On October 31, 1945, a telegram from the American Consul General in Batavia to the Secretary of State painted a picture of the chaotic situation in Java in rough brush strokes.Serious fights had just occurred in Surabaya,Semarang,and Batavia involving groups of Indonesian nationalists, armed Japanese troops, and Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command (SEAC) forces trying to get a handle on the situation. A brigade of British soldiers had taken Surabaya “sans firing a shot,” the US envoy asserted, only to be attacked by bands of Indonesians with Japanese guns. In the ensuing battle, the young Indonesian men killed a British Brigadier-General “with knives and parangs.”The Allied soldiers, for their part, tried “to avoid bloodshed, but lawless armed looters and fanatics [were] out of control,” rendering the Dutch defenseless because they “lacked men, arms, and the authority to act.”Amidst all this confusion, President Sukarno attempted to appease the revolutionary youths in East Java by addressing the crowd in Surabaya,but he was “hooted down.”Nobody seemed able to restrain the “armed mobs of hotheaded Indonesian freedom fighters,” who were commanded by small-time “gang leaders,” holding allegiance to no one but themselves and their own vision of merdeka.The Indonesian Republic's authorities,meanwhile,admitted they were not in control and Sukarno had agreed to discuss the Republic's precarious position with General Christison.

A day later, on November 1, 1945, the US Consul General forwarded a summary to Washington of the stern communiqué that the Commander of the Allied Forces in the Netherlands East Indies (AFNEI), Sir Philip Christison, issued in the wake of Brigadier General Aubertin Walter Southern Mallaby's death. Christison warned that “the truce agreed upon in the presence of Sukarno and Hatta was broken by nationalists who foully murdered General Mallaby.” He threatened that unless the killers surrender to AFNEI,he intended to deploy the comprehensive weight of his “sea, land, and air forces and all the weapons of modern war against them until they are crushed.”As a postscript in his dispatch to the State Department, the American diplomat claimed that Christison had also personally furnished him with the startling but unconfirmed information that “five former German submarine commanders and some Japanese army officers are training and possibly leading the natives in East Java.”