Forgotten Wars (31 page)

Surabaya was the largest naval base in Southeast Asia after Singapore. The city had been rather quiet during the early days of the republic, at least until Ramadan drew to a close on 7 September, and the riot at the raising of the Dutch tricolour at the Oranje Hotel. Now Indonesian flags flooded the city. Families sewed white and red patches onto their clothes, and even the
becak
(trishaw) riders decorated their vehicles. When Dutch internees began to step off the train, towards the end of August, they were, as one former colonial official put it, ‘looking completely into a dark room’. Frantic to re-establish their lives, they collided with the new Indonesian authorities in a host of ways. This fed resentment and unease. A sense of menace intensified after 28 September with the arrival of a Dutch naval officer, P. J. G. Huijer, who, as a face-saving concession to the Dutch, had been despatched to the city in advance of Allied troops. Ostensibly he was there to look after prisoners of war and internees, but as ex-internees attached themselves to him, many Indonesians thought he represented the reappearance of the Dutch regime, and that the internees had arrived by ship. Exceeding his orders, and with only five men under his command, Huijer tried to reoccupy the city. In Surabaya, at least, the Japanese would surrender to a Dutchman. The Japanese vice-admiral commanding the city was only too happy to relinquish the responsibility. Bizarrely, the terms of the agreement stipulated that republican forces would act as custodians of the Japanese arms; but this was to recognize the reality of republican forces’ control, and they were delighted to accept the responsibility. Huijer’s car was then stolen, and he could not get to the airport to return to Jakarta. When he headed for the train – which was still running – he was detained by the republican forces and locked up for his own safety. Former internees were rounded up; some were imprisoned,
interrogated and beaten in the Simpang Club, another of the pre-war playgrounds of the colonial elite.
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When the 49 Infantry Brigade Group of 23 Indian Division arrived in Surabaya on 25 October they found themselves confronted by Indonesians in possession of Japanese heavy artillery, tanks and armoured cars. Idrus described the mood:

People were drunk with victory. Everything had exceeded their dreams and expectations. All of a sudden their valour emerged like a snake out of a thicket. All their self-confidence and patriotism bubbled over like the foam on a beer. Rational thinking declined, people acted like beasts, and the results were eminently satisfactory. People no longer had much faith in God. A new God had arrived, and he was known under various names: bomb, machine-gun, mortar.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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 slogan 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.