“We can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead…”
King George V of Britain, Flanders, 1922

There are indeed “foreign fields forever England”, as the poet Rupert Brooke put it, right here in Jakarta. And forever Australia, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

For those with an ear for history, visits to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Menteng Pulo and the Dutch War Graves cemetery at Ancol on the north shore reveal an episode of British history largely neglected by textbooks and university courses, the armed intervention by Britain in Indonesia after the surrender of the Japanese at the end of the Pacific War.

Over 1100 men and women of the Commonwealth and British Empire lie buried in these immaculately tended plots. More than 700 of them died here between September 1945 and December 1946. The remainders were casualties of the world war and the brutal Japanese internment camps that dotted Java and Sumatra.

This British intervention came about for two main reasons. First, there was the need to locate and secure the many thousands of Allied POW and internees, most but not all of them Dutch. Second, there was the imperative of demobilising the defeated Japanese, some units of which were prepared to fight on.

The British Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was based in Kandy in Ceylon, ordered a force to Batavia (Jakarta) in September, a month or so after the Emperor Hirohito’s announcement of surrender. Unbeknown to Mountbatten, who would soon complain of a complete lack of advance information about Indonesia, this was a recipe for disaster.

And why? The Indonesians, seizing their moment, had declared independence on August 17. Soekarno and Hatta, under fierce pressure from young militants, had proclaimed the new state and vowed to resist the restoration of Dutch colonial rule. A new reality was awaiting the 1,000 men of the Seaforth Highlanders who came ashore from ‘HMS Cumberland’, a risen people determined to prevent the renewal of their centuries-long servitude.

Within weeks the British force, which was augmented by Indian regiments such as the Gurkhas, Mahrattas and Bengal Sappers and Miners, would be locked in a bitter struggle with the poorly armed but fiercely determined Indonesians. The original brief of finding the POW and internees, many of the latter being women and children, would become complicated by the refusal of many of the Dutch to heed Mountbatten’s instructions to stay in the camps until the Allied troops arrived to secure them.

The British would compound their problems with some terrible blunders born of their marrow-of-the-bone colonial arrogance. General Sir Philip Christison, the British commander, acting on Mountbatten’s orders and ultimately the London government of Clement Attlee’s say-so, steadfastly refused to recognise the new state. The Dutch, whose homeland had been devastated by the Nazi blitzkrieg and the Famine Winter of 1944-45, could not countenance anything but control of the East Indies.

Pemuda groups, which had acquired Japanese arms of various sorts, including armoured cars and Bofors guns, carried the fight to the battle-hardened British troops, who were supported by units of the Royal Air Force and ships of the Royal Navy. Among these groups were many militants who regarded the POW as hostages. As the crisis deepened attacks on the POW camps took place; at Ambarawa in Central Java the camp was shelled, and trains carrying the unfortunate detainees were stormed.

Repatriation of Allied Prisoner of War and Other Internee (RAPWI) teams worked in the most difficult of circumstances, and not even the humane intervention of the urbane social democrat Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir could guarantee that their work would go on unhindered.

Events took a turn for the worse in Surabaya in late October 1945 when Christison against the wishes of the British commander in the city Brigadier Auberin Mallaby despatched RAF planes to drop leaflets demanding the unconditional surrender of the Indonesians. Mallaby was at the time locked in negotiations through the Contact Bureau and the surrender demand was seen by the Indonesians as a breach of faith, a view it is extremely hard to argue with.

When Mallaby was killed in a confrontation with an armed crowd of nationalists, the British reacted with fury, blaming the Republican leadership for his death and vowing to retaliate with everything at their disposal. Fierce street fighting erupted in the East Java capital and despite the use of RAF Thunderbolt and Mosquito planes to strafe the city, the Indonesians took on the British with the utmost vigour; not even Soekarno’s intervention could pacify the people of Surabaya, who were urged on by local Radio Pemberontak.

Other cities, too, saw risings and although some Japanese commanders were cooperative with the British, others were not, a factor that further complicated the task of Mountbatten’s men. Sumatra was also a hotbed of nationalism and with the complexity of its geography very difficult ground for the British to operate in.

The Indonesian crisis became one of the very first issues to be debated at the newly formed United Nations Security Council, where British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin stonewalled a Soviet proposal for a UN commission of inquiry to be sent to investigate. The Republican government, which withdrew to Jogjakarta, pursued what diplomatic initiatives it could abroad in a bid to win international support.

The issue of British intervention in Indonesia must ultimately be seen in the light of the United Kingdom’s overall imperial project. Determined to restore British rule in Malaya and Singapore as well as Burma, the London government was also determined to aid the other European colonial powers in Asia, even to the extent of using Japanese troops against the nationalists in Indonesia and Vietnam. The rightness of the wish to end the sufferings of the POW is not in dispute but the high-handed manner in which Christison deployed his men and the adamant refusal to recognise the legitimate independence of Indonesia drew Britain into a costly impasse.