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Englishwoman. She was a Manx hotelier from Bali, interned by the Japanese and best known by her Balinese name, K’tut Tantri. She was one of the first of many Westerners to be caught up in the spirit of this revolution and to serve it. The forces and press named her variously Modjokerta Molly, Solo Sally, Djokja Josy and, finally, in a nod to the Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill hit song ‘Surabaya Jonny’, she achieved worldwide notoriety as ‘Surabaya Sue’.93 But it was the raw charisma of Bung Tomo that catalysed the resistance of the city. ‘His voice was loud and harsh,’ wrote Idrus, ‘the man himself small and pretty. His eyes sparkled like the rays of a light-house far out at sea.’94 He was able to offer on air, talking directly to the people, a kind of spiritual leadership that transcended any political organization. Speaking in the unmistakable accents of Surabaya, he drew into the youthful rebellion of the pemuda the gritty opposition of the urban poor:

It is the masses in their thousands, starved, stripped, and shamed by the colonialists, who will rise to carry out the revolt. We extremists, we who revolt with a full revolutionary spirit, together with the Indonesian masses, who have experienced the oppression of colonialism, would rather see Indonesia drowned in blood and sunk to the bottom of the sea than colonized once more! God will protect us! Merdeka!95

These phrases would be repeated like a mantra across the region.

As the British were about to land, the Indonesians in control of the docks signalled that they should await orders from Moestopo, the former dentist who was now nominally in control of the city administration. The British commander, Brigadier A. W. S. Mallaby – a long-serving Indian Army staff officer with no recent field experience – responded curtly: ‘We take orders from no one!’ Nevertheless, the initial British entry into Surabaya was quite peaceful, if tense. The British impressed on the Indonesians that they were there to evacuate the 16,000-odd POWs and internees held in and around the city. But the situation deteriorated swiftly as Mallaby tried to rescue the luckless Huijer from imprisonment. Then, on 27 September, there was an ill-advised airdrop of leaflets demanding that the Indonesians surrender their arms within forty-eight hours or be shot. This was made without Mallaby’s knowledge, and in contravention of local agreements, but it now had to be enforced. This was seen by the Indonesians as base treachery. They were now convinced that the British were preparing to reoccupy the city for the Dutch. The leaflets unravelled the ceasefire negotiations on the ground, and the Indonesian soldiers and militias fell on Mallaby’s forces. The next day there was fierce fighting throughout the city. The 6,000, mostly Indian, troops of the brigade were scattered and set on by an estimated 20,000 trained and armed regulars and 120,000 civilians brandishing knives, clubs and bamboo spears. In the midst of this, evacuees – including women and children – were attacked with machine guns, grenades and swords. ‘Bestial scenes’, recalled one British observer, which ‘rivalled the vilest moments of the French revolution’.96 The British garrison, Whitehall was forced to announce, was ‘more or less besieged’. The losses during the next four days were appalling for a peacetime operation: 16 officers and 217 other ranks.97 On 29 October Sukarno, Hatta and the republic’s defence minister, Amir Sjarifuddin, were flown into the city to negotiate a truce. They landed in a hail of bullets.

As the fighting abated British Indian soldiers were left adrift in isolated pockets throughout the city. In the afternoon of 30 October Brigadier Mallaby drove into the city to explain the ceasefire, and to visit the locations in which his troops had washed up. He was warned against this by his second-in-command, who knew about the danger of an angry crowd from a spell as a policeman in India. Mallaby, it seems, felt that only he could undertake this task. His last words on leaving his HQ were: ‘If any of us get killed, splash it