Second World War

Belalau Camps, Loeboek Linggau, Lahat, Sumatra

Based on research by Judy Balcombe

A timeline of mens' and womens' internees camps in South Sumatra

Diary February 13, 1942 - January 8, 1945 of Mr. EB van Dam (March 15, 1899 - October 7, 1970)
 

The BPM employee in Pladjoe, Emanuel Benjamin van Dam (Groningen, 1899), was interned in the Mulo school in Palembang in April 1942, in the Prison in Palembang from April 15, 1942, and in January 1943 in Poentjak Sekoening in Palembang. From September 1943 in the Prison in Muntok and from March 1945 in Belalau. In September 1945, he was transferred to hospitals in Johor Baru and Singapore.

Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan published the 102-volume Senshi Sōsho (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. This book, vol. 3 of the series, describes in depth the campaign to gain control over the Indonesian archipelago. (copyright: the Corts Foundation)

Oil fields can easily turn into battlefields. This happened more than once in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies (Nederlands-Indië, now Indonesia) in the turmoil of the 1940s, when Japanese, Dutch, Allied, and Indonesian forces fought fierce battles over the control of
local oil facilities—with good reason, because in the 1940s the Dutch East Indies was one of the world’s biggest oil exporters. Centered on the oil industry city of Plajoe, this portion of the global petroleumscape, a multilayered network of spaces made possible by petroleum
and facilitating its flow, was designed to support a country on the other side of the world.
It was then reshaped by war and revolution, in the context of changing global actors. This chapter tells a largely unknown story about the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of the petroleumscape in what is now the province of South Sumatra in Indonesia. It is
a story of how oil fields can become battlefields and of how even in peacetime a petroleumscape is shaped by attempts to protect and defend sources of wealth and power.

Through the eyes of young Major Jacobs, a full view emerges of the "boiling cauldron" that was Sumatra in 1945. In spite of the official Allied victory, Jacobs had to attempt to rule Sumatra using the existing Japanese military structure until British relief arrived.

Ian Shaw’s *On Radji Beach* recounts the sinking of the *Vyner Brooke* and the massacre of Australian Army nurses and other survivors by Japanese troops on Bangka Island in February 1942. Centred on sole nurse survivor Vivian Bullwinkel, it examines the victims’ ordeal, the evidence surrounding the killings and the enduring legacy of the massacre.

Betty Jeffrey’s *White Coolies* is a firsthand account of the Australian Army nurses imprisoned by the Japanese in Sumatra from 1942 to 1945. Based on her wartime diary, it records the women’s hunger, disease, forced labour and repeated transfers between camps, as well as the courage, humour and mutual support that helped them survive.