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

Why Tarakan

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, and the Japanese occupied it in early 1942. In 1945 General Douglas MacArthur planned a series of landings in Borneo, codenamed Oboe. 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.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

A landing in the mud

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. Before the assault Australian engineers blew gaps in the obstacles the Japanese had planted to stop landing craft, supported by artillery landed on a small island offshore.⁶

On 1 May, after a heavy naval and air bombardment, the assault battalions began landing just after 8 a.m. 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.⁷

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, and apparently abandoned by the Japanese months before. The plan had called for it to be working by 7 May. It was not ready until the end of June, seven weeks late and too late for the Brunei Bay landing on 10 June. RAAF aircraft began flying from Tarakan on 30 June, a day before the landing at Balikpapan.⁸

Bunker by bunker

Most of the garrison had withdrawn into the jungle-covered hills overlooking the airfield, and the Australians had to drive them out. It was close-quarter fighting of the nastiest kind: patrols probing for heavily camouflaged bunkers, which then had to be taken one at a time, even with massive fire support that included napalm dropped by B-24 Liberators. The fighting went on until the end of the war in August.⁹

By then the 26th Brigade had suffered 894 casualties, 225 of them killed. The Memorial compares this with Balikpapan, where the whole 7th Division was engaged and lost only two more men killed. Most of the Japanese fought to the death. Of about 2,100 Japanese on the island, including some 250 civilian workers, only 252 surrendered before the war ended and about 300 more after the ceasefire; the Memorial counts over 1,500 killed.¹⁰

A wasted effort?

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 placed it in what he called the unnecessary war of 1945.¹¹

The MHHV study, based on a chapter co-written with Professor Peter Stanley, qualifies that verdict somewhat, pointing to what the RAAF did manage to fly from Tarakan once the strip opened, and to the command quarrels inside the RAAF that hampered the operation. But the Memorial's summary stands: by the end of the war neither the island's airfield nor its oil facilities had been returned to working order.¹²