Bamboe-doeri versperringen

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tagsconcept, acehnese, military, fortification, defense, bamboo, aceh-war, botany, malay, terminology, dutch, vegetation, achehnese
aliasesbamboo-thorn barricades, bamboe-doeri, bamboo thorn barriers, Acehnese bamboo barricades, bamboo-doeri, Bamboedoeri, bamboe doeri, thorny bamboo barrier, Bamboe-doerie, Bamboe doerie, Bamboe doeri beplanting, Bamboo-doerie, Bambu Duri, Doornbamboe, Thorny bamboo, Thorny Bamboo Pallisade, bamboo doeri, thorn bamboo hedge, bamboe-doeri stoelen

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The bamboe-doeri versperringen (bamboo-thorn barricades) were the chief Atjehnese defensive works — thickets of thorny bamboo planted and woven to form impenetrable barriers around kampongs, bentengs, borstweringen and grachten. Borel mentions bamboo-doeri throughout Onze vestiging in Atjeh as the characteristic Atjehnese fortification, concealing the enemy’s stellingen “als een tijger die op zijn prooi loert” (like a tiger lurking for its prey) and obstructing every Dutch advance. The bamboo-doeri was, in effect, the Atjehnese equivalent of the European abatis or wire entanglement — a cheap, effective and locally abundant obstacle that the Dutch could only overcome by kappen en branden (cutting and burning) or by artillery fire.

Bamboedoeri — glossed by P. H. R. Beuming as doornachtige bamboestruiken, thorny bamboo bushes — was the living thorn barrier planted before the palisades of the Dutch forward posts in Groot-Atjeh as the outermost obstacle of the defences.

In Beuming’s description of the voorpostenbenting the order of obstacles ran: a square earthen wall about a metre high; above it a palisade of vertically driven coconut-palm trunks about a metre high; before that a four-metre-wide entanglement of barbed wire; en daarvoor nog een versperring van bamboedoeri — and before that again a barrier of thorny bamboo.

The barrier’s effectiveness is attested from the attacker’s side. In the surprise of Anak Galoeng the Dutch, approaching their own former post now held by the Acehnese, found the obstacles insuperable: Het gewapend ijzerdraad, de bamboedoeri, de niet te forceeren poort waren onoverkomelijke versperringen — the barbed wire, the bamboedoeri and the gate that could not be forced were insuperable obstructions. It was this that obliged Lieutenant Dijkstra to lift two Ambonese marechaussées bodily over the gate to open it from within.

Description and Construction

The bamboo-doeri was a thorny bamboo — a species with sharp, needle-like thorns along its stems — that grew in dense thickets in the Atjehnese lowlands. The Atjehneezen planted and wove the bamboo-doeri to form barriers around their kampongs, bentengs, borstweringen and grachten. The barriers were typically several metres thick and as high as a man; they could not be cut through with a klewang or a European sabel without great labour and exposure to enemy fire, and they could not be crossed by a man without tearing his clothing and flesh. The bamboo-doeri was also used to fill dry grachten — as in the dry gracht of the Mesigit that the Dutch stormed on 6 January 1874 — and to conceal earthen borstweringen from view, as in the earthen borstwering of the Kraton that the Dutch bombarded for nineteen days from 6 January to 23 January 1874 in the mistaken belief that it was thick stone. The bamboo-doeri thickets were, in Borel’s account, the characteristic Atjehnese fortification: cheap, effective, locally abundant, and adapted to the conditions of woodland fighting in Atjeh.

Role in Atjehnese Defense

The bamboo-doeri played a central role in Atjehnese defense. The storming of the Mesigit on 6 January 1874 was, in Borel’s account, undertaken against a work that the Atjehneezen had built “meesterlijk”: a 180-metre earthen borstwering with bamboo, dwarswallen, schietkokers, and a dry gracht filled with bamboo-doeri. The work lay concealed “als een tijger die op zijn prooi loert” at “niet meer dan 1200 passen” from the Dutch bivouak. The Dutch troops attacked frontally — “tegen alle Indische traditiën in, zonder noemenswaardige voorbereiding, alleen in front, waar ze natuurlijk het sterkst was” — and were repulsed with 220 dead and wounded. The bamboo-doeri was also used to conceal the approach of Atjehnese charges — the “blanke klewang in de vuist” with which warriors sprang from the boschrand — and to obstruct the Dutch pursuit after every success. The Dutch could only overcome the bamboo-doeri by kappen en branden (cutting and burning) — the two principal means Borel identifies for overcoming Atjeh’s resistance — or by artillery fire that demolished the borstwering behind which the bamboo-doeri grew.

The Dutch Counter-Measures

The Dutch counter-measures against the bamboo-doeri were of two kinds: kappen (cutting) and branden (burning). The kappen was the work of the woodcutters — a labour that exposed them to Atjehnese fire from behind the bamboo-doeri thickets, and that was repeatedly the occasion of Dutch casualties. The battle outside the ooster-face of 13 October 1874 — when a strong column under kapitein van der Straate tried to penetrate the wilderness before sunrise, and the woodcutters who began at 6 AM were attacked from all sides — was a typical example. The branden was the burning of kampongs from which the Dutch were fired on — a measure that van Swieten had prohibited as a humane policy and that Pel had reversed. The stormvrijheid — the cleared field of fire that Borel advocates throughout the book — was, in effect, the Dutch counter-measure against the bamboo-doeri: the removal of the thorny thickets from the immediate vicinity of Dutch posts so that the Atjehnese charge could be broken by salvoes of Beaumont-geweer fire before the warriors could close. The stormvrijheid was, however, only achieved by sustained and costly labour, and the Dutch posts were never wholly free of the bamboo-doeri that grew up to their very parapets.

Account in Hooijer’s De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh (1897)

Bamboe doeri — thorn bamboo — was the plant used by the Achehnese as the principal outer obstacle of their bentengs in Groot-Atjeh, which G. B. Hooijer judged more effective than the Dutch ijzerdraadversperring.

Description

Describing the benteng of T. Tjoet Toengkoeb near Kroeng Kali, Hooijer wrote that the walls, revetted upright with stone on the inner side, were unrecognisable from the outside achter den breeden gordel van slanke stammen der bamboe-doeri stoelen, die hen geheel omringen en waarvan de honderde zwiepende takjes bezet zijn met haakvormige doornen, allen toegang beter afsluitend dan de beste ijzerdraadversperring — behind the broad girdle of slender stems of the bamboe doeri stools that entirely surround them, whose hundreds of whipping twigs are set with hooked thorns, closing every access better than the best wire entanglement.

Only along a narrow passage winding through the broad bamboe doeri hedge, and leading over a ditch, could one reach the front of the great bastion; and to reach the entrance of the benteng itself, covered by a traverse (traverse (blast wall)), one had to follow the narrow passage between the hedge and half the eastern wall.

Tactical consequence

Hooijer drew the conclusion that such small strongholds, concealed amid the dense vegetation of the kampongs (villages), were usually discovered only when one stood close before them, and then only by the bullets whizzing out of an opaque green curtain of bamboo leaves — a fact that, he wrote, needed no further demonstration of the difficulty of capturing them.

See Also

Sources

Onze vestiging in Atjeh, critisch beschreven, by G. F. W. Borel, Kapitein der Artillerie. ‘s-Gravenhage: D. A. Thieme, 1878. pp. 14–17, 24–29, 58, 99–107, 117, 121–122, 168–169, 183–186, 196–206.

Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh, met speciaal vervaardigde kaart en toepasselijke photo’s, bewerkt door P. H. R. Beuming, oud-onderofficier van het Ned.-Indische Leger (Amsterdam, December 1911; uitgegeven ten bate van het te stichten Herstellingsoord voor Rijks-Ambtenaren). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br N 82-144

Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Schetsen uit den strijd op Groot-Atjeh, met speciaal vervaardigde kaart en toepasselijke photo’s, bewerkt door P. H. R. Beuming, oud-onderofficier van het Ned.-Indische Leger (Amsterdam, December 1911). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering. D. van den Berg, Cornelis Jacobus Snijders (1852–1939): Een leven in dienst van zijn Land en zijn Volk (Voorburg: September 1944), p. 27. Koninklijke Bibliotheek shelfmark 0301 4872. De geschiedenis van Nederland in onzen tijd, by J. A. de Bruyne, Directeur der Hoogere Burgerschool te Zierikzee. Deel IV. 1872-1883. Nieuwe uitgave. Schiedam: J. F. Dupont, 1912, Hoofdstuk I.

De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh, door G. B. Hooijer, Gep. Luit.-Kolonel O. I. Leger, met 24 platen (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn; Batavia: G. Kolff & Co., 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Centrale Boekerij, Amsterdam. OCR-filename: 20260719_140140_DLP-134-De_verlaten_posten_in_Groot_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt, pp. 34, 36.

Acknowledgement of sources. This article is a single consolidated account combining the material previously held in this entry with the account given in De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh (1897) by G. B. Hooijer. Dutch terminology has been rendered in English, the original Dutch being retained only in direct quotations and in bibliographic citations.

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