World War II and Japanese occupation
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
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".
(wikipedia)
