Oil from Tarakan

On 27 June 1945 an unusual ceremony took place on the oilfields of Tarakan, a small island off the east coast of Borneo. Javanese workers, led by their elder, performed a rite meant to bring good fortune: they laid a cow’s head in a miniature grave, and their leader chanted a blessing. Australian and Dutch officers looked on, among them Brigadier David Whitehead, commander of the Australian 26th Brigade, which had been fighting for the island since 1 May. The ceremony marked the restarting of the first five oil wells wrecked by the war.

It is often said that on this day the first oil pump was rebuilt on Tarakan. The date is confirmed: the caption of a photograph of 27 June 1945 in the collection of the Australian War Memorial refers to the opening of the “first five oil wells” on Tarakan. It is therefore more accurate to speak of several wells than of a single pump. It should also be added that this was only a symbolic resumption of production – oil from Tarakan flowed on a larger scale only after the war had ended.

An island worth a war

Before the war Tarakan was one of the most valuable corners of the Dutch East Indies. The swampy island, some 24 kilometres long, held two oilfields – Sesanip and the larger Djoeata – worked by the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij, a subsidiary of the Royal Dutch Shell group. In 1941 they produced about 80,000 barrels of crude oil a month. According to many accounts, the oil here was so light and pure that after minimal processing, or even without refining, it could be used to bunker warships – which mattered enormously to a navy that needed fuel in distant waters.

That is precisely why Tarakan was among the first targets of the Japanese southward offensive. In the Japanese invasion of Borneo the Japanese began with the oilfields of Miri and Seria in Sarawak and Brunei, and on 11 January 1942 they landed on Tarakan. The Dutch garrison managed to blow up the wells, pipelines and tanks before surrendering. Japanese engineers, however, quickly repaired the damage: by early 1944 the island was producing about 350,000 barrels a month, more than before the war.

Yet this prize proved less and less useful to Japan. The oil was worth only as much as could be shipped, and American submarines and aircraft were sinking tankers on the routes to Japan. The last Japanese tanker left Tarakan in July 1944. Allied air raids later destroyed the production equipment and storage, and air-laid mines cut the island off from shipping. When, in April 1945, the Japanese command expected a landing, the commandant of the local fuel depot was ordered on 15 April to destroy the wells. The Allies were thus to recover oilfields wrecked for the second time in three years.

A secondary objective

When the Australian 26th Brigade Group landed on Tarakan on 1 May 1945, oil was not its main task. The operation – the first stage of the Oboe plan, prepared by the Australian I Corps under General Leslie Morshead – was undertaken above all for the airfield. Within a few days it was to receive fighters to cover the subsequent landings in North Borneo and at Balikpapan. Securing the oilfields and bringing them into production for Allied forces in the area was a secondary objective. Responsibility for it lay with a Dutch technical company of the colonial army (KNIL), followed by the military oil-industry rehabilitation service and officials of NICA, the Dutch civil administration that was to take over authority in the recovered territories.

The Commander-in-Chief in the South West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur, justified the Borneo campaign partly on the grounds that it would give the Allied forces ports and oilfields. Tarakan was the first test of that promise.

The end of the fighting for the island

The fighting lasted much longer than expected. Some 1,700 Japanese soldiers and sailors held out in the wooded hills in the centre of the island for seven weeks. On 14 June the survivors abandoned their last positions and withdrew northwards; on the same day 112 Chinese and Indonesian labourers came out of the Japanese-held area carrying a note from a Japanese officer asking that they be treated well. Radio Tokyo announced the fall of Tarakan on 15 June, the Australians met the last organised resistance on 19 June, and according to the Australian official history Whitehead declared the island secure on 21 June. Scattered and increasingly starving groups of Japanese nevertheless hid in the jungle until the end of the war – the 26th Brigade lost another 36 men hunting them down, and some 300 Japanese soldiers surrendered only after Japan’s capitulation.

The oilfields lay in the combat zone. Both fields lay beyond the airfield, close to the hills that were fought over throughout May and for most of June. Work could not begin in earnest as long as the Japanese were able to fire on or harass the repair teams. Some accounts stress that the repairs were delayed both by the sheer scale of the destruction and by the presence of Japanese stragglers.

The ceremony of 27 June

Even so, the first wells were brought back into operation only six days after organised fighting ended. Photographs of 27 June preserved in the Australian War Memorial collection show Javanese workers – probably some of those the Japanese had brought to the island from Java – during the rite, attended by Whitehead, Major J. Emeis, commander of the local NICA detachment, and Major H. A. Stheeman of the military oil-industry rehabilitation service. According to the photograph’s caption, the ceremony celebrated “the opening of the first five oil wells on Tarakan”.

The presence of Dutch officers carried political weight. The Dutch were not only recovering their former property; they also wanted to show that they were returning to the islands as the governing power. The Australians who had taken Tarakan were cast as the force clearing the ground for the restored colonial administration – a role whose meaning became ever more contested in the light of the events of the following months.

An airfield a month late

The day after the ceremony on the oilfields, on 28 June, the airfield finally opened. Engineers of the Royal Australian Air Force’s No. 61 Airfield Construction Wing had worked on it for eight weeks instead of the planned one: the runway was cratered by bombs, and the waterlogged ground would not hold a surface. In the end it was laid with pierced steel planking, remnants of which, according to some accounts, survive beside today’s airport. The airfield came too late for the landings at Brunei Bay and Labuan on 10 June. No. 78 Wing RAAF, based there from 28 June, was able to take part only in the operations at Balikpapan, where the last stage of the Oboe plan was to land on 1 July.

Setting the two dates side by side is telling. The oil – a subsidiary objective – began to flow at roughly the same time as the main objective, the airfield, was achieved, and both were reached only when Borneo itself was losing its importance for the further course of the war.

What Tarakan’s oil was worth

The five wells opened on 27 June did not change the fuel balance of the Allies, who by then had enormous American oil resources at their disposal. Production rose quickly, however: according to studies based on Australian sources, by October 1945 the Tarakan fields were already producing about 8,000 barrels a day and providing work for many of the island’s inhabitants. The same studies also note that the fields became fully operational only after the war – the two statements do not contradict each other if 27 June is seen as the start of reconstruction rather than a return to pre-war production.

The assessment of the Tarakan operation as a whole remains disputed. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison judged it a very well executed landing that achieved its objectives at small cost. The Australian official historian Gavin Long came to the opposite conclusion: the results did not justify the losses, which amounted to about 225 Australians killed and 669 wounded. The airfield for which the landing had been made did not play its intended role, and the oil, though recovered, no longer had any bearing on the outcome of the war. Some Australian commanders, including the Army’s Commander-in-Chief, General Thomas Blamey, doubted the point of the later stages of the Borneo campaign; its defenders point out that in June 1945 no one knew the war would end in August, and further operations in the Netherlands Indies were still being planned for 1946.

From an economic point of view, however, Tarakan was an investment in the post-war order. Rebuilding the wells served not only the immediate needs of the military but, above all, the return of the Dutch oil industry and of Dutch rule in the East Indies.

What came next

After 27 June events moved quickly. On 1 July the Australian 7th Division landed at Balikpapan, the refining centre of eastern Borneo – the last major Allied landing of the war. Six weeks later Japan capitulated, and the 26th Brigade remained on Tarakan as an occupation force until December 1945.

The oil for which Japan had in large part gone to war in the Pacific returned to its former owners – but not for long under the old order. On 17 August 1945 Indonesian leaders proclaimed independence, and the Indonesian National Revolution began. At the end of 1949 the Netherlands recognised the sovereignty of Indonesia, and Tarakan with its oilfields became part of the new state. The ceremony of 27 June 1945 – a Javanese rite under the eyes of Australian and Dutch officers – was thus one of the last images of the colonial oil industry on Borneo, revived just as the era it had served was coming to an end.