Japanese Conquest of the Dutch East Indies
Japan took the Dutch East Indies in three months in 1942 and destroyed three centuries of colonial rule in the process. The invasion's object was oil. The American embargo of 1941 had left Japan with about eighteen months of reserves, and the fields at Palembang and Balikpapan were the reason for the whole southern campaign. The Dutch, British, American and Australian naval forces were destroyed in the Java Sea in February, and the colony surrendered on 8 March. Some 100,000 European civilians were interned, and around 42,000 Allied prisoners of war were put to work, many on the Burma railway. The occupation's effect on Indonesians was contradictory and decisive. The Dutch language was banned and Indonesian was made the language of administration and education, which did more for a national language in three years than the nationalists had managed in thirty; Sukarno and Hatta were released from internal exile and collaborated openly, calculating that they would emerge with a mass organisation. Japan raised Indonesian auxiliary and militia forces, the PETA, and trained tens of thousands of young men in arms — the cadre of the army that fought the Dutch after 1945. It also conscripted some four million romusha labourers, of whom a large proportion died, and requisitioned rice on a scale that produced famine in Java. Independence was promised in 1944 and declared by Sukarno on 17 August 1945, two days after the surrender. The Dutch fought for four years to reverse it and failed. The Japanese also organised the system of comfort women in the archipelago, including Dutch internees, which produced legal claims for the following fifty years. The occupation is the standard case for the argument that the war destroyed European colonialism in Asia by demonstrating that it could be beaten.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Political
