Battle of Tarakan, 1945: the airfield that came too late

Tarakan was a small campaign with a long argument attached. The Australian War Memorial calls the Oboe operations of 1945 some of the most controversial fought by Australian troops in the war, and relative to the number of men involved, Tarakan was the most costly of them all.²

Background: oil, an airfield and a plan

Tarakan lies off the northeast coast of Borneo. Before the war it was part of the Netherlands East Indies and an important oil-producing center. In 1945 General Douglas MacArthur planned a series of landings in Borneo, codenamed Oboe, at first as part of an advance toward Java. Tarakan, Oboe One, came first, followed by Brunei Bay on 10 June and Balikpapan on 1 July.³

The island mattered for its oil and above all for its airfield. Once the strip was repaired, seven RAAF squadrons of Kittyhawks, Spitfires and Beaufighters were to move in and support the landings that followed. MacArthur ordered Lieutenant General Sir Leslie Morshead's I Australian Corps to take the island, destroy the garrison, restore the Netherlands East Indies administration and save the oil installations, and Morshead gave the task to the 26th Brigade Group of the 9th Australian Division. The airfield was meant to be ready a week after the landing, on 7 May.⁴

Many senior Australian officers thought the whole Oboe plan strategically unsound. The Memorial notes that the United States, for its own political and military reasons, did not want Australian troops to retake the Philippines, while the Australian government pressed MacArthur to give them visible and meaningful roles.⁵

Armies and commanders

The force was large for so small an island: about 17,500 men, of whom 10,800 were Australian soldiers, 5,700 RAAF personnel, 130 Royal Australian Navy beach commandos and some 900 Americans and Dutch, carried by about 120 ships. The troops came from the 9th Division, some of them veterans of the Middle East and New Guinea, and gathered for the operation on the island of Morotai.⁶ › El Alamein, 1942

The air side began badly. The historian Tony Hastings traces a bitter feud between the RAAF's two senior commanders, Air Vice-Marshals George Jones and William Bostock, and a crisis in the First Tactical Air Force, whose commander, Air Commodore Harry Cobby, Bostock wanted removed. Cobby's successor, Air Commodore Frederick Scherger, took over only on 10 May, after the landing. On the day of the assault, the RAAF squadrons meant to strike the island stayed on the ground because they had used up their allotted monthly flying hours, to Bostock's fury.⁷

Against them stood a garrison of about 2,100 Japanese, including some 250 civilian workers. Most of them withdrew from the beaches into the jungle-covered hills that overlooked the airfield, and dug in there.⁸

The battle in phases

A landing in the mud

On the eve of the landing a small force went ashore on the tiny island of Sadau just offshore, so that artillery could support the engineers while they blew gaps in the obstacles the Japanese had planted to stop landing craft. On 1 May, after a heavy naval and air bombardment, the assault battalions began landing just after 8 a.m.⁹

The Memorial describes the landing as made with little real difficulty. The beaches were another matter. They turned out to be tidal flats of thick black mud, seven American tank landing ships were stranded on them, and tanks, guns and vehicles piled up on the shore.¹⁰

The airfield

The infantry pushed inland against growing resistance around Tarakan town, and on 5 May they took the airfield. When RAAF engineers inspected it, they found it cratered by Allied bombing, badly waterlogged and sown with mines; in two days a bomb disposal unit found and defused 114 of them. Peter Stanley, quoted by Hastings, remarks that the air commanders had planned the complete destruction of the very airfield on which the whole operation was based.¹¹

Repairing it became a battle of its own. The engineers filled the water-logged craters only to see them refill with rain and seepage, and the wet weather, Odgers wrote, had a depressing effect on the men. Army sappers and local labourers were brought in to help. It took seven weeks, far longer than planned, and the strip missed the Brunei Bay landing on 10 June altogether.¹²

Bunker by bunker

Meanwhile the infantry had to drive the Japanese out of the hills. They had to find well-hidden bunkers in close fighting and storm them one by one, supported by artillery, tanks, naval gunfire and aircraft dropping bombs and napalm. The defenders, with no way off the island, fought for every knoll.¹³

One of the dead was Lieutenant Tom “Diver” Derrick VC of the 2/48th Battalion. In the fighting for a ridge called Freda, which began on 19 May, his platoon took a knoll in the fading light. Before dawn on 23 May the Japanese struck back, and Derrick, hit by machine-gun fire, went on giving orders for hours before he was carried out. He died of his wounds, and the battalion's diarist wrote that the news had a profound effect on the whole unit.¹⁴

Turning point: the end of the garrison

By the second half of June the Japanese had lost their last organized positions. MacArthur's staff dated the operation from 1 May to 21 June, but small parties held out in the jungle, and the fighting went on until the end of the war in August.¹⁵

Most of the Japanese fought to the death. Of about 2,100 on the island, only 252 surrendered before the war ended and about 300 more after the ceasefire; the Memorial counts over 1,500 killed.¹⁶

Aftermath

The 26th Brigade had suffered 894 casualties, 225 of them killed by the counts of the Memorial and Hastings; the Department of Veterans' Affairs says more than 250 Australians lost their lives on Tarakan. The Memorial compares this with Balikpapan, where the whole 7th Division was engaged and lost only two more men killed.¹⁷

The RAAF began flying from Tarakan on 30 June, a day before the landing at Balikpapan. The strip remained too rough for the twin-engine Beaufighters, but in July the Kittyhawks and Spitfires of No. 78 Wing flew 858 sorties from it and gave close air support to the 7th Division.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Australia's official historians were blunt. Gavin Long wrote that the airfield proved so difficult to repair that it was not ready in time for either Brunei Bay or Balikpapan, and the RAAF historian George Odgers concluded that since the operation was undertaken chiefly to establish an airfield, Tarakan must be regarded as a failure. In 1983 the journalist and historian Peter Charlton made Australia's campaigns of 1945 the subject of a book he titled The Unnecessary War.¹⁹

Hastings, in a study written with Professor Peter Stanley, qualifies that verdict. He points out that Odgers himself records the RAAF flying from Tarakan from 30 June, and concludes that Oboe One was not essential to the success of the Borneo campaign, but that calling it simply a failure overlooks what was achieved at great cost. The Memorial goes further than the official histories, saying that by the end of the war neither the airfield nor the oil facilities had been brought back into operation; for the airfield, at least, the RAAF's own record says otherwise.²⁰ › 1 May in military history