landing party

The Raid on Griessie was a British attack on the Dutch port of Griessie (later renamed Gresik) on Java in the Dutch East Indies in December 1807 during the Napoleonic Wars. The raid was the final action in a series of engagements fought by the British squadron based in the Indian Ocean against the Dutch naval forces in Java, and it completed the destruction of the Dutch squadron with the scuttling of two old ships of the line, the last Dutch warships in the region. The British squadron—under the command of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew—sought to eliminate the Dutch in an effort to safeguard the trade route with China, which ran through the Straits of Malacca and were in range of Dutch raiders operating from the principal Javan port of Batavia. In the summer of 1806, British frigates reconnoitred Javan waters and captured two Dutch frigates, encouraging Pellew to lead a major attack on Batavia that destroyed the last Dutch frigate and several smaller warships. Prior to the Batavia raid however, Dutch Rear-Admiral Hartsink had ordered his ships of the line to sail eastwards, where they took shelter at Griessie, near Sourabaya.
On the morning of 5 December 1807, a second raiding squadron under Pellew appeared off Griessie and demanded that the Dutch squadron in the harbour surrender. The Dutch commander—Captain Cowell—refused, and seized the boat party that had carried the message. Pellew responded by advancing up the river and exchanging fire with a gun battery on Madura Island, at which point the governor in Sourabaya overruled Captain Cowell, released the seized boat party and agreed to surrender the ships at anchor in Gresik harbour. By the time Pellew reached the anchorage, however, Cowell had scuttled all of the ships in shallow water, and Pellew was only able to set the wreckage on fire. Landing shore parties, the British destroyed all military supplies in the town and demolished the battery on Madura. With the destruction of the force in Griessie, the last of the Dutch naval forces in the Pacific were eliminated. British forces returned to the region in 1810 with a large scale expeditionary force that successfully invaded and captured Java in 1811, removing the last Dutch colony east of Africa.The Berlin radio, quoting a des patch from a German correspondent in Libya, admits that the British landing party at Bardia last week did a "really good piece of work."

The correspondent said: "Just before midnight on April 19 our headquarters received an SOS from a German mobile radio near the beach at Bardia: 'British landing; we are ercircled; send help.' "Headquarters sent shock battalions but the British had done their work magnificently. "Fog hid them and in their rubber-soled boots they moved through silently. Nothing betrayed their presence to the German troops. They searched vainly everywhere and found the radio station empty. Then suddenly heavy detonations and red flames leapt up. The British had reached their own munition dump and had blown it up. They

had done quickly and noiselessly a really good piece of work." The correspondent concluded that the Germans rounded up the British from caves and captured a major, two cap lains, three lieutenants and 65 men.