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Son of Java. Only to a Dutchman in the Dutch East Indies could the certainty that the Japs were coming mean what it meant to Conrad Helfrich. For, if the Japs were coming to the Indies, they were coming to his home. They were coming to Semarang, the town on the Java coast where his father practiced medicine and where he was born 55 years ago. They were coming to the cool, ugly house in Batavia where he lived with his wife, his twin sons, his two daughters. The Japs were coming to the quiet inland kampongs, where Conrad Helfrich had many a trusting native friend, where many good brown sailors and soldiers had grown up for service in his ships.
The Japs were coming to the Harmonic Club in Batavia, to the sumptuous Grand Hotel Preanger in Bandung, to the Navy Club in Surabaya, where Conrad Helfrich had passed many solid Dutch afternoons in drink and talk. They were coming to the tin mines, the oil wells, the rice sawahs, the cinchona groves, the rubber plantations where for money and empire many a Dutchman had sweated out his life. To Conrad Helfrich, as to all true colonial Dutchmen, these islands were home in a sense that Holland never could be. Now Hitler had Holland, and the Indies was their only home, and Java was all they had left of the Indies. They had no other place to go.
More than most professional military and naval men, Conrad Helfrich embodied for his countrymen this Dutch sense of home, of a rooted life in his own land. The quality distinguished him and his colonial fellows from the imperial transients of other "colonies." It fired them to a fierce preparation, a planned thoroughness of resistance which the British in Burma and Malaya and dozing Americans in Honolulu and Manila patently lacked when the Japs first came. This was the quality, the mighty intangible, which Conrad Helfrich, the Indies' Lieut. Governor Hubertus van Mook and other Batavia spokesmen meant when they cried to their allies to stand with the Dutch, to risk everything and put everything into the defense of Java.
Son of History. Dutchmen without a home founded the Dutch Navy. They bequeathed to the Dutch sailors of Conrad Helfrich's day a tradition second to none for daring, seacraft and victory against great odds. They called themselves Les gueux de mer (Sea Beggars)—the Dutch corsairs who fled conquered Holland in the late 1500s, then harried Spanish shipping and once sailed a fleet inland across flooded fields to relieve beleaguered Leiden.
In Admiral Helfrich's veins runs the same sort of blood as that of the great Dutch naval heroes: Admiral Martin Harpertzoon Tromp, who fought the Spaniards and the British with equal ferocity and died with a British musket ball in his heart; his subordinate and student, Michel de Ruyter, whose conquering fleet once sailed up the Medway to within 30 miles of London; Vice Admiral Pieter Pieterzoon Hein, a splendid buccaneer who earned fame, plunder and death at the hands of Dunkirk pirates. These and other 17th-Century seadogs won for the Dutch the empire whose rich remnants Conrad Helfrich had to defend.