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to fight really hard.’70 The Dutch military commanders were ill-equipped to comprehend the magnitude and the meaning of the events that had taken place in Jakarta. They disliked the British; they resented the precedence that seemed to be given to French interests in Indo-China.71 They had spent the war living a grotesque colonial fantasy in Camp Columbia, where racist attitudes were, if anything, worse than in the pre-war Indies, and the Indonesians were openly called bangsat – ‘son of a bitch’.72 The two senior military men were Admiral Helfrich, a disciplinarian who thought the antidote to nationalism was corporal punishment, and General van Oyen, ‘so fond of his wine, his food and his women’, according to a 1946 British official report, and ‘universally disliked by his countrymen, particularly by the ladies who rightly or wrongly believed that he flew out of Bandung in March 1942 with his mistress, leaving his wife behind’.73

When the lieutenant governor, Dr Hubertus J. van Mook, arrived on 1 October, he too was welcomed by a crowd waving placards. Very short-sighted and unable to read them, he turned to his secretary: ‘What do they say?’ There came the answer: ‘“Death to van Mook”, Your Excellency.’74 Van Mook viewed the Indies as his homeland; he was born in Java. So too was van der Plas, probably of a mixed marriage. A celebrated scholar of Islam, van der Plas had been taunted by hardliners as an Inlander liefde: a lover of the natives. Van Mook and van der Plas personify many of the contradictions of the reforming imperialisms of the end of empire. They shared a vision of ‘association’, in which the Indies Dutch, with a privileged status, gave cohesion to the ethnically diverse society of the archipelago under the tutelage of the Netherlands – a kind of tropical Canada. But it was a politically barren vision that would compel the Indies Dutch to fight like Boers in southern Africa to maintain their primacy. To men like van Mook and van der Plas, ‘Indonesia’ was merely a geographical expression. Their vision of a multiracial society was sincerely held, but it led them to despise nationalism, which they saw as ethnic chauvinism. They did not recognize the republic’s leaders, they put their faith in old hierarchies and they saw no possibility of departure from the governing obsession with Rusten Orde.75 Above all, they could not comprehend that the coming conflict was to be a war between nation-states.

As in the case of Indo-China, the British intervention was seen, both by its critics at the time and by historians since, as a calculated war of imperial conquest. Like Indo-China, the forces shaping policy were more complex and driven by the pace of events on the ground.76 But more than this, it was a definitive encounter with nationalism. There were important differences in approach between the two territories. The British commander was Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison. A baronet and former medical doctor, he had won the first British victories against the Japanese in Burma and had been knighted in the field by Lord Wavell – the first such event since the Middle Ages. Like Gracey in Vietnam, he was told by Mountbatten that he was to be a politician, and ultimately to ‘carry the can’. But he was perhaps better equipped for this task than Gracey, and more instinctively sympathetic to nationalism. Attlee counted himself ‘lucky to have a soldier-statesman there’.77 Although for both men the safety of their troops was an overriding concern, the British paid for their presence in Indonesia with vastly more casualties than in Indo-China, and this shaped Christison’s attitude to the Dutch. He was appalled by their intransigence and, in the face of it, was less cowed by constitutional niceties than was Gracey in Vietnam. In any event, the British could more easily afford to offend the Dutch than the French. Although the question of Dutch sovereignty was unquestioned at the diplomatic level, there was a wide difference between the capacity of the Dutch and the French to restore their own authority on the ground. It was