Ships
- HNLMS Kortenaer (KN) Captain from 30 September 1940 · In command when she was lost, 27 February 1942. He survived
Antonie Kroese was born in The Hague on 18 August 1901. He joined the Royal Netherlands Navy as a sub-lieutenant on 13 August 1925, was promoted to lieutenant on 13 August 1927, and became a lieutenant commander on 1 September 1935.
By the spring of 1940 he was serving in the Netherlands East Indies, in command of the destroyer Evertsen from 26 March. On 10 September 1940 Evertsen, with the merchant ship Mijer, reached Belawan on Sumatra after a passage from Palembang. On 30 September 1940 Evertsen was taken out of commission at Surabaya for a major refit, and that same day Kroese assumed command of HNLMS Kortenaer as she was recommissioned there at the end of her own refit.
Kortenaer, pennant KN, was an Admiralen-class destroyer built by Burgerhout in Rotterdam. Laid down in 1925 and launched in 1927, she had first entered service on 3 September 1928 for duty in colonial waters. Kroese kept her in the East Indies through 1941, after the Netherlands had been overrun in May 1940 and the squadron in Asia remained the navy's principal force at sea.
In February 1942 Kortenaer joined the striking force of Rear Admiral Karel Doorman. She was ordered out with the ships that fought in Badung Strait on 19 and 20 February, but she ran aground while leaving the harbor at Cilacap, damaged her rudder, and missed the battle. Her machinery was already worn: she was steaming on a single boiler and could make about twenty-five knots.
On the afternoon of 27 February 1942 Kroese took her into the Battle of the Java Sea, the Dutch destroyers holding station to port of Doorman's cruiser line. A Japanese torpedo, most likely fired by the heavy cruiser Haguro, hit Kortenaer. She broke apart and sank quickly off the north coast of Java, near 6 degrees 29 minutes south and 112 degrees 5 minutes east. Kroese survived. After midnight the British destroyer Encounter took the survivors aboard, and with dry clothes he again took charge of his men.
Still a lieutenant commander, he published The Dutch Navy at War in London in 1945, an account of Dutch naval operations from the German invasion through the campaign in the Indies and the loss of Kortenaer. The navy promoted him to commander on 1 November 1945. He retired on 1 April 1950.