Seriously worried about a communist revolution in Italy, the Allied Military Government quickly tried to disarm the partisans, many of whom had fought bravely against the Germans. Conservative Italian politicians supported this effort, not surprisingly, since some of them had been close to the fascists themselves. Indeed, the slowness of the provisional Italian government in Rome to punish the fascists was one reason why the “justice of the piazza” came about in the first place.
As a sop to the pride of former partisans, parades were organized in various cities, with Allied commanders, flanked by Italian notables, taking the salute of partisan military units decked out in scarves denoting their different allegiances: red for the leftists, blue for the Christians, green for the autonomi, mostly deserters from the Italian army. Many had given up their weapons, but by no means all. The radical left remained strong, and sometimes armed. Still, as it turned out, conservatives needn’t have worried. There was to be no revolution in Italy. In return for extending his empire to central Europe, Stalin agreed to leave the Mediterranean to the Western Allies. But murderous reprisals still went on, and the fear of communism in Italy, as well as a bitter sense of betrayal on the left, would continue, in some cases well into the twenty-first century.
Edmund Wilson, whose sympathies were always on the left, viewed these proceedings with distaste. The main American contribution to Italy’s postwar democracy, he noted, was “calling one of our telephone exchanges Freedom; and, after our arming and encouragement of the Partisans through the period when they were serving our purpose, we are now taking their weapons away from them, forbidding them to make political speeches, and throwing them in jail if they give any trouble.” He was aware that the hands of the left, too, were bloody, but, he argued, “the new Italian revolution was something more than a savage vendetta, and it is hardly, I believe, a movement whose impetus can be curbed at this point.”44
The leftist impetus, however, was curbed, just as it was in southern Korea, in France, in southern Vietnam, in Japan, and in Greece, where Wilson arrived in the summer of 1945. He stayed in Athens at the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Constitution Square. The service was surly, to the point of hostility, and Wilson noticed bullet holes in the walls of his room. There was a reason for the surliness, for there was a stink hanging over Athens too, the stink of another betrayal.
The bullet holes need some explaining. There had been a large demonstration the previous December held by supporters of the National Liberation Front, or EAM, the partisan organization controlled by communists. The British Army was formally in charge of liberated Greece. Athens was held by a Greek provisional Government of National Unity which contained conservatives and royalists, as well as some leftists. Much of the rest of the country was still in the hands of the EAM, and its armed forces, ELAS. Having fought the Germans, EAM/ELAS had expected to take over the government and revolutionize Greece. Conservatives, backed by the British, wanted to stop this at all costs, and this is what sparked the demonstration of December 3, 1944, the day, according to Harold Macmillan, when “the civil war began.”45
Actually, as Macmillan surely must have known, the civil war had already started a long time before. Greece was deeply split during World War I, when the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, wanted to back the Allies, while King Constantine I and his military commander, Ioannis Metaxas, did not. Years of bitter opposition between royalists and “Venizelists” followed. In 1936, Metaxas became a dictator with the face of a banker and the brutality of a fascist caudillo. An admirer of Hitler’s Third Reich, Metaxas “united” Greece, as the Father of the Nation, by banning all political parties, and throwing communists and other opponents of his regime in jail. To the relief of most Greeks, Metaxas died in 1941.
Then the Germans invaded. Supporters of the old Metaxas regime mostly collaborated, and the resistance was led by communists who had emerged from Metaxas’s jails. Greek fascist battalions, egged on by the Germans, fought left-wing guerrillas who were helped initially by the Allies. There was much brutality on both sides. Many of the victims were innocent people caught in the crossfire.
But Macmillan was right: as far as the British were concerned, the real action began only in 1944, when British soldiers, reinforced by extra troops from Italy, fought the left-wing partisans who had fought the Germans just months before. Edmund Wilson’s disapproval of this was widely shared, especially in the United States, where it was seen as another typically British imperialist intervention. But many people in Britain felt the same way; Churchill, though revered for his leadership against the Germans, was distrusted for his bellicosity against the communist partisans.
Harold Macmillan noted that in Greece, as in other places, “the resistance movements had been presented by our propaganda as bodies of romantic idealists fighting with Byronic devotion for the freedom of their country.”46 The most Byronic hero was a man named Aris Velouchiotis. Aris rode through the mountains with his black band of partisans—black berets, black jackets, black beards. The romantic hero, who broke with the communists in 1945, was also a killer. Mass graves have subsequently been dug up in his areas of operation and have been found to contain the scattered bones of his political enemies.
The real issue after liberation, as in Italy (and China, and many other places), was the monopoly on the use of force. The National Liberation Front (EAM/ELAS) in Greece had agreed, after much negotiation, to lay down their arms, as long as right-wing armed militias such as the notorious Security Battalions, set up under Nazi occupation, did the same. The government’s aim was to incorporate the best elements from both sides in a national army. According to EAM/ELAS, the government failed to stick to its bargain; even as the left demobilized (up to a point), the right was allowed to retain its firepower. Quite understandably, this is remembered by many former ELAS fighters as a rank betrayal. One partisan recalled rounding up a group of collaborators in 1944. Instead of killing them, however, they were handed over to the police. A bad move, as the police proceeded to give them guns and let them go. For the partisans, defeated in 1945, the moral was clear: “Those who had said ‘kill them’ were able to point out that the second round of fighting, the Civil War, wouldn’t have happened if we had killed all the fascists.”47
This, then, was the febrile atmosphere in Athens, whose traces Edmund Wilson still noticed in his hotel room in 1945. On December 3, 1944, crowds on Constitution Square, with women and children marching in front, approached the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the provisional government was holed up. It is claimed that they were about to storm the hotel. The view Wilson received from left-wing sympathizers, shared by most Greeks at the time, is that the majority of peaceful protesters kept marching on while the royalist police opened fire and killed and wounded about a hundred people. The next day, when the protesters filed past the hotel again, in a funeral procession this time, royalists killed up to two hundred more unarmed citizens by firing guns from the hotel windows.
Macmillan had a somewhat different take, as one might expect. The “so-called civilian crowd,” he recalled, “contained many fully-armed ELAS guerillas,” and the fatal shots were probably fired by a communist agent provocateur.48
Even if the truth of the tragic event remains elusive, two things are hard to dispute. The communist-led partisans were very ruthless operators who had already killed a large number of real or alleged collaborators and “class enemies” before Greece was freed from the Germans in October 1944, and continued to purge and kill for some time after that. The second truth is that the Greek left had ample reason to feel betrayed.
Communists and leftists were the backbone of anti-Nazi and antifascist resistance in many countries. In Greece they monopolized the resistance by violently purging everyone else. In the countryside, EAM/ELAS had set up a kind of guerrilla state, with people’s courts to deal with all enemies of the revolution. A British officer stationed in Greece in September 1944 wrote about the communist “reign of terror” in Attica and Boeotia. “Over 500 have been executed in the last few weeks. Owing to the stench of rotting corpses, it is impossible to pass near a place by my camp. Lying unburied on the ground are naked corpses with their heads severed. Owing to strong reactionary elements among the people [ELAS has] picked on this area.”49
So there was a good reason to fear the consequences of a revolution in Greece. Bringing back King George II, a pet project of Churchill, whose monarchist lectures irritated even some Greek conservatives, was not the best idea. George II’s short reign in the late 1930s coincided with the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, and there was little popular nostalgia for that.
But given the fear of communism, the British felt that they had no choice but to help the government in Athens fight the leftist partisans. The fighting lasted five weeks at the beginning of 1945. Up to twenty thousand “class enemies” were deported by ELAS, and often murdered after forced marches into the mountains. On the other side, many suspected leftists were deported by the British to camps in Africa. The fighting was so vicious on all sides that a negotiated peace in February was greeted with great public relief. Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, with the archbishop of the Orthodox Church, and spoke to a huge, cheering crowd: “Greece for ever! Greece for all!”50
It was but a lull in the action. The Greek civil war would resume the following year and last for another three years. But even before that, almost as soon as Churchill had finished his rousing speech, another form of revenge began, a counter-revenge, this time against the left. Right-wing paramilitary forces and gendarmes went on a rampage. Communists, or suspected leftists, were arrested without warrants, beaten up, and murdered or locked up in huge numbers. The National Liberation Front issued an appeal drawing the world’s attention to “a regime of terror even more hideous than that of the Metaxas dictatorship.”51 By the end of 1945, almost sixty thousand EAM supporters were in prison. These included women and children, so many indeed that special detention camps for women had to be built. The common charge was crimes committed during the occupation. But crimes committed by former Nazi collaborators, or the right-wing security battalions, went largely unpunished.
Harold Macmillan and Edmund Wilson came to Greece from very different perspectives, one as the British minister resident, the other as an American literary journalist, but on one thing they agreed. Greater efforts should have been made to split the democratic left from the communist revolutionaries. Macmillan thought that “a moderate, reasonable, progressive policy” could have peeled off “the vague, radical element from the hard, Communist core.”52 In Wilson’s view, England should have “helped the leaders of EAM to detach themselves from the Soviet entanglement and keep in order those wilder elements whose fierceness, in the days of the Resistance, the British had been only too glad to abet.”53 The pity is that any such efforts, even if the will had been there, were quickly smothered in a thirst for vengeance, encouraged by political forces seeking their advantage in stirring it up.
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LIBERATION IS PERHAPS not the right word to describe the end of the war in colonial societies. Most Asians were more than happy to be rid of the Japanese, whose “Asian liberation” had turned out to be worse than the Western imperialism it temporarily replaced. But liberation is not quite what the Dutch had in mind for the Dutch East Indies in 1945, or the French for Indochina, or the British for Malaya.
American plans for the Philippines were more accommodating, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, had some sympathy for Asian aspirations towards national independence. But the Dutch and the French wanted to restore the prewar colonial order as soon as possible. Even Dutch socialists, who were not unsympathetic to the Indonesian desire for independence, were afraid that the Dutch economy, badly damaged by the German occupation, would collapse without the Asian colonies. In the popular slogan of the time, “Disaster will be our cost, if the Indies are lost” (“Indi? verloren, rampspoed geboren”). The most the relatively progressive Dutch government would concede to the Indonesian nationalists was a degree of autonomy under the Dutch crown. And there could be no truck with Indonesians who worked with the Japanese.
This made the question of collaboration and revenge rather complicated, for there had been considerable enthusiasm among Southeast Asians, at least in the early years of the war, for the Japanese propaganda of “Asia for the Asians.” To activists such as Sukarno in Indonesia, working with the Japanese was the best way to get rid of the Dutch colonial masters. But in Dutch eyes, this made Sukarno a collaborator with the enemy. There was no question of negotiating Indonesian independence with him after the war; on the contrary, the Dutch were convinced that he should be punished as a traitor.
Asians, too, were consumed by a rage for vengeance in 1945, but this was not always directed at the European colonialists. Vengeance was often more indirect, aimed at other forms of collaboration that preceded the Japanese occupation. As was the case in parts of Europe, the victims of Asian vengeance were often unpopular minorities, especially if they were thought to be privileged, richer, and in league with the Western colonial powers.
The Chinese, often called “the Jews of Asia,” took the brunt of Japanese ferocity in Southeast Asia. In Malaya, for example, the Malays were preferred to the Chinese, whom the Japanese distrusted. Chinese merchants benefited from Western colonialism, or so it was thought. And so the Chinese had to be crushed, while the Malay elites were promoted in the civil service and the police. Not that Malay or Indonesian peasants and workers were necessarily well treated; Indonesians forced to work on Japanese military projects died in huge numbers in even more miserable circumstances than most Western POWs. The countryside was often ravaged, leaving millions of peasants destitute; the cities were plundered, deprived of minimal services, the streets ruled by criminal gangs.
Japanese rule in Southeast Asia was brutal, and yet a new assertive spirit had seeped into people who had tended to adopt an attitude of surly colonial submission before. Western powers had been humbled by Japan and shown to be vulnerable. Hundreds of thousands of young Malays and Indonesians were trained by the Japanese as soldiers in auxiliary forces, militias, and various militant youth organizations. This gave them a quite unaccustomed sense of pride. Exploiting the common sense of humiliation and inferiority among colonized peoples, the Japanese deliberately stirred up anti-Western, as well as anti-Chinese, feeling.
Much of the anti-Japanese resistance in Malaya during the war came from the Chinese. Inspired by the Communist Party in China, but also perhaps by the internationalism that made communism attractive to minorities elsewhere, resistance was led by the Malayan Communist Party. Although the MCP was not particularly anti-Malay, almost all its members were Chinese. Its military arm was the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) which, in August 1945, had about ten thousand men under arms who controlled much of the countryside, forming a state within a state, with its own rules and laws and given to widespread purges of unsympathetic officials, rather like the communist guerrillas in Greece.
After the war, revenge was swiftly taken by members of the Anti-Japanese Army on local collaborators with the Japanese, most of whom were Indians and Malays; mayors, policemen, journalists, informers, former mistresses of Japanese officials, and other “traitors and running dogs” were dragged through the streets, displayed in cages, summarily tried in “people’s courts,” and publicly executed. This put the fear into many Malays. And when the British colonial government, which had worked closely with the MPAJA against the Japanese, decided in October that Chinese should be granted equal citizenship, Malays, understandably, were frightened of losing control over their own country, a fear that has been exploited by Malay politicians to this day.
Malays decided to strike back at the Chinese. The leading figure was a fierce-looking former gangster boss in a turban, named Kiyai Salleh. He emerged after the war as the chieftain of a group named the Red Bands of the Sabilillah (Holy War). Their goal was to protect the Muslim faith against Chinese heathens and to avenge the Malays whom the Chinese had humiliated and killed after the Japanese defeat. Although the jihad against the Chinese was ostensibly Islamic—Koranic texts were read, Sufi saints invoked—Salleh modeled himself after Malay mystics, claiming to be invulnerable to harm: “He cannot be killed by bullets; he can walk dry-shod across rivers; he can burst any bonds that are put on him; his voice can paralyze his assailants.”54 His followers believed that they were blessed with similar powers, after pricking themselves with golden needles and drinking potions blessed by the holy warrior chief.
The Red Bands’ favorite method of killing was by machete, or the Malay dagger called kris, a weapon imbued, like the warriors themselves, with mystical powers. In one typical incident, on November 6, a band of Malay jihadis swooped down on a Chinese village at Padang Lebar and hacked five men and thirty-five women and children to death with their daggers and machetes. The corpses of the children were thrown down a well. Malay politicians did not exactly support this kind of thing, but they did little to stop it. According to a British military intelligence report, “there appears to be an appreciable concern among educated Malays regarding the future status of Malays in Malaya and there is a fairly widespread belief that the Chinese are securing an economic grip of the country, which, if unchecked, may eventually lead to political control.”55
This same fear haunted Indonesians, so it was not by chance that the Malay chieftain’s three main lieutenants were Indonesian nationalists from the Dutch East Indies, where the situation in the autumn of 1945 was a good deal worse than in Malaya.
G. F. Jacobs, a South African major in His Majesty’s Royal Marines, was one of the first Allied soldiers to be parachuted into Sumatra in August 1945. His task was to establish contact with the Japanese military authorities and prepare the way for their surrender and Allied troops to land. Jacobs was also one of the first to see the state of Japanese POW camps holding thousands of diseased, emaciated, beaten, and starved civilians. Dutch prisoners couldn’t understand why Jacobs would not let them exact rough justice: “Why did you stop us . . . can’t you see we want to fix these little yellow bastards?”56
The reason why Major Jacobs had to stop the POWs from lynching their guards was his fear of a far greater threat. Indonesians were roaming the country with guns, daggers, and pointed spears, screaming “bunuh Belanda!,” “Death to the white man!” Japanese were needed to guard their former prisoners.
On the morning of August 17, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno read a short, typed declaration to a smallish crowd in Batavia (Jakarta): “We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power etc., will be carried out in a conscientious manner and as speedily as possible.”
The declaration had been drafted by Sukarno, self-appointed president of the new Republic of Indonesia, and his vice president, Mohammed Hatta, in close consultation with the Japanese army and navy commanders. When defeat looked inevitable in the summer of 1945, the Japanese decided that an independent, anti-Western Indonesia would be their best option. Most Japanese, after all, took the slogan “Asia for the Asians” seriously, even if they had hoped to rule over other Asians as the superior race. Many Indonesians, tired of violence, brutalized by the Japanese, hungry and vulnerable to diseases brought back by survivors of forced labor on the Thailand–Burma Railway and other hellish Japanese projects, were not sure yet what to think. There was little hostility to Dutch civilians in the first weeks after the Japanese surrender. Sukarno, Hatta, and other leaders such as Sutan Syahrir, a Dutch-educated socialist who had never cooperated with the Japanese, did their best to contain potential violence in an archipelago over which they did not yet have much control.
The new Indonesian leaders certainly had little sway over the large numbers of young toughs, who had been radicalized and trained as auxiliaries in the Japanese army. These boys were in a mood to fight. Weapons were acquired from sympathetic Japanese officers, sometimes bought, sometimes stolen from Japanese depots. In one estimate, the fighters obtained more than fifty thousand rifles, three thousand light and heavy machine guns, and a hundred million rounds of ammunition.57 What the Dutch should have done, and were encouraged to do by their Western allies, was to negotiate with Sukarno and the other Indonesian leaders who had no interest in revolutionary violence. In Mountbatten’s wishful words: “Our only idea is to get the Dutch and the Indonesians to kiss and make friends and then pull out.”58 Instead, the Dutch petitioned the British Foreign Office, comparing the “so-called Sukarno government” to the pro-Nazi Quisling regime, and the young Indonesian fighters for independence to the Hitler Youth and the SS. Sukarno’s proclamation of independence was portrayed as a Japanese plot to continue a fascist regime in the Dutch East Indies.59
About Sukarno’s collaboration with the Japanese there can be no doubt. He had spent much of the 1930s in Dutch colonial prisons, or in exile on a remote island. The Japanese had treated him with more respect than the Dutch had done. It was in any case not unreasonable for Sukarno to see Japan as the quickest route to national liberation. “For the first time in all my life,” he said, in 1942, “I saw myself in the mirror of Asia.”60
But Sukarno’s collaboration went too far even for many Indonesians. His support of Indonesian forced labor for the Japanese war effort tarnished his reputation, and the young radicals were angry that he had involved the Japanese in the declaration of independence. They wanted nothing to do with the Japanese. But no one disputed Sukarno’s credentials as an Indonesian nationalist.
Rather than deal directly with Sukarno, however, the Dutch issued vague promises of Indonesian autonomy in a Dutch-led commonwealth. Meanwhile, starting in September, veterans of the Dutch East Indies Army swaggered around Indonesian villages and neighborhoods, shooting their guns, tearing down red and white Indonesian flags, and threatening people, all in the way of showing who was boss. The most notorious vigilantes were a group called Battalion X, led by Dutch and Eurasian commanders, but mostly manned by dark-skinned Ambonese Christians, Medanese, and other minorities, who were more afraid of being dominated by other Indonesians than by the Dutch, and who had been loyal servants of the colonial system. When news came of the arrival of Dutch and British battleships carrying Allied troops, mostly Indians, and agents of the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA), bent on restoring the old order, the scene was set for the bloodiest violence in Southeast Asia, violence that was part revolution, part vengeance, and part criminality, the same lethal brew that exploded in central Europe earlier in the year.
The bands of armed extremists that unleashed the wave of terror in October and November 1945, a wave known as bersiap (“Get ready!”), consisted mostly of former members of Japanese-led militias and street toughs, often teenagers recruited from gangs in Jakarta, Surabaya, or other cities. But the youth groups, or pemuda, also included students, factory workers, and villagers. Some of their leaders were gangster bosses, whose reasons for robbing and killing the rich and powerful had less to do with politics than with greed. Some were charismatic figures, such as the bandit chief named Father Tiger, who sold amulets to his men for invulnerability. The mixture of Javanese mysticism and Japanese indoctrination about the warrior spirit imbued young fighters with a reckless sense of heroism: “Merdeka atan mati!” (“Freedom or death!”). There were instances of youths battling tanks with nothing but machetes and bamboo spears.
The main victims of revolutionary vengeance were the Chinese, associated with business and suspected of treachery, and the Eurasians, or “Indos,” as well as other minorities who had often sided with the Dutch. Then there were those often imaginary creatures called NICA spies. The definition of a NICA spy could be quite arbitrary; a person with too much red, white, and blue (the Dutch national colors) in his sarong could be picked up as an agent for the Dutch administration.
Chinese, Indos, or Ambonese knew trouble was coming when they heard the sound of bamboo spears being banged like drums of war against the hollow metal lampposts of Jakarta. The armed Japanese soldiers who were ordered to protect civilians in the absence of Allied troops often slunk away when the banging started. Shops were raided and houses set on fire. The families inside were hacked to death by frenzied youths, drunk with violence, literally in love with their daggers, and sometimes given to drinking the blood of their victims. In one area near Jakarta, there was no more fresh water, because the wells had been stuffed solid with putrefying Chinese corpses.
The Indo-Dutch phrase for the most common kind of killing was getjintjangd. Tjintjang meant slashing a person with a kris or machete. Dutch civilians, foolish enough to leave the camps still guarded by Japanese, were frequently tjintjanged, as were Japanese soldiers who resisted demands to help the rebels or hand over their weapons. Even though the old concentration camps, huge squalid villages full of sick and hungry people, were also targeted for attack, they were still the safest places to be, as long as the Japanese guards stayed at their posts.
One young man, named Peter van Berkum, born in Indonesia like many Dutch civilians, was picked up at random one night in Surabaya by a group of wild teenagers with sharpened bamboo spears. He was taken by truck to a local prison: “As the truck slowed it was surrounded by this mass of screaming people. I saw only a blur of brown, sweaty faces with contorted, wide-open mouths. They were shaking clenched fists and brandishing all sorts of weapons.” Amidst screams of “Death to the whites!” the prisoners were pushed out of the truck. “Immediately the crowd started in on them, beating, hacking, stabbing with sticks and bayonets, using axes, rifle-butts, and spears.”61
Bersiap, never wished for by the Indonesian leaders, was now utterly beyond their control. Battles broke out all over Java and Sumatra, not just acts of vengeance against colonials and their alleged helpers, but between rebels and Japanese as well, in a bloody cycle of revenge and retaliation. In Semarang, a Japanese unit led by Major Kido Shinichiro clashed with pemuda, who believed the Japanese were sabotaging the water supply. The Japanese, in a brutal form of intimidation, killed a number of Indonesian militants. Indonesians then murdered more than two hundred Japanese civilians locked up in the city jail. A British army report noted: “Some corpses were hanging from the roof and from the windows, others had been pierced through and through with bamboo spears . . . Some had tried to write last messages in blood on the walls.”62 More than two thousand Indonesians were butchered in retaliation by the enraged Japanese.
The worst violence engulfed the industrial city of Surabaya, which was entirely in the hands of the Indonesians by the end of October. The jails had been emptied. Crowds of pemuda freedom fighters, petty mobsters, and romantic youths fired up by tales of traditional Javanese derring-do broadcast on “Radio Rebellion” by a charismatic long-haired figure known as Brother Tomo, ruled the streets. Chinese, Ambonese, and Indos, accused of being NICA spies, were assaulted with daggers and spears. And the Japanese, worried about their own lives, happily supplied the mobs with more lethal arms.
Peter van Berkum’s sister, Carla, arrived with other Dutch refugees from a nearby concentration camp: “We were stormed by a mob of natives. They stuck their bamboo spears at us aggressively. And they kept screaming: merdeka! merdeka! merdeka! [freedom]. They were dressed in rags. Their dark eyes had a terrifying look. I was scared.”63
The Allies decided to act. P. J. G. Huijer, a Dutch navy captain, was sent into the city to prepare the way for an Allied landing. Quite naturally, his arrival was seen as a further provocation. Arms kept flowing from Japanese arsenals to the pemuda fighters. On October 25, about four thousand British troops, mostly Indians and Nepalese Gurkhas, came ashore. Rumor had it that these soldiers were Dutchmen in blackface. They were attacked by a ragtag army of Indonesians. Afraid that their troops would be massacred, the British asked Sukarno and Hatta to come down and control the mobs. They complied, and had some success. The cease-fire held, more or less, until October 31 when the British commander, Brigadier General A. W .S. Mallaby, trying to intervene in a fight, was shot by Indonesians.
This time it was the British who sought retribution. For the next three weeks, beginning on November 10, Surabaya was bombed, shelled, and strafed. An eyewitness described the scene in the center of the city:
Bodies of men, horses, cats and dogs, lay in the gutters, broken glass, furniture, tangled telephone lines cluttered the roads, and the noise of battle echoed among the office buildings . . . The Indonesian resistance went through two phases, first fanatical self-sacrifice, with men armed only with daggers charging Sherman tanks, and later in a more organized and effective manner, following closely Japanese military manuals.64
By the end of November, Surabaya had been pacified at the cost of being reduced to a bombed-out battleground reeking of the corpses of Indonesians, Indians, British, Dutch, Indos, and Chinese. It would not be until 1949, after further acts of vengeance, not least from the Dutch, who in 1946 sent death squads led by Raymond “Turk” Westerling into South Sulawesi, where thousands of civilians were murdered, that Indonesia achieved full independence. (Westerling, incidentally, who had fought the Germans in North Africa during World War II, later became a devout Muslim.)
Blood, however, will have more blood. In addition to accusing Sukarno of treachery, the Dutch saw him as a front man for the communists. Exactly twenty years after the Battle of Surabaya, officers in the Indonesian Army ousted Sukarno in a military coup, supposedly to prevent the communists from taking over Indonesia. This marked the beginning of a nationwide purge of communists. Muslim vigilantes, armed youths, army battalions, Javanese mystics, and ordinary civilians all took part in the killing of half a million people, many of whom were Chinese. The leader of the coup, and the future president of Indonesia, was a Major General Suharto. Trained by the Japanese military, and thoroughly indoctrinated against Western imperialism, Suharto had fought against the Dutch in 1945. His presidency would last for thirty-two years. During that time, as a staunch opponent of communism, he enjoyed the warm and unwavering support of all Western powers, including, of course, the Netherlands.
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THE FRENCH WERE AS FEARFUL as the Dutch of losing their colonial possessions in 1945, and, if anything, felt more humiliated, not just because of their defeat in 1940, but also because of their history of official collaboration. French Indochina continued to be administered by a Vichy-oriented colonial government during what was, in fact, a Japanese occupation. The Japanese used the colony as a military base, while the French carried on drinking their apéritifs at Saigon’s Cercle Sportif and generally minding their own business. But this sweet life came to an end in March 1945. Once France was liberated, French collaboration with Japan could no longer be taken for granted, so French troops and officials were swiftly imprisoned in Saigon and Hanoi.
When defeat was almost certain in the first week of August, the Japanese transferred political authority to the royal government of Vietnam, while the communist Vietminh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) took control of the north. A few weeks later, with Chinese troops pouring across the northern border and the arrival of British troops imminent in the south, both the emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai, and the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh made it quite clear that whatever happened, the resumption of French rule was unacceptable. Statues of French colonial dignitaries were already being pulled down in Hanoi. On September 2, more than three hundred thousand Vietnamese gathered on Ba Dinh Square, near the former French governor-general’s palace, to hear Ho Chi Minh declare national independence. Bands played communist marches, including harsh words about “drinking French blood.” Vietminh soldiers, armed with pistols, guarded the speaker’s platform, festooned with red flags. A royal umbrella was held over “Uncle” Ho’s head, as he softly spoke into the microphone: “Countrymen, can you hear me?” The crowd hollered back that they could.
A U.S. intelligence officer who witnessed this event reported to his superiors in the southern Chinese city of Kunming: “From what I have seen these people mean business and I am afraid the French will have to deal with them. For that matter we all will have to deal with them.”65 He couldn’t have known quite how prophetic his words would turn out to be.
If the French, many of whom remained in their prisons, still guarded by Japanese soldiers, were spooked by these events, French colonizers in Algeria were panic-stricken. Both Algeria and Indochina were experiencing serious famines in early 1945, the result of droughts as well as the diversion of food supplies for military purposes. In Indochina more than one million people died of hunger. In Algeria, hunger was fueling a popular rage that was seen by frightened Frenchmen as the beginning of a violent revolution.
In fact, despite some agitation among Algerian communists and radical nationalists, most Algerians simply wanted equal rights. But every time a Muslim stone was thrown at a French settler, the French thought that the “Arab revolt” was at hand. The new colonial administration in 1945 was led by French leftists, many of whom had actively resisted the Germans. Many of the settlers had been pro-Vichy, and were fiercely anti-Semitic. (Often the only ones who had defended the rights of Jews under French rule were Algerian Muslims.) Yet the Muslims who called for Algerian independence or equal rights were quickly branded as “Nazis.” This was like calling Indonesian and Vietnamese demands for national independence part of a Japanese fascist plot. It made it easier for leftist colonial authorities, as well as former Vichyistes, to crack down on them.
Violence had been mounting steadily in Algeria, especially in the famine-stricken areas around the town of Sétif in the northeast. Settlers clashed with nomads, arrogant police officers were chased out of villages, right-wing European youths taunted Muslims in Algiers with cries of “Vive Pétain!” or even “Vive Hitler!”, and French policemen shot into a crowd of Muslims who wished to take part in a May 1 demonstration.
Sétif, the center of Muslim agitation and Algerian nationalism, was a logical place for serious violence to explode. On May 8 the French, despite their former allegiances, decided to celebrate the Allied victory over Germany with full patriotic pomp. Early that same morning, Muslims, mostly rural people, men as well as women and children, gathered in front of the main mosque. Some men carried traditional daggers under their jellabas. Some had pistols. Leaders of the AML (Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté, or Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty), the Muslim organization for equal rights, assured the authorities that this was not a political demonstration. There would be no nationalist banners.
By eight o’clock the crowd had grown to about three thousand and began to march along the Avenue Georges Clemenceau to lay a wreath at the war memorial. Despite promises to the contrary by the AML, banners were unfurled by some nationalists, reading: “We want the same rights as you.” When policemen at a roadblock saw a banner that said “Long live Algerian Independence,” they tore it from the hands of a poor Algerian, who was killed on the spot. Whereupon French civilians, as though they had waited for this moment, started firing submachine guns into the crowd from their balconies and the windows of the Café de France. Between twenty and forty people were killed. Terrified by the shooting, Muslims rushed into the side streets, using their pistols and daggers to attack Europeans. The French communist leader Albert Denier was so badly cut that his hands had to be amputated.
A French teacher recalled having a drink at a café opposite her school, when “a flood of screaming natives appeared from all sides, with daggers in their hands. They were running towards the Arab market. Atrocities had been committed. I saw about fifteen of them beat an old friend of the Arabs, Mr Vaillant, with clubs . . . It’s terrible when you think about it. The odd thing is that most of the victims were Arabophiles.”66
News of the killings swiftly reached the villages. Vengeance was sporadic, but brutal: “We were armed with knives and rifles. It was my father who killed the baker because he was French. We broke down the doors, burning down the houses with the oil and petrol that we found.”67 French settlers fled to local police stations. Some who were caught were mutilated with knives, had their breasts slashed or their genitals stuffed into their mouths. About one hundred Europeans were killed in three days.
Instead of urging calm, the socialist governor-general Yves Chataigneau called for ten thousand troops: Moroccans, West Africans, and Foreign Legion units. This would not just be an exercise to restore order. A lesson had to be taught. The killings of French citizens had to be avenged.
French settlers formed militia units and started assaulting the local population. One of the toughest infantry regiments, manned by Algerian soldiers, was shipped back from Germany where they had fought hard to defeat Hitler. In their native country, they were sent into the hinterlands to hunt fellow Algerians. By the end of June the countryside was petrified into an awful silence. Villages and towns had been bombed for weeks from the air and shelled from cruisers; thousands had been arrested, often tortured, and executed. The exact number of Algerian dead is not known. Some say up to thirty thousand. With murder came deliberate humiliation. A nineteenth-century practice of making natives submit ceremonially to their conquerors was revived. Thousands of famished peasants, who could no longer stand the bombings, were made to kneel before the French flag and beg for forgiveness. Others were pushed to the ground and made to shout: “We are Jews. We are dogs. Long live France!”
To some Frenchmen it may have looked as though normality had finally returned to Algeria. But the more sophisticated ones, including General de Gaulle, knew perfectly well that mass-murdering native populations was an embarrassing blot on La France éternelle, which, in official mythology, had so bravely resisted the Nazi menace. So what happened in Sétif and surrounding areas was smothered in official silence for many years.
The French in Saigon, however, read Sétif as a warning of what could happen to them if aspirations for Vietnamese independence were not quickly stifled. In August things did not look good for the French. Many were still in Japanese prisons. The Vietminh were given, or simply took, more and more Japanese arms. Some Japanese military officers were joining the Vietminh, either out of conviction (“Asia for the Asians”) or because they needed a place to hide from prosecution for serious war crimes. French imperial designs were not popular with the Americans, even though the Chinese, still under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, had no objections to French rule in Indochina. The only ones who were entirely on the side of the French, not so curiously, were the British.
Mob violence often begins with a rumor. So it was on September 20 in Hanoi, when people spoke of a French plot, assisted by Vietnamese members of the French colonial security police, to regain control. Caches of arms were supposed to have been found. There was talk of poison gas. French soldiers had been released from prison by the Japanese, and even rearmed. To foil these dark French designs, thousand of Vietnamese, armed with knives, spears, and machetes, ransacked French homes and molested any French people found in the streets. Japanese soldiers mostly just stood by.
The waiters in the best hotel in Hanoi, the Metropole, attacked the guests in their rooms and barricaded them in the dining room. A Frenchman who managed to escape asked the Japanese to relieve the French prisoners and restore order.
Fran?oise Martin was a young French woman who had arrived in Hanoi “not to make money in this country, but, on the contrary, filled with humanitarian idealism.” She felt nothing but “respect for the Sino-annamite culture.” Yet her sentiments about the Vietnamese who demonstrated in the streets for independence were probably typical of most French colonials: “It is possible that there were real patriots among them . . . But so far as this mob of criminals and imbeciles bustling about town with their flags is concerned, the sight of half a dozen guns would send them scurrying back to their rat holes. Unfortunately, we don’t have half a dozen guns, nor would we have them soon.”68
In August, there had been more rumors about stockpiles of arms found in a French villa. Demonstrators denounced French imperialism. But apart from some murders in the countryside, Vietnamese violence against the French did not amount to much. The French were terrified nonetheless, all the more because they were still so helpless, despite brave words from France, where General de Gaulle spoke of developing Indochina as “one of the principal goals of [France’s] activity in her reborn power and rediscovered grandeur.”69
“Everyone is armed to the teeth,” recalled Fran?oise Martin about the situation in Hanoi, “Americans, Chinese, Annamites; only the French have nothing to defend themselves with except sticks and empty bottles . . .”70 Her analysis of the Vietnamese fight for independence was as typical of her place and time as her views of the “imbecilic” demonstrators. It was all a plot: “Officially, Japanese had laid down their arms, but continued to wage war in a different manner, impeding any revival of Europeans in Indonesia and Malaya; everywhere their methods were the same: a perfidious plan, admirably prepared, carefully carried out . . . An admirable and new example of Asian duplicity, which never fails to fool the White man.”71
When violence finally broke loose, however, it wasn’t in Hanoi, but in Saigon. The first sign of serious trouble was remarkably similar to events in Algeria. On September 2 hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, or “Annamites” as they were called in the Western press, many from the countryside, gathered in Saigon to hear Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence on the radio from Hanoi. Earlier that morning, armed Vietnamese youths had staged a demonstration at the gate of a military camp where French soldiers were still interned. The French replied to Vietnamese taunts by shouting insults back and singing the “Marseillaise.” Because of a technical problem, the crowds never heard Ho Chi Minh’s speech on the radio. Suspicions of French sabotage made the crowds even angrier. Just as the marchers reached the cathedral, shots were fired. The crowd panicked, and mobs, suspecting the French of the shooting, attacked every French person in sight. Chinese and European shops were looted, priests were killed, women had their teeth kicked in.
The French blamed Vietnamese provocateurs for the shots that caused the mayhem. A little over two weeks later, they convinced the British general Douglas Gracey that it was time to kick out the Vietnamese from police stations and public offices and rearm the French. And the British, in a spirit of colonial solidarity, complied. On September 23 it looked as if order had been restored to Saigon: the French were in charge once more. The humiliation and helplessness felt over weeks, months, perhaps even years, turned French celebrations of their triumph into a rampage: now it was the turn of Vietnamese to be lynched by mobs of Frenchmen. A British officer reported that there “were wild shootings and Annamites were openly dragged through the streets to be locked up in prisons.”72
Revenge was not long in coming. The next day, Vietnamese entered French houses and assaulted the inhabitants. People were tortured on the riverbanks. Vietnamese wives of Frenchmen were mutilated with knives. In one account, an eight-months-pregnant woman was disemboweled. Battles raged in Saigon for almost two months, with the British, the French, and the Japanese fighting the Vietnamese. Some Japanese went over to the Vietnamese side. The French Foreign Legion included in its ranks Germans who had fought the Allies in North Africa, and possibly some former SS officers too. Thousands of Vietnamese were tortured in prisons and received harsh prison or death sentences after “trials” that lasted all of five minutes.
By the middle of November, the French could enjoy their apéritifs at the Cercle Sportif once more, assured that life would soon return to normal. This illusion would last for a while, in the south until 1949, when South Vietnam became independent, with Saigon as its capital, and in the north until 1954, when Ho Chi Minh’s Communists were recognized as the rulers of the Socialist Republic of North Vietnam, whose capital was Hanoi. But nowhere have the words spoken by Macbeth to his wife about blood willing more blood been more true than in that narrow Southeast Asian country that was once thought of as three, then as two, and finally as one.