Fighting Tops to Flattops

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Fighting Tops to Flattops: A Memoir of My Time in the Royal Netherlands Navy

By

Hendrik De Jong

Trans.

Matthew Sievey


Translator’s Note

    Hendrik De Jong wasn’t the modern reincarnation of Michel de Ruyter. While he achieved flag rank and held high office in the Royal Netherlands Navy, he was never regarded as a great fighting admiral like Nelson. Nor was he armed with exceptional foresight like Admiral Fisher. He was an able combat commander, a well-regarded divisional officer, a respected ship’s captain, and a solid flag officer. Indeed, De Jong was like most naval officers then and today: a cool, efficient, professional sea officer that knew his business inside and out. 

    What makes this “ruthlessly competent” Dutch officer special is that he was an active participant in some of the fiercest naval fighting of the 20th century. He was also a witness to some the most profound changes in naval warfare. Moreover, he had the good sense to leave a memoir about all of it.  

    While not covered in everlasting fame the way some naval officers are, his career as a perfectly ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times makes his account well worth a read. Yet I also feel strongly that aspiring midshipmen and naval cadets would profit from the example of a “ruthlessly competent” officer. While every aspiring naval officer ought to strive to be the next Lord Nelson, I think it does no harm to hold figures such as De Jong as the standard to which they be ashamed to fall short of.  

    I have endeavored to translate De Jong’s own words into English in as exact a manner as possible. This was no easy task, as De Jong’s style and even his subject matter is inconsistent. Some chapters contained extensive discussions of his own personal doings; others are filled with a more narrative account of what was going on in the world around him. Sometimes he addressed his readers directly while in other places he adopted the passive-voice one uses in official reports. I have tried to capture as much of his own style and flair, but I fear I cannot do him full justice. 

    I have found it necessary to add in the occasional annotation. In some places this is done to clarify other Dutch officers or to elaborate on some point that would be familiar to Dutch readers but not to a foreign reader. In other cases, my annotations add information that De Jong was either unaware of or was classified at the time the memoir was originally published. I tried to restrain myself from offering a running commentary on what he said, but I leave it up to you to determine if I was successful in that regard. 

Matthew Sievey

Table of Contents
Front Matter: 1
Chapter 1: 1
Chapter 2: 1

[ieshima]

Oh, I am looking forward to this. If it is anything like your SaI AARs back on the RtW1 forums, this is going to be very, very good.

[cv10]

    I was born in Palembang on the island of Sumatra in 1880. My father was a doctor in the East Indies Army and was surgeon to the garrison there. He met my mother during a leave in Batavia. She was the daughter of a minor colonial official, and they married in 1879. I was their first child, and I eventually came to have 5 brothers and sisters. Life in the tropics was not unpleasant to an unaware child. However, my father was an older bachelor when he married and long service in the Indies had eroded his heath. He was invalided out of the service in 1884.

    We relocated to Leiden, where my father had been born. He opened a medical practice and we lived a middle-class existence that was quite comfortable. Yet this was not to last. His poor heath from years of service in the tropics resulted in his premature death in 1893. While my mother did receive a pension, it was insufficient to support all 7 of us and so we lived in genteel poverty.

    This spurred me to join the Navy. I figured that it was my responsibility as oldest child to do my part in easing our financial distress. Given our poverty, university was not an option. However, my mother was able to use her social connections with her own family’s friends and my father’s old comrades to secure an appointment as a midshipman in the Navy or an officer cadet for the East Indies Army. Given my father’s death from long service in the Indies, I decided that the Navy was the safer option. I must admit that after 60 years of hindsight, I’m still astounded by how naïve I was in thinking that, though I’ll still take open boats and the custom of the sea over tigers and vipers! I entered the naval academy as the youngest cadet in the Class of 1900.

    The late 1890s were great years to be an aspiring sea officer. With the British eyeing the Boer republics in South Africa, the French marching around North Africa, the never-sufficiently damned Kaiser running about declaring ‘Die Welt ist mein Feld’ and the Japanese beating the daylights out of the Qing Empire, the country no longer felt safe in its traditional unarmed neutrality. For the first time, the States-General seemed to realize just how defenseless we were. Consequently, the Navy was in a state of rapid expansion when I joined.

    Unfortunately for me, life as a naval cadet kept me too busy to fully appreciate what I was seeing. Amidst the Mount Everest of class work we were expected to complete, every cadet was dragged to the Den Helder shipyard to see the home-built units of the new fleet being built. Of most interest to me at the time were the Amsterdam-class cruisers.

    They were sleek and fast, though I didn’t realize at the time just how lightly armed they were.¹ The Amsterdams were meant to be the eyes and ears of the fleet, scouting well ahead of the main body as we learned in our elementary tactics course. I was to have much more experience with them in my career, and I can say that I knew them both man and boy. Some of them ended up with enough of my blood mixed in with their steel for me to include in my family list.

    I also saw a number of the Rembrandt-class oceangoing torpedo boat and the Noordam-class minesweepers under construction. In truth, they really didn’t interest me much. It was only later in my service that I came to a true appreciation of their work and value. Some of them outlasted me in active naval service.

    However, I had to wait until my third year to see the true pride of the fleet: the Zeeland-class battleships. They were built in British shipyards and were some of the largest and heavily armored ships in the world when they were launched. Their 12-inch guns were the best that money could buy, and they carried an absurd amount of ammunition.² The States General provided enough money for two full squadrons of them: 10 in the original order.

    The Navy was still wrapped up in its growing pains from this massive expansion as I finished up my studies. During my midshipman’s cruise on the old Amsterdam herself, it was apparent from all the technicians and shore officers aboard that something was afoot with the cruiser fleet. It was only later that I learned that the Navy was designing a more powerful cruiser, the venerable Oosterhout-class, to complement the numerous Amsterdam-class cruisers.³ 

    The fleet was working through its growing pains when I was commissioned in the Spring of 1900. My first posting was to Hs. Ms. Eindhoven, an Amsterdam-class cruiser. It was quite a good posting at that. The Eindhoven was a part of the Home Fleet, so there wasn’t the heat, sweat, and discomfort of the respective Indies stations. Moreover, Eindhoven proved to be a happy ship, and a good place for a newly minted Lieutenant (3rd Class) to start his career.

Endnotes

1: The high rate of fire of Amsterdam-class's 4-inch gun armament was intended to bury enemy cruisers in a hail of shells. However, the class was outgunned by most other cruiser classes of the time.

2: The Zeelands carried in excess of 180 shells per gun. It was hoped that this would enable them to keep engaged with enemy ships that had fired off all their ammunition.

3: The heavier armament of  Oosterhout-class was meant to give Dutch cruiser squadrons a more even chance against opposing cruisers. The idea being for the Oosterhouts to engage at range while the Amsterdams closed with the enemy.

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    In the grand scheme of things, a newly minted Lieutenant (3rd Class) is only marginally more useful than a newly enlisted sailor. That’s only the case as the officers have at least had 4 years of military discipline beat into them. Still, I was hardly of much use to anyone when I went aboard Hr.Ms. Eindhoven in May of 1900. Little was going on at the time, though some riots had occurred in the South Pacific and there’d been rumors of a deployment. Life in Home Fleet was relatively tranquil.

    Due to budgetary limitations, the battleships were kept in reserve and the Amsterdam-class cruisers were the biggest ships we had afloat then. It fell to Eindhoven and her sisters to carry out the multitude of port visits, official inspections by the Admiralty, and the occasional squadron review for a high-and-mighty or two from the Naval committees in the States General. For the most part it was routine.

    One incident worth mentioning was the Palladia Incident. I witnessed it myself. For those unfamiliar with it, the Russian cruiser Palladia came to Den Helder on a port visit. Queen Wilhelmina was looking for a husband, and the Palladia had one of the Russian princes aboard her, him having ‘come a-courting’ if you’ll forgive the colloquialism. At any rate, he was a ‘trained’ naval officer who had no sense of his duty or navigation. In an effort to impress us, he attempted to conn the ship to her moorings himself, and almost rammed the battleship Hr. Ms. Zeeland, then the flagship of Home Fleet.

    Unfortunately, the Zeeland had a number of newspaper journalists aboard. Both the Zeeland’s captain and old Admiral de Graaf fired a few choice words at the Palladia and her captain’s seamanship within earshot of the newspapermen.¹ The headlines appeared the following day, and the Russian Government was greatly displeased about having a prince’s intelligence, legitimacy, and his mother’s species questioned. It may seem like a minor incident, but this affair has often been mentioned in the history books as one of the factors in the deterioration of Russo-Dutch relation. Personally, I think its role has been overblown; it was a small enough affair, and there were far more serious problems with our relations with the Russians than that. 

    Little happened between the Palladia Incident and the Fall, but things became much livelier in October. The naval yards at Den Helder finished work on two new cruisers while the British delivered two more Zeeland-class battleships. There were also a lot of new technical developments being made. Eindhoven provided the gun crews that tested one of these, the new coincidence rangefinder, and I had the good fortune to be one of the junior officers involved in the testing. 

    This activity continued into 1901. The first in a series of expansions of the naval yards at Den Helder and Rotterdam were completed, and I saw more Oosterhout-class cruisers on the slips whenever the Eindhoven made port. The old Kuyper Cabinet was turfed out of office in favor of Groeneveld and his Liberal National Unionists. They advocated what seemed to be a mutually contradictory policy of social reform at home while championing a hawkish foreign policy. Some of the senior officers in the fleet seemed perplexed by this. I was too junior to have opinions.

    The new cabinet provided more money for the Navy. This enabled a big triumph in April when the Naval Gun Factory developed an 11-inch gun, which meant we could theoretically build battleships in our own yards.2  However, official policy remained to order them from abroad, and to this end the Cabinet had to placate the British when a few blockheaded soldiers in the Batavia garrison caused a severe crisis with Great Britain in the Cholmondeley Affair.³ 

    Aside from the occasional glimpse of these events, I didn’t take much notice of them at the time. My time was concentrated on running my own division aboard the Eindhoven and learning as much as I could about aiming and firing the 4-inch guns I had responsibility for in battle. We weren’t allowed to do much live firing with ammunition being so precious expensive, but Captain Prins didn’t let us use that as an excuse not to drill hard. During my time aboard Eindhoven, I don’t think more than 2 days went by with him sending all of us scrambling to our action stations at some inconvenient time.⁴  

    So this continued for most of 1901. Our port visits to Russia ceased as tensions rose to new heights. It was plain to me and anyone else with eyes that could see the 20 additional Rembrandt-class torpedo boats being laid down in Den Helder that we were arming for war. The Cabinet rejected proposals from Russia and Germany for a naval disarmament treaty as, in the words of Prime Minister Groeneveld himself, “You do not disarm yourself when the wolf is baring his fangs.” It was clear even to me that the balloon stood a good chance of going up. 

    Official diplomatic relations were severed a week before Christmas. I remember this as my Christmas leave was cancelled at the last minute. There was a flurry of activity, as it was rumored that Admiral de Graaf had received the official war warning. Reservists flooded into Den Helder to man the battleships and bring them into active service. However, there was a severe lack of officers for them, as a large number of the reservist officers were scattered across the globe on merchant vessels or in the Government Marine of the East Indies.⁵ Consequently, I found myself ripped from Eindhoven with all of my friends, comrades, and the division I knew. I was sent to Hr. Ms. Stadhouder to command a section of her 4-inch tertiary battery. By way of consolation, I did get my lift to Lieutenant (2nd Class). 

    This left me with little time to get to know the other members of the wardroom. Fortunately, a number of old classmates from the Naval College were also posted aboard: Jan Veder-Smit, Johan Reehorst, and Alexander Krol.⁶  Veder-Smit was a gunner like me, while Krol was one of the emerging young talents of the engineering branch. Reehorst, my first form roommate, committed apostasy: he opted for a commission in the Korps Mariniers.⁷  We messed together and liked to joke that it was the first reunion of the Class of 1900.  

    The balloon finally went up in March of 1902. Whatever the reasons of Russo-Dutch tension, we had a perfectly legitimate cause for war; on the 12th of March, our ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan was murdered by anarchists. The Turkish police persuaded the prisoners they took to reveal that the group had been subsidized and supplied by the Russian foreign ministry.⁸ The Russians made a last-minute appeal for peace, but there was no question of entertaining it. Even the more dovish parties in the States-General knew there could be no negotiation. The States-General requested that the Queen declare war on Russia. On March 19th, we were at war. 

Endnotes

1. That’s Admiral Cornelis ‘Goddamn” de Graaf, OC Home Fleet 1898-1908 and Chief of the Naval Staff 1908-1912.

2. Dutch naval expansion rested on the principle that capital ships ought to eventually be built in home yards. The Admiralty gave serious consideration to building smaller and more lightly armed battleships in Dutch yards in order to stimulate the shipbuilding industry.

3. A British diplomat (Arthur Cholmondeley) in Batavia attempted to intervene when a riot broke out against an enclave of Hong Kong Chinese. He was beaten senseless by a group of Dutch soldiers when he refused to obey their orders for him to leave off.

4. Nicholas “Old Nick” Prins: a well-regarded ship’s captain who died in 1902 from a heart attack. Many of his contemporaries were convinced he would have eventually been Chief of Naval Staff had he not died.

5. This was a frequent problem with the naval reserve system. Eventually, the government established a separate reserve for officers whose careers were ashore in the hope that these reserve officers would be at hand if they were needed.

6. These gentlemen crop up intermittently throughout the memoir. In his unique system of mentioning personal friends in passing, De Jong does not spend a great deal of time discussing his relationship with them.

7. Korps Mariniers: the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps

8. Some doubt has been placed on the validity of these confessions. Photographs of the condemned anarchists being led to their execution were discovered in a Turkish archive in the 1950s. These photographs suggest that the condemned were put through intense physical abuse while in custody. Most notably, all of them appeared to have had their fingernails torn off.

[director]

Glad to see you've started. I'm enjoying the reading and looking forward to more.

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    The outbreak of war was almost anticlimactic. We were already at our wartime establishment so there wasn’t a flood of reservists or a whole lot of newly reactivated ships. Admiral de Graff had each captain call an assembly to read out the proclamation of war, but that was about as exciting as it got.

    Much has already been written about Admiral de Graff’s conduct of the naval war against Russia and his conflicts with the Naval Staff over strategy and operations.¹ As I and every other junior officer were fairly unaware of the dispute, I cannot claim that I recognized the wisdom of de Graff’s more aggressive plan to attack Russian ships in their own home waters. To be sure, the Naval Staff’s recommendation of a distant blockade had its merits, and Admiral de Graff’s plan would be deemed too reckless had it failed. However, I was certainly glad that he prevailed upon the Admiralty to let Home Fleet operate in the Baltic.

    Our first sortie was in late March. Admiral de Graaf sent Rear-Admiral de Boer, flying his flag from Hr. Ms. Stadhouder, with a 3-ship battle squadron to lie off Finland and disrupt Russian coastal traffic.² The rest of Home Fleet was green with envy as we sailed out of Den Helder in company with 4 cruisers and a torpedo boat flotilla. Still, they managed to give us a good cheer as we sortied.

    Our voyage up the Baltic was uneventful, but immensely tiring. The possibility we feared most was that the Russians would detach a few squadrons of torpedo boats to ambush us in a night action. As a result, those of us in the secondary and tertiary batteries spent a good deal of the night on watch. At 4 hours on and 4 hours off, the men took to sleeping in the passageways by the guns.

    The squadron was in the Gulf of Finland early in the morning of 29th of March and took up patrolling stations. It didn’t take us long to spot the Russians. I was asleep at the time, as we were stood down during the day to catch up on sleep. The lookouts spotted smoke on the horizon at about half past noon. The alarm rattlers dragged me from my sleep, and I felt awful as I ran to my position. Yet the chance of paying out my exhaustion on the Russkies (not to mention plain instinct of self-preservation) quickly did away with my haggard feeling.

    At first, it seemed to be one giant goose egg. We spotted their ships, but we were out of position. Admiral de Boer ordered a pursuit and we chased for most of the day. Admiral de Boer detached the cruisers from the battle squadron and sent them at the Russians, hoping to pin the Russians between them and our battle line.³

    However, the cruisers were unable to bring the Russkies into action by the time night fell. Admiral de Boer maintained our course, which managed to do the trick. I still don’t understand what the Russians were thinking, but they kept double backing and blundering into us throughout the night.

    Night actions have always been dicey affairs, but they were damned terrifying for all involved back in those days. No radar meant we were limited to visual sightings; primitive fire control meant we had to point the guns with our eyes (and none too accurately I’ll say) and a lack of subdivision and torpedo protection meant that one hit was often a fatal affair for the ship.

    I explain all of this because it was when we were off Rosala with our main battery blazing away at whatever our gunners could see that a Russian torpedo boat flotilla came tearing out of the darkness, coming straight at us with our battleships turned broadside to them. This was exactly the situation every battleship man of the time dreaded. However, it was also my division’s purpose to deal with this sort of attack. That’s exactly what we did.

    I’m fairly certain that I actually ordered my guns to “open fire on the torpedo boats.” My memory of that night is a bit hazy, but even if I hadn’t, my gun crews knew their duty. So did every other light gun crew in the squadron. The Russians came on gallantly, but we buried them in a hail of 4-inch and 5-inch shell fire that shredded their attack. I watched as 3 of them were blown out of the water.⁴ The remainder scattered in the face of such concentrated fire and played no further part in the action.

    We continued to pursue the Russian cruisers, eventually corning one of the Bayan-class cruisers. The cruiser was separated from the rest of the Russian squadron and Admiral de Boer broke off pursuit to concentrate on it. We got fairly close to it, pasting it with 12-inch shells and what was left of our secondary and tertiary ammo. In hindsight, it was a colossal waste of ammunition and we should have been in trouble if any more Russian torpedo boats turned up, let alone the concentrated Baltic Fleet. Fortunately for us, no more Russians turned up. The action ended with the Russian cruiser sinking and us setting a course for home.

    
    The Battle of Rosala was, in the grand scheme of things, a minor action between a Dutch battleship squadron and a significantly weaker Russian force. However, its effects were completely out of proportion to its size. The Russians, cowed by our bold willingness to attack them in their home waters, restricted their Fleet to port.⁵  This enabled us to maintain a naval blockade of the Baltic ports

    It also did wonders for public morale. The battle was deemed a great victory and we returned to a hero’s welcome. I must say, it was quite the time to be a young officer ashore. Nothing was too good for Her Majesty’s brave sailors. I went on a 3-day leave to Amsterdam with Veder-Smit, Reehorst, and Krol; much to our delight, a lot of publicans and café owners wouldn’t let us pay they found out we had been at Rosala. Not a bad result for my first engagement!

    However, that was my only combat experience in the war. With the Russian battleships sitting at anchor, our own battleships were kept in port as well. The war was left to the cruisers, and they did marvelously. Two squadrons of our cruisers had it out with a Russian cruiser force in April, a near-run thing with the Russians pasting a squadron of Amsterdams until a squadron of Oosterhouts came up, smashed one of the Russkies into a burning wreck and sent the remainder scrambling for home.⁶ Then, in May, Hr. Ms. Leiden bagged an enemy cruiser that decided to play pirate against our merchant shipping.

    Victory, as any decently patriotic Dutch citizen well knows, was stolen from us in June. With Russia smashed and blockaded by a nation only a fraction of its size, the Tsar’s never to be sufficiently damned German cousin waded into the fray. Kaiser Wilhelm felt himself the great statesman, and he ‘mediated’ a peace settlement of status quo ante bellum. Our victories meant nothing, Russian incompetence meant nothing: the Kaiser presented us with a diktat and the Cabinet went along with it (they had little choice).⁷ The only concession was a pension for the widow of our murdered ambassador: the Kaiser insisted that the Tsar be responsible for paying it.

    There was immense quiet at home when the news was announced. I will not say that people were not happy at the prospect of peace: Russia had been given a bloody nose and national honor upheld. However, most of our citizens knew that we had been in a much more substantial position and that we were undercut by the damned Germans. There was a lot of ill will towards Germany. Even to the point that plans to marry Queen Wilhelmina to a German duke fell through over public opinion and her own sense of national outrage.

    For my part, I worried about my own future. Peace meant a smaller peacetime establishment, and the initial post-war budget discussions did not look good. The feeling was pervasive around the fleet: we all feared that having just won a war against a stronger enemy, we should be cast on the beach.

End Notes

1. In short, de Graff favored a more aggressive close blockade while the Naval Staff favored a distant blockade of the entrance to the Baltic.

2. Willem de Boer: A senior Dutch naval officer and Admiral de Graff’s eventual successor as OC Home Fleet. Much like De Jong, de Boer was noted for being a capable naval officer. While not nearly as much of a hard-charging fighting admiral as de Graff, no one ever accused de Boer of being the least bit shy.

3. A number of historians have critiqued de Boer's decision to send out the cruisers after the Russians. Those critical of it tend to argue that detaching the cruiser squadron dangerously weakened the battle line’s screen and left it open to the night attack which followed. Others have pointed out that it enabled de Boer to maintain contact with the enemy. Each side makes a fair point, and I’d simply add a saying from the U.S. Navy: “if it works, you’re a hero. If it doesn’t, you’re a bum.”

4. An additional destroyer foundered on the way back to port, making for a total of 4 Russian destroyers sunk.

5. While the establishment of the blockade was a triumph for the Dutch Navy, De Jong’s commentary on it suggests that it was more of a David vs. Goliath struggle than it was. It is worth remembering that the Imperial Russian Navy was not substantially larger than the Royal Netherlands Navy. While the Russians did have a qualitative and numerical superiority in cruisers, the Dutch enjoyed a similar advantage in battleships.

6. The gist of this cruiser battle is fairly simple, and not exactly the Dutch Navy’s best tactical hour. A squadron of Amsterdam-class cruisers was patrolling near a squadron of Oosterhout-class cruisers. However, there was no cooperation between the two forces aside from a general understanding to sail towards the sound of gunfire in support of each other. A superior Russian force caught the Amsterdams and came close to sinking the whole lot. The Amsterdams were only saved by the arrival of the Oosterhounts. While the Dutch sank a Russian cruiser, a greater degree of cooperation between the forces could have led to a much more decisive victory at a much lower cost.

7. The Groeneveld Cabinet wasn’t entirely hostile to Russian peace overtures, but they were nowhere near to considering status quo ante bellum. Cabinet papers declassified in the 1950s indicate that they hoped for substantial reparations or the transfer of Port Arthur from Russian to Dutch control.

[director]

Ah, the old 'stolen peace'. Too bad you couldn't get France or Britain to counter the Kaiser - but, that's RtW for you.

From the battle descriptions it sounds as though the Dutch navy is well-trained and rapidly acquiring the qualities of veterans. De Graff's penchant for plowing ahead in a pursuit at night shows a fine fighting spirit, but not perhaps a firm grasp of the actual risks. That sort of tactic, tried against the British or Germans, could get you hurt. I speak from experience...

I do wonder if, having bolstered themselves with a 'short victorious war', the politicians will be more eager to get into a fight with someone larger and better the next time. What the Navy needs is a protracted, victorious war - perhaps with some concrete financial or territorial gains at the end of it, but with lots of lovely budget money in the meanwhile.

[cv10]

Yup! We won all the battles but lost the war due to bad strategic factors: remedying this was key goal of the Dutch Navy and even some members of the Cabinet (Hint Hint!)

That night action scared the daylights out of me! I actually don't remember too much of the details, and I think I might have been in the process of turning for home when I blundered into the Russians again. To lend weight to the AAR's style, I've been taking notes on what happens as I play and then waiting to write until my memory is hazy and I have to rely on notes. It helps me capture De Jong writing his memoir after his retirement while also enabling me to footnote some of the big picture stuff.

We can only hope that such a war breaks out, if for no other reason than this peace agreement nearly bankrupted the Navy!

[director]

Now that's an interesting writerly trick - I like it.

The peacetime cuts are always painful but for me they cut more painfully when I sweat and bleed and get nothing - in fact get penalized - for winning.

[cv10]

    As the continuation of this memoirs suggests, I was not cast ashore. However, the first postwar budget was miserly even by the standards of Dutch military spending. The old Groeneveld Cabinet collapsed after the peace and a new faction of social democrats, led by Maarten van der Molen, came into power. The Molen Cabinet decreed that social spending and retrenchment were the orders of the day, and the Navy was to exist on 184 million guilders a year. I would remind the reader that this was less than the old peacetime budget even before tensions with Russia rose to such a furor.

    The effect of this was felt immediately. Home Fleet’s battleships were put back into reserve and their crews sent back to civilian employment. I was kept aboard the Stadhouder as one of the officers in her skeleton crew while she was put into reserve, but a number of more senior officers who couldn’t find billets were put onto half pay or retired from the Navy entirely. The shipyards were hit hard as all work on the 4 additional Zeeland-class battleships was halted: entire shifts of yard workers were handed dismissal notices as they filed out of the yard at the end of the day. The only source of continued employment were the new torpedo boats and 2 additional Oosterhout-class cruisers still under construction.

    The rest of 1902 was quiet. Most of my old friends were packed off into other ships or posts as the Home Fleet returned to its peacetime establishment. Jan Veder-Smith transferred into a cruiser on the West Indies Station while Alex Krol, a bit more fortunate, was assigned to a billet in the Naval Gun Factory. Poor old Johan Reehorst was sent to the marine garrison at Curaçao as a platoon commander. It made for lonely times.

    Nothing much happened until November. Old Admiral de Graaf and Rear-Admiral de Boer were out for a stroll around the Den Helder Naval Yard when they stumbled onto to some rum-looking cove skulking near the Naval Gun Factory. I mean that literally. Good old Alex Krol told me the full story, as he was an eyewitness to the whole affair. He was following a respectful distance behind the two admirals when Admiral de Boer tripped on a section of poorly maintained concrete and landed almost on top of the spy, who had been hiding in a shrub. Admiral de Graaf beat the fellow senseless with his cane when he tried to flee, and Alex Krol came running up, pistol in hand, and arrested the fellow.

    The Spy turned out to be a German. The Imperial Navy heard rumors that the Naval Gun Factory had made a new development in domestic 12-inch guns and they wanted an estimate of our progress. The Admiralty decided to make the news public in hopes of pressuring the Molen Cabinet into boosting the Navy’s funding. It was evidence of obvious German ill will, and it was hoped that this outrage would get us more public support. It didn’t work however, as the public was only mildly outraged, and the budget remained static. Meanwhile, I atrophied while stuck on a skeleton crew.

    Fortunately for my career, I was rescued from that dreary posting soon enough. In November of 1902. I was transferred to the Admiralty as a junior officer in the Department of Logistical Analysis.¹ Staff work was dull and compared unfavorably to sea duty. Particularly as the DoLA’s main role was to calculate what supplies would be needed abroad and how best organize the government’s shipping. However, it was a sign that my career was on track. Besides, it allowed me a close seat to some of the major developments in the Navy.

    The remainder of 1902 and most of 1903 saw a number of interesting developments. Funding levels remained static, but creative budgeting enabled all 4 battleships and the second trio of Oosterhout-class cruisers under construction to be finished. The Naval Gun Factory developed a 12-inch gun design that finally enabled us to build our own capital ships in our own yards. Good old Alex Krol was on the design team, and I don’t think he had to buy his own beer for at least a week. It was a great time for the Navy, even if we were broke.

    However, this was quickly surpassed. The biggest event of 1903 came in August when Queen Wilhelmina informed the States-General that she intended to marry Prince Arthur of Connaught. Though we had enjoyed good relations with the British, few people had known that the two of them had become attached to each other. It certainly surprised me.

    This was met with wide approval. Our young queen was quite popular and I’m sure the public would have approved of any protestant match. For my part, I was pleased that she wasn’t marrying a German. Indeed, from the Navy’s point of view, a British prince and a trained soldier was considered ideal. The only thing better would have been a British prince who was a trained sailor!

    In an interesting move, the British government proposed a formal military alliance shortly after news of the Queen’s proposal became public. Members of both the British Cabinet and the Molen Cabinet perceived a long-term convergence of interests between the Netherlands and Great Britain. While the Dutch government had desired the annexation of Russian territory in Northeast Asia in the late war, we never really desired further colonial expansion. This appealed to the British, who had a desire to secure their own home waters while maintaining a global navy. Indeed, there had been some discussion of an informal “understanding” regarding mutual defense, and the British were ready to make it more concrete. The alliance was agreed upon shortly after the announcement of the marriage, and must have been the last diplomatic alliance secured (at least in part) through such a manner.

    However, I didn’t have much time to consider this, and I ended up missing the festivities when they married in December. For at that time, my duties required me to travel to the West Indies on an inspection tour of our harbor facilities. I was charged with observing and reporting on the suitability of various ports for expansion into the primary fleet anchorage in the West Indies. In addition to this, I was also to travel to some of the British, Danish, and French islands to observe their own harbor arrangements to see if there was anything that we could adopt as standard practice.² I want to emphasize that for a Dutchman in an era before centralized air conditioning, this was rather warm work.

    This was supposed to be a relatively mundane assignment, but it proved to be one of the most dangerous times of my life. While I was visiting Guadeloupe in January of 1904, a series of riots by the working-class islanders against French plantation owners spiraled into a full-scale revolt. French warships were called to the island and I found myself in the middle of a shooting war with mobs running in the streets while French avisos lobbed shells indiscriminately into Basse Terre. I didn’t particularly like being shot at by the Russians, but ground warfare, particularly urban ground warfare, is something I will leave entirely to the Army. I was trapped in that hell for 3 months! God preserved me, for I’m not quite sure how else I survived. I was able to make my escape on an American freighter in harbor, but it was damned-touch-and-go until we were in open seas.³

    This was part of a larger trend of revolts in French territories. Just as the Antilles blew up, the Algerians rebelled against a series of laws which sought to abolish the last jurisdictions of religious courts in favor of a solely French-based legal system (or something along those lines).⁴ The Algerians were unsuccessful in the end. While the rebels mustered an alarmingly large army and fought a drawn-out campaign, they were poorly equipped and too close to France itself. The rebellion was crushed.

    By contrast, the Antilles rebels were much more heavily armed. Their struggle attracted a great deal of sympathy in more politically liberal circles in America and Great Britain. Consequently, they had the funds to afford plenty of modern firearms from the United States (Springfield rifles, Colt machine guns, even the odd Hotchkiss Gun).⁵ Moreover, Old T. Roosevelt wasn’t all that happy about the French shelling Caribbean cities, even ones they owned. Though his public comments were muffled on the subject, the concentration of American warships at Puerto Rico sent a clear message to the French: get control or clear out entirely. The French ended up doing the latter.⁶ The Antilles became independent in May of 1904.

    I finally reached Den Helder right as the French recognized Antillean independence. I was fortunate in that I was able to transfer from my decrepit American freighter to Hr. MS. Zeeland, which was on the homeward bound leg of a round-the-world cruise. This was particularly welcome, as being stranded on a war-torn island left me quite ignorant of current affairs. My hosts in the wardroom quickly got me up to date.

    While I was mucking about in the Antilles, the Dutch economy had entered a boom period. While much of the new tax revenue went to social affairs, the Molen Cabinet used a portion of it to reverse some of the more drastic cuts to defense budget. This was handy, as a series of technical developments left the Navy in need of funds to upgrade the fleet with the new central-firing control systems. The Admiralty was also able to fund the construction of a new class of battleships: the Friesland-class.⁷

    All of this was badly needed. Having suffered so much unrest, the French looked for someone to blame for the failure their disastrous colonial policies. We were a convenient target and Franco-Dutch relations had soured badly. The only upside to this, at least for the Navy and myself, was that the government responded to this growing tension by granting the Navy an even larger portion of the budget. By the end of 1904, the Navy had generous 212 million guilders a year to work with. We may have not been where most of us ambitious young career officers wanted to be, but the starving times were over!

Notes

1. The Department of Logistical Analysis was a “dummy” organization. It was actually the Dutch Navy’s clandestine intelligence branch. The DoLA’s official role in studying logistical problems was used as a cover to send agents abroad. At the time, it was a rather amateurish outfit, as officers were rotated in and out of it rather than specializing in it.

2. This was an intelligence mission to try and determine the capability of other powers to deploy large numbers of ships to the Caribbean. That much has been declassified.

3. According to records from the French colonial administration, this was touch-and-go as the French suspected foreigners of supplying arms to the rebels and were searching outbound traffic for suspicious persons.

4. Though Dutch involvement in the Antillean rebellion has been heavily suspected, no serious claim that they sponsored the Algerine revolt has ever been advanced.

5. It’s difficult to say if De Jong had any role in supplying these arms to the Antilleans. While the Molen Cabinet was sympathetic to the rebels, it was rather dovish. The supplying of arms to foreign rebels would seem out of place. Furthermore, no mention of it is made in the declassified records.

6. This was somewhat overblown: Inter-office notes between Roosevelt and the Secretary of State indicate that there was no intention of intervening with force. Furthermore, the concentration of warships at Puerto Rico was due to annual training exercises, as similar concentrations occurred the previous year and the following years before they were shifted to Panama after 1914.

7. The Friesland-class “Semi-Dreadnoughts” were the first in a tradition of design boondoggles: the design underwent no less than 5 revisions (at great cost) before finalized.

[garrisonchisholm]

"A Tradition of Design Boondoggles". Goodie, just like 90% of my games...

[cv10]

Sept 21, 2020 15:42:53 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

"A Tradition of Design Boondoggles". Goodie, just like 90% of my games...

    We haven't even scratched the surface. I almost regret that De Jong was not older and more senior when I built my first class of battlecruisers: they ended up costing a small fortune...

[distortedhumor]

This is a great concept, I might have to borrow the idea at some point for a AAR. Also like the work so far.

[specialist290]

I've been enjoying the format immensely so far. Reminds me a lot of some of the tales over at the Paradox AAR forums. Definitely looking forward to seeing how De Jong's career unfolds!

[cv10]

    For me, the good feeling at the situation of the Navy was dampened by my next assignment. I soon found myself with orders to aboard Hr. Ms. Venlo, in of itself not a bad assignment. However, the Venlo was part of the East Indies Squadron.

    I had my own personal reason for dreading the fetid shores of the East Indies. My father’s death was recent enough for me to worry about a similar fate if left there to languish for years. However, the East Indies Station was considered a hard assignment in its own right. The Navy had a responsibility to assist the East Indies Army, which often meant being hurled ashore and into the swampy jungle as part of a naval brigade. It also meant having to witness the colonial system and all its cruelty with my own eyes. I was born in the East Indies and lived there until I was six. Though I don’t remember much of my childhood there, the casual brutality with which all too many Dutchmen treated the people of the islands stuck with me. It made for a grim duty station, and the voyage out gave me plenty of time to brood over this.¹ 

    What’s more, the Japanese had stuck their finger right in our eye. In September of 1904, the Japanese government made a great deal of noise about the instability of Southern Korea. While we had no real interests at stake in the Korean Peninsula, the Molen Cabinet attempted to get a squadron put together with the British, the Americans, and even the Russians, to put a stop to any attempted landing by the Japanese. However, it all unraveled when the Japanese ignored the squadron and proceeded anyway. No one seemed to think that it was worth fighting over, but it was a great embarrassment to the nation.

    However, it proved to be a rather fortunate assignment in the end. The East Indies were tranquil at the time, and the colonial administration seemed far less willing to engage in the brutality I remembered as a boy.² Consequently, the Venlo was not called on to aid any punitive expeditions, and Seorabaja was actually fairly pleasant.

    The rest of 1904 was uneventful I was able to relax a bit. Indeed, I relaxed to the point that I ended up running about in what social scene there was. Some of the old officers in the garrison knew my father, and some of the families on Java remembered my mother and her family. I got a fair number of invitations to garden parties, dinners and dances. It was at one of these that I met my wife.³

    Things remained quiet until the Spring of 1905. The Home Fleet's cruisers had been modernized the previous December, and we were to be received by some of them so that we too could be equipped with the new central-firing systems. By March, Venlo was on her way home for a refit. It seemed rather odd to me that I should have been sent so far away only to be brought back a few months later, but considering how I spent my time, I won’t call it a wasted voyage. My wife booked passage aboard an ocean liner and we reunited in Den Helder. We bought a home in there after our arrival, and kept in no matter what corner of the globe we found ourselves in.⁴ 

    It was a tense time for the Netherlands. Our relations with the French were sour, and tensions were rising with Russia and Japan. Moreover, the Germans kicked off a modernization program for their own fleet, which seemed directed at us and the British. French resentment over the rebellions in their colonies continued with little sign of abatement. The French occasionally hinted as the possibility of a thaw, but the Molen Cabinet stuck to its line that we had nothing to do with the uprisings in the West Indies.

    Indeed, the Molen Cabinet was doing little to placate foreign opinion. Quite the opposite in fact: for a bunch of socialists, they were a rather bellicose lot. Rather than calming our foreign policy, they had always seemed to stir things up. The politicos they saddled us with certainly did. The Molenists were domestically focused, and the Army and Navy tended to get stuck with the more empty-headed politicians in charge of our ministries (with a few notable exceptions).⁵  In August of 1905, the blockheaded dolt we were cursed with had the bad judgment to make some ill-considered remarks about our naval policy being directed at our neighbors.⁶  At the same time, old Admiral de Graaf nearly got into a brawl with a visiting French Admiral over a badly translated joke made after too much wine at a state dinner. I wasn’t there, but according to the fleet gossip, both of them went for their dress swords and they nearly filleted each other right then and there.7  The combination of these events resulted in a state of emergency, and the Cabinet removed its head from a certain collective orifice and provided funds to bring the Battle Fleet into full service.

     There was leftover funding after the reservists were called up. This proved to be fortunate, as this surplus was funneled into R & D, enabling a great deal more technical research. During this time, numerous improvements were made to our torpedoes, submarine designs, armor forging process, and most of all, the concept of a battleship with more than 2 turrets. This last one portended great change, though most of us were too nearsighted to understand it at the time.

    The extra money provided also enabled the Navy to order two additional Friesland-class battleships. We were able to comfortably afford them in spite of the need to man and pay for the full Home Fleet. In October, Molen decided that the Cabinet needed a broader base of political support, and asked Groeneveld and his Liberal Nationalists to rejoin the Cabinet. To make the offer more enticing, Molen offered a larger naval budget in exchange. This arrangement worked out, and the government shifted to be more of a broad left national unity coalition. It felt just like the prelude to the Russian War, and it was a damned tense time to be home.

    The worst thing about this period was that it lasted nearly 8 months. There we all were, stripping ship in preparation for action while Paris and Amsterdam vacillated. There were still diplomatic efforts being made and it was like watching as a detail attempted to clear a hanging fire: it might get sorted out or it might blow up and kill anyone too close. After the initial few weeks of preparation, all we could do was drill, fish from the deck, and rot aboard ship while we waited for orders to fight or fortify up in port.

    The new year brought little solace. The most recent expansion of the Den Helder shipyard was treated as a state secret (as much as something that huge can be considered a secret!) and discussing of the new construction and technical developments was utterly banned. I was fortunate to live in Den Helder, as that meant that I occasionally was permitted to go ashore to visit my wife. Even that wasn’t relaxing: I had to keep in near-constant sight of the harbor lest the signal to sortie be hoisted.

    In spite of all this though, the matter which set the war off was rather innocuous. Old Admiral de Graaf knew how stir crazy we were feeling and decided to try and boost morale with a fleet review for the Queen and the Prime Minister on April 2nd, 1906. The Prime Minister’s visit was rather odd as generally speaking, prime-ministerial visits to military units were rare in those days. Moreover, Molen was not well liked by the Navy due to the starvation budget he imposed at the end of the last war.

    However, he made a success of his visit. A party from each ship was sent ashore to hear him speak, and I had the good fortune to be selected to take the Venlo’s party. The speech itself is available for public consumption, so I won’t rehash everything he said. The gist of it was that the Dutch fleet was the best trained and most battle-hardened in the world, as proved by its gallant actions in the Russian War. He acknowledged that the Navy had been underfunded and assured every man and office present that it was he and not they who should take the blame if the security of the kingdom was in danger.⁸  He then went on at length about how the Navy was a shield and a sword for Dutch liberty and the chief guarantor of the nation’s merchant traffic (its life’s blood) and happiness. He concluded by declaring that the Navy would always defend the country and the oceans from any foreign aggressor.

    The French perceived this to be directed at them. They declared war three days later. 

Notes

1. The brutality of the Dutch colonial system was a fact of everyday life in the islands at about the time his father was in the East Indies Army. To an extent, De Jong’s distaste mirrored the growing unease that some of the more progressive Dutch felt with the administration of the East Indies.

2. One of the noted successes of the Molen Cabinet was its efforts to transition from solely extractive imperialism to a program of gradual home rule. Many in Molen Cabinet viewed the American system of gradual devolution in the Philippines as the ideal model for colonial administration, and the colonial state underwent a number of reforms to achieve this, starting with elected legislative councils in 1908. This program was not popular with conservatives at home, but the relative prosperity of the Netherlands made Molen quite popular among the electorate.

3. Emma De Jong: Like his friends and other family members, she is infrequently mentioned in De Jong’s memoirs

4. The original manuscript of this memoir was written at that house in De Jong’s study.  

5. Molen himself admitted as much: he explained that he preferred this as the Army and Navy had their own uniformed leadership and the civilian ministers did little actual work. A number of prominent Dutch naval leaders who wrote memoirs leaders criticized this system, pointing out that the better politicians who occasionally held the office did far more for the Navy in their limited tenures than the Navy accomplished on its own when saddled with the more incompetent kind of politician.

6. This was a rather frequent occurrence with the Army and Navy ministers. When the two offices were merged into the post of Defense Minister, De Jong publicly quipped to the Naval and Military League: “At last, we will only have one idiot to suffer.”

7. De Jong scribbled a note in the margin of his rough draft: “It always struck me as moronic to let irascible old dotards get drunk on wine with each other while armed.”

8. While the politically radical Molen was never popular with the Navy, De Jong and other serving officers did acknowledge that he was never one to foist blame upon the armed forces when politicians were at fault.