed and 368 survivors were taken prisoner; Perth lost 375 men. Rooks was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Evertsen, which ran into two Japanese destroyers, was beached on fire.

Some of the Japanese torpedoes missed their targets and struck their own ships lying in the bay. Most probably it was a salvo from Mogami that sank a minesweeper and several transports, among them Ryūjō Maru, which had Imamura himself on board. The commander of the invasion army had to jump into the water and, by his own account, spent several hours afloat before reaching the shore covered in oil.

Landings at three points

The battle did not halt the landing. At about one in the morning of 1 March groups of the 2nd Division began coming ashore on the coast near Merak, right on the strait, and in Bantam Bay. Their task was to march swiftly on Batavia and Buitenzorg, the seat of the Governor-General, so as to split the Allied forces between the capital and Bandung. More than two hundred kilometres further east, near Eretan Wetan, halfway along the north coast of western Java, Shōji’s detachment, a reinforced infantry regiment with tanks, landed. According to Dutch studies, some 23,500 Japanese troops came ashore in western Java alone.

In the east of the island, some 150 kilometres west of Surabaya, the 48th Division, reinforced by Sakaguchi’s detachment, began landing near the village of Kragan at dawn on 1 March. Its regiments moved on Rembang, on the oilfields near Cepu and on Surabaya, while Sakaguchi’s detachment was to cross the middle of the island to Tjilatjap, the only large port on the south coast through which the Allies could still evacuate people. A Dutch squadron of motorised cavalry that tried to attack the beachhead was quickly destroyed.

The defenders could not defend the whole coast and did not try. Ter Poorten kept his main forces inland, counting on counter-attacks from the air and from the landward side. But there were almost no aircraft left, and the Japanese air force controlled the skies over Java from the very first hour.

Kalidjati

The smallest landing turned out to be the most dangerous. On 1 March itself, a few hours after coming ashore, Shōji’s detachment attacked Kalidjati airfield, today Kalijati, where British bombers were based. The defence, made up mainly of RAF ground staff and a small Dutch detachment, was taken by surprise and overwhelmed; according to British accounts, the Japanese killed some of the airmen captured there. The airfield lay a few dozen kilometres from Bandung. The very next day Japanese fighters and ground-attack aircraft flew in, and from then on they could be over the centre of the defence within a quarter of an hour.

The Dutch understood what this meant. On 2 and 3 March they launched counter-attacks on Kalidjati from the direction of Subang, with light tanks, but these broke down under air attack. In the west the Australian Blackforce and the Texan gunners delayed the 2nd Division’s advance for two days at Leuwiliang before having to withdraw to avoid being cut off.

Eight days to capitulation

The following days brought the rapid disintegration of the defence. Batavia was declared an open city and the Japanese entered it on 5 March; Buitenzorg fell in the same days. Shōji’s detachment broke through the Dutch positions in the Tjiater Pass and on 7 March emerged onto the Bandung plateau, where tens of thousands of civilians had taken refuge. In the east the 48th Division took Rembang and Cepu, crossed the Solo river and on 5 March captured the bridge at Kediri, while Sakaguchi’s units entered Yogyakarta. On 8 March the Japanese were in Surabaya and Tjilatjap. The Dutch demolished the installations of the naval base and the ports and from 2 March scuttled their own ships and vessels, and Helfrich dissolved the Allied naval forces, ordering the American and British ships to break through to Australia and Ceylon. In the waters south of Java, however, Chūichi Nagumo’s carriers and cruisers lay in wait; in the first days of March they sank more than a dozen escaping ships and vessels, and on 5 March they bombed Tjilatjap. On 1 March the British cruiser Exeter was also sunk in the Java Sea, together with two destroyers.

On 8 March the Governor-General and ter Poorten went to Kalidjati to meet Imamura. The Japanese commander demanded the unconditional surrender of all forces on Java and threatened to bomb Bandung. The next day Dutch radio announced that the KNIL was laying down its arms. The British and Australians, who had wanted to go on fighting in the mountains, signed the capitulation at Bandung on 12 March. According to the most frequently cited figures, more than 80,000 Allied soldiers from across the archipelago went into captivity. Vice-Admiral Helfrich managed to fly out to Ceylon, and the Lieutenant Governor-General, Hubertus van Mook, to Australia; Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer himself remained on Java (in Bandung since February) and spent the rest of the war in captivity.

Japan conquered Java in eight days, even though on paper the defenders outnumbered the invaders. The decisive factors were command of the air and the sea, the dispersal of Allied forces across countless islands, and the fact that much of the archipelago’s population had no intention of defending the colonial authorities.

Place in the war

The fall of Java closed the first, victorious phase of the Pacific War for Japan. Within three months of the Arcadia Conference, at which ABDA Command had been created, the Japanese had conquered Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, and the first experiment with a unified Allied command had ended in defeat. Ahead of them now lay the Indian Ocean, Burma, New Guinea and the road to Australia, where an invasion was feared in the spring of 1942. Once the damaged installations had been restored, the oil of Sumatra, Borneo and Java fuelled the Japanese fleet for years, until American submarines cut the sea lanes.

For the Netherlands and Queen Wilhelmina’s government in London it was the loss of its most valuable possession, and for the inhabitants the beginning of three and a half years of occupation. The Japanese confined some hundred thousand European and Eurasian civilians, women and children included, in camps, where according to Dutch estimates more than ten thousand of them died. Prisoners of war from Java were sent to build the Burma Railway and to the mines in Japan; many survivors of Houston and Perth ended up there too. Imamura pursued a milder policy on Java than Tokyo expected and courted the cooperation of the Indonesian elites, but the island’s economy was subordinated to the needs of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Javanese forced labourers, the romusha, between 200,000 and 500,000 according to various estimates, were shipped off to work all over South-East Asia, women were forced into sexual slavery, and in the last years of the occupation Java was struck by famine. According to a later UN report, some four million people died in Indonesia during the occupation from hunger and forced labour; it is an estimate that historians have not been able to verify precisely.

In the autumn of 1942 Imamura took command of the Eighth Area Army at Rabaul, from where he directed the fighting in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. After the war an Australian military court sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment for crimes committed by soldiers under his command. On Java the Japanese, seeking to win over the population, released the leaders of the national movement, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, from Dutch exile and prison and drew them into collaboration. It was they who on 17 August 1945, two days after Japan announced its surrender, proclaimed Indonesian independence in Jakarta, the former Batavia. The Dutch, who returned to Java after the war, never regained the colony: after four years of the struggle for independence they recognised Indonesian sovereignty in 1949. The defeat of March 1942 ended more than three centuries of Dutch rule in the archipelago.