In accordance with this new line, the Japanese formed quasi-military youth movements and an Indonesian volunteer army which would become the core of a future republican Indonesian army. In November 1943 Sukarno made his first foreign trip to Tokyo, where he was decorated by Emperor Hirohito and entertained by Prime Minister Tojo. In May 1944 he attended a conference in Singapore, where he publicly enunciated the five principles which would guide a future Indonesian state. These were belief in God, social justice, representative government, internationalism and unity of the archipelago from Sumatra to Papua New Guinea. In a complex society of sixty-seven million people, this was probably the maximum aspiration.59
Sukarno’s strategy appeared to pay dividends as in September 1944 the Japanese promised independence to what they had hitherto called the Southern Regions, meaning all the territory they had conquered in South-east Asia. In March 1945 they established an Investigative Committee for the Preparation of Independence. That August they appointed Sukarno chairman, and Mohammed Hatta his deputy, with 24 August set to be the date when power would be formally transferred – a date rendered irrelevant by the abrupt end of the war following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After 8 August Sukarno took matters into his own hands and on the 17th in the courtyard of a house in Jakarta simply declared, ‘We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare Indonesia’s independence.’ This was followed by demonstrations, under the nervous eyes of Japanese troops, in the lengthy interval before the Allies arrived to take their surrender. As originally planned, that should have been the Americans, with the Dutch East Indies destined to become a part of MacArthur’s vast Pacific command. He fully intended to restore Dutch rule, but while an invasion of Japan was still on the cards US Chief of Staff General George Marshall had decided that MacArthur should not dissipate forces he needed for Operation Olympic, the invasion and occupation of Japan. Marshall’s growing dislike of MacArthur gave him a further reason to cut him down to size.
Following agreement at Potsdam, the British had already subsumed the Dutch East Indies into Mountbatten’s hopelessly overstretched South East Asia Command (SEAC), an enterprise known to American cynics as ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. This sleight of hand resulted in some confused loyalties in Indonesia two months later, when Australian and Indian Army troops landed, the delay caused by the US reluctance to provide ships. Red and white flags flew openly and ‘Merdeka!’ (Freedom!) was daubed on walls; but there were also such pro-US slogans as: ‘We are fighting for government for the people, by the people, of the people.’ A British officer sourly noted to an American observer: ‘Your damned American revolution is still giving us trouble.’ After Indonesian nationalist gangs tried to kill anyone with a white face, a larger force of Seaforth Highlanders was despatched under General Sir Philip Christison. With demobilization beckoning, none of these British or Indian soldiers wished to tarry in Indonesia and, since his Muslim Indian troops would be highly unlikely to coerce Muslim Indonesians, Christison wisely announced that ‘British and Indian troops will not become involved in internal politics,’ leaving the maintenance of civil order in the hands of the Japanese. His aim was to fulfil only the limited role of freeing 100,000 Europeans from atrocious conditions of confinement, but circumstances dictated otherwise.
The new Labour government in London endorsed Mountbatten’s proposal that the Dutch negotiate with the Indonesian nationalists. Unwilling though they were, the Dutch had little choice, since their homeland was devastated and the country had no armed forces to speak of. Negotiations were complicated by the fact that the government in The Hague was provisional, and unwilling to wave farewell to a colony that was at least as important to the Netherlands economy as India was to Britain. Overseas colonies also bolstered Dutch pretensions to being a significant player in newly liberated Europe. Not unreasonably, Sukarno pleaded with the British: ‘Indonesians will never understand why it is, for instance, wrong for the Germans to rule Holland if it is right for the Dutch to rule Indonesia. In either case the right to rule rests on pure force and not on the sanction of the populations.’ Mohammed Hatta put it more bluntly: ‘the Dutch [are] about as popular as the pox’.60
The British tried to stand aside from the murderous tensions between Indonesian nationalists and incoming Dutch officials, who behaved as though they would simply take up where they had left off three years earlier. However, in Surabaya in eastern Java a British force was surrounded and shot up by a much larger number of Indonesian militiamen after they tried to extract civilian internees. A British general based in Batavia made the mistake of leafleting these militias from the air, telling them to disarm. When the British commander on the spot, Brigadier Aubertin Mallaby, tried to negotiate an exit for his forces, he was killed. The 5th Indian Division, supported by aircraft and tanks, went in to avenge the Mallaby’s death and killed around 9,000 Indonesian fighters.
Since the Dutch lacked the forces to reoccupy Indonesia, the fate of their colony devolved on the Americans and the British. US policy initially reflected the anti-colonial sentiments of the late President Roosevelt, but his idea of international trusteeships for former European colonies was quietly abandoned, partly because the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington did not want this logic extended to the new overseas bases the US had acquired, and also because US corporations had a keen interest in Indonesia’s oil, rubber and tin.
But Indonesia was affected by a more fundamental clash over policy between different departments of the US foreign service, which was to bedevil the making of policy towards other parts of the world in the post-war years. The State Department was bitterly divided between Europeanists, who wanted to support Britain, France and the Netherlands, and Asianists, who thought that the (outrageously circumscribed) independence the United States granted to the Philippines on 4 July 1946 should be paradigmatic for all former European colonies. A compromise formula that sought to reconcile the ‘natural aspirations’ of indigenous peoples and the ‘legitimate rights and interests’ of the colonizers revealed some of the tensions in US policy-making. The advent of Harry Truman with his less cynical and more broadbrush view of the world enabled the Europeanists to quietly bury Roosevelt’s more ambivalent policy, which, in truth, would have unravelled anyway under the weight of its own contradictions.
The main British concern was that the spirit of independence evident in Indonesia should not spread to Malaya, but at the same time the British wished to withdraw their forces as rapidly as possible. The solution was to rely on 65,000 Japanese troops to maintain order, as they were legally obliged to do under the terms of the surrender agreement. They were good soldiers, as a British officer noted when he used them to rescue European hostages taken in Bandung. ‘I watched the Japs closely as they went in. Couldn’t fault ’em – absolutely first class!’ When Mountbatten visited in April 1946, the guard of honour consisted of a thousand Japanese with their officers presenting arms with Samurai swords.61
The threat of peremptory British withdrawal forced the Dutch into negotiations, not with Sukarno, who was unacceptable to them, but with Premier Sutan Sjahrir, who met with them at Linggadjati under the chairmanship of Lord Killearn. The agreement, concluded in November 1946 but not ratified until six months later, accepted the existence of an independent Indonesian Republic as part of a Netherlands Union headed by the Dutch Crown, with joint control of defence and foreign affairs. Pausing only long enough to slip 55,000 Dutch troops into Java, the British withdrew.62
The Dutch hoped to establish a series of puppet states organized as an Indonesian federation under Dutch control. This resulted in fighting between the Dutch troops, who took major cities on Java and Sumatra as well as the Outer Islands including Bali, and the army of the Indonesian Republic and ad hoc militias. The Dutch launched two major ‘police’ campaigns in July 1947 and December 1948, the first called Operation Product, the second Operation Crow, after an intervening armistice known as the
Renville Agreement broke down. These operations were extremely brutal. On 9 December 1947 Dutch forces massacred all 431 men in the village of Rawagede after they refused to betray the whereabouts of a leading independence fighter – tragically, they did not know who he was. After the Indonesian nationalists also breached the Renville Agreement, in December 1948 the Dutch launched a surprise attack on the nationalist capital of Jogjakarta, their actions aided by their having broken the enemy’s military codes. They took the city and captured Hatta and Sukarno, who were about to depart for a meeting with Nehru in India, and exiled them to Bangka island.
The Dutch had failed to spot the significance of an earlier event. Between September and November 1948, Soviet-backed Indonesian Communists had launched the Madiun revolt in Central Java, which the Indonesian army had suppressed with considerable violence. This brought the Americans into play. A senior agent of the CIA (which had succeeded the OSS in 1947 as America’s main external intelligence agency) arrived in Jogjakarta, one of his tasks being to select members of the Police Mobile Brigade, who were flown to US bases for advanced training. The US was not going to allow a minor power like the Netherlands to mess up the incipient United Nations and used the threat of ending the Netherlands’ participation in the European reconstruction assistance plan known as Marshall Aid to to induce the Dutch to comply with UN ceasefire demands. Under the terms of the final settlement which gave the Indonesian Republic its independence, the Dutch clung on to Netherlands New Guinea, while Indonesia was obliged to take over £4 billion of Dutch East Indies debt, half of which was the cost of the campaign Holland had waged to frustrate Indonesian independence.63
2. HARRY TRUMAN’S WORLD
Much to be Modest About
Other than a general commitment to a liberal economic order, and to his fundamental Four Freedoms, before his death in April 1945 Roosevelt was vague about how the world might be ordered for the peace, for this was one of those seminal moments, like 1815 or 1919. He was credulous towards Stalin, regarded Churchill as an out-of-date imperialist, detested de Gaulle and reposed great faith in China. FDR thought in terms of something like the nineteenth-century Congress of Europe from the era of Metternich and Castlereagh. When updated this meant that four policemen, the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and Nationalist China, would police the world. The disguising mechanism for this quadrumvirate was the United Nations, where they would dominate the Security Council, and a General Assembly front-loaded with their allies in the pre-decolonized era.1
How the US dealt with the world was inevitably subordinated to more immediate problems. The Americans had experienced nothing of the domestic civilian death and destruction experienced by Asian and European belligerents and so failed to grasp how deeply the war had disordered the world. While the rest of the world was laid waste, US GNP rose from $886 million in 1939 to $135 billion in 1945. Nonetheless, on Victory in Japan Day there were over twelve million personnel in the US armed forces, including seven million overseas. The first task was to get them home as their families adopted the slogan ‘No boats, no votes’. Repatriated at the rate of 15,000 per day, GIs teemed into an economy undergoing painful civilian reconversion. For example, Boeing laid off 21,200 of the 29,000 men in two aircraft plants on one day, while 6,000 naval ships were mothballed at the stroke of a pen. Within a single week, $15 billion worth of arms contracts were cancelled.2
Among workers and their representatives there was fear that wartime economic expansion was only a hiatus before the return to Depression-era conditions. As prices and rents were freed, rationing was phased out and forty-eight-hour weeks with overtime ceased, union leaders contrasted their members’ newly modest incomes with the colossal profits corporations had made in wartime. A rash of ugly strikes swept the US, involving automobile and steel workers, coal miners and meat packers. Regardless of whether they were homebound veterans or civilians who had followed wartime work to remote locations, everyone wanted a place of their own, but there was a chronic shortage of new housing. This was only partly solved by loans to GIs or the application of Fordist assembly-line methods to basic suburban housing. The reality was many families doubling up, with people also camped out in cars, barns, cellars and streetcars.
Although Americans had forced savings in bonds and cash amounting to $140 billion in 1945 as a result of the wartime dearth of consumer goods, there was still remarkably little to spend their money on. For this was a lean America, where a weekly hot bath was a luxury, almost impossible for us to imagine from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. It was not concerned with whether the Russians wanted a small piece of Turkey, or which permutation of crooks and villains came to power in Athens. It did not want US armed forces permanently stationed 3,000 miles away to defend former enemy lands against a former ally. At the same time most Americans passionately believed in the universal value of the United Nations. In a poll held in late 1947, as many as 82 per cent believed that it was ‘very important that the UN succeed’, while 56 per cent wanted it converted into ‘a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States’.3
The burden of reconciling the hopes of many Americans for a better life with the responsibilities of global power fell to Harry Truman. He was a seemingly mundane Mid-Westerner, the son of a failed Missouri farmer who had gone on to fail himself as a haberdasher. Too poor to go to college, and hence the last non-graduate US president, Truman distinguished himself as an artillery officer in the First World War. He was five feet eight, with grey-blue eyes and steely hair. His personal integrity, based on a strong Baptist faith, somehow managed to coexist with being part of the deeply corrupt regime of the Democrat Tom Pendergast in St Louis. Chosen to put an honest face on the Pendergast machine in Congress, Truman was elected to the Senate in 1934, aged fifty.
His experiences of the havoc debt played on families such as his own gave him a horror of government overspending and waste. The profligacy of the armed forces and defence contractors with taxpayers’ money was a particular bugbear. Washington DC was not Truman’s kind of town, certainly not the smart salons of Georgetown. He was quick to resent the East Coast ‘pinko pansies’, ‘striped pants’ patrician snobs and impertinent journalists who darkened his path.4
Nothing about Harry would have mattered much in broader historical terms, until on the evening of 12 April 1945 he was summoned to the White House. A grieving Eleanor Roosevelt said: ‘Harry, the President is dead.’ ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked, to break the silence. Mrs Roosevelt replied, ‘Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.’5 The intimacy of this scene contrasted with the fact that FDR had met Truman only three times before he drafted him to replace the left-liberal Henry Wallace, and then three times more, perfunctorily, after Truman had become vice president. Now, aged sixty, Truman was president. While conscious that there were a dozen people who could do the job better, he told friends and colleagues that Providence had destined him for the role.
Truman quickly dumped Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, ‘a fine man, good looking, amiable, cooperative, but never an idea old or new’. His replacement was a dud for different reasons. Relations with James Byrnes, a South Carolina politician who thought he should have been FDR’s running mate and successor, were soon strained by Byrnes’s lengthy absences at overseas conferences and by disagreement over how to react to Soviet provocations as the wartime Grand Alliance came apart like an accelerating row of burst threads. Byrnes conducted diplomacy with one eye on his domestic political ambitions, seeking agreements as much for their headline value without adequately informing either Truman or Congressional leaders, his vanity making it easy for Stalin and his Foreign Minister, Molotov, to manipulate him. In January 1947 Truman recalled Marshall from China to replace him.6
The new President rapidly realized that the Soviets were bent on taking ‘here a little, there a little, they are chiselling from us’. Not long
after becoming president he lectured Molotov on Soviet bad faith. In Truman’s recollection, Molotov said, ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life.’ ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,’ Truman snapped back.7 By January 1946 Truman had decided: ‘Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand: “How many divisions have you?”’ He would endeavour to get along with the Soviets, and work with them within the new UN Security Council, but he was never going to appease them, the common nightmare of his generation.8
An inquiry from the US Treasury as to why the Soviets had rejected the International Monetary Fund and other global organizations established at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks elicited a significant response from the US embassy in Moscow, becalmed during its celebrations of George Washington’s birthday.
The diplomat and Soviet expert George Kennan dictated a powerful ‘Long Telegram’ (at 5,000 words the longest such document in US diplomatic history) in which he argued that Marxism had combined with the deep-seated neuroses of the old Russia. The Soviets would seek to dominate such neighbours as Iran and Turkey, while spreading subversion through so-called liberation movements in the undeveloped world, and via labour unions and youth organizations in the West itself. Read without the author’s later discovery of nuance, the telegram seemed to call for the US to wield a big stick: ‘Soviet power is impervious to the logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to the logic of force.’ Through the actions of this ‘expanding totalitarian state’ the world was dividing into hostile armed camps. Kennan’s Long Telegram was one of the most influential diplomatic ruminations of modern times. It used history and ideology to explain the nature of the Soviet menace, while creating a potential job for the author by calling for a level of peacetime strategic planning, resembling the girding of the sinews more customary to states at war. ‘My reputation was made. My voice now carried.’
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