The Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies

On the evening of 10 January 1942 a Dutch flying boat sighted a Japanese convoy heading for the island of Tarakan off the east coast of Borneo. The garrison commander, Lieutenant Colonel Simon de Waal, gave the order for which preparations had been made for years: engineers blew up the wells, pipelines and storage tanks, and that night a wall of fire rose over the island. By its light, at about 3 a.m. on 11 January, Japanese infantry began to come ashore on Tarakan’s east coast. That same morning, several hundred kilometres further east, naval infantry landed near Manado at the northern tip of Celebes, and over a nearby airfield the parachutes of Japan’s first ever airborne assault opened. The Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies had begun. So had the struggle for the country whose wealth was the very reason Tokyo had decided to go to war.

The oil the war was fought for

The Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, were in 1941 one of the richest colonies in the world: rubber, tin, bauxite, copra, sugar and, above all, oil. According to pre-war statistics, the wells of Sumatra, Borneo and Java yielded about 8 million tons of oil a year, more than ten times Japan’s own output. The most valuable fields were on Tarakan, around Balikpapan on Borneo and near Palembang on Sumatra, worked chiefly by companies of the Shell group. Tarakan alone, a small swampy island with some 700 wells, produced by some accounts about 6 million barrels a year, roughly a sixth of Japanese consumption.

Japan first tried to obtain these resources by diplomacy. In the autumn of 1940 a mission led by the Minister of Commerce, Ichizō Kobayashi, arrived in Batavia, and after him the former foreign minister Kenkichi Yoshizawa negotiated there. The Dutch, although their country was occupied by Germany and their government and Queen Wilhelmina were in London, conceded little, and in June 1941 the talks were broken off. When, after the occupation of southern Indochina, the United States froze Japanese assets and halted oil deliveries, the authorities in Batavia joined the blockade. The Imperial Navy began to live off its reserves, which by the staff’s calculations would last two years. The war plan adopted in the autumn of 1941 provided for Malaya, the Philippines and British Borneo to fall first, and then, in a second stage, the oil-bearing Dutch islands. Neither made sense without the other: a country that had gone to war to get oil had to get it quickly, and preferably intact.

A war Japan did not declare

Many chronologies carry an entry under 10 January 1942 stating that Japan declared war on the Netherlands. The matter was more tangled. The Imperial Rescript of 8 December 1941, which proclaimed war with the United States and Britain, deliberately left out the Netherlands: Tokyo hoped that the Dutch would remain passive, perhaps even hand over the Indies without a fight. Instead, the Dutch government and the authorities in Batavia declared a state of war with Japan as early as 8 December, and on 10 December the Dutch minister in Tokyo handed the Japanese government a note stating that, since Japan had attacked the Netherlands’ allies, a state of war existed between the two countries. According to Japanese studies, Tokyo went on trying for several weeks, through Switzerland, to induce the Dutch to accept a “peaceful” entry of its troops, but to no avail.

There was no separate Japanese declaration of war. When its troops were already landing on Tarakan and Celebes, the Japanese government announced that “a state of war has come into existence” between Japan and the Netherlands. Western sources usually date this statement to 11 January and Japanese ones to 12 January, partly because of the time difference. The date of 10 January, repeated in chronologies and in some sources, finds no confirmation. The question of who declared war first came up again after the war before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East: the defence argued that Japan had not waged a war of aggression against the Netherlands, but the tribunal held the Dutch declaration to be an act of self-defence against an attack that would have come anyway.

British Borneo undefended

The first link in the drive south, the capture of Miri, Seria and Kuching in December 1941, was forged in the British part of Borneo. At the beginning of January Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s detachment completed the work. Before the war the British had decided not to defend North Borneo, Brunei and Labuan, and the North Borneo volunteers had been sent home to avoid pointless casualties. So when chronologies record under 9 January that the Japanese “met no serious resistance”, this is something of an understatement: there was almost none at all.

On 1 January 1942 two platoons of Japanese infantry landed on Labuan (some sources give 3 January). The British Resident, Hugh Humphrey, who had managed to destroy the aviation fuel stocks, was, by his own account, beaten by the Japanese and displayed to the population in a cage for a day. From there they crossed to the mainland and set off for Jesselton, today’s Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the west coast of North Borneo. They occupied the town, which the British officials had already left, between 6 and 9 January according to various accounts, disarming a small police detachment at Beaufort on the way. Two companies under Lieutenant Colonel Watanabe then sailed east along the coast in fishing boats. On the morning of 19 January they landed unopposed at Sandakan, the seat of the colony’s government. Governor Robert Smith surrendered the territory and refused to go on governing under Japanese supervision, for which he was interned. The Japanese freed hundreds of their own nationals who had been interned since December, and by the end of January they had also taken Tawau and Lahad Datu. The whole British part of the island had fallen into their hands without a single combat casualty on the conquerors’ side.

Tarakan: the burning wells

The attack on the Dutch part of the archipelago began simultaneously from two directions. All the ground forces earmarked for the conquest of the Indies, the 16th Army, were commanded by Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, who came under Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi’s Southern Army. The naval forces were directed by Vice Admiral Ibō Takahashi. Tarakan was attacked by Major General Shizuo Sakaguchi’s detachment, a reinforced army brigade that had taken Davao on Mindanao and the island of Jolo in December and now set out southwards from those bases. It was accompanied by naval infantry from Kure, and the convoy was covered by Rear Admiral Shōji Nishimura’s destroyer squadron.

The island’s garrison numbered, according to various sources, between 1,300 and 1,400 soldiers of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL), with coastal batteries and minefields on the approaches to the harbour. Its main task, indeed, was not to defend the island but to cover the destruction of the oil installations. This was carried out meticulously: according to Dutch accounts, by 10 p.m. on 10 January some 100,000 tons of oil were in flames, and blowing up the pipes in the boreholes made production impossible for a long time.

The Japanese did not land where the defenders expected them. The Dutch defences faced west, towards the port of Lingkas, but the landing came from the swampy east coast. Throughout 11 January there was fighting on the eastern edge of the oilfields, where the Dutch re-formed their line several times. During the night the Japanese infantry broke it with attacks on the barracks. On the night of 11–12 January the Dutch minelayer Prins van Oranje, trying to slip away from the island, ran into the destroyer Yamakaze and sank after a ten-minute fight; 102 of her 118 crew were killed. On the morning of 12 January de Waal, without supplies and with no communications to his batteries, sent out an envoy and surrendered.

The surrender, however, did not reach the Karoengan battery at the southern tip of the island. At noon on 12 January, despite warnings from Sakaguchi himself, six Japanese minesweepers entered the channel leading to the harbour. The battery’s guns sank two of them, W-13 and W-14; according to Japanese figures, 156 sailors were killed. Japanese infantry did not take the battery until 13 January. In the fighting for Tarakan the Japanese navy lost about 250 men in all, the army fewer than ten. Some studies put the Dutch dead at about 300, with about 900 taken prisoner.

Manado and the first Japanese paratroops

Celebes was a task for the navy alone. The Minahasa peninsula, at whose tip Manado lies, had no oil, but it had an airfield at Langoan and a seaplane base on Lake Tondano, needed as staging posts on the way south. Rear Admiral Takeo Takagi’s force, directed on the spot by Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka, put ashore two groups of naval infantry from Sasebo at about 4 a.m. on 11 January – according to Japanese figures some 3,200 men in all, with light tanks: one on either side of Manado, the other near Kema on the east coast. The Dutch garrison under Major B. F. A. Schillmöller numbered about 1,500 men, mostly poorly trained reservists, local militia and home guard. Manado fell before 9 a.m. The defenders fell back into the interior of the peninsula, delaying the Japanese on the roads; at Tinoor they immobilised three tanks with a felled tree and machine-gun fire.

At about 9.50 a.m. Mitsubishi G3M transport aircraft appeared over Langoan airfield carrying Commander Toyoaki Horiuchi’s 1st Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force from Yokosuka. 334 paratroopers jumped. It was the first airborne assault in combat in Japanese history, and it came at the price of a tragic mistake: on the way, Japanese seaplanes covering the invasion took the transports for the enemy and shot one of them down with twelve paratroopers on board. At the airfield, defenders with machine guns inflicted heavy losses on the paratroopers before they could reach their weapons containers. By midday, however, the airfield was in Japanese hands, and by the evening the lake base as well. On 12 January a second group was dropped, and the paratroopers linked up with the units coming up from the coast. Schillmöller withdrew the remnants of his force westwards to wage guerrilla warfare, but in the open country of Minahasa, without communications or supplies, his units quickly melted away. According to Japanese studies, news of the naval paratroopers’ success was held back so as not to steal a march on the army, which was preparing an airborne assault of its own. That came on 14 February at Palembang, and it was this one that entered Japanese propaganda.

Crimes against prisoners

Both landings of 11 January were marked by crimes against prisoners. On Tarakan, on the very first night, Japanese infantry who had captured a Dutch company that had lost its way in the jungle killed some of the prisoners on the spot, and tied up and bayoneted those who refused to show them the way. The worst, however, was the revenge for the sunken minesweepers. According to the most commonly cited findings, on 18 January 215 soldiers, mainly from the Karoengan and Peningki batteries, were taken out of the prisoner-of-war camp and drowned in the sea near the spot where the ships had gone down; according to another account they were beheaded or thrown bound into the swamps. Post-war investigations could not establish exactly how the crime was carried out, but the fact of the executions is beyond doubt. On Celebes, Horiuchi’s paratroopers, enraged by their losses, murdered a dozen or so captured defenders of Langoan airfield, Dutch and Minahasan. It was a pattern that would be repeated in the following weeks of the campaign.

ABDA: a joint command in a losing position

In those same days the Allies were building the command that was to defend the so-called Malay Barrier, the chain of islands running from Malaya through Sumatra and Java to Timor. At the Arcadia Conference in Washington it had been agreed that the whole area from Burma to the Philippines and north-western Australia would come under a single command, ABDA (American-British-Dutch-Australian). At its head was placed the British General Archibald Wavell, until then Commander-in-Chief in India. Wavell flew into Singapore on 7 January, formally assumed command on 15 January, and on 18 January moved his headquarters to Lembang near Bandung on Java. Land forces were commanded by the Dutch Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten, naval forces by the American Admiral Thomas Hart and air forces by the British Air Marshal Richard Peirse, while General Henry Pownall became chief of staff.

On paper this was a joint Allied staff with wide powers. In practice Wavell was taking over the scattered forces of four states, with different equipment, different priorities and no common communications. The British thought first and foremost of Singapore, the Americans of the Philippines, the Australians of their own coast, the Dutch of Java. The air forces were few and obsolete, and the fleet, after the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse, had not a single capital ship. Ranged against it were Japanese carrier forces, and with every island taken the Japanese air forces moved their bases further south. Tarakan was the best example: Japanese aircraft were already flying from its repaired airfield on 16 January, although the oil wells were not brought back into production until June.

Place in the war

The landings of 11 January opened a campaign that in less than two months stripped the Dutch of their Asian empire. The Japanese advanced through the islands in bounds, each time under air cover from previously captured airfields: on 24 January they landed at Balikpapan, where American destroyers sank several transports but did not stop the invasion, and at Kendari on Celebes, and at the end of the month on Ambon. In February Makassar, Palembang, Bali and Timor fell. On 27 February, in the Battle of the Java Sea, the Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman was killed and most of the Allied fleet was lost, and on 8–9 March ter Poorten capitulated on Java. The ABDA command had already been dissolved on 25 February, after the fall of Singapore. The first experiment with a unified Allied command ended in defeat, although its lessons were put to use in later years.

Japan had won what it had gone to war for, but not in the condition it had expected. Dutch engineers on Tarakan, at Balikpapan and near Palembang destroyed as much as they could, and restoring production took months. After that, however, oil from the Indies flowed to Japan and for years fuelled its fleet, until American submarines and aircraft cut the sea lanes. For the people of the archipelago the occupation meant forced labour, hunger and the internment of some hundred thousand European civilians, but also the end of more than three hundred years of Dutch presence: the Japanese freed the leaders of the nationalist movement from exile and prison, among them Sukarno, who on 17 August 1945, two days after Japan’s surrender, proclaimed Indonesia’s independence. The Netherlands never regained its colony on the old terms. All this began on the night when the oil the Japanese needed so badly was burning over Tarakan.