Size: 8 x 8 inches

This WWII ‘RESTRICTED’ identification ship poster is series ‘I & C Bulletin NACI-ONI No.52’ and is dated as being issued on April 29th, 1944. Titled ‘Netherlands Navy’ and marked RESTRICTED, this poster served as an identification tool issued by the Division of Naval Intelligence and would have been used in either the Navy Task Force Binder or in the Pilot’s Chart Board. These pages were individual page bring backs of a WWII veteran and were not in a binder, making it a good guess these were used on the pilot chart boards.

The Naval Intelligence Division (NID) was created as a component part of the Admiralty War Staff in 1912. It was the intelligence arm of the British Admiralty before the establishment of a unified Defense Intelligence Staff in 1964. It dealt with matters concerning British naval plans, with the collection of naval intelligence. It was also known as "Room 39", after its room number at the Admiralty.

Service:

At the start of WW2 the Dutch had five cruisers, eight destroyers, 24 submarines, and smaller vessels, along with 50 obsolete aircraft. During the Second World War, the Dutch navy was based in Allied countries after the Netherlands was conquered by Nazi Germany in a matter of days: the Dutch navy had its headquarters in London, England, and smaller units in Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and Western Australia.

Around the world Dutch naval units were responsible for transporting troops, for example during Operation Dynamo at Dunkirk and on D-Day, they escorted convoys and attacked enemy targets. During the war the navy suffered heavy losses, especially in defending the Dutch East Indies, most notably the Battle of the Java Sea in which the commander, Dutchman Karel Doorman, went down with his fleet along with 1,000 of the ships' crew. Two Dutch light cruisers and one destroyer leader and three destroyers that were under construction were captured in their shipyard by Nazi Germany.

During the relentless Japanese offensive of February through April 1942 in the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch navy in Asia was virtually annihilated, and it sustained losses of a total of 20 ships (including two of its three light cruisers) and 2,500 sailors killed. The Dutch navy had suffered from years of underfunding and came ill-prepared to face an enemy with more and heavier ships with better weapons, including the Long Lance-torpedo, with which the cruiser Haguro sank the light cruiser HNLMS De Ruyter.

A small force of submarines based in Western Australia sank more Japanese ships in the first weeks after Japan joined the war than the entire British and American navies together during the same period, an exploit which earned Admiral Helfrich the nickname "Ship-a-day Helfrich". The aggressive pace of operations against the Japanese was a contributing factor to both the heavy losses sustained and the greater number of successes scored as compared to the British and Americans in the region.