laststandonzombieisland

Following the fall of the Netherlands East Indies, the remnants of the Dutch colonial army– the KNIL– and Royal Dutch Navy fell back to Australia to regroup and carry on the fight for liberation from exile. They were the lucky ones. Of the 42,000 European POWs taken by the Japanese in the East Indies in early 1942, almost one in five (8,200) would die before liberation.

This rag-tag group of survivors would carry on the war, with the Dutch submarine force being especially active, while the land forces would reform and wait.

The Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Service, or NEIFIS, was formed in Australia from KNIL remnants starting in April 1942.

NEIFIS was eventually given its own clandestine operations unit, dubbed the Korps Insulinde. In all, the Korps Insulinde would muster no less than 36 teams made up of 250 agents. They made 17 landings in Sumatra alone in 1943-44, in addition to operations in Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, and Java. Operating in small six-to-ten-man teams (many of which never came back), they gathered actionable intel that was used for air and sea strikes and organized guerrilla units across the islands.

Moving past covert operations, in the liberation of Borneo in 1945, a 3,000-strong overt force dubbed 1ste Bataljon Infanterie and the Technisch Bataljon of the KNIL landed on the beaches alongside Allied troops. Before that, the unit had its baptism of fire supporting the Americans at Biak.

Trained in Australia during the war, they had a very Allied flavor to include tin hat helmets and M1928 Thompsons, balanced with the KNIL’s favorite edged weapon, the klewang. To this was added increasing amounts of American kit.

The battalion first returned to the Dutch East Indies on 30 April 1945, when a company landed with the Australian 9th Division at Tarakan on Borneo.

By late August, the KNIL was in battalion strength and was fast rebuilding in Borneo.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina…

A force of 5,000 mostly newly minted Dutch Marines, the Mariniersbrigade, was being trained and equipped at Camp Lejeune with the thought that it would help liberate the DEI or, if not needed there, would land in Japan as part of the Operation Downfall plan to invade the Japanese Home Island in late 1945-early 1946.

The bulk of these trainees, formed around a cadre of regulars that had been stationed in the Dutch East Indies and Suriname, were Dutch volunteers who had lived in Holland during the German occupation and had joined up in 1944-45.

As you would expect, they looked very much like the USMC, right down to their uniforms, both service and field.

The Mariniersbrigade was organized into three infantry battalions supported by M3A1 37mm AT guns and 81mm mortars, a scout company of M8 Geyhound armored cars, a tank company with M4A3E8 105mm gunned Shermans, an LVT-3/4 Amfibische tractor (AMTRAC) company, and an artillery battalion with 3-inch and 105mm batteries. Their logistical battalion was heavy with jeeps, M3 Halftracks, and M5 trucks.

Diverted to the Dutch East Indies in December 1945 once their training was finished, they spent the next three years fighting Indonesian insurgents, which often included unreconstructed Japanese Imperial Army holdouts.

A sort of extension of the New Guinea campaign, but with more communist undertones.