Conrad Helfrich

Who was Conrad Helfrich?

Luitenant-Admiraal Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich, GNL, KCB of the Royal Netherlands Navy was a leading Dutch naval figure of World War II. He was born in Semarang.

"In the early 1920s, when he was teaching other young sprouts at Den Helder, his favorite lecture was on the coming war between the U.S. and Japan. "When?" his students would ask him, and he would boom: "In this generation." Then he would stride to a blackboard map and chalk three Xs— on Pearl Harbor, the Panama Canal, San Francisco. 'There,' he would say, 'the attacks will fall.' "

Helfrich was appointed overall commander of all forces in the Netherlands East Indies in October 1939. At the outbreak of the war in the Pacific he gave instructions to wage war aggressively. His small force of submarines sank more Japanese ships in the first weeks of the war than the entire British and US navies together, an exploit which earned him the nickname "Ship-a-day Helfrich". Admiral Helfrich worked tirelessly to establish co-operation with the Allied navies in the area since he knew that the Dutch could not hope to protect the Dutch East Indies by themselves.