The Battle of Lampoe Oek (16 April 1874) was the Dutch reverse fought on 16 April 1874 during the late phase of the Second Aceh Expedition (1873-1874). A Dutch patrol near Longbatta ran into a strong Acehnese fortification later known as Lampoe Oek. Reinforcements were sent in, fighting continued for hours, and the Dutch were finally forced to retreat with heavy losses. The action became one of the most disputed events of the campaign.
The battle mattered because it happened after the Dutch had already taken the Kraton. It showed very clearly that the war in Atjeh was not over.
Background
On 7 April 1874, Van Swieten ordered daily patrols to move out from Kota Radja in order to inspect the ground and keep the enemy from settling too close to the Dutch position. Later critics pointed out that this useful measure came very late. In their view, the Dutch had already spent too long sitting still after the capture of the Kraton.
Between the earlier operations of Expedition to Ketapang Doewa (15 February 1874) and 16 April 1874, the Acehnese had time to strengthen a new position near Longbatta. This helped make the coming clash more dangerous.
The patrols meet strong resistance
On 16 April 1874, two patrols of about 100 men each, under Captain Bardok and First Lieutenant Scheltus, went out from the Dutch side. They came under heavy fire. Major Romswinckel was sent to support them with infantry and artillery.
When he reached the area, Romswinckel found a much stronger fortified position than the Dutch had expected. This was the work later called Lampoe Oek. Because the position lay close to the Dutch center, the fight could not simply be ignored.
The six-hour fight
According to the later account used by Brutus, Romswinckel had been given an oral order to attack the enemy fortification and had even been supplied with lithofracteur charges to destroy enemy artillery if needed. During the fighting, more troops were sent from the Dutch side, and at Romswinckel’s request he also received grenades and signal lights. The battle went on for about six hours.
Borel described the terrain as extremely difficult and the resistance as fierce. Several further officers and specialists joined the effort, but even with reinforcement the Dutch could not carry the position. Romswinckel eventually had to withdraw.
Losses and blame
Losses were heavy. Borel wrote of nearly 100 killed and wounded, with five men missing. The defeat hit Dutch morale hard. It was also symbolically painful because it came exactly one year after the failure of the first expedition in April 1873, which made some Dutch writers call 16 April a fatal date.
Van Swieten was said to be furious and blamed Romswinckel. Borel strongly defended the major, arguing that he had acted in the spirit of the orders given. Brutus made the same point differently: if the attack had truly been wrong, the command near the Kraton had every chance to stop it earlier. Since reinforcement and ammunition had continued to be sent, it was unfair to place all blame on the field commander after the failure.
Why the battle became controversial
For Borel, the real cause of the disaster was Dutch passivity in the previous weeks. For Brutus, the deeper problem was what happened after the defeat. He argued that once the Dutch had suffered such a visible reverse, a second attack became even more necessary in order to break the enemy’s confidence and restore Dutch prestige. That second attack never came. In his eyes, this failure to answer the setback was proof that the expedition had ended in a weak and unfinished way.
Significance
The Battle of Lampoe Oek is significant because it exposed the weakness of Dutch claims that victory was already secure after 24 January 1874. The battle showed that the Acehnese could still build, resist, and strike back close to the Dutch center. It also became one of the strongest pieces of evidence used by critics of Van Swieten’s command.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege supplies the casualty return of the day and the commander’s subsequent line: on 16 April 1874 the troops suffered, “als het ware in de onmiddellijke nabijheid van den Kraton (ten zuiden van Lampoe Oek), op ongeveer 700 passen van onze wallen” (“as it were in the immediate neighbourhood of the Kraton (south of Lampoe Oek), at about 700 paces from our walls”), a painful defeat which cost 9 dead and 86 wounded, among the latter 10 officers. “Het lag niet in de bedoeling van den opperbevelhebber die nederlaag te herstellen” (“It did not lie in the intention of the opperbevelhebber to repair that defeat”): van Swieten merely reinforced the garrison of Atjeh with half a battalion, postponed his already intended departure to 26 April, and left Atjeh’s soil on that date with the so-called chief force. His own defence, later, in the letter of 17 October 1874 to generaal Knoop — “the fortified kampong which was well known, lying there with many further ones behind and beside it, could not be touched without involving us in a series of fights against well-defended kampongs, whose result and end could not be overseen, which would very certainly have cost many losses, and endangered the advantages gained” — is read by Verstege as the clearest evidence hidden in the opperbevelhebber’s own words of how unsafe and untenable the position was, already before his departure (see Departure of Jan van Swieten from Atjeh (April 1874)).
See Also
- Second Aceh Expedition (1873-1874)
- Longbatta
- Majoor Romswinckel
- Jan van Swieten
- Open Letter by Brutus to General Knoop
- Atjeh gedurende de tweede expeditie en later
- Expedition to Ketapang Doewa (15 February 1874)
- Kraton of Aceh
- Afwachtende houding
- 16 April
- 1874
Source
Onze vestiging in Atjeh, critisch beschreven, by G. F. W. Borel (The Hague: D. A. Thieme, 1878), pp. 58–73, 114, 131.
Open brief aan den Generaal Knoop over de Atjeh-kwestie (naar aanleiding van den brief van Generaal Van Swieten in Het Vaderland), door Brutus (L. van Bakkenes en Co., 1874), pp. 28–30.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 49-51. OCR: DLP-158.