Maju! The cry of the student soldiers
Suhario
[Kecik] Padmodiwiryo died in Jakarta last year on 19 August.
He was 93
and a prominent hero of the 1945 Battle of Surabaya. Historian and journalist
Dr Frank Palmos claims the former General was ‘the brightest literary star to
emerge from Surabaya’. Yet Kecik’s passing was poorly recognised.
That defect
is about to be repaired with the publication of his vivid memoir Revolution
in the City of Heroes, translated into English by Palmos.
The battle
in early November formed, fired and fixed the clay first shaped by president
Soekarno’s declaration of independence on 17 August 1945.
Other
cities, including Jakarta, had largely accepted the allies’ arrival to disarm
the Japanese and repatriate the 70,000 European prisoners of war.
Though not
in the East Java capital where thousands of young people [pemuda also
known as Arek Suroboyo] rightly
deduced that the British Indian army had another agenda – to reinstate the
Dutch once the occupiers had gone.
The British
little understood they were entering ‘the cauldron of the Surabayan
revolution’. They relied on the
colonialists’ arrogant advice that Indonesians would joyfully welcome the
return of their masters.
The Dutch
refused to accept the world had changed forever after Japan had defeated the
European colonialists. They loathed Soekarno and dismissed the proclamation.
Grave errors.
Europeans
who tried to retake their homes and businesses found the properties occupied by
Indonesians who refused to budge. Kecik
reported what happened next:
‘Battered and bloodied bodies were spread around the
inner city streets that had once been elegant shopping centers. This was a
prelude to open warfare’.
The next
movement came quickly. Dutch officers and administrators moved into Surabaya’s
Hotel Oranje, now the Majapahit, the city’s most prestigious address. They claimed local expertise but didn’t
realize the ‘menial hotel staff and dining room waiters’ were dentistry
students who understood Dutch.
The spies
eavesdropped the braggarts and learned their plans to raise the tricolor of the
Netherlands Kingdom above the hotel. So schoolboy Kusno shinned up the pole,
and ripped off the lower blue stripe to create the flag of the Republic. It was game on.
Kecik was a
medical student given military training by the Japanese. As deputy commander of a 500-strong force he
helped retake the Hall of Justice headquarters of the Kempeitai, the hated
secret police. But his ‘troops’ were
beyond control:
‘They
moved in a jumbled formation and all seemed in aggressive high spirits, which
they enhanced by continuous slogan shouting: “Maju! Maju! Maju! Advance!
Advance! Advance!”
‘Any
formal effort to organise these boys into a more disciplined advance or to
coordinate their firing would have failed. My military knowledge was useless
here because all tactical principles had merged into one: Advance!’
The book
has a curious genesis. In the 1960s Kecik, now a General, had been on a
military course in Russia. When he
returned Soekarno had been deposed by Soeharto who was purging Communists and
real or imagined fellow travelers.
Though
he’d also been to the US for similar training Kecik was put under house
arrest. With no formal duties he
compiled his memoirs drawing from ‘my lively imagination [which] had the
dreaded habit of accurately foretelling the dark future of my lovely
town.’
Comments
Palmos: ‘For pure, unselfishly written diarizing, nothing in Indonesian
literature compares. It has no peer in Indonesian literature as a step-by-step
record of ground level activity in the fight for independence…at a time when
the future of the proclaimed Republic looked bleak indeed.’
Palmos had
been a foreign correspondent stationed in Jakarta towards the end of Soekarno’s
rule. Five years ago his research into
the Battle of Surabaya was being hampered by a lack of first-person
accounts.
To his
surprise he discovered Kecik was still alive and writing his four-volume
text Pemikiran Militer [Military
Thinking].
Armed with
a video camera the Australian immediately flew from Perth to Bekasi. The two men got on well and the old soldier
agreed to work on a translation of the Surabaya section of his memoirs.
The book’s
credibility is enhanced by Kecik’s stern criticism of some pemuda for
their sadism, and contempt for later accounts that glamorized his former
comrades as gallants wearing headbands and striking ‘bold heroic poses’:
‘We were
gathered on serious business, with fashion or posturing playing no part in this
life or death contract we were entering into to win independence.’
This is
not a monochrome memoir, brave Indonesians versus treacherous Westerners. There are human moments - a Sikh soldier
telling a boy whose gun misfired to go home, a Catholic and Muslim under fire
praying together in high Javanese.
The
English version includes information Palmos gleaned from other sources,
including interviews with Roeslan Abdulgani, later to became foreign minister.
The
slaughter – maybe close to 20,000 died - might have been lessened had the
British conducted their own intelligence and known more of the Javanese culture
of respect.
According to Kecik truce negotiators ‘
[Captain Harold] Shaw and Abdulgani were civilized, educated and
polite men who would in peace time have become friends, whereas [Shaw’s
superiors] were unnaturally stiff in their approaches to our Governor,
resorting to haughty postures.’
As the
Revolutionaries set about arming themselves they confronted Japanese soldiers
standing to attention at an armory.
From his earlier contact with the occupiers Kecik understood that they
would not take the initiative and defend their weapons because they’d been
trained only to follow orders.
Had they
been told to remain passive, or were orders about to be given? The young men grabbed the guns and retreated
as their foes stared rigidly ahead. But
elsewhere there was serious fighting as the Japanese retaliated.
Australians
in particular now have the chance to understand why their northern neighbors
are such determined defenders of their revolution, and how the battle has
defined the nation and underpinned the fortitude of its people.
Diplomats
and public servants seeking a better relationship should read Revolution
and reflect that neither Malaysia nor Singapore had to fight for their
independence like the Indonesians.
Writes
Palmos: ‘Kecik’s
book corrects the common, mistaken assumption that
Indonesia
was free from the day independence was proclaimed on 17 August 1945.’
Revolution
in the City of Heroes by Suhario ‘Kecik’ Padmodiwiryo, translated by Frank Palmos,
Published
by Ridge Books, Singapore
206 pages
(First published in The Jakarta Post 16 August 2015)
