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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, July 9, 2025: Gravity Boat

Above we see the Dutch Navy’s fully-dressed K XIV-class colonial submarine Hr.Ms. K XVIII arriving in Surabaya, Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies, some 90 years ago this week, on 11 July 1935, to a welcome from several Dutch warships, including the destroyer Hr.Ms. Van Galen in the background. Our subject submarine had left Den Helder some eight months and 22,710 miles prior. For reference, the circumference of the Earth around the Equator is approximately 24,901 miles.

At the time, it was the longest unescorted journey by a submarine, just besting a 1926 cruise by another Dutch sub. Shipping aboard the boat was one Prof. Felix Andries Vening Meinesz– a Dutch geophysicist and geodesist known for his work in the field of gravimetry– packing his “Golden Calf,” which was beloved by the crew for reasons we will cover.

Don’t let her bookish origins fool you, K XVIII proved to have teeth when the war started in the Pacific just seven short years later.

The K XIV-class

Paid for by the oil-rich government of the Dutch East Indies in 1930 to serve as “colonial” submarines with the “K” for “Koloniën,” the five K XIV-class boats were designed by Dutch Navy engineer J. J. van der Struyff, who already had the smaller 0 9 and K XI-classes under his belt. A bit larger and more modern than previous Dutch classes, they leveraged input from across Europe. Using a pair of 1,600 hp German-made MAN diesel engines and two 430 kW domestically built Smit Slikkerveer electric motors lined up on two shafts, these 1,045-ton vessels could push their 241-foot welded steel hulls at speeds approaching 17 knots on the surface (they made 19 on trials) and nine while submerged. The plant enabled them to cruise at an impressive 10,000nm at 12 knots, ideal for West Pacific patrols.

Using double hulls with a test depth of 250 feet, they carried both search and attack periscopes provided by Stroud and a periscopic radio antenna that could be used while submerged. Ideally, for their intended use around the 18,000-island East Indies archipelago, they could float in just 13 feet of water and submerge in anything over 50.

When it came to armament, they were outfitted with help from the British, including tubes for a batch of 200 Weymouth-built dialed-down Mark VIII torpedoes (dubbed II53 in Dutch service) that could hit 42 knots and carry a 660-pound warhead– not bad performance for the era.

The torpedo tube layout in the class was interesting and not repeated in another Dutch class. They mounted eight 21-inch torpedo tubes–four bows (two on each side of the hull), two in the stern, and a twin external trainable mount forward of the conning tower– with room for 14 fish.

Besides their torpedoes, they were armed with a Swedish 88mm/42cal Bofors No.2 deck gun and two British Vickers 2-pdr QF Mark II (40mm/39cal) large-bore AAA machine guns, the latter contained in neat disappearing installations, a novel idea for guns that weighed over 500-pounds including a water-cooled jacket.

The first three boats– K XIV, K XV, and K XVI— were ordered from Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij on the same day in 1930 as Yard Nos. 167-169. The final two– K XVII and K XVIII— were ordered in 1931 as Yard Nos. 322 and 322 from neighboring Wilton-Fijenoord, Schiedam. All five were complete and ready to deploy by early 1934.

With the class complete, they typically self-deployed some 9,000 miles to the East Indies, stopping along the way at Lisbon, Cadiz, Palermo, Port Said, Suez, Aden, and Colombo. In theory, they could have done this on one tank of diesel oil without having to refuel.

Meet K XVIII

Ordered at the Wilton-Fijenoord shipyard in Rotterdam, the future K XVIII was laid down on 10 June 1931.

Launched 27 September 1932, by the next July, she had completed fitting out and was conducting her first of two months of trials.

Having been accepted and delivered, she was commissioned into service on 23 March 1934.

Beginning on 20 June 1934, she underwent a six-week summer voyage with a squadron from Nieuwediep through the Baltic and back. The squadron included her sistership, Hr.Ms. K XVII, the old coastal battleship (pantserschip) Hertog Hendrik, and the destroyers Evertsen and Z 5. They called at several ports including Danzig, Konigsberg in East Prussia, Riga, and Copenhagen.

20.000 Mijlen over Zee!

Returning home in the tail end of August 1934, our brand spanking new submarine was ordered to her intended duty station, with the fleet in the Dutch East Indies.

However, it was determined that this outbound sortie would be a bit more of a slow boat to (Indo)china so to speak, as she was tasked with a series of international port calls and put at the disposal of Prof. Vening Meinesz, who taught geodesy, cartography and geophysics part time at Utrecht University.

Why part-time?

Well, that’s because the good professor, under the auspices of the KNMI (Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute), had been tagging along on Dutch submarines for over a decade on a mission to measure the gravity field of the Earth. You see, it was in the subsurface dives that he could get the best readings, and almost every existing gravity reading up to that time had been done on dry land.

Before arriving on K XVIII, the professor had already shipped out several times on at least five other Dutch subs. The longest of these had been a six-month (27 May-13 December 1926) outward-bound cruise on the older K XI class boat Hr. Ms K XIII, when she deployed from Den Helder for the Dutch East Indies, via the Panama Canal and Hawaii.

Vening Meinesz’s primary instrument was one of his designs, a bronze-cased, wool-packed pendulum apparatus termed a gravimeter for obvious reasons. While the workings of his machine are beyond the scope of this post, the story goes that, to isolate its readings from the activities of working submariners, the best solution was to halt the work of said bluejackets, sending them to their racks, and halting the motors.

Rig for silence indeed.

As compensation for having to put up with the yo-yo work cycle when the professor was doing his thing, the Dutch admiralty authorized an extra guilder per man per dive when the gravimeter required them to secure stations. Thus, the machine became known to the submarine crews as Het Gouden Kalf (the Golden Calf).

The route from Holland to Java would be accomplished in 12 legs, the shortest just 1,200 miles, and the longest running 3,520 miles.

The end of each leg would be rewarded with a liberal port call (sometimes as long as three weeks) to show the flag, refresh supplies, and interact with the locals– with the side benefit of allowing the professor ashore to confer with regional scientific types and take gravimeter measurements in strange new places.

The port calls would include Funchal (Madeira), Saint Vincent (Cape Verde), Dakar, Pernambuco (Suriname), Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo/Buenos Aires/Mar del Plata, Tristan da Cunha, Cape Town (Kaapstad) and Durban in South Africa, Port Louis (Mauritius), and Fremantle in Western Australia before heading north to Surabaya.

Under 43-year-old Luitenant ter zee 1e klasse (LCDR) Dirk Christiaan Marie Hetterschij, a career officer who joined the Dutch navy as a midshipman in 1910 and held his first seagoing command in 1922, K XVIII made ready for her epic voyage to East Asia. He knew the vessel well, having previously supervised the construction of the submarine.

With a wardroom of five junior officers led by 30-year-old Penang-born LTZ2 Max Samuel Wytema and Officer Marinestoomvaartdienst C. van der Linden (both of whom had sailed with Vening Meinesz previously on K XIII in 1926), a goat locker of eight petty officers, and 20 enlisted, the boat had an all-up complement of 34, skipper included.

However, before leaving the Atlantic, she had a side quest.

The Snip

Dutch airline KLM in 1934 was the only operator of a precious group of five triple-engine Fokker F.XVIIIs. With an 80-foot wingspan and 9-ton maximum takeoff weight, they could carry a crew of three and a dozen passengers on convertible sleeping berths on long-range flights, able to span 950 miles in six hours before needing to refuel. They were put into service on epic 7,000-mile Amsterdam-to-Batavia (now Jakarta) runs, once making it in just 73 flying hours.

Named after birds, in December 1934, one of the five F.XVIIIs, PH-AIS “Snip” (Snipe), set out on a history-making flight, KLM’s first transatlantic service to colonial Suriname and the Antilles from Holland.

Unable to make the flight non-stop, it accomplished legs from Amsterdam to Marseille, Marseille to Alicante, Spain; Alicante to Casablanca, and Casablanca to Porto Praia in the Cape Verde Islands. Waiting for the weather to clear to hop the Atlantic and packed with extra fuel, Snip and her four-man crew set out for Paramaribo in Suriname from Praia on 19 December, making the South American strip 17 hours and 35 minutes later, by far the longest leg.

Refueling once again, it went on to Curacao, where it landed on 22 December before a crowd of thousands at Hato airport, covering the 6,516nm from Amsterdam in just under 56 flying hours. While the extra fuel tanks had taken up the normal passenger space, she had carried a cargo of 233 pounds of Christmas mail containing 26,521 airmail letters and at least one bottle of beer.

It was midway on its 2,236nm Atlantic crossing from Praia that K XVIII was waiting, surfaced, lit up, and broadcasting weather conditions and forecasts as a beacon to point Snip in the right direction and be the first on the search should she not make it. While the Dutch KNSM merchant steamships Stuyvesant and Van Rensselaer were nearby, K XVIII was the only naval vessel tasked with support, and her crew heard the plane cross over on the night of the 21st in thick cloud cover.

Anyway, back to our trip

On the way to Dakar in West Africa, the crew and the professor celebrated a somber Christmas on board before a paper tree while three musically inclined crew members formed an ersatz jazz band with a couple of horns and an accordion. They would cross the Equator just after New Year’s 1935 and hold the traditional crossing the line ceremony, dubbed Neptunusfeest in Dutch parlance.

The shortest stop would be an overnight anchor on 22 March 1935 at the lonely island of Tristan da Cunha, a romantic harbor for Dutch mariners as it was where Pieter Groen from Katwijk had famously lived as an uncrowned king for years, becoming the paterfamilias of the largest family on the remote South Atlantic colony. Rarely visited, the crew passed on food and medical supplies to the colony.

Twin stops in South Africa at Cape Town and Durban brought extensive interaction with the colony’s Dutch expatriates, and the ship’s officers made a pilgrimage to the statue of Jan van Riebeek to adorn it with a wreath. During her call, she was the first submarine to enter False Bay and the first to use the RN dry dock at Simon’s Town, where she was hurriedly scraped and repainted in five days, with her crew pitching in to meet the scheduled ship’s movement.

Then came the longest, 27-day stint across the Indian Ocean from Mauritius to Fremantle. Three dozen men in a 261-foot tin can for 3,520 nautical miles. Importantly, they would skirt a gravitational feature known today as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL), a gravity “hole” that formed around 20 million years ago and is the deepest one known to man. Professor Vening Meinesz would only identify the IOGL in 1948 when looking at past data.

The home stretch arrival off Java coincided with the 339th anniversary celebration of the July 1596 arrival of Dutch merchant mariner Cornelis de Houtman in his VOC ship Mauritius after a 15-month voyage from Amsterdam, an expedition that began Dutch influence in the region.

Over the course of the voyage, Vening Meinesz had made 240 measurements while submerged.

All the crew were presented with a special silver medal (the Draagpenning van de Rijkscommissie voor graadmeting en waterpassing) for the occasion, with Wytema and engineering officer Van der Linden earning a second award as they had earned one previously in 1926 on K XIII.

Skipper Dirk Hetterschij also picked up the Gold De Ruyter medal and was knighted, made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau. He would similarly be made an Officer in the Belgian Ordre de Léopold II in 1936.

K XVIII’s XO during her 1934-35 cruise, LTZ2 Max Wytema, would go on to write two different submarine works, Klaar voor onderwater (“Clear for diving”) and, with Van der Linden, Met Hr. Ms. K XIII naar Nederlandsch-Indie (“With Hr. Ms. K XIII to the Dutch East Indies”) about their 1926 cruise. Wytema also shot several hours of amateur film footage during the cruise, which would later be edited by Brand D. Ochse, founder of Filmfabriek Polygoon, into an exotic 96-minute travel documentary, 20.000 mijlen over zee De wereldreis van onderzeeboot K XVIII (“20,000 Leagues of the Sea, The World Voyage of the Submarine K XVIII”).

Carrying a music arrangement by Max Tak, it showed many the first known moving images from such far-off locations as Tristan da Cunha, in addition to stirring sea shots of diving operations of a submarine underway, accompanied by dolphins.

I managed to find the first reel, which covers up to March 1935, leaving Argentina, in the NIMH, and have uploaded it, below.

Her film and book-worthy cruise behind her, K XVIII got to work as a normal Dutch fleet boat. She spent the next four years in a series of peacetime exercises and maneuvers, the highlight of which was the 23-ship September 1938 fleet review off Surabaya for (but not attended by) Queen Wilhelmina to celebrate her 40th anniversary.

War!

September 1939 brought an uneasy time to the Dutch East Indies. With Japan openly pressuring the colony, the local governor and his forces stepped up preparations to repel what was felt to be a looming invasion. Once metropolitan Holland was occupied in May 1940 by Germany, the DEI, still loyal to Queen Wilhelmina’s government in exile, sent its naval forces on patrol for Axis vessels in the region.

When the Pacific War with Japan kicked off in December 1941, K XVIII was in refit at Surabaya. One of 15 Dutch boats in the Pacific at the time (along with O-16, O-19, O-20, K-VII, K-VIII, K-IX, K-X, K-XI, K-XII, K-XIII, K-XIV, K-XV, K-XVI, and K-XVII), K-XVIII was soon back in the water, making war patrols and pumping torpedoes in the Emperor’s ships, one of the brighter moments in a campaign that was otherwise dark for the doomed ABDA Allies.

Her wartime skipper, LTZ1 Carel Adrianus Johannes van Well Groeneveld, had taken her sister, Hr. Ms K XIV, whose c/o was sick, on two short patrols while K XVIII was in refit in December. During which he torpedoed four Japanese steamers, sinking three for some 23,000 tons, a great start to the war!

With K XVIII back in the water in early January 1942, Van Well Groeneveld rejoined his command and departed Surabaya on his boat’s 1st war patrol on the 14th. After scuttling the evacuated Balikpapan light vessel Orion with gunfire so that it could not function as a beacon to the expected Japanese landing force, K XVIII spent the night of 22/23 January on a series of attacks on said force.

Narrowly missing the Japanese Sendai-class light cruiser Naka with four torpedoes, he sent the transport Tsuruga Maru (7289 GRT), carrying elements of the Sakaguchi Detachment (56th Regimental Group), to the bottom with a second load of four fish.

It was while avoiding depth charges from the responding Japanese submarine chaser Ch-12 that K XVIII bottomed and was extremely damaged, cutting her war patrol short. Returning to Surabaya by the 27th, she was still in repair when the Japanese neared the strategic port in March and was ordered scuttled along with 120 assorted Allied vessels in the area.

Before she was set ablaze, her deck gun was used to scuttle the unseaworthy Dutch Admiralen-class destroyer Hr. Ms Banckert.

K XVIII’s wartime boss, the budding sub ace Van Well Groeneveld, while in charge of the Torpedo Works at Surabaya in March 1942, went missing and was believed killed while inspecting faulty demolition charges with two other men during the destruction of the port, just shy of his 36th birthday. Besides a Dutch MWO.4, he earned the British DSO, although he was never able to receive it.

Ignoble service under the Setting Sun

With Surabaya under new management for the next five years, the Japanese had a chance to raise and repair several of the ships that were hastily scuttled there. One of these was K XVIII. Patched up to a degree, she was put into service as an unnamed and lightly armed air warning picket hulk in the shallows of the Madoera Strait in 1944. She was sent to the bottom a final time by HM Submarine Taciturn (P334) on 16 June 1945 alongside the Japanese auxiliary submarine chaser Cha 105 (130 tons). Taciturn described the action with the former pride of the Dutch submarine service as

“A K-16 class Dutch submarine covered with yellow lead and rust, she was very high in the water…Several hits were obtained and the hulk was seen listing shortly afterwards..” Before turning to sink Cha 160. Then, “target was now shifted to the rusty submarine hulk whose machine gun fire became annoying as the range closed. A considerable number of 4″ rounds were fired against her before she was seen to be sinking in position 06°52’S, 112°48’E. One of the hits was a direct hit on her gun.”

Of her four sisters, all gave hard service in East Asia in WWII, opposing the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies. Two were lost during the conflict.

Hr.Ms. K XVI sank the Japanese Fubuki-class destroyer Sagiri on Christmas Eve 1941, then was, in turn, sunk by the Japanese submarine I-66 on Christmas Day, lost with all hands.

Hr.Ms. K XVII was believed lost in a newly laid Japanese minefield on or about 21 December 1941 in the Gulf of Siam and is still on patrol with 38 crewmembers. There are wild rumors she was lost in the “cover-up” in the Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory, but they are, most assuredly, groundless.

Hr.Ms. K XV, commanded for the duration by the intrepid LTZ1 Carel Wessel Theodorus, Baron van Boetzelaer, made 13 cloak-and-dagger commando missions behind Japanese lines in as many war patrols, survived 67 depth charges, and sank three of the Emperor’s vessels.

Class leader Hr.Ms. K XIV (N 22), as we touched on above, was the most successful when it came to chalking up “kills,” is credited with three Japanese troopships — SS Katori Maru (9,848 tons), SS Ninchinan Maru (6,503 tons), and SS Hiyoshi Maru (4,943 tons)– sunk along with a fourth — MS Hokkai Maru (8,416 tons)– damaged in late December 1941 alone. Updated in America, she spent the rest of the war in Fremantle and would damage the 4,410-ton Japanese minelayer Tsugaru and bag numerous small vessels. She was retired in 1946, having completed nine war patrols. Also, like K XV, she languished in Soerabaja during the Dutch war against Soekarno, then was towed out and sunk in deep water following independence.

In all, wily “Free Dutch” submarines with nothing to lose accounted for at least 168,183 tons of enemy shipping and warships between May 1940 and August 1945, sinking no less than 69 ships– a figure that doesn’t count the myriad of small craft they also sent to the bottom. They also lost 16 boats, with seven still on eternal patrol.

In an ode to these old K boats, Indonesian rice (Indische rijsttafel) is a staple meal on Dutch submarines today, especially for service in the wardroom as a Blauwe hap (Blue Snack).

Epilogue

Little tangible remains of K XVIII. Her hulk was later raised (again) and scrapped in the 1950s after the Dutch had left. With so much war wreckage around Surabaya post-war, and with an active civil war going on in the islands until Indonesia’s independence in 1949, there was little appetite to set aside the relics of the once-famous submarine.

She is remembered in maritime art, such as on a recently released stamp from Tristan da Cunha.

Incidentally, when 20.000 mijlen over zee hit the theatres, it sparked a shoe drive in Holland for the island’s moccasin-wearing population, which ultimately received 760 assorted new pairs of wooden clogs for its 200 inhabitants. Unsuited for use in the rocky islands, the locals instead appreciated them as they kept the islanders in firewood for six months. K XVIII’s circa 1934-35 skipper, Dirk Hetterschij, after the legendary voyage to East Asia, became commander of the Dutch submarine service in Surabaya for two years, then returned home just in time for the German invasion. During WWII, he remained in the occupied Netherlands, where he played a key role in the Dutch resistance and was later arrested by the Germans for a time, but was released for health reasons. Placed in command of the Loodswezen, the Dutch Pilotage Service, post-war, he was made a rear admiral in 1947, but died in poor health the following year, just 57 years old.

K XVIII’s multimedia talented XO during her 1934-35 cruise, LTZ2 Max Wytema, likewise continued to serve. The Dutch Naval Control Officer in San Francisco during WWII, he was recognized with a Legion of Merit by the U.S. Navy in 1942. While in California, he settled down and retired there, with his wife Annette passing in 1979. He joined her at age 78 in 1982.

In 2016, Dutch TV network VPRO released a digital version of 20.000 mijlen over zee in two parts. The website is kind of funky and takes a while to build, but it’s interesting to view once you get it going.

And finally, Professor Vening Meinesz, who became akin in his time to a Dutch Neil deGrasse Tyson after 20.000 mijlen over zee, continued his gravitational quest. He shipped out on four further Dutch subs in the late 1930s, including a three-month trip on Hr. Ms. O 16 in 1937. Teaching part-time both at the University of Utrecht and the Delft University of Technology, like his old pal Dirk Hetterschij, he rolled up his sleeves during the German occupation and helped organize the Resistance movement. Post-war, he took students and his instruments aboard a further six Dutch submarines, sailing as late as 1959.

His research trip on KXVIII, his longest, is seen today as the “Origin of Flexure Modelling.”  Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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