One-night stands, long-term relationships, but also sexual misconduct and widespread sexually transmitted infections. Despite strict rules on sexuality, the Dutch armed forces encountered all of these during the Indonesian War of Independence. Historian Jonathan Verwey investigated this hidden history and its lifelong impact.
After the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949), veterans and civilians in the Netherlands and Indonesia revealed very little about the sexual culture of that period. Jonathan Verwey explored this under-researched topic. Using diaries, letters, educational materials, telegrams, military policy documents and medical reports, he reconstructed what service personnel and military leaders thought about sex and relationships, and how they acted on these views.
PhD defence and book
On 17 November, Jonathan Verwey will defend his dissertation entitled Tussen verlangen en geweld: De seksuele geschiedenis van de Nederlandse krijgsmacht in Indonesië 1945-1949. ('Between Desire and Violence: The Sexual History of the Dutch Armed Forces in Indonesia, 1945-1949'). His book with the same title will also be published that day.
Moral decline
More than 130,000 war volunteers and conscripts left for Indonesia at a time when a renewed moral offensive was introduced in the Netherlands. After the Second World War, politicians, social groups and Christian organisations noted what they described as 'moral decline'. Divorce rates rose, the number of children born out outside marriage increased and sexually transmitted infections became far more common.
Under social pressure, the armed forces therefore took a conservative stance on sexuality. Condoms were not distributed and visits to brothels were not facilitated, something that armies from, for example, the United States, United Kingdom and France did at the time. Relationships with Indonesian or Indo-European women were disapproved of because of racist prejudice. Medical examinations were also used to identify homosexual men because of widespread fears that homosexuality could somehow be 'contagious'.
Public perception mattered most
Ideally, Dutch servicemen and the few thousand women serving in uniform, most of them around 20 years old, would remain sexually abstinent throughout their deployment. 'In reality, that was not what happened', says Verwey.
About half of the deployed service personnel were sexually active, and hundreds contracted an STI each week. 'You can also see that the army leadership was more concerned about public perception than strict compliance with the rules.' They wanted to prevent stories appearing in the press about service personnel contracting sexually transmitted diseases on a large scale, entering into relationships with people in Indonesia or engaging in misconduct.'
Sexual misconduct
Little was ever documented about such misconduct, making it difficult to determine how widespread it was. Verwey did find hundreds of references to misconduct such as sexual harassment, sexual abuse of power and, in particular, sexual violence. He found no evidence that sexual violence was used as an official military strategy, and most service personnel were never involved in it.
Even so, many hundreds of service personnel were guilty of sexual misconduct against civilian staff and civilians. 'Individual perpetrators often acted outside combat situations, while groups of perpetrators were more likely to commit abuses during military operations, interrogations or combat. The armed forces rarely took action, as long as it didn't attract attention.'
Negative effects of policy
According to Verwey, the armed forces' sexual policy had negative effects in almost every area. He gives a few examples: 'Not distributing condoms had far-reaching consequences for sexual health. And when it came to sexual violence was concerned, the authorities repeatedly looked the other way. Anyone who was prosecuted got away with a light sentence. Victims were treated with suspicion and their morality was called into question.'
The length of time that service personnel were away from home also had a huge impact. Although the army leadership was advised by military doctors and chaplains not to separate people from their families and loved ones for more than a year and a half, the demobilisation of troops was postponed several times. As a result, marriages and relationships came under strain, and many ultimately broke down.
Major influence on military life
For a long time, there was little historical attention to this history in Indonesia and the Netherlands. To this day, there is still little space for it, let alone political accountability. With his PhD research, which will also be published as a book by Boom Publishers, Verwey wanted to show that sexual policies and sexual experiences played a bigger role within the armed forces than is generally assumed. 'It affected the lives of all 222,000 serving service personnel, as well as millions of men and women outside the military. They carried their sexual experiences with them for the rest of their lives, in both positive and negative ways.'
