by Harper, Tim
The pemuda of Surabaya scented an historic opportunity. This found expression in the figure of Sutumo, the 25-year-old son of a clerk, who had worked as a journalist for the Domei news agency and was known universally by the revolutionary honorific of ‘Bung [Brother] Tomo’. He was a model pemuda: jaunty military attire, a handgun, a Napoleonic bearing. He refused to cut his hair, and swore not to touch a woman, until Indonesia had gained its freedom. With a Japanese transmitter he created his own radio station: Radio Pemberontakan, ‘Radio Rebellion’. British soldiers were astonished to hear on it the voice of a Englishwoman. She was a Manx hotelier from Bali, interned by the Japanese and best known by her Balinese name, K’tut Tantri. She was one of the first of many Westerners to be caught up in the spirit of this revolution and to serve it. The forces and press named her variously Modjokerta Molly, Solo Sally, Djokja Josy and, finally, in a nod to the Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill hit song ‘Surabaya Jonny’, she achieved worldwide notoriety as ‘Surabaya Sue’.93 But it was the raw charisma of Bung Tomo that catalysed the resistance of the city. ‘His voice was loud and harsh,’ wrote Idrus, ‘the man himself small and pretty. His eyes sparkled like the rays of a light-house far out at sea.’94 He was able to offer on air, talking directly to the people, a kind of spiritual leadership that transcended any political organization. Speaking in the unmistakable accents of Surabaya, he drew into the youthful rebellion of the pemuda the gritty opposition of the urban poor:
It is the masses in their thousands, starved, stripped, and shamed by the colonialists, who will rise to carry out the revolt. We extremists, we who revolt with a full revolutionary spirit, together with the Indonesian masses, who have experienced the oppression of colonialism, would rather see Indonesia drowned in blood and sunk to the bottom of the sea than colonized once more! God will protect us! Merdeka!95
These phrases would be repeated like a mantra across the region.
As the British were about to land, the Indonesians in control of the docks signalled that they should await orders from Moestopo, the former dentist who was now nominally in control of the city administration. The British commander, Brigadier A. W. S. Mallaby – a long-serving Indian Army staff officer with no recent field experience – responded curtly: ‘We take orders from no one!’ Nevertheless, the initial British entry into Surabaya was quite peaceful, if tense. The British impressed on the Indonesians that they were there to evacuate the 16,000-odd POWs and internees held in and around the city. But the situation deteriorated swiftly as Mallaby tried to rescue the luckless Huijer from imprisonment. Then, on 27 September, there was an ill-advised airdrop of leaflets demanding that the Indonesians surrender their arms within forty-eight hours or be shot. This was made without Mallaby’s knowledge, and in contravention of local agreements, but it now had to be enforced. This was seen by the Indonesians as base treachery. They were now convinced that the British were preparing to reoccupy the city for the Dutch. The leaflets unravelled the ceasefire negotiations on the ground, and the Indonesian soldiers and militias fell on Mallaby’s forces. The next day there was fierce fighting throughout the city. The 6,000, mostly Indian, troops of the brigade were scattered and set on by an estimated 20,000 trained and armed regulars and 120,000 civilians brandishing knives, clubs and bamboo spears. In the midst of this, evacuees – including women and children – were attacked with machine guns, grenades and swords. ‘Bestial scenes’, recalled one British observer, which ‘rivalled the vilest moments of the French revolution’.96 The British garrison, Whitehall was forced to announce, was ‘more or less besieged’. The losses during the next four days were appalling for a peacetime operation: 16 officers and 217 other ranks.97 On 29 October Sukarno, Hatta and the republic’s defence minister, Amir Sjarifuddin, were flown into the city to negotiate a truce. They landed in a hail of bullets.
As the fighting abated British Indian soldiers were left adrift in isolated pockets throughout the city. In the afternoon of 30 October Brigadier Mallaby drove into the city to explain the ceasefire, and to visit the locations in which his troops had washed up. He was warned against this by his second-in-command, who knew about the danger of an angry crowd from a spell as a policeman in India. Mallaby, it seems, felt that only he could undertake this task. His last words on leaving his HQ were: ‘If any of us get killed, splash it all over the world.’ Travelling in an ordinary car in convoy with Indonesian negotiators, and with only three British aides with him, Mallaby went first to the Internatio Bank in Union Square, where a company of 6th Mahrattas were holding out, confronted by a hostile crowd of 500 or so Indonesians. Mallaby, with the aid of the Indonesians, tried to broker a ceasefire and to disperse the crowd, but the crowd was in no mood to listen. Mallaby’s car was surrounded and, as armed Indonesians threatened to overwhelm the Mahrattas in the bank building, their Indian officer, seemingly unprompted, gave the order to fire. The volley of Bren-gun fire and grenades killed perhaps 150 Indonesians. In the British accounts, Mallaby’s car came under fire in front of the bank. No one was hit, and Mallaby and the two officers in the car with him lay inside it playing dead for about two hours. Then two Indonesians came to the car window. One touched Mallaby on the shoulder; the brigadier stirred and demanded to see the Indonesian commanders. The men went away, as if to confer, and when they returned one of them shot Mallaby who died almost instantly. General firing started up again, and the two Indonesians ducked behind the car. The two surviving officers seized the opportunity, and as Mallaby’s killer was about to open fire again one of them lobbed a grenade. It is unclear exactly where the grenade exploded, but it almost certainly killed the assailants. The officers escaped from the car and dived into a nearby canal. Hidden between barges and pontoons, and ducking under floating corpses, they made it back to the burning warehouses near the naval base. It took them several hours.98 The Indonesian version was that Mallaby was hit by a mortar shell fired by the Indian troops in the Internatio Bank. This version was relayed by Tom Driberg to the House of Commons. Mallaby, Driberg argued, was killed in action and not by ‘foul murder’; the charge was a slur on the Indonesian people.99 The details of the episode remain confused and disputed. What is clear is that by scattering his command and exposing himself personally, Mallaby made fatal errors of judgement. Military historians have tended to reach a verdict of death by misadventure. Mallaby’s brigade had been all but overwhelmed and the defenders of Surabaya claimed victory. An Indonesian news photographer captured the scene: the burnt-out Lincoln sedan in the square and, behind it, a banner: ‘Once and forever – the Indonesian Republic’.100
The British response was immediate and unflinching. Christison issued a chilling proclamation to the defenders of Surabaya: ‘I intend to bring the whole weight of my sea, land and air forces and all the weapons of modern warfare against them until they are crushed.’101 Sukarno and Hatta were told that Major General E. C. R. Mansergh would arrive with a full infantry division and tanks. Sukarno himself now made a radio address: ‘A tiny grain of arsenic is enough to ruin a glass of water’, he pleaded. ‘So also in a nation.’ This created sufficient calm for the withdrawal of around 8,000 internees, and for the British counter-attack. Over the next few days 5 Indian Division massed in the docks. On 9 November Mansergh ordered the surrender of all arms by the following daybreak, on pain of death, and all women and children were to leave the city by the following nightfall. ‘Crimes against civilization’, his ultimatum stated, ‘cannot go unpunished.’ The republican leadership in the city was divided: there was little realistic opportunity for the ultimatum to be obeyed and, as the British officers well knew, it gave the city leadership no alternative but to fight.102 The surrounding countryside was awash with calls for jihad; students from the religious schools poured into the city. Sukarno, pressured to intervene once more, left the issue to the city to decide. In this mood the pemuda prevailed. The airwaves were used to dramatic effect by Bung Tomo that evening. Radio Pemberontakan urged the people of Surabaya to brace themselves: ‘Our slo
gan remains the same: freedom or death.’ He closed with the invocation he used to begin all his broadcasts: ‘Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!’
The next morning the city was at war with one and a half British divisions: 24,000 troops, supported by twenty-four tanks and twenty-four aircraft. The battle of Surabaya remains one of the largest single engagements fought by British troops since the end of the Second World War, and it was the last use of Indian soldiers in combat by the British Empire. There was little doubt in the minds of the city’s defenders that the British were fighting Surabaya to avenge Mallaby. The Indonesians felt that they had brought the British to their knees, and this further inflamed the situation. The British fought for the city as if it were a full campaign of the Burma war, and not a peacekeeping operation. They opened with a tremendous barrage from the sea and from the air: perhaps 500 bombs were dropped in the first four days. RAF Thunderbolts and Mosquitoes strafed republican buildings and, according to Indonesian reports, refugees on the road south. British troops fought slowly and methodically to minimize their own casualties, street by street, house by house. Pemuda rushed Sherman tanks with spears and knives, and there were suicide squads with explosives. At night women came to claim the men’s bodies. The fighting was most furious in the first few days, but resistance continued until the end of the month, the first fury giving way to a more disciplined core of Indonesian troops.103 The British attempted to point to the hidden hand of the Japanese, but admitted privately that, apart from a couple of Japanese bodies recovered, there was no evidence that they were engaged in the fighting.104 By the time the British reached the city perimeter at Wonosobo bridge on 28 November, Surabaya was in ruins:
Smoke came off the scorched beams like the smoke of Zipper cigarettes; and from people’s mouths came the moans of death. The air stank of cordite and of human and animal carcasses; the hospitals stank of ether and rose-water. Now and then an explosion could be heard, followed by black smoke billowing up into the sky. The rain was full of a dirty black dust which hurt the eyes and the heart alike.105
In a private letter to Sir Archibald Nye of the general staff, Christison estimated some 10,000 casualties and a loss of 600 Allied troops. It was, he said, ‘a most tricky party… One false step… would have brought a mass slaughter of Europeans and Eurasians in comparison with which the notorious Armenian massacres of forty years ago would have been small beer.’106 Local estimates of casualties were higher at perhaps 15,000 dead. The decision of the Indonesians to fight British tanks was a tactical disaster, but it was a national epiphany. It is commemorated each year as Hari Pahlawan, Heroes’ Day, and the monument in the heart of the city remains a point of assembly for young protesters. In August 2001, in a rare gesture, the British government made a statement of apology.
The wake of the battle washed across Indonesia. East Java was flooded with refugees from the city. They brought a new level of instability to the villages, and a struggle for food and other resources. The women, in particular, had a terrible time. Tan Malaka had left Jakarta in disgust at the temperance of the republican leadership there. He arrived in Surabaya to witness the desperate resistance and the exodus from the city. The veteran revolutionary was at once inspired and appalled by the undisciplined fury of the fighters: the Indonesians must, he wrote, ‘harness holiness with reins we made ourselves’.107 But the radicals regrouped at Malang and Bung Tumo resumed his broadcasts. Fighting broke out again in Semarang and the British managed to regain control of the city only with the use of air power and Japanese troops. The Gurkhas were forced to abandon the central Javan town of Magelang. The pemuda were galvanized to action further afield in Medan and elsewhere in Sumatra. This era in Java was known as the bersiap time, from the cry ‘Siaaap!’ – ‘Get ready!’: the perpetual call to vigilance and to arms in the towns and villages. It was a time of revolutionary violence in the name of the sovereignty of the people or the defence of the revolution. It manifested itself in attacks on Christians, Japanese and British stragglers, Chinese, Eurasians and in an obsessive search for spies. It also built on local traditions of fighting: as in Malaya, cults of amulets that conferred invulnerability to their wearers flourished, and the figure of the jago – literally ‘fighting cock’ – the martial-arts champion of the village, on whom Javanese tradition conferred legitimacy as a protector figure in times of crisis. Some Western-educated local leaders, who saw their revolution as an extension of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, were deeply shaken by what they witnessed. But in many Indonesian accounts of the time, the violence seemed inevitable, even morally neutral.108 Many of the more organized and politicized pemuda militias made common cause with the underworld of large cities such as Jakarta to draw on the expertise of men experienced in violence.109 The bersiap amounted to social revolution in some areas – in north and east Sumatra the old aristocracies came under bloody attack – but in Java much of the republican leadership fought shy of its implications; here the social revolution remained a feral populism, without programme or direction. In many places it simply meant the struggle for scarce resources or settling of old scores. ‘The Indonesia revolution’, admitted the Islamicist leader Abu Hanifah, ‘was not totally pure.’110
British horror and incomprehension at the violence came to a head at the village of Bekasi, in west Java. The area was notorious for containing what Abu Hanifah, who was based there, termed the ‘lairs of the wild men of the district. They of course had their own leaders, their own heroes and strongmen. In the beginning there was nothing the republic could do about it.’111 On 22 November a military Dakota crashed in its vicinity, and its twenty-three British and Indian crew and passengers were taken prisoner, stripped and hacked to pieces. When patrols disinterred the remains, the bodies of Indian and British soldiers could not be distinguished from each other. There was little exceptional about this incident in the midst of so many. What was exceptional was the swiftness and ferocity of British response. Around 600 houses were burned, including sixty occupied by neutral Chinese that caught light as the flames spread in the wind. The attack engendered lively public debate in Britain. It was perhaps the first occasion when the British people had to confront a crucial dilemma of the end of empire: how far should terror be met with terror? Mountbatten did not defend the action, but justified it on the grounds that ‘we must realise the feeling of our regiments who suffer casualties every day at the hands of these terrorists and who on this particular occasion had to bury the dismembered bodies of their comrades’.112 Already in northern Sumatra a young Dutch officer, Raymond Westerling, was developing a reputation for cold-blooded killing. Raised in Istanbul and known by the sobriquet ‘Turk’, he had been trained by the British in the dark arts of commando warfare. In Sumatra he cultivated an Indonesian fighter’s mystique as ‘The White Tiger’. His memoirs, published in England in 1952, portray northern Sumatra as a ‘convulsed society… in the grip of terror’ and show him abandoning the collective policing methods employed by the British for a very personal kind of war. The ‘method of execution’ was all. In the East, ‘To execute a criminal behind prison walls has absolutely no effect on the population. To execute him in the marketplace does.’ Westerling’s legend and methods were to spread, a grisly omen of the drift towards colonial white terror.113
In the wake of events in Surabaya and elsewhere, the leadership of the republic changed hands. On 14 November Sukarno, whilst remaining president, passed power to a new cabinet headed by Sutan Sjahrir as prime minister. He was the obvious choice: his opposition to the Japanese enabled him to negotiate with the Dutch; his support amongst the Jakarta pemuda gave him the radical credentials the times demanded. Under Sjahrir’s direction, the earlier working committee for independence reconstituted itself as a parliamentary government, and political parties were founded. Sjahrir was also the author of one of the key attempts in 1945 to analyse and direct the revolution, a pamphlet published as he came into power, entitled Perjuangan Kita, ‘Our Struggle’. Without nam
ing Sukarno, it attacked the running dogs and henchmen of Japanese. It traced the psychological impact of the war on the young, a tragic legacy of confusion and hatred, and repudiated the millennial fire of battles such as Surabaya: ‘Many of them simply cling to the slogan Freedom or Death. Wherever they sense that freedom is still far from certain, and yet they themselves are not faced with death, they are seized with doubt and hesitation. The remedy for these doubts is generally sought in uninterrupted action.’ Sjahrir instead set the Indonesian revolution firmly in an international context. ‘Indonesia’s fate’, he wrote, ‘ultimately depends on the fate of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism.’ He argued the need for allies, and for the political maturity necessary to gain their respect, a sign of which would be Indonesia’s treatment of its ethnic minorities. There were no fewer than four Christians in Sjahrir’s cabinet.114 It was a bold move, in which Sjahrir repudiated the social revolution that had largely brought him to power, and heralded a long process of diplomacy that would drag on for the rest of the British occupation of Java and Sumatra.
In the wake of the fighting, war reporters began to arrive in Indonesia. The old scourge of the colonial establishment and ‘whiskyswilling planters’ of pre-war Singapore, Ian Morrison, was an eyewitness to events in Java for The Times. Martha Gellhorn reached an even wider audience with her vivid report on the ‘seedy ruin’ of Dutch imperialism and new political style of the ‘adolescent guerrillas’ of the pemuda. Like many Western journalists she was drawn into the circle of young dandyish intellectuals that had formed around Sutan Sjahrir. She shared a train journey with a young, delicate, bird-like poet named ‘Johnny’. As they talked she became charmed by ‘the place [the Indonesians] give a boy like Johnny; they know he is good for nothing except to write poetry once in a while but everyone loves him and respects him…’ It seems that ‘Johnny’ was Chairil Anwar, himself a protégé and distant relative of Sjahrir.115 These witnesses did not always understand well what they saw. When the New York Times reported the appointment of the new prime minister, it gave him a royal name: ‘Sultan Charir’. In common with many Javanese people, Sukarno had only one name. It was an American journalist who gave the Indonesian president a first name he did not possess: ‘Achmed’. It stuck.116