13 - “Soeharto was a Cautious Man”

Summary

On his return to Central Java, Soeharto was assigned to the Peta battalion being established at Wates, seventeen miles southwest of Yogyakarta. Still fearing an Allied attack from Australia, the Japanese had drawn up operational plans to fight a defensive battle on the south coast of Java, concentrating the bulk of their forces on East Java but with other units guarding the southern coast of Central and West Java. Under these plans, Indonesian battalions would defend the beaches most susceptible to amphibious assault while Japanese troops were held in reserve, ready to launch an immediate counterattack. It was, of course, a strategy of desperation. No one doubted for a moment that the Japanese excelled in the art of beach defence. Imperial Army engineers were skilled in the construction of bunkers, dugouts and blockhouses, all of them mutually supporting and extremely well camouflaged. It is also true that the south coast of Java is notoriously forbidding, with dangerous seas and very few beaches. But the Japanese could not hope to defend every beach on the south coast. Nor could one or two 500-man Peta battalions stem a full-scale Allied landing, which, the Japanese estimated, would consist of as many as ten divisions. At best, a defending battalion could cover a beach frontage of 900 to 2,000 yards. That meant that Peta units would be very thinly distributed. It also meant that frontline Peta battalions would be subjected to a devastating naval bombardment before any Allied landing. Japanese reserve units, as hopelessly outnumbered as the Dutch had been when they faced the Japanese in 1942, would be pounded from the air and sea as they sought to join the battle. To make matters worse, this strategy created political problems. It did not take long for Indonesian leaders to conclude, erroneously, that the Japanese had decided to let local troops do the fighting and dying while the Japanese remained safely out of sight. “Sukarno,” Morimoto Takeshi recalled, “hated the idea of using Indonesians as a shield for the Japanese.”

As these plans were put into operation Soeharto was posted to Glagah, a hamlet on the Indian Ocean, nine miles west of Wates. Glagah stands on a narrow strip of low-lying ground between the Menoreh Hills and the ocean, a few miles south of the east-west highway.