Word: helfrich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...commander of the allied Dutch and U.S. Fleets* knew that the battle was lost. Vice Admiral C. E. L. Helfrich's orders to the Dutchmen and the gentle, excited Indonesians on his own ships, to the hard young men on the U.S. ships, said as much. His orders were to attack the oncoming, superior enemy at all costs, to kill Japs and sink Jap ships regardless of the risk to Allied lives and outnumbered Allied ships. If the Jap could not now be stopped at sea, almost within gunshot of the Java coast, at least he could be made...
These things the stolid, seawise commander of the Allied fleets in the Indies weighed at his headquarters in Java. When events go badly for Vice Admiral Helfrich, he does not rant or snarl or gloom. He goes grim. This week he was very grim...
...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...
...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...
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...