Allies Arrive in Tandjong Priok

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.

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.

Photo of Guards taken last week of August, 1945

Photos from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)

8 Responses to "Allies Arrive in Tandjong Priok"

Eileen Harryvan says:

August 12, 2009 at 10:04 am

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
Henriette van Raalte-Geel says:

April 11, 2010 at 8:40 am

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
Connie says:

November 20, 2011 at 11:16 am

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.
33Jolie says:

May 17, 2017 at 8:53 am

I must say it was hard to find your page in search results.
You write great articles but you should rank your website higher in search engines.

If you don’t know how to do it search on youtube:
how to rank a website Marcel’s way
Boudewyn van Oort says:

July 5, 2017 at 9:06 pm

Thanks
I will follow up
Lisa Harley says:

June 19, 2019 at 3:00 pm

My uncle was in Tjideng at the end after being in two other camps. He is looking for Pieter Tissot Van Patot who was in ADEK in the 1945 list. He is wondering what had happened to him. Please contact me if anyone knows anything. LisaHBskt at aol dot com
maryke scott says:

July 12, 2019 at 7:38 pm

I was only 8 months old when we (my mother, 7 months pregnant, my brother not yet 3 and my older brother nearly 10 years old), arrived in Bandung in Feb 1942 after having fled from Penang, Malaya to avoid the arrival of the Japanese from the north. My mother rarely spoke of her experience but now I am trying to reconstruct some of the family history for my grandchildren. I have gathered much information about the camps and the movement between them to finally find my mothers name end up on the Tjideng list. What I am interested in is how my father would have found us after the end of the war. My mother did tell me about the English servicemen who looked after the family once liberated and a little about the danger from the Indonesians themselves.
Boudewyn van Oort says:

August 15, 2019 at 3:04 pm

Hello Maryke,
How your father found out where you and your mother were “camping” in the hellhole of Tjideng, depends a bit on your father’s location . If he was interned, as so many civilian men were, in Tjimahi, he could have benefited from the surprisingly efficient bush telegraph that came into being between Batavia and Bandoeng, dependent entirely on volunteers flitting back and forth with scraps of paper. Otherwise I have no clear idea. I know that prewar Red Cross workers (of whatever ethnic group) attempted to organize themselves in various localities, and gradually re-established links with the outside world. Was your father Dutch or British? COFEPOW in the UK might be able to help. Another source of knowledge is Bronbeek in Arnhem ( dealing with Veterans ) or the NIOD in Amsterdam.
Sorry , I cannot be of more help
Boudewyn van Ooirt

Photo of Guards taken last week of August, 1945

Photos from NIOD ( Netherlands Institute of War Documentation)

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