Play as · Cold War 1947 · L1 · Dutch Colony · In Revolt

Dutch East Indies - 1947

The Dutch East Indies in 1947 is not a colony but a war. Two days after Japan surrendered in August 1945, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia, and when the Dutch came back they found not the profitable oil-and-rubber possession they had lost to Japan in 1942 but an armed revolution holding most of Java and Sumatra. Across an archipelago of some seventy million people, the Republic has a government at Yogyakarta, a national army built from Japanese-trained auxiliaries and the pemuda youth militias, a currency, a foreign service, and a red-and-white flag flying over territory the Dutch no longer control. The colonial power holds the cities, the ports and the sea lanes; the Republic holds the interior and, decisively, the loyalty of the population. This is the sharpest reversal on the board - the possession that anchored Dutch wealth for three centuries returning as a coloniser's nightmare, a nationalist state that has already declared the sovereignty the metropole has come back to deny. The strategic identity is the colony in revolt: a war of decolonisation fought against a European power that still calls it a police matter.

Starting position

The starting board is a broken agreement and a coming offensive. The Linggadjati Agreement, initialled in November 1946 and ratified in a mutilated form in March 1947, had recognised de facto Republican authority over Java, Sumatra and Madura and sketched a federal United States of Indonesia under the Dutch crown - but each side read it as the other's surrender, and by mid-1947 it is dead in all but name. On the twenty-first of July the Dutch launch Operatie Product, the first of the two 'Police Actions', a full military offensive that seizes the plantations, the oilfields and the major cities and cuts the Republic into blockaded enclaves. It is a battlefield success and a strategic trap: the guns take the economic heart of the islands but not the Republic, whose government survives at Yogyakarta and whose cause now has what conventional defeat cannot touch. Within weeks the war is at the United Nations - the Security Council takes up the question in August 1947, calls for a ceasefire, and appoints the Good Offices Committee, turning a colonial reconquest into an international dispute under the eyes of a watching Washington. The Republic, shrunk on the map, is winning the argument the offensive was meant to end.

What turns the campaign

What the Dutch want is restoration on their own terms - the plantation-and-oil economy back in hand, a federal structure they can steer, the Republic cut down to one state among many docile others, and the whole thing settled before the outside world makes it impossible. What the Republic wants is recognised sovereignty over the entire archipelago and the international standing that puts reconquest out of reach. The campaign turns on whether force can decide the question at all: Operatie Product proves the Dutch can take any place they choose and still not end the war, because each offensive trades territory the Republic can lose for legitimacy it cannot, and burns the goodwill of a United States that is paying for Dutch reconstruction and does not want to fund a colonial war. Historically the Dutch won the battles and lost the country - a second Police Action in December 1948 captured Yogyakarta and Sukarno himself, and it was precisely that victory, condemned at the UN and answered by an American threat to cut off Marshall aid, that forced The Hague to the table and to the transfer of sovereignty in December 1949. The colony that had made Dutch wealth walked out as independent Indonesia.

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