The Pacific War experience of Dutch Eurasian civilians in Java, 1942–48

The European community in what was the Dutch East Indies formed the largest group of European civilians caught up in the events of the Pacific War in Southeast Asia. While they also constituted the biggest group of European wartime civilian internees in that conflict, and experienced the highest mortality rates, a much larger proportion of the European population experienced Japanese occupation outside ‘the wire’. ¹ In the Japanese period these people were known as the Belanda-Indo, an Indonesian term that referred to their mixed Dutch-Indonesian parentage. In Dutch accounts they are referred to as the buitenkampers ‘those outside the camps’, and in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender came to be referred to in Anglophone documents as IFTUs (Inhabitants Friendly To Us). Arriving as refugees in the Netherlands, they were the IIGs (Dutch initials for their characterisation as in Indië geworteld or ‘rooted in the Indies’), given what was hoped as temporary respite before their return to a Dutch colony; later still they were the ‘coloureds’ rejected by American and Australian migration officials.