The bezettingskorps in Atjeh was the reduced occupation corps that remained in Atjeh after the departure of the hoofdmacht under generaal van Swieten on 26 April 1874. Placed under the command of generaal Pel — at first as kolonel, from May 1874 also as civiel en militair bevelhebber — it was, in Borel’s account, far below the strength the position required, and was left in a “zeer gebrekkige stelling” that it took Pel two years to reconstruct. The bezettingskorps bore the brunt of the crisis of May–June 1874, the cholera catastrophe of February 1875 and the Longbatta disaster of 31 December 1874, and was repeatedly reinforced by individual bataljons from Java as casualties and disease took their toll.
Composition and Strength
The bezettingskorps that Pel inherited in April 1874 consisted of the troops van Swieten had judged sufficient to hold the captured Kraton and the new Dutch hoofdplaats of K. Radja after his afscheidsrede of 23 April 1874 declaring the war ended. Its strength was augmented by the half bataljon that, “à quelque chose malheur est bon,” was kept in Atjeh as an unintended consequence of the échec at Lampoe Oek of 16 April 1874. Throughout the period described by Borel the bezettingskorps’s strength was far below what the stelling required. By the end of May 1874 the Dutch macht had “ten gevolge van het overgroot aantal zieken bijna niets meer beteekende”; some companies could field fewer than 30 men of an original 125. Borel insists that 500 kloeke Atjehneezen willing to sacrifice themselves would have sufficed “om den Kraton, en met dezen onze geheele vestiging ter kuste van Atjeh, ten val te brengen.” The reinforcements that began to arrive with the Baron Sloet van de Beele on 11 June 1874 allowed Pel to clear the ambulances and resume the offensive, but the bezettingskorps remained chronically understrength. The 5de bataljon, ~500 strong when it arrived in December 1874, could field barely 100 usable soldiers by 15 February 1875; the 10de bataljon bore the brunt of the Longbatta disaster on 31 December 1874. On paper the Dutch troepensterkte in Atjeh in the first half of 1875 was between 5 000 and 6 000; the actual field strength was a fraction of that.
The Burden of the Inherited Position
The bezettingskorps inherited from van Swieten not merely a numerical weakness but a strategic one. Van Swieten had recalled one of the two companies of vesting-artillerie and the achterlaadkanonnen van 12 c.M. to Java in February 1874; he had permitted padi-snijden on the Langkroek sawah; he had ordered no zeehoofd built at Oeleh Leh; and he had given Pel the verbal instruction to keep “zooveel mogelijk vechten weinig, eene zuiver afwachtende houding bewaren.” The bezettingskorps thus found itself besieged in a half-finished fortress: the desecration of Dutch graves at Lampoeloe on 26 April 1874 and the enemy attack on Marassa the same night were the “eerste wrange vrucht” of the inherited system. Pel’s reversal — the daily bombardment of kampongs from 28 April 1874, the establishment of the Oeleh Leh post in early May, the battle of Lampoeloe of 20 June 1874 — was the work of the bezettingskorps acting with what means it had. Throughout, Pel repeatedly urged Batavia for reinforcements; Borel credits him with restoring the position from “allerdonkerendst” state.
Reinforcements and the Coming of the Stelling-Pel
The bezettingskorps was sustained through 1874 and 1875 by a stream of reinforcements: the 6de bataljon (two companies with staff) arrived at K. Radja on 1 September 1874 from Padang, “with music at the head”; the compagnie mariniers arrived late October 1874; the 5de and 10de bataljons, ~500 strong each, arrived in December 1874 for the Longbatta operations; the Barissans bataljon arrived on 10 December 1875 and the 9de bataljon on 21 December 1875. With these in hand, Pel was able to launch the great offensive of December 1875 – February 1876 that conquered the VI, IV and IX Moekims and reached the Kroeng Tjoet. After Pel’s sudden death on 24 February 1876 the bezettingskorps passed to generaal Wiggers van Kerchem and reverted to the afwachtende houding; it remained in the stelling-Pel, “nagenoeg onveranderd,” until the enemy breakthrough of June 1878 exposed the danger of stripping it of mobile forces.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege’s brochure, in chapter III and Appendix D, gives the kernel of the garrison’s material history. Numbers left behind at van Swieten’s departure of 26 April 1874: 128 officers and 3,151 men, with 178 Europeans and 41 natives already in the field hospital; the posts he enumerates are at the folding map set out: Kota Radja with Pakan Atjeh (2 companies), the hornwork on the Kroeng Daroe’s right bank with Kota Goenoengan (1 company), the small earthwork southwest of the Kraton, the redoubts of Penajoeng and Kampong Djawa on the Atjeh river, the Marinebenting (50 men) and the beach bivouac at Oedjong Kali/Koeala Atjeh (50 men). Kielstra’s pages gave, for the whole Atjeh force at the veldtocht’s end, 339 officers and 6,810 men, so that — very different from van Swieten’s own 1,800 — 211 officers and 3,659 men returned. The same summer witnessed the arrival of the complementary forces: 500 men in June; three companies of the XVth battalion on 11 September, another company and a miner company on 8 October; and the two half battalions (each 18 officers and 506 men) with a company of horse artillery (3 officers, 140 men) of 8 and 9 December, “waarmede de bezetting van Atjeh reeds op de dubbele sterkte gebracht was van het oorspronkelijk door Generaal VAN SWIETEN vastgestelde cijfer” (“with which the garrison of Atjeh was already brought to the double strength of the figure originally fixed by general van Swieten”). The sickness and loss returns are: 308 ambulance patients and 223 quarter-sick on 12 May 1874; 902 dead and 1,917 evacuated by December 1874; and in 1875 957 dead and 5,151 evacuated, so that by one account (Kielstra) even half battalions from Java had repeatedly to be called forward. At the end of April 1875 the position was fixed as given at Verstege’s folding map of Groot-Atjeh (1886): thirty-eight posts, occupied by 2,750 men out of a total force of 5,000-6,000, along the chain from Oleh-leh past Longbatta-Missigit to Kota Alam and Kota Moesapie over 2,500 hectares. Of quelling necessary measures Verstege adds the revisions forced upon the empire: in April and May 1874 the exceptional arrangements for the recruiting of Europeans and natives had been withdrawn — self-confident government, “precocious thrift outwitted wisdom” — while in April 1875 the re-engagement bounties of Europeans had to be raised to the unheard-of sums of 600 and 400 guilders for six and four years, in order to keep the usable, trained soldiers as long as possible.
See Also
- Indische Leger
- Padangsche brigade
- Vesting-artillerie in Atjeh
- Bataljon Barissans van Madura
- Compagnie mariniers in Atjeh
- Generaal Pel
- Jan van Swieten
- Generaal Wiggers van Kerchem
- Crisis at Kota Radja (May–June 1874)
- Stelling-Pel
- 1874
- 1875
Source
Onze vestiging in Atjeh, critisch beschreven, by G. F. W. Borel, Kapitein der Artillerie. ‘s-Gravenhage: D. A. Thieme, 1878. pp. 77, 86, 96, 116, 121, 144–148, 150–152, 164–165, 175, 195, 213, 224, 252, 263, 322.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 48-50, 125-127. OCR: DLP-158.