Alfred Russell Wallace climbs Mount Ophir, near Malacca

Alfred Russell Wallace, the co discover with Charles Darwin of evolution by means of natural selection, spent many years hacking his way through the jungles and sailing between the far flung islands of what is now modern Indonesia. He visited Singapore and Malacca on the Malay Peninsula only for brief excursions. But his wonderful account of climbing Mount Ophir (Gunung Ledang) in the Malay state of Johor gives us a vivid snap shot of a near pristine Peninsula landscape:
We passed through extensive forests, along paths often up to our knees in mud, and were much annoyed by the leeches for which this district is famous. These little creatures infest the leaves and herbage by the side of the paths, and when a passenger comes along they stretch themselves out at full length, and if they touch any part of his dress or body, quit their leaf and adhere to it. They then creep on to his feet, legs, or other part of his body and suck their fill, the first puncture being rarely felt during the excitement of walking…Early in the afternoon we reached the foot of the mountain, and encamped by the side of a fine stream, whose rocky banks were overgrown with ferns… We ascended steadily up a moderate slope for several miles, having a deep ravine on our left… Here we put down our loads, and in a few minutes more stood on the summit of Mount Ophir, 4,000 feet above the sea. The top is a small rocky platform covered with rhododendrons and other shrubs. The afternoon was clear, and the view fine in its way: ranges of hill and valley everywhere covered with interminable forest, with glistening rivers winding among them.’

The Battle of Surabaya

Following the Japanese surrender at the beginning of September, 1945 British forces were in action in French Indochina and the former Dutch East Indies, Indonesia. One empire was collapsing - another was struggling to be born...

By September Mountbatten could no longer put off tackling the tumult in Indonesia. Although the SOE was being wound down, SEAC was receiving misleading reports from Dutch agents, known as ‘Flying Dutchmen’, that the situation in Java was calm. SEAC had set up RAPWI (Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees) to locate the POW and internment camps in Java and Sumatra and provide assistance and support to the prisoners. An agreement had been hammered out with the Dutch on 24 August that handed responsibility for Java and Sumatra to the British and the outer islands to the Australians. They would work towards the ‘Netherlands Indies Civil Affair Administration’, the NICA, that had been established in Australia by the Dutch colonial government in exile. In the Netherlands Queen Wilhelmina was under pressure from the Dutch business elite to ‘sort out the Indonesians’. The Queen obliged by insisting that her kingdom was ‘indivisible’. With an eye on the Americans the Dutch government made a few token gestures towards promising reform but clearly imagined that the ridiculous ‘Indonesian Republic’, which had after all been underwritten by the Japanese, could be safely ignored. They would be grossly mistaken. Although Mountbatten did not directly question the matter of Dutch sovereignty in Indonesia, he was increasingly queasy about the situation on the ground, though the intelligence he had was, to say the least, partial. In a report on ‘Post Surrender Tasks’, Mountbatten recollected ruefully that:
‘…Dr. H.J. van Mook, Lieutenant General of the Netherlands East Indies, had come to Kandy [SEAC HQ] on the 1st September, had given me no reason to suppose that the re-occupation of Java would present any operational problem, beyond that of rounding up the Japanese… The seriousness of the position was not suspected…’

The Dutch Lieutenant Governor, Dr Hubertus J. van Mook, was short sighted in every sense. He had been born in Java: now he was ‘coming home’. He believed passionately that he and his Dutch forebears – not the Sukarnos and Hattas – had gifted Rust en Orde to the splintered ethnic world of the archipelago. The Dutch were the makers of Indonesia not its native peoples. And yet Dr. van Mook was seen as a dangerous liberal by the Dutch colonials – a ‘lover of natives’. So too was Charles van der Plas: known to Indonesians as ‘piss-puddle’. When van der Plas took up residence in Jakarta he went on the radio to promise retribution for the ‘collaborators’ Sukarno and Hatta. It was van der Plas who reassured Mountbatten that the Indonesians were ‘too nice a people to fight really hard.’ It is telling that when Dr. van Mook stumbled off the boat in the port of Jakarta on 1 October without his spectacles he was greeted by a crowd of Indonesians waving placards. ‘What do they say?’ he asked. ‘ “Death to van Mook”, your excellency’ was the less than reassuring reply. Mountbatten sensed that Sukarno would not be so easily pushed aside. He realised that his ‘case is similar to Aung Sang, traitor patriot according to point of view…’ But Mountbatten could not persuade the Dutch that they could by ‘dealing with him [Sukarno] now…avoid having to deal with extremists later.’ In the Dutch colonial mind shame, wish fulfilment, nostalgia and sheer obstinacy simmered together with calamitous results. Mountbatten had little room for manoeuvre. If British power could be restored in Malaya and Singapore, and French rule in Indochina, it followed that the agreement with the Dutch would have to be honoured.
Mountbatten was an expedient and opportunist politician. He had simultaneously supported and rebuked Gracey’s blunt assault on the Vietnamese government. To command SEAC forces in Java he chose a ‘soldier statesman’ who understood the political uses of subtle ambivalence. Lt. General Sir Philip Christison was the fourth ‘Christison baronet’. He was, as Laurens van der Post discovered, an unusual kind of soldier. Christison had read anatomy and physiology at Oxford. He joined the Officer Training Corps and won a Military Cross at the Battle of Loos. After the war he got to know Bill Slim at the Staff College, Camberley, and would become one of the heroes of the Burma Campaign in 1944: he had been knighted in the field after the Battle of Imphal and led the 15th Indian Army Corps, known as the ‘Fighting Hockey Sticks’, into Rangoon in May. Van der Post was intrigued to discover that the tall, broad-shouldered general ‘loved birds’ and was the author of a number of well-regarded ornithological studies. He was, he sensed, ‘truly religious’. When he received news of his new appointment Christison was not happy at all. He had been warned that ‘things look pretty rum in Java and Sumatra.’ Would he ‘carry the can for Dickie’?
In the meantime Mountbatten deviously reshaped the agreement with the Dutch. He emphasised that SEAC forces could not afford to be ‘drawn into internal troubles’. This was, of course, both disingenuous and, as it would transpire, impractical. Restoring law and order, as SEAC was obliged to do, meant confronting the nationalists. Who, in short, would rule liberated Indonesia? Mountbatten’s options had narrowed. The Indonesian operation would need to rely on Indian and Gurkha troops and with India lurching towards independence Mountbatten concluded that Christison had less than seven months to settle matters in Indonesia. That meant that NICA would be obligated to take on the restitution of Dutch colonial power – as soon as Dutch troops became available. Mountbatten refused to guarantee ‘finishing the job’ with SEAC forces. When he met Christison the British Secretary of State for War, Jack Dawson, muddied the water still further: ‘nothing should be done to suggest that your troops are going to re-impose Dutch colonial rule. You must not take sides…’ This secretive redrafting of the Anglo Dutch agreement would drag SEAC into a tangled thicket of acrimony.
On 15 September the first Allied forces arrived in Jakarta on board HMS Cumberland. The British chose the occasion to send a blunt message to the Dutch. The first regiment to step ashore at Tanjong Priok harbour was a battalion of the 29 Seaforth Highlanders. This was the very same battalion that led Sir Stamford Raffles’ campaign in Java in 1811when they helped rout Dutch and French forces. Raffles had been appointed Lieutenant Governor of Java and tasked by the British government to reform Dutch rule. The point was not missed on Charles van der Plas. Soon after his arrival General Christison appeared to openly provoke the Dutch. At a press conference he reiterated SEAC objectives in Indonesia: protecting and evacuating Allied POWs and other internees, disarming and repatriating the Japanese and maintaining law and order. He went on: ‘The British have no intention of meddling in Indonesian internal affairs…’ As to the nettlesome subject of law and order he proposed that the Japanese 16th Army would be ‘held responsible’ for internal security in non-occupied areas, and that pending a Dutch-Indonesian agreement he would ask ‘present party leaders’ to ‘treat him and his troops as guests’.  The Dutch were stunned. ‘Present party leaders’ meant the traitors Sukarno and Hatta. Chistison concluded: ‘British forces will not move outside the designated occupation areas of Batavia [Jakarta], Surabaya, Medan and Padang for any purpose.’ From the Hague came an almighty cry of rage. To the Dutch it appeared that SEAC was empowering both the hated Japanese and Indonesian demagogues. Dutch prisoners languishing in the former Japanese concentration camps in the interior of Java and Sumatra, outside ‘designated occupation areas’, had been abandoned to their tender mercies. This was intolerable. Writing a few years later Hubertus van Mook denounced Christison’s broadcast as virtual recognition of the upstart Indonesian Republic. He was at least half right. Mountbatten did believe that the Republic was a fact on the ground that SEAC disregarded at its peril. He knew that Chistison’s job would be a lot easier if the Dutch could be persuaded to take a softer line. As he put it: ‘Our one idea is to get the Dutch and the Indonesians to kiss and make friends and then pull out.’ Christison’s statements had, unfortunately for him, the opposite result. The inadvertent consequence of Christison’s remarks was to entrench Dutch obduracy and galvanise the nationalists.
As it soon became clear Sukarno and his KNIP government had only the most tenuous control of unfolding events. The ‘Proclamation of Independence’, made on his doorstep in Jakarta on 17 August, was echoed by local declarations in provincial capitals, smaller inland towns, and villages across Java and Sumatra. As Anderson puts it ‘a hidden impulse emanating [from Jakarta] spread across the island, creating a rhythm linking locality to locality where organisation, planning programmes and ideology as yet scarcely existed.’ It was the Pemudas who set, or forced, the pace of Merdeka. They personified its wild spirit. As the Japanese fled the prison camps in Sumatra and Java, Dutch and Eurasian prisoners, many profoundly traumatised, began to slip away to try and return to their homes. Starving bedraggled Dutch families began to reappear in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and other cities hoping to take back their old houses. At first many of the Indonesians they had known before the war treated them kindly and gently. But as the numbers of Dutch refugees escalated, tempers frayed and Christison soon discovered just how tough it would be to dodge ‘internal affairs’. He was forced, as Gracey had been in Saigon, to turn to the Japanese. Mountbatten had, in any case, insisted that Japanese forces must maintain law and order. But as Sukarno warned inviting back the Japanese enraged the Pemudas. His warning was prescient. With British connivance Japanese forces reoccupied Bandung in West Java on 10 October, pushing aside and humiliating local Pemuda leaders, who received gifts of lipstick from their comrades in East Java. Gangs of young men began killing Japanese. When the British turned to the local commander Major Kido to help defend the nearby prison camp the Japanese took advantage to enact revenge. The cycle of violence cost thousands of lives. The undefeated Japanese relished any chance for action. Japanese security operations in East Sumatra at the market town of Tebing Tinggi provided a pretext for mass murder: at least 5,000 Indonesians died there. As in Indochina and Malaya many embittered Japanese joined the nationalist rebels,or supplied them with arms and ammunition.
The situation deteriorated further when former soldiers of the Royal Netherlands Indies Army set up ‘Battalion X’ to seize back by force their lost colony. Like the Dutch colonial armies that conquered Aceh at the end of the nineteenth century ‘Battalion X’ was bolstered by mercenaries from ethnic groups considered loyal to the Dutch, in this case Christian Ambonese. The island of Ambon, as Laurens van der Post reminds us, was where the story of the Dutch in Southeast Asia began – and in a very nasty manner. The Dutch rolled up in Ambon in 1623 and slaughtered a small community of English traders. The Ambonese readily converted to Christianity and became brave and loyal subjects of the Dutch regime. These Ambonese recruits in ‘Battalion X’ behaved like trigger happy vigilantes. By the beginning of October the death toll across Java, Sumatra and Kalimantan was mounting. Dead and mutilated bodies floating through Jakarta along the Tijiliwoeng River to the sea became a common and grisly spectacle.  Canals, culverts and road side ditches were putrid cemeteries. In the rural hinterlands, as roaming Pemuda gangs clashed with Dutch vigilantes, terrified Europeans fled back behind barbed wire. In the meantime the Dutch blamed the British and refused to talk to the nationalists. But at the end of September the volcanic forces of the Indonesian revolution would erupt on the streets of Surabaya in East Java.
The ‘City of Heroes’ was, and still is, a heavily industrialised port city. The people of Surabaya collectively embraced a long tradition of assertive independence and celebrated a pantheon of folk heroes who had, since the sixteenth century, resisted Madurese, Javanese, and finally Dutch, incursions.  The native, or ‘arek’, Surabayan is admired – or feared – as a bloody-minded and headstrong free thinker to this day. The Dutch did all they could to crush the spirit of Surabaya. They razed the old city, expelled its recalcitrant peoples to the periphery and built a grand new commercial and naval hub. By the end of the nineteenth century Surabaya was the largest and richest city in the Dutch East Indies – and the second biggest naval base in Southeast Asia after Singapore.  Though Surabaya was a symbol of colonial rule, and a mini police state, the Dutch could not hold back the emergence of a fiercely determined nationalist movement. A single word encapsulated the ideals of this diverse and often argumentative Javanese intelligentsia: ‘Pergerakan’. It means both movement, change, and ‘The Movement’. By the beginning of the 1930s Surabaya was at the heart of a number of different Pergerakan groups that insisted: ‘We are all headed home…’ – to independence.
Surabaya was oddly quiet in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender. The calm ended quickly and bloodily when Dutch refugees began pouring into the city in August. As former prisoners stepped off the train at Surabaya Station many were astonished to find the city so ‘Easternized’. A colonial officer recalled that it was ‘like looking into a dark room’. There was no welcoming party. Surabaya was now a city of strangers. Native deference had been supplanted by disdain or insolence. This hardening of attitudes was reciprocated. Shock soon modulated to hostility. The Dutch openly expressed contempt for the theatrics of merdeka. Most Dutch laughed at the new ‘Indonesian’ authorities, and defied their regulations. Tense encounters took place between the Dutch and Indonesians with new powers, such as policemen, railway workers and hospital staff. Surabaya was awash with the red and white Indonesian flag: plastered on walls and vehicles, and sewn into clothing. Both the Dutch and the Indonesians were ready for a fight. An incident with a flag at the Oranje Hotel provided a casus belli, and when a Dutch naval officer called P.J.G. Huijer staged a coup all hell broke loose. An Indonesian militia called the Badan Keamanan Rakyat (BKR), later renamed the TKR, seized arms from Japanese depots.  The great Sumatran born writer Idrus (1921-1979) lived in Surabaya during these tumultuous months. His little book ‘Surabaja’ is a lyrical documentary account of the unfolding drama. Now that the Japanese had armed the revolution,
‘People were drunk with victory…All their self confidence bubbled over like the foam on a beer. Rational thinking declined, people acted like beasts…A new God had arrived, and he was known under various names: bomb, machine gun, mortar…’

The self-appointed leader of the Surabaya rebels was a nervous, bespectacled and pale-skinned graduate of Surabaya’s School of Dentistry, and a former PETA officer. Dr. Moestopo had suffered a traumatic encounter with the Japanese in 1942 when he had been mistaken for a European. He emerged from prison a changed man. He stopped speaking Dutch and refused to wear western clothing. According to Anderson he was ‘eccentric, flamboyant and given to mysticism’. Dr. Moestopo feared and admired the Japanese – he had enthusiastically volunteered to join the Japanese sponsored militia, the PETA, and rose to battalion commander. Now in 1945 Dr Moestopo took over the once exclusive colonial Simpang Club as his headquarters and unleashed a reign of terror directed against the Dutch, the Ambonese, the Madurese and the Chinese. Dr. Moestopo was a man of action. The ideological voice of the Surabayan revolution emerged from the loud mouth of Sutomo – known as ‘Bung’ or ‘Brother Tomo’. ‘Small and pretty’ with ‘sparkling eyes like the rays of a lighthouse’ according to Idrus, Sutomo was the twenty-five year old son of a middle class kampong family who, during the occupation, had carved out a career as a journalist for the Japanese Domei News Agency. By the end of the war he was second-in-charge of the Indonesian desk. Bung Tomo was an archetypal cocky arek Surabayan, who noisily criticised the slow pace of the Indonesian revolution and dared, it was said, argue with Sukarno himself. Now he adopted the full Pemuda get up – pseudo military attire, long hair and, in his case, a rule of chastity until Indonesia had won its freedom. Bung Tomo managed to get hold of an abandoned Japanese radio transmitter and set up ‘Radio Pemberontakan’, ‘Radio Rebellion’. The writer Idrus recalled that his voice was ‘loud and harsh’ – but his speeches were spiced with a ‘Pergerakan’ longing for freedom:
‘We extremists and the masses cannot now trust in sweet talk. We distrust every movement they make…It is the masses in their thousands, starved, stripped and shamed by the colonialists who will rise to carry out the revolt….We extremists…would rather see Indonesia drowned in blood… than colonised any more… God will protect us! Merdeka!’

At dawn on 25 October HMS Waveney steamed into Tanjung Perak, the port of Surabaya, to crush the revolution. On board was a single brigade, the 49th Indian Infantry. The Indian soldiers would be led into battle by their commander, Brigadier Aubertin Walter Sothern Mallaby.Standing on the foredeck with his intelligence officer Captain Douglas MacDonald, Mallaby peered intently through his binoculars at the port. MacDonald recalled later that ‘what we saw were a lot of agitated natives dashing about. They were armed to the teeth with bandoliers of ammo, tommy guns, rifles, swords and anything else portable you care to think of.’ Mallaby turned to MacDonald:  ‘We shall have to pussyfoot our way in and you shall be pussy… We come in peace.’ Mallaby was not an experienced officer, but he was close to Mountbatten who had concluded that Surabaya would be an ‘easier assignment than Jakarta because there were no Dutch to complicate matters’. Mallaby and hundreds of the men under his command would not get out of the City of Heroes alive.
On the afternoon of 26 October Mallaby sent small units of Indian troops into Surabaya’s business district where they took over buildings and set up command posts. They commandeered cars and trucks. A ‘Mahratta’ unit got as far as the Wonokromo Bridge on the southern edge of the city where they set up a machine gun nest close to a kampong. In Indonesia eyes this was surely not peace keeping but occupation.  Worse was to come. That evening Mallaby sent a platoon to spring from jail Captain Huijer, the Dutch naval officer who had tried to occupy Surabaya singlehanded. Huijer and a handful of other RAPWI staff were successfully liberated after a fire fight. Evidently the British and the Dutch were planning a joint operation. (In fact, Mallaby sent Huijer back to Jakarta.) Dr Moestopo acted decisively. Through ‘Radio Rebellion’ he warned Indonesians that their revolution was in grave danger. Throughout the night of 27/28 October the Indonesian militias quietly spread out across the city. The following morning was calm. Then at tea time the storm broke. A tidal wave of armed Indonesians engulfed the scattered Indian troops. The TKR troops were reinforced by at least 80,000 very determined kampong folk. The Indonesian rebel army extinguished Mallaby’s army in six hours of savage fighting. All over Surabaya, wherever Mallaby had posted his men, crowds of Pemuda and enraged kampong villagers fell on stunned British troops. According to a British report ‘bestial scenes’ unfolded ‘rivalling the vilest moments of the French Revolution’. The Indonesian leaders were astonished by the violent rage of the kampong villagers:  ‘The rakyat [the common people] have begun to move…’ a journalist observed with some ambivalence: ‘The rakyat alone… the masses are now led by extremists and pemuda.’ This was the beginning, Sukarno said in his ‘Autobiography’, of ‘the infamous, savage, never to be forgotten Battle of Surabaya, the first battle of the Republic… The British were hacked to pieces with knives, literally torn limb from limb, brutally slain… there is the soul of a tiger in the Indonesian.’ And yet it was Sukarno who would bring the battle to an end.
At his headquarters in Jakarta the cascade of reports from Surabaya left General Christison in no doubt that his mission was in peril. As the Japanese commander Hitoshi Imamura had done in 1942 he turned to Sukarno. He had no time to waste mollifying the Dutch. A British journalist summed up the situation: ‘the heroic resistance of the 49th Brigade was bound to end in extermination unless someone was able to quell the passions [of the Indonesian nationalists]…all hopes rested on Sukarno’s influence.’ It is not difficult to understand Sukarno’s response to Christison’s plea. He was Robespierre facing the terror of the sans-culottes. He feared the armed might of the pemudas. The language he used in his ‘Autobiography’ underlines this: ‘The city was pandemonium… Bodies were strewn everywhere. Decapitated, dismembered trunks lay piled on top of one another… Indonesians were shooting and stabbing and murdering wildly.’ At midday on 29 October Sukarno, accompanied by Vice President Hatta and Minister of Defence Amir Sjarifuddin, flew into Surabaya airport ‘amidst a hail of bullets’ with General Hawthorn.  Sukarno hurriedly brokered a temporary ceasefire with Mallaby. He claimed that he toured the city in a jeep ‘to do what I’d been brought to do… the moment they [Indonesians] saw me and heard my voice they obeyed.’ A deal was hammered out and the British agreed to withdraw to the port. But then on 30 September Mallaby was killed, quite possibly by ‘friendly fire’, when he tried to stop fighting that had erupted in Union Square.
Revenge was not long in coming. Christison vowed to crush the Indonesian rebels using ‘all the weapons of modern warfare’ if the perpetrators of the ‘foul murder’ were not arrested and handed over. The killing of Mallaby looked like provocation. Christison blamed the Indonesians. He was infuriated when an Indonesian photographer took a photograph of Mallaby’s burned out Lincoln sedan framing the wreckage against a billboard that proclaimed ‘The Indonesian Republic: Once and Forever’. ‘A grain of arsenic had poisoned a whole glass of water’ Sukarno lamented. In Surabaya rumours spread that the British had surrendered. Crowds filled the streets. ‘Idrus’:
‘They fell in love with carbines and revolvers as if they were beautiful girls; they caressed them, kissed them, and sold them at very high prices. Their faces looked very happy and proud.’

By then the 5th Indian Division had begun debarking at Tanjong Priok. The commander was Major General E.C. R. Mansergh, who insisted that ‘Crimes against civilisation cannot go unpunished.’ Bung Tomo replied: ‘Our slogan remains the same: Freedom or Death!’ As Jihad was proclaimed from the minarets of mosques all across East Java, Sukarno once again fell silent. From the bellies of British convoy ships, tanks and armoured cars clattered onto the harbour wharves. Two cruisers and three destroyers lurked off shore. The Allied hammer blow fell on Surabaya on 10 November. The Battle of Surabaya, the biggest British engagement since the end of the war, would last for three terrible weeks. From the sea came a massive barrage as RAF Thunderbolts and Mosquitos roared low over Surabaya tearing a trail of smashed concrete and blood across the city. At the port the engines of Sherman tanks snarled and spluttered. Then their drivers engaged their engines and roared off into the city.
‘Idrus’ again:
‘…from people’s mouths came the moans of death. The air stank of cordite and human and animal carcasses…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 heart alike…’

The RAF punished Surabaya with more than five hundred bombs. The Indian troops pushed resolutely into the maze of streets, and the Indonesians made them fight for every district. As the TKR brigades fell back, entire city blocks burst into flames. This was a ‘slash and burn’ retreat. Bung Tomo fled to Malang where he continued broadcasting: Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! For one British soldier the Battle of Surabaya was reminiscent of the bloody Burma campaign: ‘heat, flies, dirt, mosquitoes… The air is full of the sickening sweet smell of human bodies.’ It took the British three weeks to subdue the revolt: until an official statement declared that ‘the lawless Indonesian element has been cleared from the city…’ Allied casualties were light: a few hundred or so. But by the time the fighting ended more than seven thousand Indonesians had been killed. As 90% of the population of Surabaya fled the city lay empty, ruined and dowsed in black ash.
The crushing of the Surabayan revolution was, as it would soon become all too clear, a catastrophe for SEAC. Mountbatten had insisted that Christison must not be dragged into ‘resolving internal disputes’ and ‘re-imposing Dutch colonial rule’… Now British troops had been dragged into a violent revolutionary war. Surabaya had ripped away SEAC’s benevolent face and exposed the true face of imperialism. Sukarno appealed, not for the last time, to the international community to condemn Allied brutality. The Battle of Surabaya handed the Indonesian nationalist movement a thrilling symbol of resistance and sacrifice. A ‘native’ army had taken on the might of colonial forces. They would not give up now… For the British, there were frightening lessons to digest.

Revolution in Indonesia

REVOLUTION IN INDONESIA

Britain’s short, nasty war in Indochina provided ample evidence of how tough it would be to restore ‘friendly’ colonial powers in Southeast Asia. MacArthur had washed American hands of Southeast Asia in the medium term at least and Britain was severely overstretched by her commitments in Europe, the Middle East and India. Indian troops had long been the human mainstay of British forces deployed in Asia; the Indian Army had played a vital, not entirely appreciated role overthrowing Japanese armies in Burma. But now India was firmly set on the road to independence. Nehru had signalled that he would not tolerate the culling of future citizens of India as imperial cannon fodder. Indian nationalists had not forgotten or forgiven the way in which the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow had declared war on their behalf without consultation. For their part British military commanders were troubled, to say the least, that the late Subhas Chandra Bose had persuaded so many thousands of Indians in Malaya and Singapore to join the Indian National Army and fight against them alongside Japanese soldiers. Would Indian soldiers still take up arms against fellow Asians, Hindu or Muslim on behalf of an arrogant far away power? Only the most blinkered colonial Blimp could fail to see that there was trouble ahead.  It was not only the loyalty of Indian troops that bothered SEAC commanders in 1945. The new Labour Government had made a commitment to rapidly demobilising Britain’s impatient war weary conscripts, whose votes, after all, had thrust the famously modest Clement Attlee into 10 Downing Street. In Britain there was a mood of expectation and promise. Memories of the 1920s, when Tory governments betrayed a generation of war heroes, had not faded. Atlee’s cabinet would need to scrape together the massive funds needed to bankroll their ambitious programme of social welfare reform and the creation of a national health service. What price imperial overstretch?
And yet – Britain’s commitment to restoring her colonial power in Southeast Asia was fierce, steadfast and unwavering. And not only British power, but French and Dutch dominion as well. With India on the brink of independence it was vital to buttress Malaya and Singapore with friendly powers. In any case Britain had a £100 million stake in the Dutch colony, and owned 40% of Royal Dutch Shell. This ‘new imperialism’ or ‘second colonial occupation’ was driven not by any nostalgic desire to turn back the clock and restore the ante bellum world of ‘British Malaya’, which in any case had been thoroughly mythologised. It was all about money and trade, as the imperial project always had been. The British were resolved to reorganise the colonial government of Malaya, restore its economy and once more tap deep into its dollar earning assets like tin and rubber. The awkward jigsaw puzzle of ‘British Malaya’ could at last be welded together as a dominion. The cumbersome old patchwork of federated and unfederated states would need to be streamlined. That would mean another row with the rulers but there was no sign that the Sultans would resist any more strongly than they had in the past.
It was not just British interests at stake. As the spectre of Asian communism loomed over China and Southeast Asia, and the French threw in the towel in Indochina, the Americans too would make a strategic investment to the Southeast Asian theatre. The British and the Americans had begun investing heavily in nuclear programmes and both had an eye on Indonesian deposits of thorium. Although we are jumping ahead of the main narrative here, it is worth recalling that at the height of the war in Vietnam the British government defended its refusal to send in even a token force by emphasising its military commitments in Malaysia.
The economic imperative was more pressing for the Dutch. In the nineteenth century the riches of the Dutch East Indies, Holland’s Far Eastern ‘Atlantis’, had enriched the Netherlands. ‘Our overseas interests condition our very existence’ said wartime prime minister Pieter Gerbrandy. Dutch rule was founded on the myth of Rust en Orde, tranquillity and order (tata tentram in Javanese), but this had been imposed across the vast arc of the Indonesian Archipelago by means of aggressive military campaigns that had often pitched one ethnic group against another with calamitous consequences. Java, the most densely populated island in the archipelago, was the epicentre of Dutch rule. The Dutch colonial apparatus – much admired by the British for its technocratic efficiency – held in check a sprawling realm of perplexing diversity. In Yogyakarta and Surakarta resplendent royal courts still exercised tangible, as opposed to ornamental, power and the priyayi aristocracy had nimbly transformed itself into a native elite. As in Malaya minorities like the Chinese and Arabs possessed enormous, if resented, influence. The Dutch governed through local authorities like the sultanates, the priyayi aristocrats and tribal chiefs, though they could deploy formidable firepower to quell recalcitrant rulers. Confined to protected enclaves in the big cities of Batavia, Surabaya and Bandung, the Dutch colonial class was relatively small and enjoyed an ostentatiously sumptuous lifestyle. In the liminal world between the Dutch elite and their native proxies were the Eurasian ‘Indo’ communities spawned by Dutch fathers and their ‘temporary wives’. These were the true outsiders of the Indonesian world – and would suffer most in times of invasion and social upheaval.
Despite, or because of, the vastness of the Dutch colonial realm and the tremendous ethnic diversity of its peoples an Indonesian nationalism had begun to take shape just before the First World War emerging, as we noted in an earlier chapter, from a resurgence of Islamic traditions. These religious movements, like ‘Sarekat Islam, inspired the foundation of the ‘Partai Komunis Indonesia’, the PKI, in 1920 – the first communist party in Asia. The second leader of the PKI was the Netherlands educated Tan Malaka, a brilliant figure whose influence on radical nationalism in Indonesia and Malaya was profound, though he spent much of his life as a peripatetic agitator beyond the borders of his homeland. The danger he represented to ‘order and tranquillity’ was early recognised by the colonial regime. Tan Malaka was exiled to the Netherlands in 1922. Here he defied the Netherlands government by throwing himself into communist political activity before moving on to Berlin, Moscow and finally Amoy in China. Here he witnesses Japanese military oppression at first hand. Tan Malaka would never kowtow to the Japanese bearing promises of independence. With Tan Malaka banished to the Netherlands, the PKI organised a succession of chaotic uprisings in 1926 and 1927 that terrified all the ruling elites and were brutally put down. The pattern of harsh repression imprinted the hallmarks of Indonesian political history for the rest of the century: as many as 13,000 alleged rebels were arrested; thousands were exiled to the malaria infested prison colony of ‘Boven Digoel’ built in swamplands on the southern slopes of the Maoke Mountains on the island of New Guinea.  This penal settlement would become a university of nationalism for those prisoners who survived. The nationalist heart beat strongest in Java but powerful centrifugal forces generated by the Dutch struggle to fuse and control their sprawling dominions had sent the idea of ‘Merdeka’ spinning out to the periphery. By the end of the 1920s the shock of nationalist uprisings had thrown Dutch Rust en Orde onto the back foot. Their shallow efforts to liberalise colonial rule, the ‘Ethical Policy’, jammed in reverse. They struck hard at the emerging generation of secular nationalists led by Dutch educated engineer and architect Sukarno, Muhammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir. No ground was given by either side. Sukarno was banished to the island of Flores, then Bengkulen in Sumatra. Hatta and Sjahrir both endured the horrors of ‘Boven Digoel’. Like the Malayan communist party, the PKI  was forced underground, but many of its leaders found refuge in Singapore and Malaya under the noses of Special Branch. Dutch intransigence bred a passionate, romanticised nationalism that was infused, most of all by Sukarno, with Javanese mythology. When General Yamashita ousted the Dutch in 1942 he offered them the same deal that the French had accepted in Indochina as a kind of satellite. But the Dutch chose to fight – and lost. Tens of thousands of Europeans ended up behind Japanese barbed wire in huge jungle concentration camps. Many Indonesian nationalists, led by Sukarno, embraced Japanese Pan Asian ideology and the seductive lure of a Japanese gifted ‘Merdeka’. Collaboration would become the motor of independence.

Mountbatten dreaded tackling the problem of the Dutch East Indies. SEAC would need to deal with a quarter of a million surrendered but undefeated Japanese troops. The armies that had conquered a vast swathe of Southeast Asia bristled with arms and remained well equipped for a war many had wanted to fight to the bitterest of ends. The colonial power they had ousted was on its knees. The Netherlands itself had been devastated by the long German occupation. Nearly three hundred thousand Dutch civilians had perished. Its rich and cultured Jewish community had been liquidated. Many Dutch citizens had collaborated with the German occupation regime. Dutch police had hunted down Dutch Jews; Dutch civilians had callously betrayed their Jewish neighbours. The Dutch Waffen-SS division recruited by Heinrich Himmler was the biggest in Europe. But the ‘Greater German Reich’ that these Dutch collaborators hoped to join never materialised. Instead the catastrophic collapse of Germany in 1945 brought ruin and starvation. In 1945 the economy of the Netherlands lay in ruins. Ports and harbours had been wrecked by bombing. Vast areas of farmland were under water. The new government looked longingly eastwards to their former colonial treasure house in the Indies. Future prosperity, many concluded, depended on retrieving the lost Dutch colonial holdings. But there were no Dutch armies anywhere in East Asia – so the burden would fall, as it had in Indochina, on SEAC planners and British forces. It was a burden that Mountbatten took on with foot-dragging reluctance. French Indochina, Burma, Malaya, Siam must be dealt with first. The Dutch East Indies was right down at the end of the list: nothing could be done until September at the earliest. SEAC, the biggest single administrative body on earth, was in any case looking in the wrong direction. Mountbatten’s anxieties focused on the daunting task of tracking down and recovering the many thousands of starving Europeans incarcerated in the prisoner of war camps that were scattered across Java and Sumatra and repatriating possibly belligerent Japanese soldiers. When ‘HMS Cumberland’ steamed into the port of Batavia on 15 September bearing British admiral Sir Wilfred Patterson,  American military observer Colonel Kenneth Kennedy, and a former governor of East Java, Dr. Charles Olke van der Plas, to accept the Japanese surrender they were in for a very nasty shock. General Yamamoto Moichiro, the head of the military administration, met the European party with shattering news. Indonesia had declared independence. And national leaders Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta were at that moment preparing to fight to the death for their new republic.
The Afrikaner author Laurens van der Post had joined the British army at the beginning of the war and was captured by the Japanese in Java in May 1942. He spent three years in captivity near Bandung. After the Japanese surrender he was summoned by Mountbatten to assist with British operations in Indonesia. He was with Admiral Patterson when the Japanese surrendered. In his account of this period, ‘The Admiral’s Baby’, published long after the war in 1996, van der Post captures the peculiar juxtaposition of Dutch complacency and political turbulence in a single memorable image. The little black hat known as a songkok had become the symbol of the Indonesian nationalist movement. The Dutch, van der Post tells us
‘…knew all about those black hats and what they meant. How could they possibly talk as if they were about to be welcomed back with joy, as if they would be able to resume the comfortable way of life they had enjoyed in Indonesia before the war. My own memory of the alacrity with which a population of millions had discarded the batik turbans…and had overnight donned those black hats suggested to me not just a sudden change of heart but also the revelation of a spirit that had long glowed like the coals of a great fire ready to be blown into flame…’

The history of the Indonesian revolution that began with the Japanese surrender in 1945 has been described in detail by a number of historians, most notably by Benedict Anderson in his ‘Java in a Time of Revolution’. The details need not detain us here. The most important point to consider is that events unfolded very differently in Indonesia from Malaya. The question is why. We can immediately reject the clichéd explanation that the Malays of the Peninsula and northern Borneo were merely simple-minded kampong dwellers. The most persuasive explanation is that the Indonesian nationalists had developed a level of political maturity by 1942 that allowed them to take advantage of the Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and to act decisively when the Japanese occupation came to an end. The idea of Indonesia was a European invention but for ‘Indonesians’ it summoned into existence an ‘imagined community’ that could shape the aspirations of the hundreds of different communities of the vast archipelago. Nationalism was a late comer to British Malaya. Its ‘imagined community’ was governed by a single ethnic faction, the Malays whose leaders believed that the other ethnic communities in Malaya threatened their own. Indonesian nationalism was precocious and inclusive. The movement was powered by an idealistic and pugnacious youth movement. Anderson writes:
‘The central role of the ‘Angkatan Muda’ (Younger Generation) in the outbreak of the Indonesian national revolution of 1945 was the most striking political fact of that period. For the returning Dutch and their British allies, as well as for the Eurasian and Chinese communities, the once innocent word pemuda (youth) acquired an aura of remorseless terrorism… On the Indonesian side, a whole literature of glorification attests to an exultant consciousness of the sudden emergence of youth as a revolutionary force…’

The Malay KMM failed to mobilise the youth of Malaya. Finally, there was no Malay leader with the political cunning and stamina of Sukarno. The KMM founders Ibrahim Yaacob and Mustapha Hussein failed to win the respect of many Malays. Few had even heard of the KMM. Ibrahim was too self-centred to learn how to ride the wave of strategic ‘cooperation’ with the Japanese and come out the other side with an intact reputation as Sukarno did. Nor did the Malays ever command the respect of the Japanese. Sukarno, it will be recalled, was invited to cooperate, and held on to the support of sympathetic Japanese like Rear Admiral Maeda to the very end of the war. In August 1945 Ibrahim Yaacob botched his chance for independence – and there was no Malay Pemuda movement to keep stoking the fires of independence. Yaacob, as we know, ended up fleeing to Jakarta, leaving the good-natured Hussein to bear the stigma of collaboration.
Sukarno did not have everything his own way. But he was a supremely skilled survivor and, as one American journalist put it, ‘a whizz bang demagogue’. As a ‘collaborator’ he took tremendous political risks – and won. As the war turned against the Japanese the premier General Tojo made a cynical decision to exploit nationalist emotions in Southeast Asia by calling for the formation of native militias – cannon fodder that would help repel the Americans. Sukarno complied. He believed, and was proved right, that these militias, such as the ‘Sukarela Tentara Pembela Tanah Air’, ‘Volunteer Army of Defenders of the Homeland’, or PETA, could form the core of an Indonesian national army. The Japanese militarised the Indonesian pemudas. After the Japanese crushingly defeated the Dutch many young Indonesians became spellbound by the ‘Bushido’(‘way of the warrior’) that seemed to explain Japanese military prowess. In its modern form ‘Bushido’ exalted frugality, honour unto death and veneration for violence embodied in the practice of ritual suicide or seppuku. Resistance to the enemy was poeticised as the ‘blooming of the flowers of death’. This moral code was immensely seductive. For the ‘pemuda’ youth the idea of Merdeka conveyed not just  desire for political independence but a spiritual freedom and liberation from fear of violent death. In ritual greetings young Indonesians would first cry ‘Merdeka!’ then answer ‘Mati!’ – Death! Violence was the path to virtue: the working out of a moral code. Even though many youth leaders were disillusioned with Sukarno, he nevertheless turned their energies to his advantage.
On 16 July 1943 the Japanese Premier Tojo made a speech in the Diet in Tokyo that appeared to promise the native peoples of the Co Prosperity Sphere a bigger role in self government. Tojo repeated the same vague message when he came to Jakarta later that month – though it was telling that when he welcomed the Japanese delegation Sukarno referred to Indonesia, whereas Tojo was still talking about the ‘the southern regions’ and ‘natives of Java’.  Nevertheless, in September the Japanese administration in Jakarta created a nest of hierarchical advisory bodies under a Central Advisory Council – and offered Sukarno a presidential role. Sukarna was shrewd enough to recognize that the Japanese had simply reupholstered the old colonial ‘Volksraad’ (People’s Council) which was, as we saw in an earlier chapter, a sham pseudo-government. This was academic from Sukarno’s point of view: to most ordinary Indonesians the ‘President of the Advisory Council’ looked like a future national leader. This was symbolic power – but it was power.
Two years later, as the Japanese empire crumbled, Sukarno was forced to confront another threat, this time from inside Indonesia. It was one that he had himself conjured up, for like Cadmus he and the Japanese had sown the serpent’s teeth by arming the pemudas, and the Indonesian Spartoi now sprang up to do battle. On 14 February 1945 a PETA unit led by a twenty-year-old battalion commander called Soeprijadi launched an attack on Japanese troops at Blitar. The spark of revolt was the Japanese ‘romusha’ forced labour system that Sukarno had done nothing to alleviate. The Blitar battalion had been working closely with a ‘romusha’ unit. The Japanese quickly crushed the revolt, but the damage was done. The spirit of Blitar heralded a growing spirit of revolt against the Japanese – and sympathy for the Allies. It was their armies after all that promised to rid Indonesia of the Japanese. One of Sukarno’s old comrades, Ki Hadjar Dewantoro, proclaimed that ‘the reputation of the leaders is ruined in the eyes of the people’. He insisted that the young men of the revolution ‘do not want to build on filthy ground – they want to clear away the filth.’ Yet Sukarno turned the crisis to his advantage. He recycled a tried and tested political tactic. He formed yet another ‘national organisation’ that would draw the young men into his struggle for national liberation.  He promised that this ‘New Movement’ (Gerakan Baru) would purge ‘the stamp of the military’. In the teeth of fierce opposition from the most radical ‘Pemuda’ groups the ‘New Movement’, yoking together all previous associations and military organisations, emerged, struggling and mewling, into life. It was 28 July.
 On 3 August the Indonesian ‘Council of Leaders’ met at Sukarno’s house at Pegangsaan Timoer 56 in Jakarta and elected him head of the ‘New Movement’. Its mandate, Hatta declared, was to lead Indonesians from their present misery to a new life. A few days later, on 7 August, Count Terauchi, the Japanese Commander in Chief of the Southern Regions – who had once warned that Sukarno might become ‘the pet that bites back’ – conveyed a new message from Tokyo to speed up Indonesian independence. Sukarno was elated. In a now famous speech he brought the mythological narrative of Indonesia full circle by reminding the crowd of another prophecy of King Joyoboyo: that at the end of a ‘year of corn’, the yellow-skinned ‘conquerors from the north’ would return to their own land. The days of ‘Dai Nippon’ would soon come to an end. Indonesians must now ‘destroy the Americans, the English and the Dutch’.
The Japanese had not yet left the stage. On 18 August the ailing Count Terauchi summoned Sukarno and Hatta to his headquarters at Da Lat near Saigon to receive detailed instructions concerning independence. Freedom would be the Emperor’s gift. The date set was 7 September. It was on the way back from Saigon that Sukarno and Hatta stopped over at Taiping airport in Perak to meet the Malay leader Ibrahim Yaacob, who tried to persuade them, unsuccessfully, to include Malaya within ‘Indonesia Raya’ – a greater Indonesia. Before the delegation left for Saigon, Sjahrir had urged Hatta to ‘save his skin’ by deliberately provoking a row with Terauchi and showing off the sharp teeth of the independence movement. Instead the two nationalist leaders had held out a begging bowl. Many Indonesians were infuriated that Sukarno and Hatta once more had fallen for the old Japanese tricks.
But when the Indonesian delegation returned to Jakarta on 14 August Sukarno was on a high: ‘I declared that Indonesia would be independent before the corn was ripe. I can declare that Indonesia will be independent before the corn blossoms.’ At a tense and angry meeting he resisted demands to sever all links with the Japanese and proclaim independence immediately – without waiting for approval. Sukarno insisted on honouring the schedule he had agreed with Count Terauchi.
That meeting took place on 15 August. By the time it was over rumours about the Japanese Emperor’s ‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’ in Tokyo had begun to swirl through Jakarta. It was the radical Sjahrir who had the most reliable information: he was listening, illegally, to Allied radio broadcasts. Sukarno was disbelieving: he had lived with the myth of Japanese invincibility for too long. As the harsh reality sank in  Sukarno procrastinated; he promised he would make a statement at 5 p.m. At Japanese headquarters Rear Admiral Tadashi Maeda, who was head of intelligence in Java, fobbed them off – details of the Emperor’s speech were still coming through, he said. They must all wait for instructions from Tokyo. This was vexing. On the Indonesia side, in any case, there was still much to do. It is incredible that at this critical moment not one of the Indonesian leaders had thought to draw up a constitution. This omission Hatta now tried to remedy. In the meantime Sukarno sent word that he would make the proclamation the following day, 16 August. The pemudas erupted with rage: forget Sukarno and Hatta, we must go ahead now! We should bear in mind that it was Ramadan, when daily fasting can provoke the fiercest emotions. An astonishing sequence of events now unfolded. At Sukarno’s home at Pegangsaan Timoer 56, Adam Malik, Wikani and other Pemuda leaders confronted Sukarno: ‘If Bung Karno [Sukarno] does not announce independence tonight, tomorrow there will be murder and bloodshed everywhere.’ Sukarno was enraged: ‘Go ahead and cut my throat, go on, drag me into a corner and kill me, no need to wait until tomorrow…’ There then followed an astonishing political farce. Some of the Pemudas kidnapped Sukarno and Hatta and held them at the Rengasdengklok barracks. An indignant Hatta raged that ‘this was not a revolution but a putsch!’ Eventually the Pemuda gang drove Sukarno and Hatta back to Jakarta. The city was eerily quiet. Sukarno was convinced at last that the waiting game could no longer be played. At ten o’clock on the morning of 17 August Sukarno and Hatta stood outside Pegangsaan Timoer 56 and read the proclamation of independence, which had been hurriedly drafted overnight: ‘We the people of Indonesia hereby declare Indonesia’s independence.’ The small crowd that had gathered that morning and witnessed this oddly low key moment sang ‘Indonesia Raja’ and then quietly dispersed. The longed-for moment of ‘Merdeka’ had come – and gone – with a whimper.

Britain's War in Vietnam

THE BRITISH VIETNAM WAR
The modern nations of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos occupy the former imperial realm of Indochine. The French had first taken an interest in the bulbous peninsula that lies wrapped around the Siamese border east of India and southeast of China when the British had begun squeezing them out of India at the end of the eighteenth century. French Catholic missionaries were the vanguard of conquest and from the mid-nineteenth century Gallic colonisers chipped away at the local kingdoms under the pretext of protecting its missionary expeditions. Saigon, the main city of Cochin China (Southern Vietnam), was captured early in 1859 and, with British connivance, the French carved out an eastern empire. Following war with China in the 1880s French Indochina was formally established in October 1887 from Annam, Tonkin, Cochin China, which occupied the territory of modern Vietnam, and the Kingdom of Cambodia. Laos was added after a war with Siam. The building of ‘Indochine’ was a very nasty business. According to Governor-General Albert Sarraut, ‘Indochina is from all points of view, the most important, the most developed and the most prosperous of our colonies…’ Although the French maintained a façade of Annamite sovereignty by coercing Bao Dại, the last emperor of the old Nguyen dynasty, to serve as a puppet ruler from the old royal city of Hue, colonial rule impoverished its very diverse Asian peoples, who were treated as a pool of cheap labour for the rubber and coffee estates. The French, unlike the British, did not recruit Coolie labour in China. At the beginning of the 1930s the global depressions had a ruinous impact on the economy of Indochina and deepened the immiseration of its peoples. French colonial armies clamped down hard on any expression of revolt. But they could not prevent the emergence of a determined anti-colonial movement.  We have already encountered the most important and sophisticated Vietnamese rebel leader, who was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890. Later he would call himself Nguyen Ai Quoc –Nguyen the patriot. After a long and arduous odyssey, which took him from his homeland to the United States, France – where he helped found the French Communist Party – to West Ealing in Great Britain and the kitchens of a London hotel, and finally to the Comintern University in Moscow, the man who would become known to the world as Ho Chi Minh (he who instructs) returned secretly to Vietnam on the eve of the Japanese invasion.
By then France had fallen to the Germans. Hitler inflicted on its demoralised people a puppet government led by the feeble Marshal Philippe Pétain and headquartered in Vichy. The Vichy regime controlled most French overseas possessions, including Indochina. For the Japanese French Indochina was a strategic headache. Every month 10,000 tonnes of American military aid destined for Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang armies rumbled along the French-built railway that linked the port of Haiphong to Kunming on the Chinese border. To begin with the French resisted Japanese demands to cut off this military lifeline. But at the beginning of September Major-General Takuma Nishimura crossed the Indochinese border with an amphibious expeditionary force, backed in the Gulf of Tonkin by a naval flotilla and aircraft carriers. Faced with such determined intimidation the French backed down. On 22 September the colonial government signed a military accord with the Japanese. By December 1941 the Japanese had taken over airfields, ports and railways, turning the southern regions of French Indochina into a huge military base. The French expatriate population of Saigon and Hanoi offered minimal resistance. As a reward colonial officials were permitted to carry on colonial business as usual. For the duration of the Pacific war the tricolour fluttered unmolested over Saigon, Hanoi and Hue.  The Japanese left the Vietnamese nationalist movements to their own devices. Even after the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944 French colonial administrators found the collaboration habit hard to give up. It was only when the British 14th Army routed the Japanese in Burma that French attitudes began to change. But they had chosen the worst possible moment. The Japanese fell hard on the French and on 16 April imposed what they hoped would be a tame nationalist government led by Tran Trong Kim, an elderly and rather frail scholar who had been recalled from exile in Bangkok on behalf of the Japanese by emperor Bao Dại. With great reluctance Kim submitted to forming a nationalist government. In Saigon native troops in the French army staged huge rallies, proclaiming their thanks to the Japanese for liberating them from the French.
The first independent Vietnamese government lasted just five months. Outside the big cities, in rural areas, Kim had no authority. Communists and bandit gangs roamed at will and, as in Malaya and Indonesia, the scourge of famine blighted the countryside. In the wings powerful new nationalist forces waited patiently.  For some time the Soviets, the Americans and the Chinese had been sending funds and military supplies to the communist Viet Minh – the League for the Independence of Vietnam – which, like the MPAJA in Malaya, had been waging a guerrilla war against the Japanese. The Viet Minh was led by Ho and a gifted soldier called Vo Nguyen Giap. As Chinese Kuomintang forces mustered on the Vietnamese border the sick and ailing Japanese commander of Southeast Asia, Count Terauchi, handed over power to the Vietminh, and Ho stood on the balcony of the baroque Hanoi Opera House to proclaim the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and denounced the French: ‘They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood…’ Tran Trong Kim was happy to go back to his quiet library.
The new government was acrimoniously split between moderates and radicals, and Ho would need to find the will and the means to rule a fractured new nation. Colonel Jean Cédile arrived to muster resistance to the Viet Minh usurpers. Outside Hanoi Buddhist religious fanatics and vicious gangsters held sway. It was rumoured that the Emperor was readying an attack. The Japanese frankly acknowledged to Mountbatten that they could not hope to control this fast unravelling situation. On 2 September Ho proclaimed Independence Day. In Saigon huge crowds marched down ‘Paris Commune Street’. Without warning, shots rang out. Some of the marchers fell, bleeding. A wave of fury roared through the crowds. Mobs formed and French men and women were caught and beaten. Crowds smashed the windows of elegant French stores. Blind fury replaced the joy of independence… There was an atmosphere of smouldering hatred. Vietnam would be the first test of SEAC resolve.
The soldier Mountbatten despatched to Saigon, Major General Douglas Gracey, had one vital qualification. He commanded the complete loyalty of the 20th Indian Division. This counted for a great deal. In the long shadow of Subhas Chandra Bose few British officers could confidently rely on their Indian troops as Gracey could. During the Burma campaign ‘Chacha’ (uncle) Gracey and his Indian soldiers had fought with reckless bravery at Mandalay and Meiktila earning the approbation of the grumpy General Bill Slim: ‘a magnificent division, magnificently led.’ But the loyalty of the 20th Indian was about all Gracey could offer SEAC. He despised politics as ‘ideas and waffle’ and knew very little about Indochina. This would endear him neither to the French nor the Vietnamese people – and he probably could not have cared less.  The famous French war correspondent and photographer Germaine Krull watched Gracey’s men fly into Saigon.
‘The transport planes carrying British troops arrived in Saigon at one o'clock… We had left Rangoon at three o'clock that morning. I was the only woman and one of the three correspondents to accompany these handsome, impeccable Gurkhas - like over-grown children - and their Scotch commanding officer…’

The airport, Krull observed, was still ‘serviced entirely by the Japanese’, who followed British orders punctiliously. As the party of journalists followed Gracey’s troops into Saigon they noticed ‘sullen, stormy-eyed Annamites [Vietnamese] and Chinese…’ As they entered the city banners and slogans festooned walls and official buildings: ‘Down with French imperialism!’, ‘Vive les Allies!’, ‘Down with the colonials!’, ‘The era of colonization is over!’. Flags were everywhere – British, American, Chinese, Russian – and the Vietminh’s big red one with a yellow star. In the city Krull walked along the Rue Catinat, ‘the heart of it’ – the elegant street was teeming with French families, a few Chinese – but not a single Annamite, ‘not even a rickshaw’. A British captain contemptuously described a ‘feeble WOG [i.e. Viet Minh]’ party that was expecting the British to ‘confirm their independence from the wicked French’. The latter were ‘all rather futile and vaguely Vichy…’ As Gracey tried to take stock of a baffling and evidently explosive situation Chinese troops commanded by General Lu Han, ‘the dragon cloud’, and backed by American advisors, poured across the Indochinese border into Hanoi, where they were just as joyfully welcomed as the Gurkhas were in Saigon. In stark contrast to Gracey’s well fed Indian troops these Chinese soldiers were shockingly emaciated and shod in straw boots. General Lu Han and his American advisor General Philip E. Gallagher brushed off the French, who had made the grievous mistake of assuming that the Americans would oust the new national government. Instead Lu Han and Gallagher backed the Viet Minh – for now. According to Gallagher Ho had not forgotten President Wilson’s famous ‘Fourteen Points’ and admired the United States as the ‘saviour of all small nations…’ In the south Gracey would, of course, take a very different line. He was ‘an old fashioned product of the British Empire’ and bewildered by the swirling hatreds that he was encountering in Saigon. He was hopelessly out of his depth. He had no political officer and refused to listen to the advice of the well informed American OSS agent stationed in Saigon, Colonel A. Peter Dewey. The scion of a Republican dynasty, Dewey was articulate, well informed, passionate – and, in Gracey’s view, thoroughly annoying. Dewey hated the French and enjoyed close friendships with Viet Minh leaders like Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach – fervent nationalists, whom he thoroughly admired as champions of liberty and democracy: he told Gracey that the Viet Minh all enjoyed tuning into the ‘Voice of America’.
The no-nonsense Gracey took a contrary view: the local ‘Annamite’ government was both incompetent and a ‘direct threat to law and order’. It was imperative to get the French back into the driving seat. This was his task as imperial policeman – to restore order. General Charles de Gaulle had entrusted General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc, the hero of the Libération, with the restitution of the French Asian empire: but Leclerc was a general sans army. Everything depended on the British. On 17 September the Viet Minh called for a national strike in Saigon and Cholon. In the city strikers vented their fury on French official buildings. These events handed Gracey a casus belli to strike at the ‘Annamite government’.  On 19 September he issued a proclamation banning processions and political demonstrations, proscribing the carrying of arms by any unauthorised forces, and warning that wrongdoers would be shot. Krull noted in her journal: ‘It was like being on top of a volcano about to erupt…’ That night Krull was awoken by the sound of machine guns and exploding hand grenades. At 5 a.m. the following morning the shooting was still going on. The street was jammed with  car and military trucks. It was at this very tense moment that de Gaulle’s representative, Jean Cédile, persuaded General Gracey to re-arm French soldiers, who had been recently released from the Japanese camps, and deploy them across the city. This seemed to Gracey to be an eminently sensible idea.
On the morning of 23 September the people of Saigon woke up to find their city was French once more. Cédile had forbidden ‘arrogant attitudes or triumphalist gestures’ – but neither he nor the British had taken into account the state of mind of many of the former French prisoners. Many of them had been humiliated and starved by the Japanese and now turned their pent up anger on the hapless Vietnamese. Mobs of out of control ununiformed French soldiers and citizens rampaged through the Vietnamese quarters of Saigon, kicking, beating and raping any non-European they could lay their hands on. They behaved, Krull reported, ‘as if they were celebrating the 14 July, their guns slung over their shoulders…’ She witnessed soldiers driving Vietnamese captives down the Rue Catinat ‘bound slave fashion to a long rope.’ By arming the French, Gracey had made a mistake. He had unleashed a war that would last more then twenty-five years.
Mountbatten had only reluctantly supported Gracey’s onslaught on the Vietminh government in Saigon. He preferred the Vietminh to the French. Ever conscious of face and reputation Mountbatten was mortified by the torrent of critical reports in American and Australian newspapers. But his sympathy for nationalists had limits. He wrote to Gracey: ‘since you have taken this line and you are the man on the spot, it is my intention to support you.’ He proposed that Gracey ‘redefine’ his mission and give any unsavoury jobs, such as burning down villages, to the French. Saigon was, he realised, a costly mistake.  Krull’s last journal entry reads:
‘I left by plane on the next day, the 25th of September. Saigon was in flames as we flew away. The last ten days in Saigon proved to me that the French population understood nothing of the situation and knew nothing of the outside world; that it consisted of people who would not tolerate the least infringement upon their comfort and who also were incredibly cowardly. Never have cause and effect been so closely linked. The events of the 22nd of September determined the issue of the conflict. Everything which happened thereafter can be directly traced to that date -- women captured and mistreated, men and children assassinated, Dutch, English and American officers killed, shooting, burning factories, mysterious disappearances, all these and more happened. The French, terrorized by the lack of foresight and motivated by avarice… are responsible for what happened.’

A few weeks later French troops of the ‘Far East Expeditionary Corps’ began pouring into Saigon. Much of their equipment, weapons, trucks and so on, had been supplied by the United States. The French would now take the fight back to the Vietminh. The patrons of Saigon’s teeming bars and brothels would soon become familiar with the rousing strains of German drinking songs – for many veterans of Erwin Rommel’s ‘Afrika Korps’ had re-enlisted in the French Foreign Legion – and they would now help crush the Viet Minh. Frequently ragged and manacled Anammite prisoners would be hauled ignominiously through town. To the French they already looked like defeated men: ‘We’ll kill them off… It is really nothing.’ By the middle of November the OSS was reporting to Washington that Vietminh resistance had been ‘dispersed’. This sense of imminent victory was illusory. Ho Chi Minh had sent one of his most ruthless deputies, Nguyen Binh, to resuscitate the military campaign in the south. He did so with fearless determination – laying the foundation of a very long war.
The resurgence of French resistance to the Viet Minh, supported by the Americans, meant that the British could exit the maelstrom. By then the leaders of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, were insisting that the British withdraw all Indian troops from active service Indochina. At the end of November Mountbatten flew into Saigon to accept the Japanese surrender. News film of the ceremony shows Terauchi stepping forward very unsteadily, walking with a stick. He had suffered a very bad stroke. An aide carries endraped wooden cases containing the two ceremonial swords that Mountbatten had insisted the Japanese hand over. He wanted to present one to King George VI. Terauchi shakily surrenders the swords, salutes and totters away. Soon afterwards Mountbatten and the new French high commissioner for Indochina, Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu (a former ‘barefoot’ Carmelite monk), signed an agreement that French forces would henceforth take over all military operations. On 14 January General Gracey and French General Leclerc took the salute standing on the steps of Saigon’s City Hall. Indian soldiers, soon to become citizens of an independent India, marched past to the sound of the Dogra Pipe and Drum Band playing ‘Scotland the Brave’. At Government House Gracey handed over to Leclerc two Japanese swords to underline the fact that political sovereignty was his gift to France.  General Leclerc remarked that ‘The 20th Indian Division under General Gracey was friendly towards us and we much appreciated their aid.’ He did not trouble to disguise deep reserves of bitterness.

The Spark, June 1948

That morning Arthur ‘Wally’ Walker, the manager of the Elphil Estate, had started work before sunrise inspecting the long rows of silvery rubber trees with his dog, and talking to his estate workers. Just before 8 a.m., he returned to his office where he met the estate clerk A.H. Kumaran. Both men then began work. Walker would take breakfast two hours later. Such was the custom of the British rubber estates. Walker was in his mid 40s. Born in Moffat in Scotland, he had come out to Malaya in the 1920s. In 1942, he had been captured by the Japanese and imprisoned at Changi jail in Singapore. Earlier that morning, his wife had left the estate to go shopping in the royal town of Kuala Kangsar. They would meet later to discuss their planned holiday in England. At about 8.30 a.m., three young Chinese men rode up to the office on bicycles. They jumped off, carefully parked their machines, then walked unhurriedly into Walker’s office. The dog began barking. Next door, the clerk Mr Kumaran heard a Chinese voice greet Walker: ‘Tabek, tuan!’ Salutations, sir. He heard Walker reply. Then two shots rang out loudly in the small office. Next door Kumaran froze, terrified. Would he be next? He was greatly relieved to hear footsteps clattering through the door of Walker’s office. Concealing himself by the door, Kumaran watched as the men rode wobbled away on their bicycles heading towards the road. There was nothing he could do for Walker. He was stone dead, shot through the head and chest. Acrid gun smoke hung for a few moments in the still, humid air. Kumaran noticed that the key to office safe lay on the floor, though the safe itself containing $2000 had not been opened. Walker may have hurled the key at his assassins.
Half an hour after the murder of Walker, another armed party of twelve young men entered the Phin Soon estate, a few kilometres away on the other side of the Lintang Road.  They surrounded the plantation office. Inside, the ringleaders discovered Ian Christian, the trainee ‘conductor’ or overseer, Tan Ah Joo, another conductor called Cheah Lip Chong and an Indian clerk K.N. Mudaly. Christian had not been in Malaya long. One of the intruders tied his hands behind his back. The estate manager, fifty five year old John Allison had the office next door. Like Walker, he had been a prisoner of war. His wife and son were in England. Allison too was tied up. One of the gunmen seized the safe keys from his pocket and rifled through the safe. Then they hustled him, Christian, Tan and Cheah out of the office and set off in the direction of the plantation bungalow a few hundred yards distant. The gunmen ordered the two Chinese to wait outside as the two Europeans were taken inside – presumably to find any other valuables. A short while later, the gunmen and their captives reappeared and hauled Christian and Allison back to the office. They informed Tan and Cheah: ‘We are out only for Europeans. These men will surely die today: we will shoot all Europeans.’ Back inside the office, Allison and Christian were tied on chairs. The Chinese men lifted their pistols and fired at point blank range. Allison and Christian died instantly. The rebels then set fire to a rubber store and fled. One of the first to arrive on the scene was a local doctor, David Tweedie. He reported:
‘I was told by the Manager of Kamuning Estate when I made my routine visit that the Manager of Elphil Estate had been shot. I rushed to the estate and as I passed the entrance to Phin Soon Estate, now Sungei Siput Estate, I saw a policeman guarding the entrance. Also in the distance was a column of black smoke rising to the sky as in the days when smoke houses and stores were burned to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Japanese. I stopped and asked the policeman what was the matter. He said that the European Manager, Mr Allison and the Assistant, Mr Christian, had been shot and the store set on fire. By the time I reached Elphil Estate a huge crowd including senior Police Officers and police had arrived. The Manager, Mr Walker, had been shot as he sat in his office by two Chinese pretending to be making a business call. He was a very popular Manager with his staff and labour force. At that moment a car drove up. It was Mrs Walker returning from a shopping trip to Ipoh.’
The Sungei Siput murders have an iconic significance in the history of British Malaya. Few historians mention the killing of a Chinese foreman on the Senai Estate near Johor Bahru and a Chinese contractor near Taiping on the same day. Neither one is commemorated in the historical literature. The British planters have well tended memorial graves at ‘God’s Little Acre’ near Ipoh. It is conventional, even clichéd to regard the events that took place near Sungei Siput as the spark that set off a conflict that raged for twelve years. The real war lasted much longer: Chin Peng and other communists did not formally lay down their arms until 2 December, 1989.
On the same day that the MNLA squads struck at the Sungei Siput plantations, the High Commissioner Sir Edward Gent, damaged by his perceived mishandling of the Malayan Union crisis, declared a state of emergency in Perak, which he extended to the whole of the Peninsula two days later. On 23 July, the British banned the MCP and its allies. Gent’s declaration had a profound impact on the course and nature of the war. The British did not ‘declare war’ on the Malayan communist insurgents.

Empire builders

Kwasi Karteng argues in his book ‘Ghosts of Empire’ (2011) that British imperialism was driven not by a moralistic desire to export liberal democracy but by ‘anarchic individualism and paternalism’. The grand moralistic sentiment of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Hands all Round’ (dedicated to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her sixty third birthday in 1882) was merely childish blather:
‘We’ve sailed wherever a ship could sail
We’ve planted many a mighty state;
Pray God our greatness may not fail
Through craven fears of being great.’
As a declining post imperial nation, Britain remains preoccupied with Empire – and whether, to adopt the terms set by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman in ‘1066 and all that’, ‘the Empire’ was a good thing or a bad thing - or perhaps ‘Right but Repulsive’ as they judged the English Civil War. That kind of debate, which has become sterile and polarised, presupposes that the Empire was ‘a thing’ at all – that is to say a coherent consequence of intent. It has been argued that the British Empire was to some degree accidental: the initiatives of colonial administrators, the ‘men on the spot’ had equal if not greater impact than any master imperial plan hatched in London. The makers of empire were, with very few exceptions, the idiosyncratic products of English public schools who were recruited not on the grounds  of their language or administrative skills but their sporting prowess. If a man came from a decent school and 'played the game' he would be asked to join the colonial ruling class. These kinds of chaps exalted natural hierarchies and despised democracy, let alone any stronger intellectual fare. Such were the makers of Empire.

The Planter's Life

For the British or French or Dutch planter the rubber estate was a world within a world. ‘He hadn’t much to talk about but rubber and games, tennis, you know, and golf and shooting…’ Somerset Maugham wrote of a planter called Bronson: ‘he had the mind of a boy of eighteen. You know how many fellows when they come out east seem to stop growing.’ Many of the young Europeans employed on the rubber estates of Southeast Asia worked as assistant planters or ‘creepers’. They were the backbone of estate operations because a colour bar prevented Coolies rising above the level of clerk. The creepers were an odd bunch. James Mill said that the main purpose of Empire was to ‘provide out door relief for the British upper classes’. Many were misfits or black sheep exiled by their families. Others were restless fellows who had fled enervating office jobs in the City. In Malaya, at least a third of the assistant planters were Scottish. The Ramsden company archive is chockfull of reports of assistants sacked because they were alcoholic, prone to violence, mentally ill or just bone idle time wasters. A surprising number ended up destitute on the streets of Singapore, waiting, or begging, sometimes in vain, for a passage home. It was worth it for some. Colonial service offered a step up. They enjoyed powers that were not easy to attain in the normal run of things at home. These ‘Tuan Besars’ and ‘Tuan Kechils’ – the ‘great gentlemen’ and ‘junior masters’ – who strutted about their domains in stained khakis, tropical whites and solar tepees, periodically lunging at coiled snakes with a stick, were the petty lords of all they surveyed. A good number were unashamed racists who fervently believed in the civilising ethos of empire and the natural inferiority of native lesser breeds. The best and the brightest admittedly turned into decent linguists – learning the rudiments or more of Tamil, Malay, Javanese and the Chinese dialects often with the assistance of Asian ‘wives’ known as ‘sleeping dictionaries’. Work was hard and most of the ‘Tuans’ had to endure recurrent bouts of debilitating malaria. 

After a day on the estate, checking and rechecking the work of the tappers, they fled to their bungalows to sip whiskey stengahs, and bitter English beer. Who can blame them? The Dutch too were ‘tremendous soaks’ who could as one memoir admitted ‘put away an incredible amount of beer at an incredible pace’. An Australian journalist reported from Papua that a appropriate coat of arms for the territory would be ‘a white man rampant, with a boy couchant, bearing a bottle of beer proper.’ ‘Beer, Boy!’ was the most distinctive cry of the species. Many of the French planters in Indochina were veterans of the Foreign Legion – and some were distinctly unsavoury types. The British recruited their planters from the ‘great’ public schools like Eton and Rugby or ‘lesser’ public schools and elite state grammar schools. Many of the Scots had been educated at Fettes School near Edinburgh. Life was rarely comfortable. The working day began in the cool before dawn – and no one, Tuan or Coolie, stopped work until the setting of the hot and merciless sun. Life might be uncomfortable. A Scot called Ian Matheson recalled that on his estate in Sumatra he had to live in a leaking bungalow with no running water and electricity and a ‘thunder box which needs no description’. Leopold Ainsworth, who was sent to an estate near Penang, could not forget the ‘miserable dreary light’ of the single oil lamp in his quarters, and a malodorous mildew ridden mattress and rotting ‘Dutch Widow’ pillow. With the onset of the monsoon, a ‘solid, streaming, crashing wall of water’ broke through the roof. He had first come to estate after a long journey by cart. He arrived late and his new employer, a cantankerous old Scot, had whipped the cart driver with cruel abandon and retired, exhausted, to bed. Supper was a ‘disgusting meal’ of tinned soup with ants floating on its greasy surface. Coffee was strained through an old sock. Ainsworth was woken the next morning, bowels churning, by a barrage of hammering on his door and a cry of ‘Get up you lazy bastard!’ Strong drink was a refuge. Not a few sodden prematurely aged and pickled ‘Tuans’ lost their wits and ended up in the Singapore Lunatic Asylum before being shipped home if they were lucky. The Rubber comanies actively discouraged marriage. ‘Creepers’ were forbidden to tie the knot until the fourth year of their contracts. Lonely, far from hearth and home, it was unusual for a young planter not to seek relief and solace in Malay ‘kip shops’ or in the arms of Asian concubines known as ‘Keeps’ (short for ‘housekeeper’) in Malaya. Some planters treated their Asian mistresses with respect, fathered families and sent their children to school. A very few married their former ‘Keeps’; the majority were summarily dispensed with when a ‘Memsahib’ finally turned up to share the planters’ ordeals.