The guns of August: Singapore and the Indonesian revolution

Singapore is not the only nation that has cause to celebrate its independence this August. Indonesia celebrates its achievement of independence on 17 August with a collective intensity that matches Singaporeans’ enthusiasm for National Day. Both Singapore and Indonesia mark their respective independence days with full military pomp, including a 21-gun howitzer salute. In Indonesia, neighbourhoods actively compete to outdo one another, and the streets are festooned with all manner of decorations in the national flag’s colour scheme (red-and-white, or merah-putih).

Carnivalesque games and celebrations are held throughout the country, the most striking being Panjat Pinang, in which contestants climb an areca palm tree to win prizes mounted on top. Under pandemic constraints, this year’s celebrations will be relatively muted, as they were in 2020. Muted or fervent, Singaporeans should be aware that they have a reason to celebrate alongside their neighbours.

Singaporeans are generally proud of their country and its collective achievements. There is, however, a tendency to exhibit a strong attraction to the narrative of Singaporean exceptionalism. This exceptionalism may be implicitly disrespectful to our neighbours: it imagines Singapore as an island of incorruptibility or hyper-efficiency embedded in an economically underperforming archipelago. Political leaders’ appetites for trading barbs over fraught issues like Malaysia’s water exports to Singapore, or the seasonal haze originating in Sumatra, have cemented this tendency to see Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia as separate and competing.

This tendency is understandable but regrettable. Having come into a different colonial inheritance, which included war reparations to the Dutch, Indonesia did not pursue the same developmental trajectory as Singapore. Nevertheless, Indonesia has plenty to be proud of. Much of that pride is derived from the bitter war of independence it waged and won against the returning Dutch, and this pride manifests itself in the celebrations surrounding Independence Day, colloquially known as Tujuhbelasan (the Seventeenth).

These celebrations also have a totemic function in the present, providing an opportunity for Indonesians to perform their loyalty to the Indonesian state and its founding principles (Pancasila). Few Singaporeans are familiar with the Indonesian Revolution, which fundamentally shaped the region that Singapore was born into in August 1965. This has inhibited Singaporeans’ ability to understand and empathise with our neighbours.

Indonesia’s Independence Day commemorates the proclamation of independence and the beginning of the Indonesian revolution (1945-49). These four gruelling years mixed guerrilla and conventional warfare and followed fast on the heels of the brutal Japanese Occupation (1942-45). Throughout the revolution, the deck was stacked against the nascent republic: upon proclaiming independence, Indonesia inherited civilian infrastructure devastated by war, a miniscule number of experienced soldiers, and a dysfunctional commodity crop economy shorn of its connection to global markets. Its main source of fighting strength lay in the revolutionary youth, a small proportion of whom had accumulated paramilitary experience in Japanese-sponsored organisations.

Most of the youthful volunteers were all zeal and no training. In the opening months of the revolution, weapons and munitions were in short supply. Sometimes, republican soldiers went into battle armed with nothing more than a bamboo spear. Firearms had to be stolen, traded for, or taken by force from the demoralised Japanese, who were awaiting repatriation after Imperial Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945. They were often inclined to cooperate with the Indonesians against the returning Allies, and sometimes facilitated the transfer of weapons.

The republican officer corps was limited to a small number of former colonial career soldiers of middling rank, and a somewhat larger pool of Japanese-trained paramilitary officers. Field experience was in short supply, and general staff experience non-existent. A betting man would not have put money on the republicans beating the well-organised, well-led, and well-armed Royal Netherlands East Indies Army.

Yet win they did. Moving and blood-stirring memoirs of the revolution abound, including the British volunteer John Coast’s Recruit to Revolution and the republican statesman Abu Hanifah’s Tales of a Revolution. None of them, however, can rival Soehario ‘Kecik’ Padmodiwiryo’s Student Soldiers for dramatic effect. Kecik’s memoir recalls the bloody battle of Surabaya, which took place from October to November 1945. He volunteered to serve in the republican army against a British brigade under orders to restore Dutch colonial rule.

Faced with unyielding resistance from the Indonesian republicans, the 6,000 soldiers of the 23rd Indian Division proved unable to execute their orders, and had to be reinforced by another 24,000 soldiers from the 5th Indian Division. In the end, the British won by using their naval superiority to bombard Surabaya into submission, incurring massive civilian casualties. This was the defining battle of the revolution, and the sacrifices made in Surabaya inspired the republicans to keep fighting through the lean years ahead.

The romance of the revolution’s youthful participants is masterfully captured by the academic work of Benedict Anderson and Mary Steedly. Outgunned and outclassed, it was their tenacity and – in the case of Surabaya – willingness to sacrifice their lives which wore the Dutch down. The Dutch won decisive military victories in two euphemistically-named “police actions,” Operation Product (1947) and Operation Kraai (1948). Neither, however, could break the back of republican resistance, with republican units splitting up and withdrawing into the hills and forests to wage protracted guerrilla warfare.

Towards the end, the republic clung to life by the slimmest of threads: by 1949, nearly all republican leaders had been either killed or captured, including Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir. Crucially, the unwillingness of ordinary Indonesian citizens to bow to impossible odds bought the republic time: time enough for the republic’s diplomats to win recognition for an independent Indonesia at the United Nations. Forcing the exhausted Dutch to the negotiating table, they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat on 27 December 1949.

Exciting as the revolution is, few Singaporeans know about Singapore’s role in the Indonesian revolution. Yong Mun Cheong has shown how republican agents based in Singapore mustered material support for the republic. Indonesian commodities like sugar and rubber, which could not be traded internationally because of a Dutch embargo, were bartered for arms and munitions with Singaporean merchants eager to dispose of the military surplus created by Allied demobilisation.

High-value goods including opium were smuggled to Singapore to raise funds for the war effort, often leveraging kinship networks which connected diasporic Chinese merchants in Indonesia and Singapore. Fundraising activities targeted at the Indonesian diaspora were organised by the Indonesian republic’s representatives in Singapore. Given the razor-thin margin between victory and defeat, Singapore’s involvement in the revolution’s eventual success was not insignificant.

Singapore’s tempestuous and largely unplanned journey toward independence is regularly recounted on National Day, and features prominently in many memoirs, particularly Lee Kuan Yew’s. In these narratives, Lee takes centre stage in the process of achieving independence, steering the young nation through uncharted waters. Indonesia’s origin story, however, has a more communal character.

Born in the fires of war, the Indonesian republic was made a political reality by a combination of shrewd diplomacy and the dogged tenacity of its freshly minted citizen-soldiers. The many sacrifices made by both soldiers and civilians, who regularly provisioned republican soldiers in the field despite their own precarious livelihoods, have become part of the revolutionary mythos. This is why every August 17 is celebrated with a deep intensity that can match any Singaporean paroxysm of patriotism.

Unlike the better-known Vietnamese victories against the French and Americans in the First and Second Indochina Wars, the Indonesian revolution is barely remembered outside of Indonesia and the Netherlands. At best, most Singaporeans are only dimly aware of it. Given Singapore’s economic, cultural and strategic enmeshment in Southeast Asia, it behoves us to understand our neighbours better.

Their moments of civic pride define them as a nation, just as our accomplishments define us. As Indonesians bask in the glory of revolutionary remembrance this August, Singaporeans should rejoice with them, and perhaps take some pleasure in our role in facilitating Indonesian independence.

The views expressed in this forum are those of the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, or the institutions to which the authors are attached.