ABSTRACT
It was not until 29 September 1945 that the first 2,000 British troops arrived in Indonesia, at the port of Jakarta. Their numbers would eventually swell to around 50,000, the great majority of them in the British Indian Army. On 10 October 1945, the first 5,000 British troops also landed at Belawan, Medan. The British (Indian) contingent on Sumatra eventually came to 15,000 men. In late September 1945, Louis Mountbatten, the commander-in-chief of all Allied forces in South East Asia (seac), concluded on the basis of new information that the nationalist movement was much stronger and enjoyed much more popular support than he had previously assumed. 1
