The Skyward Defiance

 

They say that rage is a kind of madness. I don’t know about that, not exactly. But I do know this—when rage and youth come together, when they crash into each other like thunderclouds on a hot summer day, something dangerous is born. Something that can change the course of history, or at least rewrite a small chapter of it.

This is what happened in Indonesia back in 1947, when a handful of boys—because that’s what they were, just boys playing at being men—decided they wouldn’t take it anymore. Wouldn’t take the Dutch stomping over their newfound independence like it was yesterday’s newspaper.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story really begins in 1995, in one of those meetings that seems inconsequential at first but ends up altering the course of how we remember things. The kind of meeting that might’ve taken place in a dusty diner off Route 66 or a backroom in some Mississippi roadhouse, only this one happened in Jakarta.

Suharnoko Harbani—remember that name—met a woman called Irna H. N. Hadi Soewito. She was a historian, the kind who dusts off forgotten stories and holds them up to the light. They were introduced by a retired Colonel Moeljati, one of those old military types with ramrod-straight posture and secrets tucked away behind her eyes.

Suharnoko had a hope, the kind that lodges itself in your brain and doesn’t let go. He wanted Irna to take his story—the story of the Indonesian Air Force’s struggles back in ‘45—and turn it into a book. Something that would outlive him.

And outlive him it did. By the time Awal Kedirgantaraan di Indonesia: Perjuangan AURI 1945 hit bookshelves in 2008, Suharnoko had already gone to whatever waits for us on the other side. Died in 2001, he did. But his story—that was just getting started.

Now, Suharnoko wasn’t what you’d call famous. Not at first. Born March 30, 1925, he started his aviation career inspecting fuel and oil at some workshop in Yogyakarta called Wonocatur. Not exactly the stuff of legends. But that’s how it always goes, isn’t it? The most extraordinary people often begin in the most ordinary ways.

What changed everything for him—what changed everything for a whole country—was July 29, 1947. Mark that date. Remember it. It’s when boys became men and hatred became heroism.

But I’m skipping ahead again. Let me back up.

Suharnoko was one of the first cadets at Maguwo Flight School in Yogyakarta. And when I say “school,” I’m being generous. These boys studied under cherry trees, for Christ’s sake. When it rained, they huddled in the hallway of a hotel dormitory like stray dogs seeking shelter from a storm. Their only training aircraft was something called a Cureng, left behind by the Japanese—a relic from 1933 that the Allies nicknamed Willow. Not exactly an F-16, if you catch my meaning.

The clothes on their backs weren’t much better. Suharnoko owned exactly one uniform. One. Made from belacu fabric, dyed with boiled mahogany tree bark to give it that yellowish-brown color that reminded you of old teeth. He wore it until the collar frayed, until it probably stank to high heaven, but he wore it with pride. That uniform saw things—the sweat of fifteen-hour training days, the trembling hands of first solo flights, the tears of frustration when landings went wrong.

Despite it all, those boys learned to fly. They soared above the treetops of their troubled homeland, tasting freedom in the sky even as it was being contested on the ground.

Then came Monday, July 21, 1947.

Picture it: midday sun beating down mercilessly on Maguwo Air Base. The kind of heat that makes the air shimmer and dance. Six aircraft sitting on the tarmac, maybe not the newest or the best, but they were Indonesia’s. They were hope made of metal and fuel.

Then the Dutch came.

They called it Operation Product—a sanitized name for what was really just naked aggression. Four Kitty Hawk aircraft carved through the sky above the base, executing what pilots call a “lazy eight.” There was nothing lazy about what followed.

The 20mm cannons opened up first, followed by the staccato rhythm of 12.7mm machine guns. Metal tore through metal. Fuel ignited. Dreams burned.

When the smoke cleared, most of the Indonesian aircraft were nothing but charred frames and ashes. Lives had been lost. Dignity had been trampled.

And Suharnoko Harbani, twenty-two years old with a heart full of fire, watched it all.

Have you ever felt hatred so pure it feels like a living thing inside you? Something with teeth and claws that scratches at your insides, demanding to be let out? That’s what filled Suharnoko and his friends—Bambang Saptoaji, Sutarjo Sigit, and Mulyono. Young men barely old enough to shave, but old enough to kill if it meant defending what was theirs.

“It turns out these cadets were restless,” Marshal Elang Suryadi Suryadarma would later say, his words preserved by historian Sutrisno Kutoyo. “Especially after so many aircraft were destroyed in the air raids. They thought Indonesia’s strength had been wiped out. That amateurish fighting spirit is what we wanted to highlight.”

Amateurish. That’s what experience calls youth when it can’t quite comprehend its courage.

In secret—because the most dangerous plans are always hatched in whispers—they convinced technicians to repair whatever aircraft could still fly. They modified them, weaponized them. Turned training planes into war machines with whatever they had at hand.

When they approached Air Commodore Halim Perdanakusuma with their plan, he listened. He was young himself, unmarried, living among the cadets like an older brother. But he couldn’t authorize a mission. That power lay with Marshal Suryadarma.

So Suharnoko, chosen as their representative, went to see the Marshal. And Suryadarma, set in his ways like most men of authority, said no. Too young, he said. No rank, no experience.

But sometimes, youth has a wisdom all its own. A clarity that comes from not yet knowing what can’t be done.

“Those fighting on the front lines are just as young,” Suharnoko fired back, his voice probably shaking but his resolve solid as bedrock, “and are using whatever weapons they have. The cadets are already capable of flying; AURI has aircraft and bombs. Why shouldn’t we show our strength?”

Have you ever seen conviction melt resistance? It’s like watching ice give way to spring. Suryadarma’s refusal softened into something else entirely.

“I do not order it,” he finally said, words chosen carefully for posterity, “but I will not forbid it either.”

And just like that, the mission was born.

Four aircraft were prepared: a Guntai dive bomber, a Hayabusha fighter-trainer, and two Cureng basic trainers. They were transformed—cockpit glass removed, fuselage and wings painted military green, bomb-release mechanisms jury-rigged under the wings.

Each aircraft carried fragmentation bombs—fifty-kilogram messengers of revenge. Six for the Guntai, two each for the Curengs. The Guntai got fixed machine guns on both wings. The Hayabusha had two more on the nose, just above where the propeller spun its deadly arc.

The targets? Dutch barracks in Semarang and Salatiga. Places where the enemy slept, ate, laughed, not knowing what was coming.

Mulyono, with Dulrachman as his gunner, would take the Guntai to Semarang, escorted by Bambang Saptoaji in the Hayabusha. Sutarjo Sigit would lead the attack on Salatiga in one modified Cureng, with his gunner Sutarjo beside him.

And Suharnoko? He’d be the wingman, flying the second Cureng with gunner Kaput. His job was to create chaos, to confuse and disrupt enemy defenses while the others delivered their payload of retribution.

One last instruction from Halim: don’t fly straight to the target. Use a dog-leg formation—zigzag through the sky, make yourself harder to predict, harder to shoot down.

On Tuesday, July 29, 1947, at five in the morning when darkness still claimed the world, those four aircraft thundered down the runway at Maguwo Air Base. This wasn’t just Indonesia’s first aerial bombing mission; it was a statement written in contrails across the sky. We are still here. We will fight back.

But plans, as they do, went sideways almost immediately.

As they took off, Sutarjo Sigit noticed something wrong. His wingman, Suharnoko, was missing. He circled Maguwo once, flashing his light in all directions, but saw nothing.

What Sigit didn’t know was that Suharnoko had mistakenly followed Mulyono’s larger Guntai aircraft instead of Sigit’s Cureng. A rookie mistake, the kind that gets you killed in wars where the enemy is less forgiving.

Realizing his error, Suharnoko broke away, charting his own desperate course. At altitude, he spotted a lake at the center of a city. Ambarawa, he thought—enemy territory.

The Dutch weren’t expecting an attack from the air. Why would they be? They thought they’d crushed Indonesia’s air capabilities days earlier. But here was Suharnoko, twenty-two years old and probably scared out of his mind, two bombs still nestled under his wings like deadly eggs waiting to hatch.

His first bomb fell true, striking a Dutch military vehicle parking lot. But his second attack went awry—flying too low, the bomb didn’t have enough force behind it. Did it explode? He couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that both bombs were gone, and it was time to get the hell out of there before Dutch anti-aircraft guns found his range.

He flew low toward Salatiga, taking the long way home like a teenager who’d missed curfew. When he finally landed—last of all the pilots to return—his aircraft was quickly hidden in a village by a man named Kliwon, camouflaged with branches and leaves like something out of a child’s game of hide-and-seek.

Were these attacks devastating? No. Did they cripple the Dutch military machine? Not even close. But they did something perhaps more important—they proved that Indonesia wasn’t beaten. That its young men could still bare their teeth and bite back.

The psychological impact rippled through Dutch command. After this incident—this amateur attack by boys playing at war—the Dutch cut all electricity in Central Java at night. Darkness became their shield against the threat from above. Fear had changed sides.

These young men—Suharnoko, Mulyono, Bambang, Sutarjo, and the others—they chose defiance when submission would have been easier. They wrote themselves into history with contrails and bomb blasts, creating Indonesia’s first successful aerial bombing operation with little more than determination and makeshift weapons.

Years later, their story would inspire a film, Kadet 1947, bringing their courage to a new generation who’d never know the terror of foreign boots on their soil or the thrill of rebellion against impossible odds.

But that’s how it always goes, isn’t it? The young and the brave do impossible things. They fight when fighting seems futile. They fly when their wings are clipped. They become the stories old men tell, long after the smoke has cleared and the world has moved on.

And sometimes, if they’re lucky, someone like Irna comes along to make sure those stories aren’t forgotten. Because courage, like fear, never really dies. It just waits for the next generation to discover it, hiding there all along, like an old uniform dyed with mahogany bark, worn until the collar frays but never surrendered.

Never surrendered. Not then. Not now. Not ever.