Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [111]
The next morning the city was at war with one and a half British divisions: 24,000 troops, supported by twenty-four tanks and twenty-four aircraft. The battle of Surabaya remains one of the largest single engagements fought by British troops since the end of the Second World War, and it was the last use of Indian soldiers in combat by the British Empire. There was little doubt in the minds of the city’s defenders that the British were fighting Surabaya to avenge Mallaby. The Indonesians felt that they had brought the British to their knees, and this further inflamed the situation. The British fought for the city as if it were a full campaign of the Burma war, and not a peacekeeping operation. They opened with a tremendous barrage from the sea and from the air: perhaps 500 bombs were dropped in the first four days. RAF Thunderbolts and Mosquitoes strafed republican buildings and, according to Indonesian reports, refugees on the road south. British troops fought slowly and methodically to minimize their own casualties, street by street, house by house. Pemuda rushed Sherman tanks with spears and knives, and there were suicide squads with explosives. At night women came to claim the men’s bodies. The fighting was most furious in the first few days, but resistance continued until the end of the month, the first fury giving way to a more disciplined core of Indonesian troops.103 The British attempted to point to the hidden hand of the Japanese, but admitted privately that, apart from a couple of Japanese bodies recovered, there was no evidence that they were engaged in the fighting.104 By the time the British reached the city perimeter at Wonosobo bridge on 28 November, Surabaya was in ruins:
Smoke came off the scorched beams like the smoke of Zipper cigarettes; and from people’s mouths came the moans of death. The air stank of cordite and of human and animal carcasses; the hospitals stank of ether and rose-water. Now and then an explosion could be heard, followed by black smoke billowing up into the sky. The rain was full of a dirty black dust which hurt the eyes and the heart alike.105
In a private letter to Sir Archibald Nye of the general staff, Christison estimated some 10,000 casualties and a loss of 600 Allied troops. It was, he said, ‘a most tricky party… One false step… would have brought a mass slaughter of Europeans and Eurasians in comparison with which the notorious Armenian massacres of forty years ago would have been small beer.’106 Local estimates of casualties were higher at perhaps 15,000 dead. The decision of the Indonesians to fight British tanks was a tactical disaster, but it was a national epiphany. It is commemorated each year as Hari Pahlawan, Heroes’ Day, and the monument in the heart of the city remains a point of assembly for young protesters. In August 2001, in a rare gesture, the British government made a statement of apology.
The wake of the battle washed across Indonesia. East Java was flooded with refugees from the city. They brought a new level of instability to the villages, and a struggle for food and other resources. The women, in particular, had a terrible time. Tan Malaka had left Jakarta in disgust at the temperance of the republican leadership there. He arrived in Surabaya to witness the desperate resistance and the exodus from the city. The veteran revolutionary was at once inspired and appalled by the undisciplined fury of the fighters: the Indonesians must, he wrote, ‘harness holiness with reins we made ourselves’.107 But the radicals regrouped at Malang and Bung Tumo resumed his broadcasts. Fighting broke out again in Semarang and the British managed to regain control of the city only with the use of air power and Japanese troops. The Gurkhas were forced to abandon the central Javan town of Magelang. The pemuda were galvanized to action further afield in Medan and elsewhere in Sumatra. This era in Java was known as the bersiap time, from the cry ‘Siaaap!