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the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Asian revolution. He had returned to Indonesia only in 1942, incognito, working as a clerk in a Japanese coal mine in Java, a stranger in his own country. In August he revealed his identity to the revolutionary leaders, though not to the public. Such was his mystique that Sukarno even signed a secret document stating that Tan Malaka should assume the leadership of the revolution were Sukarno to be incapacitated. But the veteran revolutionary felt that his time had not yet come. The Ikeda Square demonstration had been his suggestion: a way of testing the will of the revolutionaries. He was disappointed in Sukarno, who had come not to inspire the crowd to action, ‘but to request the masses to “have faith” and “obey” and to order them to go home’.60 He was appalled at the concessions Sukarno was prepared to make to the imperial powers. He bided his time, waiting to reveal himself and seize his moment as had Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Perhaps a more telling comparison would prove to be Subhas Chandra Bose. In 1945 there were to be reports and sightings of various ‘Tan Malakas’ throughout Java and Sumatra. In Malaya, some – including British intelligence – believed that the mysterious founder of the Malay Nationalist Party, Mokhtaruddin Lasso, was none other than the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’.61

The British and Dutch heard little of events in Java. During the war there had been virtually no intelligence gathered about Indonesia, an information gap which British secret warriors were now tasked to fill. Even as Special Operations Executive was being rapidly wound down in Europe, Mountbatten retained a force of not less than 2,500 for peacetime tasks. The need for information about Indonesia was desperate.62 There were a few Dutch officers at Mountbatten’s HQ at Kandy, but most Dutch who knew anything about Indonesia were either in Japanese prison camps or in Australia, as part of a government-in-exile at Camp Columbia just outside Brisbane, where their shipping – known as ‘Flying Dutchmen’ to port workers – choked the harbour. A formal Anglo-Dutch agreement on civil affairs was signed only on 24 August. It gave authority to a British commander working through a Netherlands Indies Civil Affairs Administration. The British were to take responsibility for Java and Sumatra; the outer islands would be looked after by the Australians. Dutch political planning for the future of its vast Asian empire was founded upon a speech made by Queen Wilhelmina on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor: it reaffirmed the ‘indivisibility of the Kingdom’. As a sop to United States opinion it called for a conference with national leaders, but the proposal was no advance on the last major programme of Dutch colonial reform in 1918; arguably, it promised less. When it was announced in Indonesia, it was met with scorn: ‘ridiculous’, a leader in West Java recalled, ‘as if Hitler and Japan had done nothing to the world of men’.63

The first landings on the isolated Dutch territories of New Guinea gave no foretaste of conditions elsewhere. The first British officers to parachute into Java and Sumatra added little to the picture: they landed on 8 September and reported a reasonably peaceable situation. They met the moderate Indonesian leaders, and not the pemuda. In any case, their principal task was to begin to locate the 100,000-odd prisoners of war and civilian internees in Indonesia. They were mostly Dutch, but included British women detained in remote locations after their ships had been sunk in the ‘Dunkirk’-type small-ship exodus from Singapore a few days before its fall. Their conditions were dire. It was at this point that tensions began to mount. Like their British counterparts, the former Dutch officials in the internment camps fully expected to return to their Indonesian homes and resume their old jobs and, unlike the old Malaya hands, the opportunity was there for them to do so. They were, therefore, bitterly angry on hearing the first broadcast announcements of South East Asia Command ordering them to stay in their camps.