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The Pentagon’s Plan to Fight Zombies and Other Unusual Military Schemes

Khalid Elhassan August 7, 2021 36 min

The US military has a plan to deal with zombies. AMC Studios

16. A Small Ship in a Sea of Enemies

The Abraham Crijnssen was based in Surabaya when the Japanese kicked off WWII in the Pacific. Things started off bad for the Dutch and the Allies, and soon went from bad to worse. By February 1942, after they were humiliatingly defeated in the naval battles of the Java Sea and the Sunda Strait, all Dutch and Allied ships were ordered to evacuate the now-inhospitable region and withdraw to Australia. The Crijnssen was ordered to sail away as part of a four-ship Dutch convoy.

Unfortunately for the small Dutch minesweeper, the Japanese Navy sank the other three vessels. That left the Crijnssen to make her way to safety as best she could, alone. Too weak to fight off Japanese warships or Japanese airplanes, the Crijnssen’s sole hope for survival lay in figuring out a way to sneak past the enemy without being spotted. The lush Dutch East Indies were dotted with tropical islands, so the ship set out to camouflage itself as a tropical island.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.