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Son of the Sea. Fighting the Japanese first became Conrad Helfrich's serious study when he was a chubby cadet at Den Helder, the Royal Naval College in Holland. The curriculum was pointed at the Japanese, because even then the Dutch Navy expected that some day it would have to fight Japan in the Indies. Cadet Helfrich took this and all phases of his studies very seriously. He never excelled at anything except at working hard. He got good grades, but he never won prizes. He sailed small boats, but never won races. The other cadets seldom saw him lounging about the streets, loafing amid the yellow buildings at Den Helder. He was a solid character, even to look at from behind, with his broad Dutch bottom, below the high, blue, single-breasted jackets the cadets wore. They and their instructors considered Conrad Helfrich a sound man; they felt in him a force that marked him for something more than a naval drudge.
At about the same time (1907), the Navy was licking into shape a professional copy of Conrad Helfrich. That was Johannes Theodprus Furstner. An instructor at the academy said of them: "If war comes to Holland next time the world is set afire, I hope it comes before 1942, because Helfrich and Furstner will be admirals." Admiral Furstner is now Queen Wilhelmina's Naval Minister-in-Exile.
After Cadet Helfrich became an officer, the spirit of prophecy and offense both waxed within him. In the early 1920s, when he was teaching other young sprouts at Den Helder, his favorite lecture was on the coming war between the U.S. and Japan. "When?" his students would ask him, and he would boom: "In this generation." Then he would stride to a blackboard map and chalk three Xs— on Pearl Harbor, the Panama Canal, San Francisco. "There," he would say, "the attacks will fall."
His prophecies grew keener. In 1925 he saw other officers smile when he led the small Dutch Indies fleet far from its home waters-toward Malaya and Japan-to execute problems which involved many times the few ships actually in his command. "Don't fret," he would say, "the day will come when an English admiral, because of our superior knowledge of these waters, will ask us to command a combined fleet." The chief of the United Nations naval staff under Conrad Helfrich in Java this week is the Royal Navy's Rear Admiral A. S. E. Palliser.
Helfrich's prophecies sometimes caused trouble. Two years ago he visited Singapore. There were cocktails and good companions, but something in the leisured air of Singapore got his Dutch up. He barked that the Japs were going to attack Malaya, Singapore and the Indies, and when they did the defense would be a joint job for the British, the U.S. and the Dutch. His half-amused, half-horrified hosts asked each other: "Did you hear what that Dutchman said?" and word got back to The Hague that an alarmist admiral was disturbing the peace of the Pacific. Admiral Helfrich got a reprimand, almost had his career ended then & there.