Page 533 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

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ActA
The Royal Netherlands Navy in the Korean War 1950-1953.
A case study on worldwide ambitions,

and international as well as national prestige 1

Anselm VAn DER PEET

Introduction
n November 1951, there was a large-scale attack by a UN task force on the North
I Korean port of Hungnam, codenamed Operation Athenaeum. One of the ships in-
volved was the Dutch destroyer Hr.Ms. Van Galen. According to the Dutch commanding
officer, the participation in the operation was an “excellent exercise for everybody on
the ship”, due to many ‘action bombardments’, with aerial reconnaissance and registra-
tion of the impacts and corrections from helicopters. The British commander of the task
force, rear-admiral A.K. Scott-Moncrieff, was also positive about the efforts of the Van
Galen. He congratulated the Dutch “[…] on making an extremely good show of your in-
direct bombardment”. In addition, the flag officer was “very pleased” that the Dutch ship
“had no difficulty in using United States air spotting procedure with Australian pilots”.
The reports on this combined enforcement operation on the east coast of North Korea
gave great satisfaction to the authorities in the Netherlands. Both in national terms and
from a maritime-military point of view, the Dutch government was of the opinion that
this action strengthened the country’s own international status.
It is a well-known fact that after 1945 the Netherlands made no secret of its will-
ingness to participate in multinational peace operations under the UN flag. What is
less known is that the promotion of national interests played an important role in the
decision-making process regarding such deployments. In this article that approach is
discussed by using the case study on the Dutch naval involvement in the Korean war.
In order to be able to place these naval operations in the appropriate context, first
the Dutch fleet policy around 1950 will be discussed briefly, and reference will be made
to previous multinational naval manoeuvres. Further on this article briefly reflects on
the political influence of the navy at the time, and on the fact that the Dutch navy was
already familiar with combined operations. After giving an overview of the decision-
making process, regarding the deployment to Korea and the deployment itself, this ar-
ticle concludes with an analysis whether the objectives both of the politicians and the
navy were achieved with this multinational mission.

Dutch naval policy and worldwide multinational fleet operations
Around 1950, a vast majority in the Dutch parliament was in favour of a strong Royal

1 This article is largely based on a PhD research project of the author on out-of-area operations of the Royal
Netherlands Navy between 1945-2001. This research is a project of the Netherlands Institute of Military
History (NIMH), supported by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).