Marc Lohnstein

Having enjoyed the author's Osprey booklet on the Dutch colonial military in the Far East, I had high expectations for this number, and Lohnstein did a good job of meeting them. The main point to appreciate is that while the Netherlands East Indies Army looked effective on paper, the reality is that the colonial military hierarchy was simply not intellectually ready to fight a modern war against a Japanese army that was at its operational zenith. Of course, the shoe would ultimately be on the other foot for Imperial Japan, with the irony being that Tokyo really didn't have the logistical infrastructure to exploit the oil wealth of the Dutch colonial holdings.… (más)

There is a tendency for numbers in the Men-at-Arms series to have a throwaway quality to them as, after all, there is only so much that you can do with 48 pages. In this case the author made the most of his space to give you a good sense of the force structure of the Dutch East Indies military, its issues, and how, despite not being badly equipped, there was less military performance than might have been expected. Like the Dutch regular army, much of this comes down to a lack of operational training. This is even assuming there was more motivation on the part of the Indonesian subjects to support their Dutch overlords.… (más)