The landing at Balikpapan

On the morning of 1 July 1945, after three weeks of bombing and several hours of naval bombardment, American amphibious vehicles and landing craft put Australian infantry ashore on the beaches at Klandasan, just south-east of Balikpapan – the largest centre of the oil industry in eastern Borneo. The force landed was the 7th Division under Major General Edward Milford, and in the afternoon the beachhead was inspected by the Commander-in-Chief of Allied forces in the South West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur. The operation was codenamed Oboe Two and was the third and last stage of the Borneo campaign to be carried out – after the landing on Tarakan on 1 May and the landing at Brunei Bay on 10 June.

The landing itself was almost bloodless, but the fighting for the town, the hills above it, two airfields and the road inland lasted three weeks. Organised Japanese resistance died out around 21 July, and patrols pursued the retreating units until Japan’s capitulation. The whole undertaking – in the view of many historians, executed in exemplary fashion but of doubtful strategic value – became one of the symbols of the last, “unnecessary” campaigns of the Pacific War.

War chronologies record under 1 July that the Australians landed at Balikpapan “in the last major land operation of the Western Allies in the war”. The date and place are accurate, but the description needs narrowing. Balikpapan was the last great seaborne landing of the Western Allies and the largest amphibious operation in the history of the Australian Army – that is how Australian historiography assesses it. It was not, however, the last major land operation: in July and August the Australians were still fighting on Bougainville and in New Guinea, the Americans on Luzon and Mindanao, and the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, launched on 9 August, was incomparably larger than all the Borneo operations put together.

A city of oil

Balikpapan lies on the bay of the same name on the east coast of Borneo, facing the Makassar Strait. Before the war it belonged to the Dutch East Indies and was one of the colony’s main oil centres: its refineries, fed with crude from the fields at Sambodja and Sangasanga to the north-east, produced about 1.8 million tonnes of petroleum products a year before the war. Along the steep ridge south of the harbour stretched the refinery with dozens of storage tanks and a cracking plant, and beyond it, on the headland, lay the European quarter of Klandasan. East of the town a road ran along the coast through Stalkoedo and Sepinggang to Manggar, where the Japanese had built two airfields.

In January 1942, during the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch garrison managed to destroy part of the oil installations. The Japanese took the town on 24–25 January and, in reprisal for the destruction, murdered – according to most accounts – between 80 and 100 of the Europeans living there. They quickly rebuilt the refineries, however, and in 1943–1944 Balikpapan supplied a considerable share of the Imperial Navy’s fuel. From the autumn of 1943 it was bombed by American Liberators flying from around Darwin, and Australian Catalinas mined the approaches to the harbour. A series of heavy raids from the island of Noemfoor in the autumn of 1944 badly damaged the refineries; from October of that year the Japanese stopped sending tankers to Balikpapan, and the surviving installations worked only for local needs. By the summer of 1945, then, the town was of almost no importance to Japan’s war effort.

The dispute over Oboe Two

The plan to recover Borneo was drawn up at MacArthur’s headquarters as part of a broader scheme intended to cover the whole of the Dutch East Indies. Balikpapan was its second stage, a prelude to a landing on Java. In the spring of 1945 that prospect vanished: the Australian government refused to commit the 6th Division to the Java operation, and responsibility for most of the Netherlands Indies was to pass to the British South East Asia Command. The Balikpapan landing thereby lost its main justification.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Military Forces, General Thomas Blamey, openly advised against it, believing it served no strategic purpose. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff also had doubts. MacArthur nevertheless managed to obtain the agreement of both – the historian Garth Pratten goes so far as to say that he manipulated them – and the government of Prime Minister John Curtin, after long hesitation, consented to the 7th Division’s participation. Officially the aim was to secure the port and refineries, gain a base for further operations and restore the Dutch administration. David Horner believes that what MacArthur wanted above all was to show the Dutch government that he had tried to recover part of its territory.

The opposing forces

Some 33,000 men were assigned to the operation, 21,000 of them from the 7th Division. It was one of the most experienced Australian formations: it had fought in Syria in 1941 and then in New Guinea – on the Kokoda Track, at Buna and in the Markham and Ramu valleys. At Balikpapan it went into action complete for the first time in the war, with all three of its infantry brigades – the 18th (Brigadier Frederick Chilton), the 21st (Brigadier Ivan Dougherty) and the 25th (Brigadier Kenneth Eather). It was supported by Matilda tanks of the 1st Armoured Regiment, artillery, engineers and a company of the Dutch colonial army (KNIL). All the land forces on Borneo were commanded by Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead, commander of the Australian I Corps.

The invasion fleet – more than a hundred warships and transports, mostly American and Australian – was provided by the US Seventh Fleet under Admiral Thomas Kinkaid; the attack force was commanded by Rear Admiral Albert Noble. Fire support came from American and Australian cruisers and the Dutch Tromp. The landing craft, amphibious tractors and DUKWs were crewed by American soldiers from amphibian battalions and the 593rd Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment. The air forces – the Australian First Tactical Air Force and the US Thirteenth Air Force – operated from the southern Philippines, because the airfield on Tarakan, which was supposed to cover this landing, was still unusable; three American escort carriers made up for the missing fighter cover.

The Balikpapan area was defended by Rear Admiral Michiaki Kamada’s 22nd Special Base Force, reinforced by the 454th Independent Infantry Battalion (brought over from Tarakan in March 1945) and part of the 71st Independent Mixed Brigade. Allied estimates put the Japanese in the area at between 8,400 and 10,000, but only 3,100–3,900 of them were front-line troops; the rest were rear-echelon units, anti-aircraft gunners and between 1,100 and 4,500 armed Japanese, Taiwanese and Indonesian labourers. The garrison had been cut off from supplies since the end of 1944 and was undernourished, but it had 18 coastal guns and more than a hundred anti-aircraft guns, a network of tunnels in the hills, an anti-tank ditch along the shore, underwater obstacles and minefields.

The heaviest preparatory bombardment

The navy wanted to land further east, at Manggar, where the water was deeper. Milford, however, chose the beaches at Klandasan, a stretch of about 1,800 metres in the very middle of the Japanese defences: this spared the infantry a ten-kilometre march across difficult ground, and the risk was to be reduced by a massive preparatory bombardment. Aircraft attacked the area for 20 days before the landing, and for 15 days minesweepers cleared the waters within range of the Japanese batteries; three of them were sunk. American frogmen of the underwater demolition teams blew gaps in the obstacles under fire. Throughout this period false information was spread and dummy preparations were made far from the real beaches to mislead the defenders.

According to American and Australian tallies, a total of more than 3,000 tons of bombs, 7,361 rockets and more than 38,000 shells fell on the landing area; Australian historians regard this as the heaviest preparatory bombardment before any landing in MacArthur’s entire area of command. The fleet sailed from Morotai on 26 June, and on 1 July itself 63 Liberators, five cruisers and fourteen destroyers were still at work over the beaches, the warships firing more than 17,000 shells. Most of the Japanese field guns were destroyed – but so, along with them, was much of the refinery and the town that the operation was meant to recover.

The landing of 1 July

Shortly before 9 a.m. the first waves reached the shore. On the left, on Red and Yellow beaches, two battalions of the 18th Brigade (the 2/10th and 2/12th) landed; on the right, on Green Beach, the 2/27th Battalion of the 21st Brigade; the 25th Brigade remained afloat in reserve. Smoke and dust from the bombardment obscured the landmarks, and some of the obstacles had not been cleared, so two battalions landed too far to the left and their sub-units became intermingled. The Japanese, however, replied with only weak fire, and within 15–20 minutes the beachhead had been secured. In the first phase of the landing the Australians did not lose a single man.

The real fighting began in the hills above Klandasan. Lieutenant Colonel Tom Daly’s 2/10th Battalion attacked a ridge the Australians called Parramatta, fortified with bunkers, tunnels, mines and booby traps. Because of communication problems the artillery support did not materialise, and the tanks allotted to the battalion broke down; the battalion attacked nevertheless and, after several hours and with the help of two Matildas that finally reached the battlefield, took the ridge at around 2 p.m. On the right the 21st Brigade advanced east along the coast, meeting increasingly stiff resistance. By evening the beachhead extended about two kilometres inland. It also turned out that the tank landing ships could not get close to the beaches, so supplies were unloaded all day by DUKWs.

MacArthur on the beach

MacArthur watched the landing from the cruiser USS Cleveland, in which he had come from Manila. Before noon he received on board Morshead, Milford, the Australian air commander Air Vice-Marshal William Bostock and the commander of the Seventh Fleet’s amphibious forces, Vice Admiral Daniel Barbey; he then went ashore and toured the beachhead with Morshead and Milford – photographs of this inspection are held by the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. According to accounts cited by his biographers, the general went forward to positions still under Japanese fire and refused to withdraw. It was his last participation in a landing in this war. For MacArthur, who had directed the war in the South West Pacific from Australia since 1942, Balikpapan was a symbolic conclusion to that campaign; for the Australians it was yet another operation whose point many of them did not understand.

The town, the port and the airfields

On 2 July the fighting for the hills above Klandasan went on. They were defended mainly by armed rear-echelon troops and gunners of the 2nd Garrison Unit and part of the 454th Battalion; Australian engineers blew up tunnels and disarmed thousands of mines and booby traps. That day the 25th Brigade came ashore, and the 2/14th Battalion of the 21st Brigade took the airfield at Sepinggang. On 3 July the 18th Brigade captured the town and the port, and the 25th Brigade set off inland along the road to Samarinda, which the Australians called the “Milford Highway”. By the end of the day the beachhead was eight kilometres deep.

The 21st Brigade reached Manggar airfield on 3 July and took it the following day, but was then held up for several days by fire from Japanese guns and mortars hidden in the hills overlooking the runways. Two tanks were destroyed; the Japanese positions were taken one by one with the support of ships and aircraft. On 5 July the 2/9th Battalion and the 2/1st Pioneer Battalion landed at Penadjam, on the western shore of the bay, to clear the Japanese artillery from there and open the port; the task was completed in two days, almost without fighting. By 9 July two forward Japanese battalions had been broken, and their remnants withdrew from the coast.

Meanwhile, on the beaches, American Seabees of the 11th Naval Construction Battalion were building jetties, and on 10 July a new supply beach was opened in a sheltered part of the bay where eight landing ships could unload at once. Although both airfields had been taken quickly, the first Australian Spitfires began operating from them only on 15 July, and bombers could not be based there before the end of the war.

Batuchampar

The longest fighting was along the “Milford Highway”. On 5 and 6 July a Japanese battalion halted the 25th Brigade there, and its positions in the jungle had to be taken with the help of flamethrower tanks and a barrage of more than 8,000 shells. The Japanese fought a delaying action: with mines, booby traps, sniper fire and night raids. Kamada set up his headquarters near Batuchampar, a dozen or so kilometres from the beaches, where the third battalion of his force had prepared the main defensive position.

For two weeks artillery and aircraft pounded the Japanese fortifications, while Australian patrols – including commandos of the 2/7th Cavalry Commando Regiment and the Dutch KNIL company – searched for the enemy’s flanks. When, on 21 July, the encirclement was almost complete, the Japanese withdrew inland in good order; the Australians noted with respect the skill with which the defenders had chosen and held their positions. Milford decided that the strategic situation did not require pursuing them to Samarinda and confined himself to deep patrolling. The main fighting for Balikpapan thus ended around 21 July. Most of the surviving Japanese moved north-east and then across the island towards Kuching and Banjarmasin; in August Kamada’s units made several more attempts to approach the port from the western side of the bay.

Losses

According to the Australian official history, the capture of Balikpapan cost the 7th Division 229 killed and 634 wounded – far fewer than its earlier campaigns in New Guinea. To this must be added the losses among American and Australian sailors, airmen and engineers, including the crews of the three sunken minesweepers. According to the same sources the Japanese lost at least 2,032 killed, and 63 were taken prisoner. No one has established the number of civilian victims – Indonesians, Chinese and forced labourers from other islands; all that is known is that the bombing reduced much of the town and refinery to ruins.

The dispute over the operation’s value

As early as 1945 many Australians were asking why their soldiers were dying on Borneo when the war was being decided elsewhere. After the war Balikpapan was placed – alongside the fighting on Bougainville, New Britain and in the Aitape–Wewak area – on the list of the so-called “unnecessary campaigns”. The historians Rhys Crawley and David Horner judge that the operation had no influence on the course of the war and was “strategically questionable”. Garth Pratten points out that once the Java landing was cancelled its main rationale disappeared, and that it may have gone ahead because of an overestimate of the refineries’ importance. The British historian Max Hastings wrote of the whole Borneo campaign that sound strategic judgement would have left the isolated garrisons to themselves.

The balance of gains was indeed modest. The port and refineries had been so badly damaged by bombing and Japanese arson that for a long time they gave the Allies no fuel – just as earlier on Tarakan, where the first rebuilt wells were brought into production only at the end of June. The fields at Sambodja and Sangasanga, which supplied the refineries, remained in Japanese hands until the end of the war. The airfields were never used by bombers, and the destruction of the oil installations weighed on relations with the returning Dutch administration.

The same literature stresses, however, that militarily the operation was carried out very efficiently. Peter Dennis called it “strategically dubious” but “tactically skilfully executed”. The Australian infantry had fire support more lavish than in any other of its campaigns, and the complex cooperation between the land, naval and air forces of several countries went off without major hitches. Milford’s cautious command – instead of storming the Japanese positions, he had them destroyed by artillery and outflanked – was, moreover, a deliberate answer to the question of whether it was worth risking soldiers’ lives in the last weeks of the war. An important factor in the success was American logistics – above all the shipping, which the Australian Army did not have itself and which the parallel Australian campaigns in New Guinea conspicuously lacked.

What came next

The Balikpapan landing closed the series of great amphibious operations by the Western Allies in the Second World War. Its beachhead became the base from which the Australians patrolled eastern Borneo as the war entered its final phase: on 5 July Prime Minister Curtin died and was succeeded by Ben Chifley. In the Pacific, air and naval attacks on the Japanese home islands were going on at the same time, and within a few weeks the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet entry into the war sealed Japan’s capitulation. The news reached the Australians on patrol in the jungle beyond Balikpapan.

In September Kamada surrendered to the headquarters of the 7th Division, and its brigades carried out occupation duties on Borneo and Celebes until early 1946 – the 21st Brigade accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces at Makassar. The Australian Army brought the Dutch civil administration back to eastern Borneo, and its return collided with the independence of Indonesia, proclaimed on 17 August 1945, and with the Indonesian National Revolution. The Australians who in 1945 had restored Dutch rule were, a few years later, through both their government and their trade unions, supporting the Indonesians’ struggle for independence.

In memory of the landing, a monument known to local people as Tugu Australia stands in Balikpapan, today one of the main cities of the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan (East Borneo). For Australia the landing of 1 July 1945 remains the largest amphibious operation in its history and its army’s last great battle of the Second World War – and also, together with the whole Borneo campaign, the subject of an unresolved debate over whether it was worth fighting.