The disappointment of the war in Indonesia

I wondered why my father, who clearly loved Indonesia, was bitter about the circumstances in which his three years ended in 1949.  At home in New Zealand, we children gained a very romanticised view about his action there.  We knew our Dad as adventurous, impulsive, reliable but casual.  Photographs of his time in the Dutch East Indies showed a handsome man in uniform, a muscled paratrooper with a sporting bent; and what does a paratrooper do, but jump out of aeroplanes, the most daring thing a soldier could possibly be.  In other words, his time there applauded his character, a soldier diligent in his duty to his homeland, a volunteer to restore post-war order in a colony.

Dad entered the army as a volunteer on 18 August 1945

For a long time, the political circumstances of the immediate aftermath of war passed me by.  Riek de Wit, a family friend, had been in a women’s camp in Indonesia at the same time as Dad; her story passed me by too.  All I knew is that the experience of Indonesia shaped their lives.  Only later, too late, did I grapple with the three notebooks of letters that my grandfather had transcribed: Brieven uit Indonesië. These 368 pages of inheritance deserve more context. 

Brieven uit Indonesie Volume III. Transcriptions

Two days after the war in the Pacific ended in August 1945, ‘revolutionaries’ Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta declared independence (Proklamasi).  350 years of Dutch colonisation and hegemony was supposed to end.  Instead, lawlessness erupted. A power vacuum sucked even more chaos into Indonesia, mob violence and anarchy stripped any security for villagers, colonists, and independence fighters alike.

For near neighbours like Australia, reconstruction of a Dutch colony to the north seemed anachronistic. For Britain, settling the future of Singapore and Malaya was their prime focus; a presence in the Dutch East Indies was merely a holding pattern. As for the US, their focus had been defeat of the Japanese and revenge for Pearl Harbor; reconstruction of most of Asia was a shrug of the shoulders—not their issue. They were busy building the post-war consensus through a new United Nations. As for the Dutch, still recovering from their own war-time occupation by the Germans, a romantic belief in restoration ruled their thinking. 

My father arrived in Indonesia as a Grenadier with the 3^rd Battalion on the Tegelberg.  Frans’ first letters from that lovely land come from Buitenzorg, inland Java. It's a colonial spot, the governor-general's idyllic hideaway in the mountains (today, the Bogor Residence and Botanical Gardens). Within days, the patrols begin.  His company is tasked with keeping the peace; they called it a “police action” to secure a demarcation line against “terrorists”.  Through his letters, the Stijnman family at home get a sense of the greenery, the heat, the tropical rain, the tramping through waterlogged paddy-fields and the insect life that bedevils a writer; though what soldier doesn’t feel the blood freezing in his veins as bullets fly through bivvies, fire-fights echo both near and far, shadows loom treacherously in the forest? Patrol involves water—either sweat from one’s body, or deluge from the sky. It ruins your cigarettes, requires you to clean and dry your weaponry before it rusts. 

Letter-writing from Indonesia

Frans’ letters don’t describe his own part in a “lesson” given at Buitenzorg in December 1946, a turfing out of the Resident from the town hall, a military clearing out of insurrectionists.  He does write about the huiszoeking – house search—in a neighbouring kampong. Strictly a search for arms, you understand; a clearing out of rubbish, of “bad elements” that make village life dangerous.  They didn’t come to pillage, writes Frans.  Rather, it was most surprising to find European goods in the poorest houses; one had five radios and another had three electric clocks. We had to leave well alone, he writes, though it was all stolen goods.  “You have to grin, when you yourself have no radio at home, not even one for the whole company. Many houses were too dirty to even enter, others were locked.  We only took knives, swords and Japanese bayonets.” He thinks that the locals appreciate the clean-up. 

Securing an agreed demarcation line involves moving soldiers to key positions to guard against “extremists”.  The seemingly impossible in Indonesia is disheartening for the troops. In mid-January 1947, Frans finds himself in Dramaga.  He’s been invited to undertake a storm course, although what that will involve he doesn’t know. There is a period when Frans' letters sound weary, disappointed.

Eventually, Frans finds himself in paratrooper company. The irony of a colonial action, just as the Germans had inflicted on his homeland not ten years earlier, is not evident in his writing. Details of the excitement of action do appear in his letters. Pictures of action jumps excite the family at home. His letters are upbeat.

But of course, all is not going well. He never writes about the experiences of others on the ground, nor about any of the atrocities later uncovered by historical records. Perhaps he is lucky to have become part of a company that is not required to exact 'discipline' of the kind that might never have been tolerated at home; actions that were, at that moment, the subject of war trials in Nuremberg.

On the ground in Indonesia, the exercise of establishing order is less clearcut, less satisfactory. Soldiers must do as their superiors order. There are 'incidents'. The to-and-fro of diplomatic manoeuvring is reported at home in the local newspaper (New Leidsche Courant, August 21, 1948) in disdainful terms:

According to the French AFP from Yogyakarta, the parliament there adopted a resolution approving the Republican government's decision to suspend all negotiations with the Dutch, because they will not protect the inviolability and 'democratic rights' of the members of the Republican delegation (to smoke opium? - the editor). 

The indignity of a tit-for-tat approach is not lost on historians. (And feels familiar in war today!)

“The prevailing culture was one of looking away [from excesses and atrocity], shirking and a misplaced colonial sense of superiority,” said Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister, issuing a formal apology in 2022. “That is a painful realisation, even after so many years.” 

Inevitably, the Netherlands finds itself squeezed into agreeing to independence on terms dictated by the UN (that is, the Americans) and the freedom fighters. By 23 October 1949, Frans Stijnman could write to his father about the the army’s plans for his repatriation.  He is in the transition camp at Kampong Makassar in Batavia, a place notorious for its role under the Japanese as a concentration camp for women and children.  As Indonesian independence becomes a reality, the camp has already lost its most serious horrors. Frans’s description is light, of bamboo poles and mud floors; it delivers an impression of can’t-wait-to-get-away.   He is with his paratrooping mates, but the rule is that he has to return home with his original Grenadier regiment. 

Dad was able to say goodbye to his father, who died within weeks of his return. He was single, wanted to continue his career as a soldier, but the army was down-sizing. Besides, the medics could find an excuse for a medical discharge. Dad wasn't the only returned serviceman to consider emigration as a solution to being at a loose end.

Discharge paper. The disappointment about the end of his career made Dad consider emigration to New Zealand.

The disappointment of the war in Indonesia led many Dutchmen to walk away from their homeland. Many first-generation kiwis whose fathers were also in Indonesia can describe an unwillingness on the part of one or both parents to talk about this painful time. Dad was an active member of the Netherlands Veterans Legion, the RSA equivalent for Dutchmen in New Zealand, even serving for a time as its president.

My father-in-law, also a Dutchman, never joined. And never shared his experiences there either.