Cumberland
Towards the end of September 1945, one and a half months after the war had ended, the first Allied military personnel set foot on Java. The arrival of HMS Cumberland and HMNS Tromp in Tandjong Priok, the port of Batavia, was hardly the way we had anticipated being liberated by our victorious Allies. The tiny force was barely sufficient to take over Tjideng Camp guard duty from the Japanese army who for one and a half months had continued to guard the gate, but now from the threat of Indonesian rebels.
Guards
Elsewhere on Java, Japanese soldiers continued their new task of “protecting us” from former fellow citizens, an utterly bewildering turn of events. Seldom in history has a political weathervane swung so swiftly from one extreme to another. The Korean and Japanese chaps who had spent three and a half years trying to keep us locked up in the camp as enemy aliens, immediately after the armistice was signed, changed their role, and kept us locked up under Allied orders “for our safety”.
The tsunami of Japanese invasion was now replaced by the typhoon winds of political change. Within three and a half years life on Java had morphed from colonial oppression through military tyranny to descend into anarchy.
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Which Allies came to the camp to, for lack of a better term, liberate it? My mother in law doesnt remember but alternately says the Americans or the English perhaps because they spoke Eng. thanks
Hi Eileen,
The Americans never came. The first allies to turn up in Batavia ( Jakarta) was a tiny platoon of RAPWI personnel, parachuted in. Their function was to size up the relief requirements. After that HMS Cumberland a Britsh cruiser arrived in the latter half of September, (accompanied by a Dutch Cruiser) and the Cumberland sent a detachment of sailors to Tjideng to relieve the Japanese as camp guards for a week or two. The situation was bizarre, as I explain in my book, and it caused a great deal of grief among the Tjideng inmates, who realized since Aug 23 , 1945 , that the Japanese had capitulated a week earlier, but saw absolutely no evidence of this in terms of a changed military presence for over a month thereafter.
Dear mr. van Oort, On our website Dapperemoeders is announced that my book will be published in Tokio. I wrote a book of the youth memories of a child of 5 years old. It is called “Mogen wij altijd in dit kamp blijven?” It is translated into English, but not yet published. Mr. van Nouhuys, the former Dutch ambassador in Tokio, who also was a camp victim wrote a word of recommendation for Japanese people.
Meanwhile we are busy making a film of the Japanese occupation.
With kind greetings,
Henriette van Raalte – Netherlands, The Hague
My step-father Wing Commander Thomas S Tull headed the RAPWI platoon. As Officer in charge of a parachuting team he was dropped at Magelang, Central Java. His orders were to safeguard and help the 24000 APWI’s (Allied Prisoners of War and Internees) until the arrival of the Allied Forces to accept the Japanese surrender. He met my Dutch mother, who was by then divorced from my father, they fell in love, and they eventually married in Amsterdam. I was four years old at the time and within the year we moved to England where I went to school. My mother, brother and I were lucky and just avoided being thrown into camp when the war with Japan ended. My father, a dentist, was put into camp but survived. He remarried and spent the rest of his life in Amsterdam. My brother who is 5 yrs. older than I has just written his memories of our lives in Bandoeng during the war. He was born in 1936.