Raymond Westerling

Raymond Pierre Paul Westerling (31 August 1919 – 26 November 1987) was a Dutch military officer of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army.

Raymond "The Turk" Westerling was born on 31 August 1919 in Istanbul.

He was the second son of a Greek mother, Sophia Moutzou, and a Dutch dealer in antiques, Paul Westerling, whose family had lived there for three generations.

He grew up speaking Greek, Turkish, French and English, and later wrote: "One of the few Western European languages that I didn't speak a word of was my mother tongue: Dutch."

When World War II engulfed Europe in 1941, he went to the Dutch consulate in Istanbul and enlisted in the Royal Netherlands Army, much to his father's dismay.

At the age of 22, in 1941, Westerling reported to the Dutch consulate in Istanbul as a volunteer for the Allies.

He made his way to England, where he was conscripted into the Princess Irene Brigade in Wolverhampton, but he was unhappy with garrison life.

Westerling was among the first 48 Dutch soldiers to receive special training at the Commando Basic Training Centre in Achnacarry, on the barren, cold and uninhabited Scottish coast.

He completed this training under William E. Fairbairn in July 1942.

After his promotion to corporal, Westerling became the instructor for "Unarmed Combat" and "Silent Killing", in No. 2 Dutch Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando.

Within a year, he was teaching these skills to 10 Commando as a whole, and was also instructing in "Toughness Training".

At his own request, he left this staff position and, in December 1943, he rejoined No. 2 Dutch Troop in India.

In Ceylon, he underwent jungle training.

In 1944, he was appointed sergeant for special services and was placed at the disposal of the Office of Special Assignments (BBO), an organization that trained agents for covert actions in the occupied Netherlands.

To his disappointment, Westerling was never sent to the front line.

Instead, he was appointed sergeant major instructor of the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten in the liberated southern Netherlands.

On March 10, 1945, Westerling was seriously injured by a German attack with a V-1 Rocket.

He was then taken to London.

After healing, he was promoted to lieutenant by the head of BBO, General Van Oorschot, and sent to the Korps Insulinde on Malacca.

From that corps he was deployed to Medan (Sumatra) to act together with the British against Indonesian insurgents in and around Medan.

Westerling first came to Indonesia in September 1945, landing in Medan, North Sumatra, as an officer of the KNIL.

Conditions there, as in much of Indonesia, were tense and chaotic after the end of the Japanese occupation.

Since the end of World War II, parts of the Indonesian people were in an armed and diplomatic struggle against the Dutch for independence.

To restore Dutch control in Medan, Westerling set up an intelligence network and a police force.

Formally, Westerling was under British command, but he mostly went his own way.

Within a few months, he was notable for his sense of intelligence, which laid the foundations for some important successes for the British forces.

He had built a reputation for decisive and heavy-handed action where necessary by successfully rooting out enemies classified as rogue elements by the Dutch, which those most involved legitimized by referring to the brutal methods of the opposing side.

With methods such as his elimination of a gang leader who went by the name of Terakan and who was said to be responsible for attacks against European and Indonesian civilians in North Sumatra.

In his memoirs he described his action as follows: “We planted a stake in the middle of the village and on it we impaled the head of Terakan.

Beneath it we nailed a polite warning to the members of his band that if they persisted in their evildoing, their heads would join his own.”

In July 1946, Having completed his first assignment as a first lieutenant, Westerling took over the Depot Special Forces (DST) commando unit.

Westerling's training of his unit was primarily based on his experiences with the British commandos.

In September 1946, the DST, stationed at Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), numbered about 130 soldiers, a mix of Dutch war volunteers, and Indonesians.

In December 1946, he received the instruction to eliminate the insurgency and to restore Dutch control in Sulawesi.

That island - like other parts of the Dutch East Indies - was in the grip of a violent uprising that was characterised by the Dutch government and in the media as 'red-white terror'.

Government authority had all but collapsed, economic life was paralysed, while people in doubt were pressurised to turn away from colonial authority.

Guerilla fighters from Java had joined the local groups and government officials and members of the pro-Dutch Eurasian and Indo-Chinese community, were attacked and killed.

He orchestrated a counter-guerrilla operation in Sulawesi during the Indonesian National Revolution after World War II and participated in a coup attempt against the Government of Indonesia in January 1950, a month after the official transfer of sovereignty.

Both actions were denounced as war crimes by the Indonesian authorities.

Born in the Ottoman Empire, despite his nickname, The Turk, Westerling was of mixed Dutch and Greek descent.