Suharto - Military Career - World War II and Japanese Occupation

World War II and Japanese Occupation

See also: Japanese occupation of Indonesia

After finishing middle school at the age of 18, Suharto took a clerical job at a bank in Wurjantaro but was forced to resign after a bicycle mishap tore his only working clothes. Following a spell of unemployment, he joined the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) in 1940, and studied in a Dutch-run military school in Gombong near Yogyakarta. With the Netherlands under German occupation and the Japanese pressing for access to Indonesian oil supplies, the Dutch had opened up the KNIL to large intakes of previously excluded Javanese. After graduation, Suharto was assigned to Battalion XIII at Rampal. His service there was unremarkable, although he contracted malaria which required hospitalisation while on guard duty, and then gained promotion to sergeant.

The March 1942 invasion of Imperial Japanese forces was initially welcomed by many Indonesians as a key step towards independence and Suharto was one of thousands of Indonesians who volunteered for Japanese organised security forces. He first joined the Japanese sponsored police force at the rank of keibuho (assistant inspector), where he claimed to have gained his first experience in the intelligence work so central to his presidency ("Criminal matters became a secondary problem," Suharto remarked, "what was most important were matters of a political kind").

Suharto shifted from police work toward the Japanese-sponsored militia, the Peta (Defenders of the Fatherland) in which Indonesians served as officers. In his training to serve at the rank of shodancho (platoon commander) he encountered a localized version of the Japanese bushido, or "way of the warrior", used to indoctrinate troops. This training encouraged an anti-Dutch and pro-nationalist thought, although toward the aims of the Imperial Japanese militarists. The encounter with a nationalistic and militarist ideology is believed to have profoundly influenced Suharto's own way of thinking. The Japanese turned ex-NCOs, including Suharto, into officers and gave them further military education, including lessons in the use of the samurai sword. Suharto's biographer, O.G. Roeder, records in The Smiling General (1969) that Suharto was "well known for his tough, but not brutal, methods".

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