While the Dutch boasted about capturing the enemy’s leaders, the war was already slipping through their fingers. The Indonesian War of Independence, which began with the Japanese surrender and the declaration of independence in August 1945, did not truly end until the formal transfer of sovereignty on December 27, 1949. From an Indonesian perspective, the struggle continued even beyond that, reaching its final chapter only with the transfer of Papua in 1962.
Internal conflicts that had emerged between 1945 and 1949 also dragged on, in part, into the 1960s.
