Toys of the Spice Islands, Part 1
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2010

I have a friend who goes by the nom de jeux of Zut Alors. I was familiar with clubbing names among goths and ravers, but had never come across a gaming name before. But if he wants to be Zut, he can be Zut. So anyway, Zut bought me a plateful of buckwheat pancakes awhile back and proceeded to lay out his ideas for a scenario expansion for our Second World War at Sea: Leyte Gulf. These centered around the notion that, in the 1940s, political and military mindsets had not yet become fixated on petroleum. It's oil that makes all those ships and planes and tanks go, but many strategists were only just grasping the importance of industrial centers.

Maybe someday he'll submit a supplement, but he did get me thinking about oil and the Dutch East Indies. It wasn't just the Japanese and the Americans who undervalued oil centers in their strategic thinking. The Dutch started much too late in their efforts to shore up defenses in their colonies — though the armored corps they tried to set up on Java would definitely have helped. I'd already done a fair amount of research into Dutch ship designs of the 1930s for Daily Content, our East of Suez book and other projects so I had a good idea of what types of ships they might have constructed. And in pushing around a game design based on the 17th century Anglo-Dutch Wars, I had gained a fascination with Dutch ship names. The cruiser Gilded Rooster simply had to sail our cardboard oceans.

Finally, I didn't really want to create a new supplement for Leyte Gulf — the game's sold out and is very, very unlikely to ever see a reprint. But its sister game, Strike South, is in pretty good supply and I'd definitely like to see more of them move out of the warehouse. I'd started to play around with a sequel to Imperial & Royal Navy set in the Far East, mostly because I really like the unusual terrain of the Indonesian archipelago. I wanted to write more scenarios set on those maps, since those in the games we've done feature overwhelming force (the Japanese in 1942, the Americans in 1944) against very movable objects. I'd added some Dutch ships to the mix, but after hearing Zut's dissertation on oil and strategy, I decided to ditch the Austrians and go with a purely Dutch counter mix.

The resulting supplement, Second World War at Sea: Spice Islands, is purely a Dutch affair. We've done some Dutch hypotheticals before, the 1939 battle cruisers and some others in East of Suez, but I wasn't very happy with the ship drawings on those pieces. I've done ship drawings for a number of games and supplements now since learning how — Plan Gold, Jutland, The Tsar's Navy, Imperial & Royal Navy, Pacific Crossroads, Cone of Fire, Black Sea Fleets and Plan Crimson. It takes a lot of patience, which I don't normally have, and an eye for color and composition, which I'm kind of lacking, too.

I didn't like the Dutch ship drawings in East of Suez, for a number of reasons, not least of them the color composition — the brown decks don't pop off the burnt-orange counter background at all. The ship drawings in our naval games aren't necessarily given "historical" paint jobs — they also have to be visible against the background. So I gave most of the ships a gray finish to make them stand out better, and I'm pleased with the result.

Battleships

The Dutch considered dreadnought battleships of their own before the Great War, as they had grown dissatisfied with their small and slow "armored ships" and felt it necessary to defend the East Indies from potential Japanese adversaries. We covered these in a previous Daily Content piece, and included examples of them in Great War at Sea: Cruiser Warfare and Great War at Sea: Jutland.

Spice Islands has three classes of them, all grown up and modernized with improved anti-aircraft batteries and additional armor and blisters like other nations' battleships of 1914 vintage. There are 14 of them included in the set, but they don't all appear in scenarios together. The Dutch might have built a second class of dreadnoughts if they'd laid down their first set during the 1912 fiscal year but they definitely would not have constructed a third class.

These ships all appeared in Jutland or Cruiser Warfare or both, in their Great War at Sea era configurations. The names don't match up exactly in all cases: the Dutch named their major units after "Admirals of the Golden Age" in the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th, but then started giving those names to destroyers in the 1930s. So some names had to be altered to avoid confusion, but that did let me honor Bloys van Treslong — the Dutch second-in-command at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 fought heroically. The current frigate named in his honor is best known for the wild antics of topless female crewmembers during NATO exercises.

Large Cruisers

The 1939 battle cruiser appears in East of Suez, together with an article describing her design process. There are three examples included with that supplement, and I put three more in Spice Islands mostly because I wanted a chance to re-work the ship drawing on the counters. And it gave me a chance to include Ridderschap van Holland, a name I just plain liked.

During the 1920s, Dutch firms fronted for the Germans in a number of areas of weapons development, including warship design. That in turn yielded contacts in Germany once open re-armament commenced, and so plans for the Hipper class heavy cruisers came into Dutch hands. The admirals wanted a similar ship for the East Indies, thinking the design — if modified to Dutch standards — a good counter to the big Japanese heavy cruisers.

There are six of them in Spice Islands — two sets of the three-ship groups the Dutch preferred to build — and they get a lot of work in the scenarios. The degree of fantasy involved in the various ships included differs from design to design of course, but these big cruisers were exactly what the Royal Netherlands Navy wanted for the East Indies station. They were well within Dutch financial and industrial capability to build, even if some economically conservative politicians preferred to cling to balanced budgets and the gold standard rather than face up to the threat presented by Axis aggression.

Mine Warfare

The Royal Netherlands Navy took mine warfare very seriously, and designed and built a series of modern and highly innovative minelayers and minesweepers in the 1930s. Most of the minelayers were dual-purpose vessels, in keeping with the parsimonious nature of Dutch politics — peacetime roles included fishery protection vessels, survey ships, a cadet training ship and a government yacht.

The minelayers included in Spice Islands are based loosely on Willem van der Zaan, but unlike the actual vessel they do not carry a seaplane and are intended for a single purpose (though they are quite capable anti-submarine escorts, another mission the Dutch built into their mine warfare craft). The Dutch named their minelayers, but those in Spice Islands are numbered instead — I borrowed the actual names for destroyers.

The minesweepers, likewise, follow actual Dutch practice and are very similar to the actual Jan van Amstel class — the difference here being their greater numbers. With the narrow waters of the East Indies, Dutch players will find many tempting locations for minefields to slow the Japanese advance.

This piece originally appeared in October 2009.

You know what we say: It's all about the toys! Click here to order the print version of SWWAS: Spice Islands — with REAL counters! ... OR ... Click here to order the download version.