The Samalanga ambuscade of 30 June 1880 was the surprise attack by the Atjehnese on a part of the Dutch garrison of Samalanga — one of the small coastal posts of Atjeh — that had gone out on a militaire wandeling (military walk). The marching troop, sixty-five men strong, was suddenly fallen upon by the Atjehers and suffered in this verraad (treachery) a number of losses. The kampong Batoe Iliq was held to answer for the attack, and the affair was the immediate cause of the three successive, thrice-failing assaults of the Batoe Iliq expedition of July 1880.
The punitive operations
After the ambuscade the Gouverneur of Atjeh, generaal K. van der Heyden, took the command of the punitive expedition upon himself. The general arrived on 22 July 1880 in the roadstead of Samalanga, but, on account of the heavy surf, could land only the following day. From the negotiations that were opened, radja Potjoet Maligoï obtained for the kampong a delay of six days within which Batoe Iliq was to be evacuated; when the term had run out fruitlessly the offensive was resumed on 30 July. The operation ended — after losses on the day of the new attack of 19 killed and 56 wounded — in the decision of the governor that it would not be responsible to renew the fight the following day: the dwangbesluit (compelled decision), as Coblijn called it, to abandon further attempts upon Batoe Iliq.
Significance
The ambuscade is significant in the literature of the Atjeh-oorlog less for its size than for its place in the argument. Pruys van der Hoeven and Coblijn both made the gebeurtenissen van 30 Juni 1880 in Samalanga (events of 30 June 1880 in Samalanga) the standing refutation of the optimistic reading of the state of Atjeh after the occupation of the XXII Moekims and the XXVI Moekims: how lamentably the confidence of the civil party had been deceived was proved, they wrote, by the events of 30 June in Samalanga. The affair, with the threefold failure that followed, belongs also beside the comparison Coblijn drew with Kaloet: the same error of attacking fortified kampongs with too small means, repeated twelve years later.
See Also
- Batoe Iliq Expedition (July 1880)
- Batoe Iliq
- Samalanga
- K. van der Heyden
- Potjoet Maligoï
- Von Lübtow
- Aceh War
- 1880
Source
Hoe Atjeh te onderwerpen, door W. A. Coblijn, gepensionneerd Kolonel van het Oost-Indisch Leger (‘s-Gravenhage: De Gebroeders van Cleef, 1893), pp. 50–52. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-100-Hoe_Atjeh_te_onderwerpen_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.