Hein ter Poorten

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KNIL Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten

Hein ter Poorten (born November 21, 1887 in Buitenzorg on Java , † January 15, 1968 in The Hague , Netherlands ) was a lieutenant general in the Dutch army .

Life

After attending the cadet school in Alkmaar , which he left on July 25, 1908 as a lieutenant in the KNIL , ter Poorten served in the artillery construction workshop of the artillery in Delft .

Shortly afterwards he became interested in military aviation. In 1910 he acquired his license as balloon commander and made a request to the Colonial Minister , who was the supreme commander of the KNIL armed forces remaining in the Netherlands , to allow him to do pilot training. The Minister granted the request and Ter Poorten began his training first in Antwerp at a Belgian flight school and later in France . As the first Dutch professional officer, he obtained the international pilot's license on August 30, 1911 , whereby he had to finance the training privately. In the next few years he gained flight experience in many maneuvers in which he participated as a pilot. On behalf of the Colonial Minister, he investigated the possibility of setting up a KNIL squadron on Java.

In February 1913 ter Poorten returned to Java and initially served in the artillery again. It was not until 1915 that he came into contact with aviation again when he traveled to the United States as commission head , where two aircraft were made ready for use by the KNIL at the Glenn L. Martin Company .

In February 1916, ter Poorten crashed on Java with one of the Glenn Martin aircraft that had been delivered . He himself suffered serious injuries, the KNIL commander JPM Michielsen who was flown with him was killed. As a result, Ter Poorten was banned from flying for four months for health reasons. As a result, he was not able to test-fly the newly commissioned seaplanes for KNIL in the USA. This ended his aviation career and Ter Poorten returned to the service of the artillery.

Hein ter Poorten attended the higher military academy in The Hague in the Netherlands from 1919 and served in the rank of colonel again in Java from 1922. He was assigned to the General Staff of the KNIL, where he served between 1926 and 1931 and between 1933 and 1936. In the end, he held the positions of chief of operations and inspector of the artillery as major general . In 1939 ter Poorten followed Lieutenant General GJ Berenschot in the office of Chief of Staff. After a plane crash in which Berenschot was killed on October 13, 1941, he took over his post of commander-in-chief of all KNIL army units on Java and was promoted to lieutenant general.

Ter Poorten was responsible for the defense of Java after the Japanese began invading Southeast Asia in December 1941. To this end, he worked with the Allied British , Australians and Americans and was a staff member at ABDACOM , which gave him the command of all land forces . Ter Poorten's headquarters were in Lembang , West Java.

After the Japanese army began to invade Java on March 1, 1942 and within a few days had brought the Allies to the brink of defeat, ter Poorten held discussions with the Dutch governor general Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer and then began surrender negotiations with the Japanese lieutenant general Imamura Hitoshi which ended with the Dutch surrender on March 9th.

Hein ter Poorten spent the rest of the war in various Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, first on Java, then on Taiwan and from October 1944 on in Manchuria . There he was liberated on August 17, 1945 and returned to the Netherlands.

Until the end of his life, Hein ter Poorten fought for the recognition of his services for the Netherlands, as he was repeatedly confronted with the fact that he was held responsible for the surrender of the KNIL in Java. He died in 's-Gravenhage in 1968. Hein ter Poorten was married twice and had two daughters from the first marriage.

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