(Old page) East Indies Crisis - do not edit: Difference between revisions
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== Beginning of the Revolt ==
What started out as a relatively small and contained uprising to northern Sumatra in February 1960 had by January 1st, 1962 turned into an open revolt. the KNIL had been pushed out of the northern & central interior and was relegated to the coast with the southern parts of Sumatra still under their full control. While initially, this would not warrant further expansion, by this time small uprisings in Malaya, Borneo, and Celebs had been crushed stretching the KNIL her limited manpower. On the 1st of February 1962, the Staten-Generaal of the Netherlands approved 120.000 European Dutch soldiers to be sent to the indies to aid the KNIL in squashing the revolt and to bring back Dutch control to the archipelago. through the year it seemed to go well with Dutch forces crushing any revolts on the islands and regaining control over central Sumatra. This was done through a relative standard colonial campaign, they first secured the major population centers and worked from there. Yet unbeknownst to the Dutch forces, the Liberation was only growing in their numbers by recruiting from the countryside, which still was not fully under Dutch control, yet it was seen at that time as a winnable campaign. All changed when on new Year eve 1963 a major conventional assault by the Liberation Front was launched against major areas of Dutch control in central and northern Sumatra, most notably Padang in northwest Sumatra and Pekanbaru in central Sumatra. This conventional assault caught the Dutch forces off guard as the liberation front used older Russian tanks, heavy weapons such as artillery and
==== New Year Offensive ====
[[File:A soldier in Sumatra during the new years offensive.jpg|thumb|A Dutch soldier near Palembang during the fighting around the city in late February.]]
The '''New Year offensive''' as it was called changed the nature of the war from a “colonial conflict” where the rebels were relegated to asymmetric warfare and the Dutch approach was one of limited action. This new phase due to the Liberation front her firm control over northern and central Sumatra. This base of operations how small as it was let the rebels to built up their potential forces and at the same time the attacked showed that the Dutch were not undefeatable, the revolution began to more properly spread across the archipelago. When the front by mid-February had stabilized the Dutch began to change their strategy and began to approach it more seriously. The first mass use of strategic bombers soon followed and shore bombardments became more and more common, the use of Search & Destroy tactics now became the norm. This phase of the war however was still primarily a guerilla conflict as the Dutch in sheer firepower outgunned any conventional force the rebels could bring to bear. This period is often seen as one of the more intense periods as across the islands from Celebs to Borneo and in the Malaya peninsula guerilla strikes became more and more common and Sumatra quickly became just one of the fronts of what was by now a full-blown uprising. From 1963 all the way up to 1967 the Dutch fought a brutal campaign against ever-increasing numbers, entire villages were burned the ground, the mass use of chemical agents such as tear gas employed, firebombing in the form of napalm was used on mass turning once green jungles into burned up husks.
(To be worked on)
== Phase of Fire ==
the period from 1963 up to 1967 commonly called “Phase of fire” marked the rapid departure from it being a standard colonial conflict and instead of being something bigger. KNIL and now regular Dutch forces were not fighting colonial uprisings anymore but a well-organized foe. While in individual battles Dutch/KNIL units always came out on top it was the attrition rate that came with patrolling the central parts of Sumatra that were simply too high. Long-range patrols by the KNIL often resulted in 3 out of 10 men being killed, 4 more being wounded. This rate of attrition was simply far too high for the Netherlands to sustain what really woke the Dutch command structure up was the New Years’ offensive. The use of conventional military forces by the rebels combined with asymmetric warfare was a deadly one. While eventually the front was stabilized by mid-february 1963 the situation had not. Uprisings across the islands, from Malaya to Celebes and even Borneo were becoming more intense and organized. Dutch & KNIL forces were more and more divided with quelling them limiting and weakening their power projection. It was around this time that Lieutenant-General Cornelis van Langen of the Army came with a new doctrine, a doctrine that would become known as the Langen Doctrine and would change the face and nature of the war.
The Langen Doctrine as it was simply called was quite simple in its principle yet brutally effective. It not only shifted the objectives of military operations across the archipelago but also the nature of the fighting in itself. While before the new Year offensive the KNIL/Army her objective was to retake the territory held by the rebels, mainly central Sumatra, and after the new Year offensive parts of Malaya. However, the rebels were deadly in the jungle using their contacts in the countryside and their knowledge of the terrain to lay waste to the patrols going in. The reason for such an objective was quite simple the Dutch colonial administration had the goal to reconquer and bring back order to the territories while the fighting was still going on through the use of garrisons tying up troops.
The Langen Doctrine would see a shift in warfare with mobility and overwhelming firepower being key. The goal is to destroy the rebels their ability to wage war by hitting their supply lines and areas of operations. All the while using air power and mobile forces to prevent Dutch forces from being tied down in areas. This emphasis on mobility Langen argued would allow them to respond rapidly to insurgent activity, all the while making it possible to shift quickly between offensive and defensive operations. The doctrine shift was proposed to the general staff in march of 1963 and accepted on the 22nd of March. On the same day, orders were given to all units in the indies to move towards defensible positions and hold on to the urban centers and defend them at all costs. Van Langen has estimated that for this doctrine to be effective a period of 10 months would need to be spent on training the soldiers, getting the equipment, and getting the airpower in place. Through 1963 and early 1964 the fighting in the archipelago changed into something more static. This period put the rebels off and for a while activities even seized as their intelligence networks were unable to determine what was happing, all that they knew from their Russian sources was that the Dutch were preparing for something.
While in Indies the rebels waited for what they assumed to be a large dutch offensive, in Europe things were far more active. The air force was taking on more and more aircraft, many fighters and its bomber fleets were expanding at a rapid pace unseen in Dutch history. All the while the conscription period was reformed, the national service period would now be 24 months, 6 months for basic training, and 18 months on deployment. This decision was met with opposition in parliament but a series of backdoor deals were approved. This was done as the calculation was made that Dutch conscripts would be outnumbered 4 to one and would need to kill 8 rebels before they broke even. This calculation while cold to some was seen as the only way they could ever hope to defeat the rebels. This rapid training provided the first battle-ready formations by December 1963, trained in mobile warfare and combined arms these formations, some 12,000 men, were deployed as quickly as possible for what they planned to be a field test of the concept in the form of Operation Blink.
==== Operation Blink ====
''The assault on Jambi''
On August 18th, 1967 the rebels attempted a major conventional assault upon Malakka yet after 2 weeks of fighting around the city it was halted. This was up to then the largest conventional battle and is often seen as the end of the “Phase of fire”. The failed assault costed the lives of 23,000 regular rebel soldiers while the Dutch only lost 1200. Through the entire phase by modern estimates cost the lives of 4.7 million civilians 1.3 million rebels and 22.000 Dutch/KNIL soldiers
== 1967-1972 Period of Stalemate ==
The following period which lasted for 5 years (1967-1972) was marked by both the rebels and the Dutch recuperating their losses, stabilizing frontlines, and modernizing their armed forces rapidly. Dutch control of Sumatra and the Malayan peninsula by 1967 was relegated to the coastal areas and urban centers. It was around this time that troop deployments were scaled-down and the KNIL was operationally fully integrated into the Dutch armed forces. The Dutch already by mid-1966 began to be armed with more advanced aircraft, ground weapons, artillery, and ships. Through this period the Dutch conscript system was reformed to increase the manpower mobilization abilities and the quality. At the same time, the Rebels who now controlled the interior of the Malaya peninsula and most of Sumatra began properly built up their forces and rebuilt and regrouped, turning themselves into a proper conventional force and increasing the number of guerilla fighters. At this time in 1968, they also began through Russian channels to push for a diplomatic end to the war offering a peace treaty to the Dutch which was refused. Everyone knew that this lull in the fighting, reduced to more limited but still intense guerilla warfare, was because both sides were building up their forces for what would become known as the war. a period so deadly so brutal so destructive that only in recent years the archipelago has begun to properly recover in regards to population and development.
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