HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen: Minesweeper Turned Tropical Island

 

The Allied fleet suffered a disastrous defeat in the Battle of the Java Sea on February 27, 1942, against the Imperial Japanese Navy. Afterwards, only four Dutch ships survived in the Java Sea. In the days after the battle, the Japanese sunk three of them. only a Jan Van Amstel-class minesweeper—HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen—remained.

 

A slow-moving ship built in the 1930s and named after a 17th-century naval commander, the Crijnssen was 184 feet long, with a beam of 25 feet (7.6 m), a draught of 7 feet (2.1 m), and a displacement of 525 tons. The minesweeper had two Yarrow 3-drum boilers and two Stork triple expansion engines, allowing the ship to reach 15 knots (28 km/h or 17 mph). She had a single 3-inch gun, and two 20-mm cannons, and a payload of depth charges. The ship’s 45 crewmen were sitting ducks for any Japanese air or naval attacks. The ship couldn’t defend herself or outrun a Japanese vessel.

 

Camouflaging ships and other naval vessels was widely used in both the First and Second World Wars. More than 18,000 islands dot the Java Sea, from large ones such as Borneo to small ones without much more than a handful of trees on them. While the Crijnssen wasn’t a large ship, it had enough size to pass for a tiny island.

 

So the Crijnssen stopped at the nearest island and her crew cut down as much vegetation as possible. The main threat of being spotted was from the air, so they had to cover the entire surface of the ship with trees and branches to resemble a jungle canopy. The jungle foliage made the ship blend in with that of the landscape if near land or gave the impression of a small island if not. The crew painted any parts of the hull still exposed to resemble rocks and cliffs. 

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As night fell, the Crijnssen set out, inching out of the hostile zone of the Java Sea toward Fremantle, Western Australia. To maintain its illusion, the ship remained close to shore, anchored and still during the day and sailing only at night. After eight days, the Crijnssen entered Australian waters and safety on March 20, 1942.

 

The Crijnssen thus became the only Dutch vessel of her class to escape the Java Sea, and the last Allied naval vessel to escape the area, which then came fully under Japanese control. Once in Australia, she was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). In the RAN, the Crijnssen was refitted and then reclassified as an antisubmarine convoy escort.

 

While escorting a convoy to Sydney through Bass Strait on January 26, 1943, the Crijnssen detected a submarine. The convoy was ordered to scatter, while the Crijnssen and HMAS Bundaberg depth charged the submarine. No wreckage of the suspected submarine was found, however. A pair of hastily released depth charges at the start of the engagement damaged the ship; several fittings and pipes were damaged, and all of her centerline rivets had to be replaced during a week-long dry-docking. 

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The Crijnssen also served as a submarine tender for the Dutch submarines that relocated to Australia after the Japanese conquest. Survivors from the British destroyer HMS Jupiter and other Australian personnel supplemented the ship's Dutch sailors, all under the command of an Australian lieutenant. The wardroom tradition of hanging a portrait of the commissioned ship's reigning monarch led to some tension. But the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands remained on the bulkhead; a portrait of King George VI of the United Kingdom was installed in the lieutenant’s cabin. Although returned to RNN control in 1943, the Crijnssen remained in Australian waters for most of World War II—the only ship in the war to have evaded the enemy by being camouflaged as an island.