Mallaby's death explained

The city profile of Surabaya (The Jakarta Post, May 31) raises once again the question of the death of Brigadier A. Mallaby, British commanding officer there on Oct. 30, 1945. This is a perennial controversy.

A British researcher, J. G. A. Parrott, whose material I have looked at in the Imperial War Museum, London, has what seems to me the most convincing case on the matter. Parrott corresponded with important survivors of the incident in which Mallaby was killed, notably his two adjutants, Captain Smith and Captain Shaw as well as Major K. Venu Gopal, officer commanding D. Coy 6 Mahrattas, the British Indian army unit at the center of events on Oct. 30. D Company was holed up in a city center building and facing off against a large crowd of Indonesians, many of them armed.

Parrott also considered the writings of Roeslan Abdulgani, a key Indonesian player, and later a senior diplomat and politician.

The controversy centers on whether or not Mallaby gave orders for 6 Mahrattas to fire on the crowd besieging the building they were in. Roeslan believed he did, but both Smith and Gopal thought otherwise. Gopal told Parrott with refreshing candour that the order to fire was his and his alone. D Company, the Indian asserted, was hopelessly outnumbered and, moreover, could not accept that if they laid down their arms they would be guaranteed safe conduct in what was a city in tumult.

Smith, for his part, insisted that Mallaby did not give any order to open fire, and that had Mallaby done so, he would have remembered it when, shortly afterwards, he wrote his report.

Captain Smith also insisted -- and he was by Brigadier Mallaby's side -- that the commanding officer was killed by an Indonesian teenager who approached their staff car in the confusion. Smith and Shaw escaped by swimming across the Kali Mas river.

After considering the evidence, Parrott concluded that Mallaby's handling of the situation in Surabaya was incompetent, his "men being deployed in penny packets". This may be correct from the military point of view, but it must be remembered that British forces had arrived in Java in September with absolutely no forward intelligence, a fact bemoaned by Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia on whose orders the troops were here in the first place.

What is not in doubt, in my mind at least, is that the British response to the unfortunate Mallaby's death was disastrous, as indeed much of it was elsewhere in Java and Sumatra in 1945-1946.

DAVID JARDINE

Jakarta