Hein ter Poorten

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Hein ter Poorten (21 November 1887, Buitenzorg - 15 January 1968, The Hague), was the commander of the Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands Indies Army; KNIL) in the Pacific campaign of World War II. Ter Poorten was also Allied land forces commander in the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command, during early 1942.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Early

He was born in Buitenzorg (now Bogor), Java, which was then part of the Netherlands East Indies. After having been sworn in as an artillery officer in 1911, Ter Poorten helped to found the army air force, and in 1919 began a course at the Hogere Krijgsschool staff college in the Netherlands.

[edit] World War II

He steadily rose up the ranks upon his return to the East Indies, and by July 1939 was the Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands Indies Army; KNIL) Chief of the General Staff. Lt Gen. Gerardus Johannes Berenschot's death in a flying accident in October 1941 saw Ter Poorten, by now a Lieutenant General, promoted to Commander in Chief of the KNIL.

Ter Poorten was regarded by his contemporaries in the army as a skilled commander with a firm understanding of military affairs in the East Indies, and thus was able to get on well with his subordinates and fellow officers; his relations with the civilian administration were less successful.

In January 1942, following the outbreak of war with Japan, Ter Poorten was appointed commander of land forces in the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command, a short-lived unified command of all Allied forces in South East Asia.

By March, Ter Poorten became the de facto head of all Allied forces on Java, following rapid Japanese advances and the break-up of ABDACOM. It was left to him to unconditionally surrender the island to the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war in various prisoner of war camps, and in 1945 returned to the Netherlands.

[edit] Pearl Harbor

In the many investigations into how Pearl Harbor could have happened, particularly at the largest, a Congressional Inquiry in 1945, there was a focus on whether the Japanese had sent a message to their embassies saying "east winds rain" which would have meant cutting off relations with the US ("north winds rain' meant USSR, "west wind rain" meant the UK), including the burning of code books. It was also an issue whether US military intelligence had intercepted this message. One important Navy intelligence officer, Lawrence Safford, claimed it had come in, but was later removed from the files. There has been an issue ever since about this message. It is called the "winds code message" or the "winds execute message." General ter Poorten plays a role in this controversy.

Layton, And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets (1985), pp. 521-2:

“

Further corroboration that the Japanese transmitted a winds code was provided by Brigadier General R. Thorpe, who in 1940 was lend-lease commissioner and military observer with the Dutch command on Java. Thorpe, who did not testify at any of the Pearl Harbor investigations, later claimed that the commander of the Dutch army in the East Indies -- General Hein ter Poorten--showed him a winds execute message. It was contained in a decrypt of 'an intercepted and decoded dispatch from the Foreign Office in Tokyo addressed to the Japanese ambassador or Bangkok.' Thorpe took it to the American consul general in Batavia, who forwarded it to Washington -- but with a comment to the effect that it was not to be taken seriously. Not content with Dr. Walter Foote's assessment, Thorpe -- whose own code books were a hundred miles away in his Bandoeng office -- took his message to the senior naval attache, Commander Paul S. Slawson, who sent it off in navy cipher.

”

When the message was shown to the Congressional inquiry, it contained only details of the "winds code setup" not the "execute phrase." Ter Poorten recalled in 1960 that he'd sent a teletype of the message to Washington. The Dutch embassy in Honolulu also got a copy. Ter Poorten says he did not specifically mention Pearl Harbor. He also said that when the Dutch in DC delivered the message to the US army, the only response from General Marshall was to ask the source of the information.

"The Dutch intelligence records were all destroyed before their evacuation of Bandoeng." Thorpe also claimed, however, that while stationed in Japan after the war he eventually located the Japanese who had actually transmitted the message.

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Thorpe's account is supported with information that has recently surfaced in the Royal Netherlands archives. Dutch army headquarters in Bandoeng, Java, maintained throughout 1941 a small but highly successful cryptanalytic unit that had succeeded in breaking into the Japanese diplomatic codes independently of the American or British efforts. Although they had not penetrated Purple, they were reading the messages in the Red machine cipher and also the J-19 consular traffic.

”