This lesson was forced home in the Dutch East Indies, and at a bloody cost in Indonesian, Indian and British lives. The Allied reoccupation was a strung-out affair. British troops landed in force only towards the end of October 1945. General MacArthur, in whose command the region originally fell, had not felt the need for an immediate intervention in the former Dutch colony. He feared resistance from the 250,000-odd Japanese who remained in the theatre, and demanded that action wait upon the formal surrender of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay. The transfer of responsibility for Indonesia to Mountbatten’s command came on 15 August, with MacArthur’s warning: ‘Tell Lord Louis to keep his pants on or he will get us all into trouble.’ At a stroke of the pen, the area under South East Asia Command was increased by half a million square miles, and another 80 million people were added to its responsibilities. Mountbatten’s already strained communications were strung out another 2,000 miles across a vast archipelago. South East Asia Command had become the largest single administrative apparatus on earth.
Indonesia lay at the final stretch of the great strategic arc of control from Suez to Sydney harbour: it was the ‘Malay barrier’ that had broken with such dire consequences in early 1942. By 1945, British interests in the region were chiefly economic: pre-war British investments in the Dutch colony totalled £100 million, and this included a 40 per cent stake in Royal Dutch Shell with its large refineries in Sumatra and Borneo.47 In August 1945 a highly secret agreement had been signed by the Dutch granting the British and Americans access to thorium deposits – vital for nuclear processes – on Singkep island, south of Singapore.48 But by the end of 1945 Britain had been drawn into the fire of a national revolution that threatened to overwhelm its own possessions in Southeast Asia.
The British were once again the proxy for a defeated power of Europe. To the Dutch, the reconquest of Indonesia was vital to their credibility as a nation. In the words of the wartime Dutch prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy: ‘The Netherlands nation is far more than a small part of the European continent. We have a stake in four continents. Our overseas interests condition our very existence.’49 The will to empire was intensified by an emotive nostalgia: the Netherlands East Indies was ‘Holland’s Atlantis’.50 Pre-war Dutch administration was admired by British colonial officials for its technocratic achievements, but known also by its unflinching authoritarianism: the Rust en Orde – tranquillity and order – that it took as its motto. But the Dutch had never fully controlled the archipelago. Their power was felt in ever-decreasing circles around core areas of control: the world’s most densely populous island, Java, the plantation belt around Medan in northern Sumatra, and the Christianized island trading posts of Maluku in the east. Most of the archipelago was governed only lightly through local authority, such as the Islamic sultanates of east Sumatra, southern Borneo and Sulawesi and other tiers of subordinate native officials or tribal chiefs. Even at the epicentre of empire on Java, the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta still possessed aura and authority, and the proud priyayi aristocracy had carved out a role for themselves as a native administrative elite. It was a kaleidoscopic society, shaped by influential minorities such as the wealthy communities of Chinese and Arab traders and governed by an elaborate and legally entrenched racial hierarchy. At the apex of this world stood a large community of Dutch settlers and officials. In the villaed suburbia of cities such as Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya they had enjoyed a privileged lifestyle that made the social excesses of pre-war Malaya and Indo-China seem modest by comparison. At its margins was the Indo-European community. For many generations it had been the custom of the Indies Dutch to take ‘temporary wives’ locally and create families that remained behind in Indonesia when a father was repatriated to the Netherlands. In 1945 the Dutch settlers and Eurasians who emerged from the Japanese internment camps were to face the most uncertain of futures.
In the years after the First World War, the façade of Rusten Orde had been crumbling. To describe this era as one of ‘national awakening’ does inadequate account to the maelstrom which confronted the British in late 1945. For Indonesians, the first decades of the century were the time of pergerakan, the age of movement: of dramatic experiment, particularly in journalism and letters in the Malay medium, which was fashioned by writers into a new Indonesian national language. It was also a ‘world-upside-down’: old hierarchies were challenged by a level of popular mobilization that was not to be found in Britain’s Southeast Asian colonies. Different streams of thought and action emerged, sometimes in synthesis, sometimes in competition.51 Global currents of Islamic resurgence swept through Indonesia, and re-energized an old tradition of religious learning at a village level. In Sumatra, from where many of the new intellectuals heralded, in Java and then beyond, arose ‘wild schools’, independent of the Dutch system, whose graduates created a series of Islamic associations that both the Dutch and the Japanese hesitated to repress. Then came the internationalism of Marxism. The Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), founded in 1920, was the first in Asia. It had emerged, in part, out of the Islamic movement, and some of its key intellectuals sought to equate the struggle for Islam with the struggle against colonialism and capitalism. The PKI was repressed savagely by the Dutch after abortive uprisings in 1926 and 1927. As many as 13,000 people were arrested, and 1,308 of them sent to a purpose-built ‘isolation colony’ at Boven Digul in New Guinea. However, they left behind them a spectre that haunted European power throughout the Malay world after the war: that of Islamic social revolution.
By the 1930s a more secular nationalism had taken centre stage. Parties were formed and were dissolved in fierce disputes as to how Dutch rule, and its insipid efforts to reform itself, might best be challenged. The dominant personality was Sukarno, a Dutch-trained engineer who sought to build on the legacy of the pergerakan by synthesizing the different ideological currents and movements in the name of national unity: his 1926 credo was entitled Nationalism, Islam and Communism. His oratorical style, which appealed to Javanese mythology and to the symbolic language of the shadow-play theatre, was utterly beguiling to an Indonesian audience, and incomprehensible to most Europeans. In 1945 Sukarno would emerge as the charismatic centre of the nation. Yet in the relative calm before the storm of the Japanese conquest of Indonesia, the Dutch seemed to have neutralized the threats of nationalism, Islamism and communism, and that of Sukarno himself. He was arrested for sedition in 1933, exiled to Flores and then Bengkulu in south Sumatra, where he disappeared entirely from public view. The other leaders of national stature, the Sumatran-born intellectuals Muhammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, were sent to the malarial jungle fastness of Boven Digul. Given that they were the most educated Indonesians of their day, this was a damning testimony to the failure of Dutch rule. The PKI remained underground; its leaders spread their influence in a self-imposed exile in British Malaya and Singapore, where many of the Malays were recent migrants from other parts of the archipelago. Through these links, the vision of a vast, free Indonesia was kindled.
When the Dutch fled the islands in 1942, few Indonesian leaders held any illusion that co-operation with the colonial power was possible. All the pent-up ideological ferment and popular frustration found expression in a world and a time out of joint. To this, the Japanese invasion brought a sense of millennial expectation: in Java it seemed to herald the fulfilment of the prophecy of the twelfth-century King Joyoboyo that the rule of the white man would end with the coming of the dwarfish yellow men who would reign as long as ‘a maize seed took to flower’.52 There was genuine popular enthusiasm for the Japanese in many parts of Indonesia, and the impact of Japanese social policy was very marked. But the promise of Japanese rule was not sustained and it soon generated deep resentments, as the state trespassed into areas of neighbourhood and family life which the Europeans had wisely steered clear of. The moment the Japanese ordered people to bend in prayer to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was, as the Sumatran writer Hamka termed it: ‘the day of the severest trial for Muslims’.53 The great crimes of the Japanese occupation were perhaps committed most freely in Indonesia: romusha forced labourers were sent to projects in the outer islands, and further afield in Singapore, Burma and Thailand, and women were enslaved for the ‘comfort houses’. These and other policies, such as food requisitioning, discredited many of the traditional authority figures, who were associated with them as Japanese underlings. By 1945 the situation was explosive: the people of Indonesia were living in conditions of dire poverty and nursing bitter resentments against authority of all kinds.
But a vital and enduring legacy of Japanese rule was what one historian has termed its ‘ideological, fanatical romanticism’.54 This created a new sense of the possible for many young Indonesians. In particular, the Japanese led an assault on the Dutch language and in the war years Malay, or more strictly bahasa Indonesia, gained credence as a ‘national’ language. By the end of the war a self-proclaimed ‘Generation of 1945’ spearheaded a literary revolution in the service of national struggle. The iconic figure of the time was Chairil Anwar, the Medan-born poet. His urgent, intense language distilled the revolutionary personality, and was fired by a sense of the power of words to shape events, no more so than in the 1943 poem, ‘Aku’ – ‘I’:
When my time comes
No one’s going to cry for me,
And you won’t, either
The hell with all those tears!
I’m a wild beast
Driven out of the herd
Bullets may pierce my skin
But I’ll keep coming,
Carrying forward my wounds and my pain
Attacking
Attacking
Until suffering disappears
And I won’t give a damn
I want to live another thousand years.55
Chairil Anwar lived fast and died young, in 1949, of tuberculosis. His influences were diverse, modern, and often European. In the words of the Generation of 1945’s ‘Testimony’: ‘we are heirs of world culture’. But Chairil Anwar also became an archetype of the kind of figures who gave the Indonesian revolution its distinctive character: they were known as pemuda, a word which translates as ‘youth’, but conveys much more than this: a spirit that challenged the poised bureaucratic finesse of the older elite generation. It was a claim to lead in troubled, dislocated times, to take responsibility when others had failed. These elements of pemuda identity had deep roots in Javanese culture.56 The permuda were not a party as such, nor a clear class. They were vague coteries of young, mostly single men who took upon themselves the responsibility for the Indonesian revolution. They were marked by their attire; their simple clothes and long hair, and a semi-military swagger; they chose to speak in a staccato, commanding Indonesian, or a low form of Javanese, ignoring affectations of status: all men were bung – brother – or saudara – comrade. At times the world of the pemuda would overlap with the criminal world of the towns, the social banditry of the countryside, and the anger of the ordinary folk. Their watchword was Merdeka! or Freedom! But again this word had deeper connotations: derived from the term for the free men of early colonial Java – the mardijkers – it evoked freedom from slavery and, after 1945, political independence. But it was also something to be lived: a freedom of the spirit, a freedom from fear of death. The cry Merdeka! would be answered with a raised fist and Bebas! – Unchained! In the dark days of 1945, it would be answered also by the shout of Mati! – Death! By the end of the Japanese occupation, the pemuda would drive forward events, goading on the more moderate nationalist leaders. As they were to acknowledge: ‘These long-haired youths, these armed fighters whose names were not known, were the strength of our Revolution.’57
As in India and elsewhere, the Japanese war had divided the older nationalists. Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir were brought out of exile. Back in Jakarta, they adopted complementary strategies. Hatta cooperated with the Japanese regime in the hope of ameliorating some of the effects of occupation. Sutan Sjahrir, a socialist internationalist, was to organize an underground. Sukarno himself saw the war as a contest between empires and was more open to exploiting its political opportunities. He did so by aligning himself with some of the Japanese initiatives and manipulating them for his own national purposes. With a formidable Japanese propaganda machine behind him, Sukarno honed his oratorical skills, and although he was not immune from criticism for his association with unpopular policies, he managed, by subtle shifts in message that were never really translatable to the Japanese, to project his claim to embody the nation. He played to the messianic mood: independence, he said, was a ‘golden bridge’ to a glorious future. Politics became a form of theatre, in which the main actors were the Indonesian auxiliary forces that the Japanese recruited and armed. These took multiple forms and, as in Burma and Malaya, a generation of young men became deeply militarized. By the last months of the war the Japanese were losing control of these forces; at the surrender they were dissolved into a host of local militias. When the Japanese surrendered, they unleashed revolution.58
The initial events were dramatic enough, but, in the light of what was to come, relatively peaceful. In mid 1945 the war effort was at a point where Sukarno and Hatta found the Japanese more receptive to the idea of a declaration of independence for Indonesia. This was hammered out at a meeting in early August between the Indonesians and Field Marshal Count Terauchi at his headquarters in Dalat in Vietnam. On their return on 12 August, Sukarno and Hatta stopped in Malaya at Taiping airport. There the Malay radical Ibrahim Yaacob met them to try to persuade them to include Malaya within a greater Indonesia: an Indonesia raya. The provisional date for the declaration of independence was 7 September, and the first meeting of the planning committee was scheduled for 18 August. But events moved faster than this. The sudden surrender of Japan precipitated a crisis. Sukarno and Hatta well realized that the good will of the Allies was vital to the success of Indonesia’s freedom. But there were other, more radical voices, not least those associated with the socialist underground. On 17 August – in a dramatic foreshadowing of the shape of things to come – Sukarno was kidnapped by his own armed pemuda. They were determined that the new nation should not be seen as a Japanese puppet regime. Sukarno was compelled to seize back the initiative. In the courtyard of his house in Jakarta he read out the prosaic formula: ‘We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare Indonesia’s independence.’59 There was no mention of Malaya, or of Indonesiaraya, but in the minds of many Malays their destiny still was bound up with that of the new nation.
Such was the force behind this idea that spontaneous declarations for the new republican government, and of loyalty to President Sukarno, were made throughout the islands. But the new government was not universally embraced: many local administrators were suspicious; many local aristocrats feared its levelling rhetoric; others were simply bewildered by the pace of events and uncertain where their loyalties should lie. In many areas it was young partisans who seized the initiative in the republic’s name. In the face of this, Japanese troops as often as not withdrew into their secured perimeters, leaving the streets, key buildings and installations in the hands of the Indonesians. Soon the key royal houses, such as Yogyakarta, and local governors in Java and the outer islands declared for the republic. By September it possessed a relatively stable bureaucracy and, with the assistance of many sympathetic Japanese officers, the core of a well-equipped army. This was a massive shift in initiative, and one that was to reverberate throughout the Malay world. At the same time, however, the Indonesian revolution unleashed all the social frustration and political anger of decades of colonial rule and Japanese oppression. It was unclear how far this could be controlled by the new political elite in Jakarta.
This first phase of revolution reached a crescendo with a series of massive ‘ocean’ rallies in Indonesia’s major cities. On 19 September a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Ikeda Square in Jakarta under the watchful eyes of a cordon of Japanese troops. Many in the crowd were armed with sharpened bamboo staves. Sukarno, increasingly worried about provoking the Japanese or the Allied armies that were poised to take their place, had tried and failed to prevent the assembly but, in a moment of supreme political theatre, demonstrated his control over the crowd by taking the rostrum, persuading it to disperse peacably. Not everyone was impressed. A silent witness to this event was Tan Malaka. One of the first leaders of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, he had been in exile since 1922, living under a string of pseudonyms, working as an agent of the Comintern, avoiding the colonial police. It was a life that was lived, as the title of his memoirs has it, ‘from jail to jail’. He was perhaps the most travelled Indonesian of his age: a legend, like Lai Teck in Malaya, a figure for the cloak-and-dagger novels of the day, Patjar Merah, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Asian revolution. He had returned to Indonesia only in 1942, incognito, working as a clerk in a Japanese coal mine in Java, a stranger in his own country. In August he revealed his identity to the revolutionary leaders, though not to the public. Such was his mystique that Sukarno even signed a secret document stating that Tan Malaka should assume the leadership of the revolution were Sukarno to be incapacitated. But the veteran revolutionary felt that his time had not yet come. The Ikeda Square demonstration had been his suggestion: a way of testing the will of the revolutionaries. He was disappointed in Sukarno, who had come not to inspire the crowd to action, ‘but to request the masses to “have faith” and “obey” and to order them to go home’.60 He was appalled at the concessions Sukarno was prepared to make to the imperial powers. He bided his time, waiting to reveal himself and seize his moment as had Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Perhaps a more telling comparison would prove to be Subhas Chandra Bose. In 1945 there were to be reports and sightings of various ‘Tan Malakas’ throughout Java and Sumatra. In Malaya, some – including British intelligence – believed that the mysterious founder of the Malay Nationalist Party, Mokhtaruddin Lasso, was none other than the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’.61
The British and Dutch heard little of events in Java. During the war there had been virtually no intelligence gathered about Indonesia, an information gap which British secret warriors were now tasked to fill. Even as Special Operations Executive was being rapidly wound down in Europe, Mountbatten retained a force of not less than 2,500 for peacetime tasks. The need for information about Indonesia was desperate.62 There were a few Dutch officers at Mountbatten’s HQ at Kandy, but most Dutch who knew anything about Indonesia were either in Japanese prison camps or in Australia, as part of a government-in-exile at Camp Columbia just outside Brisbane, where their shipping – known as ‘Flying Dutchmen’ to port workers – choked the harbour. A formal Anglo-Dutch agreement on civil affairs was signed only on 24 August. It gave authority to a British commander working through a Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs Administration. The British were to take responsibility for Java and Sumatra; the outer islands would be looked after by the Australians. Dutch political planning for the future of its vast Asian empire was founded upon a speech made by Queen Wilhelmina on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor: it reaffirmed the ‘indivisibility of the Kingdom’. As a sop to United States opinion it called for a conference with national leaders, but the proposal was no advance on the last major programme of Dutch colonial reform in 1918; arguably, it promised less. When it was announced in Indonesia, it was met with scorn: ‘ridiculous’, a leader in West Java recalled, ‘as if Hitler and Japan had done nothing to the world of men’.63
The first landings on the isolated Dutch territories of New Guinea gave no foretaste of conditions elsewhere. The first British officers to parachute into Java and Sumatra added little to the picture: they landed on 8 September and reported a reasonably peaceable situation. They met the moderate Indonesian leaders, and not the pemuda. In any case, their principal task was to begin to locate the 100,000-odd prisoners of war and civilian internees in Indonesia. They were mostly Dutch, but included British women detained in remote locations after their ships had been sunk in the ‘Dunkirk’-type small-ship exodus from Singapore a few days before its fall. Their conditions were dire. It was at this point that tensions began to mount. Like their British counterparts, the former Dutch officials in the internment camps fully expected to return to their Indonesian homes and resume their old jobs and, unlike the old Malaya hands, the opportunity was there for them to do so. They were, therefore, bitterly angry on hearing the first broadcast announcements of South East Asia Command ordering them to stay in their camps. Many now hated the Indonesians for what they saw as betrayal. Many defied SEAC and began re-enter the towns to reclaim their old privileges.
The returning Dutch found a new world, one that now belonged to exultant Indonesians. The red and white flag of the republic flew from public buildings, shops and houses. Graffiti were scoured on walls and banners spanned the streets. They saw everywhere the word Merdeka! and also citations – in English, the language of the Atlantic Charter – from the preamble of the United States Constitution, even of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Many Indonesians fully expected to enlist the support of the Allies behind the revolution. The ex-internees were entirely unprepared for such scenes. Emaciated and in rags, many were treated sympathetically by the Indonesians they met, but refused to abandon the arrogance and swagger they had shown during the pre-war era. Antagonism erupted into violence. Dutch men and women were murdered as they tried to reclaim their businesses and homes. Men of military age were especially vulnerable. Derek van den Boegarde was deeply scarred by the memory of domestic murder in Bandung, where he was stationed with the British forces: Dutch internees had returned to their homes, ‘trying with what remained of their looted belongings to restart their lives, only to lose them in acts of hysterical hatred and violence’.64 Hotels and clubs became battlegrounds. As in French Indo-China, there was an obsession with symbols of sovereignty. In many towns and cities there was a ‘war of the flags’. One incident at the focal point of European community life in Surabaya, the Oranje Hotel, was to assume a much wider significance. On 19 September young Dutch and Eurasians crowded round the hotel, then principally housing journalists and still bearing its Japanese name, the Yamato. In an atmosphere almost of schoolboy rivalry they entered the hotel and raised a Dutch tricolour. Angry Indonesian youths stoned the building, fatally injuring a Eurasian lawyer. They scaled the walls of the hotel and ripped the blue stripe from the flag, leaving the red and white of the republic flying.65 The Eurasians were incensed. In the words of the writer Idrus, an acerbic witness to events in the city: ‘They remembered how things had been three and a half years before, and they remembered their fathers, who had been real Dutchmen. And they felt insulted, as though their own fathers had been stripped naked.’66A mêlée ensued. In Jakarta, Indonesian medical students responded by electrifying the flag poles.67
The first major British landing was in Jakarta on 15 September, a month after the end of the war, when HMS Cumberland docked in Tanjong Priok harbour. The first regiment ashore was 29 Seaforth Highlanders. The regiment had served in the last British occupation of Java: Thomas Stamford Raffles’s conquest of 1811. Raffles had sought to reform and reverse the corrupting effects of Dutch rule on native society. In 1945 British officers were to invoke his memory. The bulk of 23 Indian Division disembarked on 25 September in an eerie calm. It was not a scene of chaos. ‘The trams ran regularly up Koningsplein, the trains steamed out of the main station to Bandung with innumerable passengers.’68 The tensions rose as Dutch began to arrive in the baggage-train of the British. The first senior official on the scene was Charles van der Plas, the pre-war governor of East Java: the vanguard of the Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs administration. He was met with a poster: Nèr Plasje – Indonesia maoe kaoe tjatoet–Djenggolmoe nanti koe tjaboet! It was a cruel play on his name; loosely translated, it read: ‘Hey piss-puddle – If you try to wipe out Indonesia – I’ll pull your beard!’69 His first broadcasts to the people of the islands were a disaster: he spoke of ruthless retribution for traitors and collaborators, by which he clearly meant Sukarno and Hatta. In his first reports he gave Mountbatten no hint of the difficulties that were to be met: ‘The Indonesians’, he informed the supremo, ‘are too nice a people to fight really hard.’70 The Dutch military commanders were ill-equipped to comprehend the magnitude and the meaning of the events that had taken place in Jakarta. They disliked the British; they resented the precedence that seemed to be given to French interests in Indo-China.71 They had spent the war living a grotesque colonial fantasy in Camp Columbia, where racist attitudes were, if anything, worse than in the pre-war Indies, and the Indonesians were openly called bangsat – ‘son of a bitch’.72 The two senior military men were Admiral Helfrich, a disciplinarian who thought the antidote to nationalism was corporal punishment, and General van Oyen, ‘so fond of his wine, his food and his women’, according to a 1946 British official report, and ‘universally disliked by his countrymen, particularly by the ladies who rightly or wrongly believed that he flew out of Bandung in March 1942 with his mistress, leaving his wife behind’.73
When the lieutenant governor, Dr Hubertus J. van Mook, arrived on 1 October, he too was welcomed by a crowd waving placards. Very short-sighted and unable to read them, he turned to his secretary: ‘What do they say?’ There came the answer: ‘“Death to van Mook”, Your Excellency.’74 Van Mook viewed the Indies as his homeland; he was born in Java. So too was van der Plas, probably of a mixed marriage. A celebrated scholar of Islam, van der Plas had been taunted by hardliners as an Inlander liefde: a lover of the natives. Van Mook and van der Plas personify many of the contradictions of the reforming imperialisms of the end of empire. They shared a vision of ‘association’, in which the Indies Dutch, with a privileged status, gave cohesion to the ethnically diverse society of the archipelago under the tutelage of the Netherlands – a kind of tropical Canada. But it was a politically barren vision that would compel the Indies Dutch to fight like Boers in southern Africa to maintain their primacy. To men like van Mook and van der Plas, ‘Indonesia’ was merely a geographical expression. Their vision of a multiracial society was sincerely held, but it led them to despise nationalism, which they saw as ethnic chauvinism. They did not recognize the republic’s leaders, they put their faith in old hierarchies and they saw no possibility of departure from the governing obsession with Rusten Orde.75 Above all, they could not comprehend that the coming conflict was to be a war between nation-states.
As in the case of Indo-China, the British intervention was seen, both by its critics at the time and by historians since, as a calculated war of imperial conquest. Like Indo-China, the forces shaping policy were more complex and driven by the pace of events on the ground.76 But more than this, it was a definitive encounter with nationalism. There were important differences in approach between the two territories. The British commander was Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison. A baronet and former medical doctor, he had won the first British victories against the Japanese in Burma and had been knighted in the field by Lord Wavell – the first such event since the Middle Ages. Like Gracey in Vietnam, he was told by Mountbatten that he was to be a politician, and ultimately to ‘carry the can’. But he was perhaps better equipped for this task than Gracey, and more instinctively sympathetic to nationalism. Attlee counted himself ‘lucky to have a soldier-statesman there’.77 Although for both men the safety of their troops was an overriding concern, the British paid for their presence in Indonesia with vastly more casualties than in Indo-China, and this shaped Christison’s attitude to the Dutch. He was appalled by their intransigence and, in the face of it, was less cowed by constitutional niceties than was Gracey in Vietnam. In any event, the British could more easily afford to offend the Dutch than the French. Although the question of Dutch sovereignty was unquestioned at the diplomatic level, there was a wide difference between the capacity of the Dutch and the French to restore their own authority on the ground. It was not until March 1946 that Dutch troops landed in Java in any numbers. The earlier arrivals gave major provocation to the Indonesians without contributing to security. Their Indonesian auxiliaries, mostly Christian Ambonese, were a liability. Many felt that their trigger-happy entry into Jakarta was an attempt to provoke the British into more decisive moves to save the Dutch empire. But Christison embargoed the introduction of more Dutch troops: if any were landed, he told Mountbatten on 13 October, civil war was inevitable. They were diverted to the outer islands, which were under the jurisdiction of Australian forces, and a much milder political climate.78 Faced by an armed revolution, British troops would bear the liability for the bitter-ender mentality of the Dutch. Both Christison and Mountbatten viewed this prospect with horror.
There were now clear limits to what British soldiers were prepared to take. Morale, Mountbatten told the chiefs of staff in mid October, was good. But there was every likelihood it would deteriorate. His men were war weary, and many of them had slogged through the worst of the Burma campaign. They were obsessed with demobilization and did not understand their role in Indonesia. It would be a ‘grave mistake’, Mountbatten warned, to give any impression that ‘they are about to become involved in putting down local independence movements on behalf of other governments in countries they are liberating’.79 The Indonesia campaign was the last outreach of the Raj, and carried with it all the signals of its imminent dissolution. Only four of the thirty battalions at Mountbatten’s disposal were British. It was not clear how willing the Indian troops would be to fight another Asian nationalist movement. Congress supported the new republic. Nehru asked to visit Java to assess the situation, but Mount-batten could not guarantee his safety. Reports on SEAC units in the early part of 1946 spoke of a ‘growing sympathy’ for the INA and a deep dislike of the Dutch, who treated sepoys ‘like… native[s]’.80 For their part, Dutch internees had little faith in the Indian soldiers’ ability to protect them.81 Indian Muslim soldiers came under a barrage of republican propaganda. Indonesian nationalists believed many of them to be sympathetic to their cause. The West Java leader, Abu Hanifah, witnessed an Islamic militia attacking a small British convoy crying Allahu akbar! God is Greater! The Indian Muslims escorting it then put out a white flag. ‘What do you want from us?’ they asked, and supplied the fighters with tinned food and cigarettes, rifles and ammunition.82 By the end of the year, there were reports of desertions to the republican forces, some lured by pan-Islamic propaganda, others by promises of women and plenty.83
Mountbatten limited the British mission in Indonesia to the preservation of law and order in key areas; the disarming and repatriation of the Japanese and the release of prisoners of war and internees. On 10 October Mountbatten decided to focus on the key port cities of Jakarta, Semarang and, fatefully, Surabaya. The hill towns immediately behind, where many of the internees were believed to be, were to be occupied if possible. In the interim Mountbatten had informed Count Terauchi that the preservation of peace in Java was the responsibility of the Japanese. There were, at the surrender, 65,000 Japanese troops in Java alone. But such was the magnitude and multitude of the tasks facing the British that the Japanese were deployed in a much wider role. The British were warned against this by Sukarno, who, struggling to control the pemuda, feared that reprisals would be taken against Dutch internees.84 An early flashpoint was Bandung, the major inland city of West Java. Japanese commanders in the city were keen to reassert their authority and, with at least the tacit encouragement of British liaison officers, Bandung was reoccupied on 10 October. This was a major humiliation to the local revolutionary leaders: they were sent lipsticks by their comrades in East Java. In Semarang the local British officer, fearing attacks on internment camps, turned to the Japanese for aid. Their local commanders too were incensed after the detention and killing of Japanese civilians by pemuda forces, and struck back on 15 October – ‘fighting mad’, in one British account – giving no quarter to Indonesians in arms. About 2,000 Indonesian and several hundred Japanese lives were lost. In these areas the use of Japanese troops went far beyond the minimal defensive requirements of the peace agreement and, in Semarang and elsewhere, they were incorporated into the command structure of the British and Gurkha forces who began to arrive in the cities after the worst of the fighting was over. The Japanese commander in Semarang, Major Kido, was recommended for a DSO. In East Sumatra Japanese troops were used on a large scale after attacks on British forces and their own men: at the market town of Tebing Tinggi a Japanese operation in mid December left between 2,000 and 5,000 dead. Whilst the British government struggled to justify the use of Japanese troops even to rescue internees, in Sumatra, in conditions of some secrecy, the Japanese were used to guard key economic installations until as late as November 1946. Mountbatten, on an official visit to Palembang in April 1946, was shocked to be greeted by a 1,000-strong Japanese guard of honour, the officers saluting him with their swords.85 Yet individual Japanese field commanders saw their role in very different ways. As one Japanese officer in Sumatra put it: ‘Most of us had no earnest desire to prevent the flow of arms.’ They would stage mock battles as cover and leave ‘presents’ of ammunition behind. By the end of 1945 perhaps 1,700 Japanese in Java, 350 Japanese in North Sumatra and 100 more in Aceh had defected to fight with the revolution. Most of them were killed in battle.86
From their first arrival until the departure of the British over a year later the Dutch protested at lack of support from the British. They were furious at Christison’s first statements on landing in Jakarta, which promised good will and co-operation with the Indonesians. They argued that it amounted to a ‘virtual recognition’ of the republic. Such was the mood in The Hague that it was considered treasonable even to talk to the nationalists. From early October Mountbatten’s political adviser, Esler Dening, attempted to mediate in Jakarta. Whilst Britain wholeheartedly desired the return of the French and the Dutch to their positions, he argued, it was vital not to prejudice Britain’s own position in the Far East. Both French and Dutch had to be saved from themselves to ensure that they did ‘not to imperil the general position of European power in the Far East’.87 With increasing frustration, he urged the Dutch to talk. The first meeting between the British – Christison and Dening – and the new Indonesian government took place in Jakarta on 24 October. The republic was represented by Sukarno and Hatta. Dening was impressed by Hatta, but less so with Sukarno: ‘not a man of remarkable character’. Both men were struck by the extent to which the Indonesians felt that the Dutch were in thrall to pre-war attitudes.88 By this time van Mook was visibly under strain. Mountbatten demanded that more authority be given to van Mook to bring the republican leadership to talks, but the main stumbling block was Sukarno, whom the Dutch saw as an arch-collaborator and with whom they would not negotiate. A South African officer, Laurens van der Post, later to win fame as a travel writer and spiritual guru to the present Prince of Wales, was flown to The Hague to meet with the die-hards in the Dutch government. He had been a prisoner of war in Sumatra and was the first eyewitness to events in Java to reach the Netherlands. He also saw Attlee, and although he was dismissive of Sukarno, on the assumption that his reputation had been ruined in the war, he told the British prime minister that the Indonesian president must be included in the negotiations. The Dutch government, however, insisted that Sukarno was a traitor and was not representative of the Indonesian people. ‘My reply’, Mountbatten telegraphed the British cabinet on 14 October, ‘is that his case is similar to Aung San, traitor or patriot according to point of view… the Dutch by dealing with him now could avoid having to deal with extremists later’.89 He had been urged to take a hard line against him in Burma, but found that the alternative leaders had no support. ‘It is as though [the Dutch] refuse to recognise any British government which did not contain Mr Baldwin or Mr Chamberlain.’90 But events were unfolding in the east of Java that demonstrated to all observers that Indonesian nationalism was an unstoppable and revolutionary force.