Indonesian History – The war for independence Discover Indonesian

On September 30, 1945, together with the first British officers dispatched by the Allied command to Java to take aver the provisional administration from the Japanese, a handful of Dutch civilian authorities arrived in Jakart a for the purpose of laying the groundwork for the re-establishment of the Netherlands’ colonial administration in the East Indies. In Jakarta, they set up a provisional adm inistrative body, known as the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA). In Oct ober of that same year, the first Dutch military units arrived in Jakarta together with the British, who came for the main purpose of disarming the Japanese.
Incidents involving Indonesian youths and Dutch soldiers soon became inevitable, and often escalated into armed skirmishes. Similar incidents also occurred in other big cities where the Dutch and British had ensconced

themselves. In Surabaya, the skirmishes erupted into a full-scale battle when a British officer, Brigadier General Mallaby, was kille d while efforts were still being made by the Indonesian and British authorities to calm down the situation. The date of the outbreak of the “Battle of Surabaya” — November 10
— is at present commemorated annually as Heroes Day.
Even in many of the provinces outside Java, it took the Dutch some considerable efforts before they could pacify important areas and re-entrench themselves. In some cases, atrocities’on a massive scale occurred, such as in South Sulawesi, where thousands of people
— according to Indonesian accounts as many as 40,000— were killed in mopping – up operat ions by Dutch special forces units under the command of Col. Raymond Westerling.

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