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The raid was carefully planned by a team of army and air-force experts, summoned to the crisis center in The Hague. It was a challenging assignment. A surprise attack on the train was difficult because it stood in the open, surrounded by soggy pastures that would not carry the weight of armored cars. Knowing that the Moluccans had infrared field glasses, the operation planners decided to use the Starfighters to drop smoke bombs as cover for the marines and to warn the hostages that something was up. Valuable intelligence about the Moluccans' activities came from listening devices planted by marines who had crawled up to the train a few nights before the attack. When the plan was ready, the troops involved carried out exercise attacks on a duplicate of the hijacked train at a nearby shunting yard.
As a young marine lieutenant explained after the attack, "We had been following the movements of the Moluccans for three weeks and knew exactly where they were at night. We knew the Moluccans did not guard their hostages properly at night. The gunmen and hostages slept separately, with only an occasional guard over the prisoners. We stormed aboard with armor-piercing weapons, then shot a wall of flame to cut off the Moluccans from the hostages. Everything went according to plan."
Besides providing smoke cover for the troops, the low-flying Starfighters were deliberately used to make the hostages seek cover on the floor—the safest place for them during a gun battle. Authorities theorized that both victims #151;a 40-year-old man from Elst and an Indonesian girl from Groningen who spent her 20th birthday on the train —were shot when they stood up. But so effective were the terrifying roars of the jetcraft that the great majority of the prisoners instinctively dove for the ground. Summed up Air Force Major W.A. Blaauw: "It was a nice operation. You must count on some casualties in operations like this, but they were kept very low, and it was a great success for the men who did it."
Not to mention those who regained their freedom as the result of it. One of them was Daan Peter Pot, 20, a civil engineering student at the Groningen technical college, who missed his year-end examinations during the ordeal (his dean ordered him advanced anyway). The Moluccans, he said, had treated him reasonably well, and despite low moments, morale among the passengers had remained surprisingly high. The running joke among the group, he said, was that their endless train "ride" must mean that Holland had become a huge country.