May 1940. The Netherlands falls in a matter of days. The army surrenders, the government flees to London, and on the other side of the world, in the Dutch East Indies, there is silence. No uprising.
No revolution. Even though millions of Indonesians lived under a colonial government they deeply resented. So why, when the colonial motherland collapsed, did no revolt break out? On the 10th of May, 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands.
After fighting around The Hague, at the Grebbeberg, and the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch capitulated. In the Dutch East Indies, the shock was enormous. But no uprising emerged from the indigenous population. Governor-General Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer simply remained in office.
The administration kept functioning. The KNIL, the colonial army, remained intact. No territory lost, no troops wiped out, no front collapsing. With The Hague suddenly out of the picture, the colonial government actually gained more autonomy.
That didn’t lead to weakness, but to more control, more surveillance, and at times even harsher measures. For the Indonesian population, almost nothing changed. The news of the German attack hit the Dutch East Indies like a bomb. The European community was completely shaken.
Planters, civil servants, businessmen, and missionaries suddenly had no idea what had happened to their families and friends in the homeland. The Netherlands had fallen, and no one knew what the future would bring. Remarkably, part of the Indonesian elite reacted in a completely different way. Not only the traditional nobility, but even prominent nationalists expressed sorrow over the downfall of the Netherlands.
Take Dr. Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo. One of the earliest and fiercest critics of the colonial system. Co-founder of Budi Utomo and the Indische Partij.
Exiled to Europe in 1913, and sent to Banda Neira in 1928 for alleged involvement in the communist uprising. What did he do after 12 years of isolation? He openly voiced his support for the Dutch administration and called on other activists to do the same. Many followed his appeal.
How was that possible? They had been silenced for years, exiled and imprisoned, and they had fiercely criticized the colonial regime. But even they did not wish such a devastating invasion upon their political opponents. In spite of everything, many Indonesians had an emotional attachment to the Netherlands, the country that had shaped and influenced them.
But Governor-General Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer ignored their declarations of support completely. It was as if he saw himself as a man in mourning at his beloved mother’s deathbed, with no desire to be disturbed by some exotic houseboys’ eager condolences. Among ordinary Indonesians, the reaction was completely different. Rice farmers, street vendors, and young people largely shrugged off the European crisis.
The less contact they had with the Dutch, the less the news affected them. “I was in my first year of primary school when the Netherlands was taken by Germany,” Soerachman recalled. Living in Jogjakarta, he remembered the teacher informing the class and having them sing songs and pray for the Netherlands to recover. “I didn’t know Queen Wilhelmina had fled to London.
Nothing really changed. We still used guilders. ”
Of course, much did change. But the colonial government worked hard to maintain the illusion of stability.
Behind the scenes, strict emergency measures were put in place. A state of emergency was declared. Public meetings were prohibited, and individuals seen as potential threats were detained. All 2,800 German residents in the Indies were interned, along with 500 members of the Dutch Nazi movement, the NSB.
These included missionaries, civil servants, doctors, scholars, technicians, planters, sailors, merchants, and even several Jews who had escaped Germany. The authorities were equally determined to prevent nationalist momentum from building. The prison camp at Boven Digoel remained operational. Nationalist leaders Soekarno, Hatta, and Sjahrir stayed in confinement, and questions raised in the Volksraad, the Indies parliament, about holding a conference or creating a local parliament were ignored.
Political life was effectively frozen. Both the Governor-General in Batavia and the Dutch government in exile in London argued that such major constitutional decisions could only be made by the Dutch parliament, which would not reconvene until after the war. Nationalist representatives pushed back. No talks about the future.
No possibility of a local parliament. Could they at least discuss equal rights? Indonesians still had a different legal status than Europeans. Could that racial hierarchy finally be abolished?
Was it time to introduce some form of shared Indische citizenship? Again, the answer was no. Then, could the offensive labels “Dutch East Indies” and “native” be replaced by “Indonesia” and “Indonesian”? Even that was deemed too sensitive.
The only minor concession the administration would accept was replacing “native” with “indigenous,” or occasionally “Indonesian,” in official documents. Indonesian nationalism had been growing steadily since the early 20th century, but by 1940, the movement was far from strong. Soekarno’s nationalist party, the PNI, had already been banned in 1931. Soekarno himself, along with other leading figures such as Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, had spent years in prison or in exile on remote islands like Banda and Flores.
The colonial government had learned that neutralizing leadership was more effective than suppressing mass movements. Throughout the 1930s, every nationalist activity was closely monitored by the political intelligence service, the PID, which used informants down to village levels. Meetings and publications were tightly controlled. As a result, by 1940, there was certainly a strong desire for independence, but no solid framework capable of organizing a mass uprising.
Although the colonial state was unpopular due to taxes, forced cultivation programs, and social inequality, this did not mean that the population was ready for revolution. Indonesian nationalism in 1940 was still primarily the domain of urban elites, students, intellectuals, civil servants, and parts of the middle class. The vast majority of the population, especially in Java, but across the outer islands as well, lived in rural conditions and focused mainly on daily survival. The connection between everyday village life and political activism was weak.
Communications were limited, literacy levels were low, and the idea of a pan-Indonesian identity was still in its infancy. All of this made it nearly impossible to quickly organize a coordinated uprising across the entire archipelago. A crucial factor was that the fall of the Netherlands did not mean the collapse of the colonial state. On the contrary, the Governor-General remained in power and gained even more autonomy since direct communication with The Hague was cut off.
The colonial authorities even demonstrated their strength by cracking down harder on political dissent. Fearful of Japanese infiltration, memories of earlier failed uprisings further discouraged revolt. The Java War in the early 19th century, the Aceh War in the late 19th and early 20th century, as well as the communist uprising of 1926–1927, had all shown that the KNIL could intervene mercilessly. By 1940, the colonial state still possessed a relatively modern infrastructure by Asian standards, including an air arm, armored cars, and well-organized communication channels.
For Indonesian leaders, their calculation was simple. Any rebellion without foreign support was almost guaranteed to fail and would entail heavy losses. Japan was seen by some Indonesian nationalists as a potential liberator. Japanese propaganda worked hard to present Japan as a leader of a pan-Asian mission of liberation.
But in 1940, Japan had not yet attacked the Dutch East Indies. It was at war with China, but had taken no direct action against the colony. Nationalist leaders understood that Japan acted opportunistically. Sjahrir and Hatta distrusted Japan deeply.
They feared Japan would merely replace one colonial regime with another. Soekarno was more pragmatic, but he, too, recognized that an uprising without the Japanese army would be suicidal. Geopolitical uncertainty therefore kept the nationalist movement in a holding pattern. It is also important to remember that Indonesia in 1940 was not a cohesive national entity.
The archipelago contained hundreds of ethnic groups and religions, and an infrastructure hardly suited for long-distance communication. The idea of Indonesia as a single political community was emergent but not yet deeply rooted. The colonial state exploited this diversity by playing groups against one another or binding local elites through indirect rule. In such a context, a coordinated revolt across multiple islands was almost impossible.
The most influential nationalists were rational strategists. They understood that time, organization, and international conditions were crucial. They chose not to act prematurely, but to wait until circumstances improved. That would come only in 1942, when Japan defeated the KNIL in a matter of months, and the colonial state collapsed completely.
That period, from 1942 to 1945, would create the ideal circumstances for the Indonesian Revolution.
