Hubertus van Mook

Hubertus Johannes Huib van Mook was a Dutch administrator in the East Indies. During the Indonesian National Revolution, he served as the Acting GovernorGeneral of the Dutch East Indies from 1942 to 1948. van Mook also had a son named Cornelius van Mook who studied marine engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also wrote about Java and his work on Kota Gede is a good example of a colonial bureaucrat capable of examining and writing about local folklore.

Hubertus van Mook was born in Semarang in Java onMay 1894. As with many Dutch and Indos growing up in the East Indies, he came to regard the colony particularly Java as his home. Following the Japanese conquest of Indonesia in 1942, Hubertus van Mook was appointed as Acting GovernorGeneral by the Dutch East Indies government in exile near Brisbane, Australia. Due to his liberal inclinations and sympathies towards Indonesian nationalism, many conservative Dutch distrusted his policies and he was never given the full title of GovernorGeneral. Due to the weakened position of the Dutch due to the Nazi invasion and occupation, much of the task of retaking the East Indies following the Japanese surrender in August 1945 was carried out by Australian and British forces. While Australian forces succeeded in occupying the Outer Islands with minimal resistance, British forces in Java and Sumatra were challenged by a nascent Indonesian Republic led by Sukarno and Hatta.

Source: Wikipedia