Borneo 1945: The Last Major Allied Campaign in the South-West Pacific

96 pages

Prof Geoffrey Till

As the subtitle to this book says, it covers the last major amphibious operation that was conducted largely by the Australians under General Dougla A MacArthur in the Pacific war.  Indeed, the operation – one of the OBOE series – was still underway when the Pacific War finally ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The book follows the standard Osprey template for battle and campaign booklets. Lavishly illustrated, with especially good and very necessary maps, concisely written with explanatory diagrams and pictures, it covers a great deal of ground very quickly, indeed a little too quickly in places. The trouble is that this is a big subject and there’s much that requires attention. The result is therefore heavy on narrative but light on analysis. In some places, the reader is overwhelmed by tactical detail and it can be hard to see what’s significant and what isn’t.

To a degree, the nature and objective of campaign itself makes that likely. The author situates his readers well, as he explains that towards the end of the war while MacArthur was determined to return to the Philippines, the Australians were adamant that they too should have a place in the sun of distinctive operational achievement. This would, they hoped, set them up as an autonomous actor in the final drive on Japan and its ultimate invasion. This could have consequence for their agency in the postwar world. In the recovery of the Philippines, however, they would be just a bit player. In the recovery of Borneo, on the other hand, they would be the primary actor. This would give them, they hoped, strategic influence to be reckoned with. Retaking Borneo could also be a step towards the recovery of Singapore from the south while British Imperial forces swept in from the West.

So, the long series of OBOE operations to recover Borneo was prepared for and initiated with the invasion and recapture of the nearby island of Tarakan in early May 1945. By this time though, the Japanese were poorly prepared and greatly outnumbered. Hitherto, the amphibious war in this part of the Pacific had been fought on British lines, by avoiding frontal assault and building on surprise as much as possible. This was in striking contrast to the ‘storm landings’ characteristic of the campaign of the US Navy and Marines in the Central Pacific. In that campaign, the small size of the islands in question and the ease with which the Japanese would be able to predict the next small islands needed for the Allied air war against Japan, both made frontal assault unavoidable. To compensate, the Americans abandoned the prospect of of surprise and instead relied on massive, long air and sea bombardment to suppress Japanese defences. This proved so efficient that the Japanese were forced to respond by pulling back their defences from the beach and instead investing in vast underground fortresses, from which they needed winkling out often at high cost.

The Borneo campaign proved to be a fusion of the two approaches. Apart from OBOE 1 at Tarakan, the initial landings were mostly largely unopposed. The Japanese did build underground redoubts but their resistance even here was limited. The Australians, with an eye to the approaching end of the war, were very anxious to avoid casualties as much as possible and so assembled large US-Australian bombardment fleets to reduce Japanese resistance beforehand. Overall, this worked. With far superior resources, there was a kind of mechanical efficiency to the Australian campaign. It led to the progressive capture of objective after objective with a level of loss that was a fraction of that suffered by the US Marines at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But even so, the campaign was not finished and so did not yield the strategic benefits the Australians had hoped for because the war ended far more quickly than its planners could possibly have anticipated.

The operation nonetheless led to the loss of nearly 300 Australians and about ten times that number of Japanese. In consequence, there were many who wondered what had been the point of it all. This book usefully answers that basic question, and by so doing underlines the fact that when planning in war nothing can be taken for granted.