T

he plot is Shakespearian.

So are the characters.

The flywheel of time, heavy with history and greased by blood, spins on. Old men, blind with prejudice, fumble for the imagined brake. Leaders vacillate. The young seize the moment.

Synopsis: It is late-1945. The Japanese have been atomised into defeat. The Allies arrive in East Java to restore the colonialists. The tough locals resist, but the invaders win. It’s a Pyrrhic victory.

The last scene comes four years later when the stubborn Dutch finally accept the inevitable and quit. A new nation has been born.

Journalist Frank Palmos’ doctoral thesis Surabaya 1945: Sacred Territory forms the basis for several “new” histories about the Battle of Surabaya. These are expected to be published next year with schools in mind.

Palmos first came to Indonesia 50 years ago to learn the language then returned as Australia’s youngest foreign correspondent for the Year of Living Dangerously. He interpreted Sukarno’s speeches. He was befriended by Roeslan Abdulgani, who participated in the battle. When the former diplomat died, Palmos was given the freedom fighter’s personal papers.

These became the substance of Palmos’ research along with scores of interviews with veterans. He was granted access to the Indonesian Army’s historical accounts and has burrowed deep into Britain’s war archives.

His work won’t please everyone. Accounts written by lazy hacks, or produced according to a political script, have become engrained with age, so that acceptance of the new version may be hampered by prejudice and envy.

But who better to do the job than an ethical foreign journalist who understands Indonesia from the inside, is sympathetic but not partisan, knew Sukarno and has seen war from close up in Vietnam?

Palmos is particularly scornful of the accounts of Idrus, given credibility through inclusion in US scholar Benedict Anderson’s seminal Java in a Time of Revolution.

“No authoritative Indonesian source used Idrus,” writes the iconoclast -- and the italics are his. “This was a fictional reconstruction by Jakarta writer Idrus, who pretended he was an eyewitness. He had never been to Surabaya.

“Women were also prominent in the conflict, feeding the fighters and nursing the wounded. Calls for reinforcements were met by thousands flooding in from the hinterland to cook and provide care. I’d like to know more of their stories.”

Not every aspect of the struggle was benign or glorious. The chaos was used to settle personal vendettas, slaughter civilian internees, spy on colleagues and plunder the 20,000 refugees fleeing the city every day. Some Chinese supported the pemuda (literally “youth”, but it became the word for action and attitude); others were spies. War brings out both the best and worst in people.

There’s an uneasy relationship between academics and journalists who report history. The latter write to be read, the former to be footnoted. Fortunately, Palmos tells a good yarn while maintaining the annotations.

The lead up to the start of the main conflict on Nov. 10 was menjelang datangnya (awaiting the hurricane). An earlier three-day battle of awful brutality had ended with a cease-fire brokered by Sukarno, who’d been called in by the Allies. His action went against the advice of the local leaders, who had their enemies on the run and suspected foul play.

They were right. The British used the interregnum not just to evacuate the Europeans who had been held in Japanese concentration camps, but also to bring in thousands of well-equipped reinforcements.

Like a modern thriller, Palmos takes us, step by muffled step, through the nightmare wait for the inevitable doomed clash of untrained schoolboys against bombers; pushbikes against tanks.

It took 99 days for the British to drive the exhausted and outgunned fighters into the hills.

There, they continued guerrilla warfare when the Dutch returned in early-1946. The pemuda never surrendered. Their kampung warfare tactics set the pattern for street fighting in Indo-China and their spirit stoked the movement for independence in India.

Could it have been avoided? Probably not. When the British violated the cease-fire conditions, concrete positions had been set. The Allies were determined to crush the “terrorists” and “insurgents”, grossly misreading the mood through flawed “military intelligence”, that great oxymoron.

Palmos rightly makes much of the tension between the Revolutionary Command fiddling in Jakarta and the fighting Surabaya pemuda — a tricky subject for local writers to handle.

To understand why Indonesians — and particularly Surabayans — are such ferocious patriots, this book explains it. Like the French and American revolutionaries, the Arek Soeroboyo fought for a universal principle — the freedom to decide their own destiny — and paid a terrible price, with maybe 100,000 casualties and a scorched and virtually deserted city. Little wonder why the national flag is half red.

Why haven’t local writers been more active? They were certainly restricted under the first two presidencies, famous for tweaking history to suit their own respective agendas.

“Indonesian historians are now perhaps a little indolent, certainly too modest, about their nation’s remarkable history. The world expects much more from them before time wipes clean the last traces of their glorious earlier years,” Palmos says.

He particularly wants a higher profile for governor Surio’s outstanding leadership and “Churchillian” speeches.

Finally, Palmos raised the issue of special recognition: “At the time of writing [2011], there were no battle ribbons, no medals struck for bravery, and veterans were still pushing for those who fought in the Battle.”

Maybe a foreigner’s book will spur the government to put things right.