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These tropical islands in the South Seas motorized their artillery, partly motorized their infantry, improved their coastal batteries, equipped and trained a parachute corps, created fire-fighting brigades, barbed-wired their airfields, built air-raid shelters. They have two cruisers, four (possibly six) destroyers, twelve submarines, other small vessels, plus what Netherlands Navy ships escaped from the home country.
Timetables and Two-timers. To get his islands aroused and armed before the eastern end of the Axis got busy on them, Hubertus van Mook needed time. He made time—and he did not waste the time he made.
The Japanese were working on a timetable set by Adolf Hitler and against one set by his foes. When Japanese Premier Prince Konoye first sent a mission to the Indies, he timed its arrival for September 1940, when German air raids were expected to have softened up the British and their Dutch allies for surrender.
Head of the Japanese mission was Minister of Commerce & Industry Ichizo Kobayashi. The wily Japanese hoped to force the Dutch to pick as chief negotiator someone equal in rank to a Cabinet Minister, i.e., Governor General Jonkheer A. W. L. Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, who is not the tough customer Hubertus van Mook is. The Dutch did no such thing. Twelve days after the Japanese delegation arrived, while small Minister Kobayashi was being escorted around by a guard of honor picked for stature and bulk, Queen Wilhelmina cabled Batavia the appointment of Van Mook as Cabinet Min's er for the duration of the negotiations. Minister van Mook and Minister Kobayashi thereupon set out to two-time each other out of their timetables.
No Bluffer, however, was Hubertus J. van Mook. A big, burly, blond Dutchman, only 46 years of age, with big, strong hands and a sharp, broad mind and a sense of humor besides, he was everything the traditional negotiator is not. He opened every discussion with: "This is our last word," and every time he stuck to it.
Minister van Mook was a scholar raised to the rank of statesman. He came of sturdy stock (a great-grandfather marched to Moscow and back with Napoleon), was the son of two schoolteachers. Born in Semarang, Java, he was educated in Amsterdam, Delft, Leiden (and for a few months later on attended California's Stanford University). He is still proud of his American slang and of being a cover-to-cover reader of TIME. Back in the Indies, he became a civil servant, served a hitch as adviser to the Sultan of Jokyakarta. By 1931, when he decided to take a flyer in politics, he had become—for a Dutch colonial—a man of very liberal ideas. He edited what was known in the Indies as a "radical" weekly.
As a member of the Volksraad (People's Council), Hubertus van Mook advocated more influence for the Indies in Empire affairs. He even talked of the day when the natives must be given more power in the colonies. He studied economics, began thinking in broad terms of Pacific, not simply Indies, economics. He found his right niche in 1934 when he entered the Department of Economic Affairs. In 1936 he represented the Indies at the Pan-Pacific Conference in California, and there he met that veteran diplomat, Kenkichi Yoshizawa, who was to succeed Ichizo Kobayashi as negotiator for Japan with the Indies.