“This Landing Is Pointless” — How 21,000 Australians Took The Beach MacArthur Wasted Them On

On the morning of the 1st of July 1945, the sea off the east coast of Borneo was black with ships and the shore ahead of them was on fire. Nearly a 100 vessels stood off a place  called Balik Papan, an oil port on the far side of the world from home and their guns had been pounding it for the better part of 3 weeks.

 Now the barges were forming up, loaded with Australian infantry and running in toward a beach hidden behind a wall of black smoke and burning oil. It was the largest  and most complicated attack Australia had ever launched. And it had been years in the making. The men in the barges belonged to the 7th Australian Division, Veterans of the Desert and the Jungles of New Guinea, and there were around 21,000 of them at the heart of a combined force  of more than 33,000.

Behind them lay the heaviest bombardment ever fired to cover  an Australian landing. Ahead of them lay a fortified oil town held by a Japanese garrison dug deep into the ridges  above the water. Everything about the operation was bigger and more carefully organized than anything the division had done before.

  And it was about to become the finest setpiece assault the country ever mounted. And almost  none of it needed to happen. By the middle of 1945, the war in the Pacific was all but decided. Japan was beaten in the field, her navy gone, and her cities  burning, and her surrender lay only weeks away over a horizon nobody on that beach could yet see.

 Australia’s own commander-in-chief, General Thomas Blamey, had studied the plan to take Balik Poppin, and told his  superiors that it served no strategic purpose worth the lives it would cost. The town would  change nothing about how or when the war came to its end. But the plan had a powerful backer. General Douglas MacArthur, the American who commanded the whole of the Southwest Pacific, wanted the Borneo landings,  and he pushed them through over Blamey’s objection.

 The government in Canra, unwilling  to break with the man running the theater, agreed to hand him the men. So on the 1st of July, the seventh division went in anyway  into a burning oil port to win a prize the war would soon make worthless. MacArthur himself sailed in aboard a cruiser  to watch them do it.

 And then he sailed away again. In the barges, the diggers crouched under the smoke and watched the shore come up close now, the oil tanks burning along the ridge line and the water  itself sllicked and a light in patches. The naval guns lifted their fire and walked it inland. The ramps were about to go down.

 21,000 men were about to storm a beach for a battle their own commander had called a waste in a war they already sensed was  won. And there was nothing left to do about any of that now. The only  way off the water was forward up the sand and into whatever was waiting in the smoke. The road to that beach had started  far away in the quiet strategy rooms where the last year of the Pacific War was being planned.

 By 1945,  the Great American Drive was rolling north toward Japan itself, island by island, carried on a tide of ships and aircraft that grew heavier every month. Australia’s soldiers, who had done so much of the early fighting when the situation looked desperate, had been gently pushed to the edge of that drive. The main event no longer needed them.

What they were handed instead was Borneo, a large island off to the side of the war and a run of landings that carried the code name Obo. On paper, Borneo had a reason, and the reason was oil. Oil ran everything that floated or flew. And Balik Papan on the east coast of the island was one of the richest oil ports in the whole region.

 Its refineries and fuel tanks stood crowded along the shore where for years they had fed the Japanese war machine that reached down through the islands. Taking the port back, the planners argued, would deny the enemy his fuel and hand the allies a fresh base for the push ahead. It was a tidy argument on a map. By the middle of 1945, it had quietly stopped making sense because the enemy it was meant  to starve was already starving on every front.

 There was another reason the Australians  were given Borneo, and it had less to do with grand strategy than with the awkward politics of a shrinking role. As the American war machine swelled,  it needed the Australians less, and there was a quiet wish in the high command to keep  the Australian army busy and visible somewhere that would not get in the American way.

Borneo answered that need neatly. It was a genuine campaign against a  genuine enemy, far enough from the main thrust that it could be handed off entirely to Australian troops under overall American direction. The men who fought there were in a sense being kept in a game whose outcome no longer depended on them.

 The Obo landings were the work of MacArthur’s headquarters, and by that stage of the war, Borneo had become an Australian job through and through. The pattern  was already set by the time Balik Poppin came round. In May, the Australians  had gone ashore at Tarakan, a small oil island off the northeast coast and found  a hard, drawn out fight for a strip of ground that turned out to matter very little in the end.

 In June, a second force  had landed at Brunai Bay in the north. Both were Australian assaults, and both had begun to raise the same  uneasy question in the ranks and in the newspapers back home. What exactly were these landings meant to achieve? General Blamey did not want to make the third one.

 As the senior Australian soldier, he had the standing  to say so, and he said it plainly, arguing that a landing at Balik Pppen  would win nothing the war still needed and would spend Australian lives for a  beach of no real value. He had already fought one of these battles on paper and won it, talking the government out of a further landing  on Java that would have cost more men for even less.

On Balik Papen, he lost the argument. The operation was too far advanced, the shipping already committed, and the American who wanted it simply  outranked him. That man was MacArthur, and Balik Papan was his  to insist on. His headquarters had planned the Borneo operations. He had championed them all the way up the chain of command, and when doubts drifted back from the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, he pressed on regardless of them.

 The decision was not his alone, and it would be unfair to pretend it was. Canbor agreed to provide the troops, and the Americans signed the final plan off. But the drive behind the thing was his, and in the long argument that followed the war, history has largely laid the battle at his door  and left it there.

 The men who would pay for the decision were the soldiers of the seventh division, and they were not green troops being  thrown away by commanders who did not know them. The division had earned its name the hard way in the worst places the war could offer. Its men had helped stop the Japanese on the Kakakota track when it looked as though nothing on earth could.

And they had cleared the enemy out of the New Guinea beach heads in some of the filthiest,  closest fighting of the whole Pacific War. They knew exactly how expensive a mistake in that kind of country could be. That knowledge was  part of what made Balikapan sting so much.

 Men who had already given the war  so much were being asked to do it all again at the very end for a beach their own commander said was  not worth the taking. For this last battle they were led by Major General Edward Milford and their three brigades the 18th, the 21st and the 25th were about to carry out the  largest amphibious assault their country had ever attempted.

 Balik Papon itself sat on a curve of the coast, a working oil town of refineries and fuel tanks  and jetties backed by a line of steep jungle-covered ridges that rose almost straight up from behind the waterfront. Those ridges were the real key to the place. Whoever held the high ground behind the beaches could look down on everything coming ashore and pour fire into it at leisure.

 And the Japanese had spent long months  turning that ground into a fortress. The defenders had dug deep, and they had used their  time well. Along the ridges and around the edges of the town, they had built pill boxes and bunkers linked by  tunnels, and they had cighted their guns with care to cover the beaches and the roads inland.

 They had anti-aircraft guns that could be cranked down to fire straight out to sea, level with the landing craft coming in. And they had the oil itself pumped into trenches and out along the foreshore  and left standing ready to be set alike so that any man waiting ashore in the wrong place might have to come through fire as well as through bullets to reach dry sand.

Nobody on the Australian side knew for certain  how many defenders were waiting. But the garrison at Balik Poppen ran into several thousand men. It was a mix of naval landing troops and army units stiffened with laborers who had been pressed into the line to hold the oil port to the last. They had  watched the bombardment come down on them for the better part of 3 weeks and had stayed at their posts through all of it, deep in their tunnels  while the ground shook.

 Whatever the Australians thought of the reasons for the coming battle, the men waiting for them in the bunkers had every intention of making it a costly one. Before the assault waves  went in, small parties had already been at work in the dark. Swimmers and reconnaissance teams went in close to the shore in the days before the landing, charting the water and the beach gradients and marking the underwater obstacles the Japanese had planted to snag the barges.

 It was patient, dangerous work done a few hundred yards off a hostile coast with the enemy watching, and it took much of the guesswork out of the run-in. By the morning of the landing, the men steering the assault craft had a fair picture of where the safe water lay and where the traps had been cleared for them.

 Then, before a single Australian riflemen set foot on the sand, the Allies set out to hammer the place flat. For 20 days, the ships and the aircraft worked over Balik Poppin in the heaviest preparation ever fired to support an Australian landing anywhere. Something like 3,000 tons of bombs went down on the town and the ridges behind it.

 More than 7,000 rockets and better than 38,000 shells  followed them in. The mind sweepers spent 15 days clearing the approaches under fire and lost boats  and men doing it, so that by the time the infantry arrived, whole districts of the  port had been pounded down into rubble and ash. The bombardment did something the planners had not entirely reckoned on.

  It set the oil al light. Shells and bombs walked through the tank farms and the refineries, and the fuel  caught and burned out of control, sending columns of thick black smoke a thousand ft up into the tropical sky  and laying a filthy, greasy paw over the whole length of the coast. Between the Allied fire and the fires the Japanese  lit deliberately, the shoreline the diggers were about to assault had become a smeared landscape of flame and smoke.

 The men out on the ships could smell the burning long before they were close enough to make out the beach itself. None of this was an Australian show alone, and it would be dishonest to tell it that way. The whole operation  rode in on an American amphibious machine that Australia could never have built for itself. The United States 7th  Fleet carried it.

 The transports and the landing craft and the shape of the assault, all run by Vice Admiral Daniel Barbie, whose amphibious force had put one army after another ashore across the length of the Pacific. American bombers of the 13th Air Force and escort carriers standing off the coast flew much of the air support, working alongside the Australian squadrons of the first tactical air force.

 The Americans supplied the reach and the muscle. The Australians would supply the infantry who had to walk into the fire. The fleet gathered off Balik Papen was a small navy in its own right, close on a 100 ships riding at their stations off that burning coast. American and Australian cruisers and destroyers hammered the shore in support while the flatbottomed landing ships waited their turn to discouge the tanks and the trucks and the guns.

  Overhead, bombers and fighters wheeled in and out of the smoke, marking  targets on the ridges and coming down to work them over. It was the kind of concentrated force that only the industrial weight of a great  power could assemble. Gathered here and lent for the day to put a single Australian  division onto one Japanese beach.

 Just before 9:00 on the morning of the 1st of  July, the first wave went in. The barges and the tracked amphibians ground toward the beaches with the naval guns firing flat over their heads. And then the guns lifted away inland. And there came that terrible hanging moment when the shelling has stopped and the ramps have not yet dropped.

 The men could see the smoke rolling black off the burning tanks above them and the churned gray sand ahead of the boughs. Then the ramps banged down and they were out waiting through the warm shallows and up onto the beach at Balikapan with their weapons held high out of the water. The infantry came ashore aboard a strange managerie of craft.

 Some rode the flat steel barges that simply dropped a ramp onto the sand and  spilled them out. Others came in aboard the tracked amphibians, the boxy armored buffaloos that could swim in out of the sea, and then drive straight up over the beach and in land without ever stopping to unload.

 The plan had been drilled and drilled until every man knew his exact place in it, which wave he rode in, and where he was to head the moment the ramp went  down. For all the fire waiting ahead of them, the run-in itself had the strange, awful orderliness of a thing rehearsed a hundred times  over.

 The landing itself went almost exactly to the plan, which after the fires and  the shelling felt to the men like a small miracle. The long bombardment had done its  work on the beach defenses, and the leading waves crossed the open sand and pushed on inland faster than anyone had let themselves hope. behind them. The machine kept pouring  men and vehicles and stores ashore in an endless stream.

 Within the first hour of the assault, something like 16,000  men and close to a thousand vehicles were already up on the beach, moving off it and sorting themselves out for the drive on the town and the high ground beyond it. For the men who had braced themselves for a slaughter down on the waterline, the sheer ease of it was almost harder to bear than a fight would have been.

 They had heard all the stories of other landings, of beaches swept end to end by fire and barges  stopped dead and burning in the shallows, and they had gone in fully expecting the worst of it. Instead, the enemy fire on the open sand was thin and scattered, the bombardment having smothered the forward positions, and the first waves crossed the beach and just kept  walking.

 The hard fighting was still ahead of them up in the town and the ridges. But the one moment every man had dreaded, the drop of the ramp into the worst of it,  had somehow passed almost gently. While that was happening down on the sand, the man who had insisted on the whole thing came ashore  to look it over.

 General MacArthur landed on the beach head at Balik Papen during the first day, walked a stretch  of the captured sand with his staff around him, and cast an eye over the operation he had driven through against Blamey’s advice. It was a habit of his by  then, this arriving on the beaches for the newsre cameras once the fighting had rolled  on inland and the danger had passed.

 The diggers doing the actual work up in the ridges never saw him, and most of them  would only learn much later that the general who had sent them there had stood a while on their beach. With the beaches firmly in hand, the division fanned out to seize the things the landing had come all this way to take.

 One thrust drove straight into the town itself and the tangle of oil installations along the water. Others pushed inland and up along the coast toward the airfields at Sepinggon and Mongar, the flat strips that the Allies wanted so they could fly their own aircraft in close. Each objective meant leaving the relative safety of the crowded beach head and going forward into ground the enemy still held in strength and each one soon turned into its own separate little battle in the days that followed the landing.

 The easy part had ended the moment the beach was won. Balik Papan was never going to be lost or held down on the sand and both sides had  always known it. It was going to be fought out up in the ridges and through the wrecked burning streets of the town where the Japanese had built the real weight of their defense and meant to stay.

 As the Australians pushed off the beaches and into the port, the ground itself seemed to come alive and fight back,  and the neat clockwork timetable of the landing gave way to the slow, ugly, grinding work of clearing a fortified position one bunker at a time. The oil town was a nightmare to fight through.

Refinery pipework and steel  storage tanks stood everywhere a man looked. Some of them still burning, others  full and heavy and liable to go up in a sheet of flame the instant a stray shell found them. The ground underfoot was slick with spilled fuel, and the air hung thick and stinging with a smoke that hid the enemy from  more than a few yards off.

 Snipers held the wrecked upper floors of the buildings, and machine guns fired from bunkers built cunningly into the rubble. The infantry had to work forward through all of it with the engineers and the tanks, breaking one strong point before they could move on to the next. The tanks made the difference again and again, all through the town and up into the ridges beyond.

  The Australians had brought their Matildas ashore, slow and heavily armored old machines that  the Japanese in that battle had almost nothing capable of stopping, and they used them to crawl right up to each bunker  and break it open at point blank range. Some of the tanks carried flamethrowers in place of a gun, and where a bunker simply would not give in to shell or bullet, the flame tanks burned the defenders out of it.

 It was brutal, close, methodical work, and it saved the lives of the infantry who would otherwise have had to take those positions with grenades and their own bodies. Behind the tanks came the engineers, and their part in the battle was as dangerous as  any rifleman’s. They went forward to lift the mines the Japanese had sewn thickly across every likely approach,  and to bridge the ditches and craters so the armor could follow.

 and much of it was done down in oil that lay everywhere, waiting for a single spark.  In a town built entirely around fuel, fire was a weapon that did not much care whose side a man happened to be on,  and the sappers spent the whole battle moving through it with the steady knowledge that the ground  itself might suddenly go up all around them.

The naval guns and the aircraft never  really stopped working, even once the infantry were deep in the town. When a company came up hard against a strong point, it could not shift on its own, the call would go back, and a warship lying off the coast would drop its shells onto the map reference, or a fighter would come down out of the smoke to rake the position.

 It took nerve on both ends, calling heavy fire down so close to your own men, and it bound the whole machine together, the soldier in the rubble, and the gunner far out on the gray water, working the same small square of ground. Beyond the town rose the ridges, and the ridges were where the Japanese had chosen to make their real stand.

 They ran in a rough arc behind Balik Pppen, steep and jungle covered and slick underfoot after the rain, and every crest and spur along them had been dug in, tunnneled and wired to hold out for as long as men could hold it. The Australians had to take them one by one, climbing up under fire into positions the defenders had spent months preparing at their leisure,  and then rooting the enemy out of tunnels and bunkers that even that enormous bombardment had barely scratched.

 It was by a distance  the hardest fighting of the whole battle. A single ridge could swallow days. The infantry would fight their way up to the top of one under fire, take it, and then find the  next crest just behind it, held every bit as strongly, so that the whole grinding business had to begin again from the bottom.

 On some of the ridges, the fighting came down to  meters and to minutes. A platoon would work its way up a spur behind covering fire, get in among the forward bunkers with grenade and bayonet, and then have to hold what it had taken through the night against  men who came back at it again and again in the dark, feeling their way in close, where the guns could not help.

Here the ugly little machine carbine the diggers carried came into its own. The Owen gun had been designed and made at home in Australia and cursed at first by the ordinance officers who had wanted nothing to do with it. And it had gone  on to become the one weapon the infantry trusted above all others in the close wet scrub.

 In fighting where a whole action might open at the length of a cricket pitch,  it never jammed and it never let a man down. Ground was one a bunker at a time and then held through the dark and in the gray morning the whole thing began once more on the next crest  along the ridge. The enemy fought the way he almost always did in that war.

 The Japanese on the ridges did not pull  back to save themselves and they did not give up their positions while a man was left to hold them. They stayed in their bunkers under fire that would have broken most troops. They came back in the night in small savage counterattacks to win back a lost crest.

 And when a position was finally overrun, it was usually because the last of its defenders were dead in it. Whatever else the diggers felt about them, the men climbing those ridges came away with a hard respect for an enemy who  would not be moved by anything short of killing. The airfields cost their own hard price.

 The push up the coast toward Mangar  ran into Japanese coastal guns that had somehow ridden out the bombardment down in their imp placements  and they fired on the advancing Australians over open sights until they were dug out one by  one. It took days of careful dangerous work with warships called in to duel the shore guns and infantry closing the last of the ground on foot before the flat strip was finally in hand and the engineers could begin patching it up.

 The airfields had looked so small and simple on the planning maps. On the ground, they were another fortress to be taken. For all the ferocity of the fighting, the cost to the Australians stayed lower than the scale of the assault might have led anyone to fear. The long bombardment, the armor, the flame, and above all, the patient, methodical tactics the division had honed over years of hard war all worked together to keep the casualties down.

 In the whole battle for Balik Pppen, the seventh division lost around 229 men killed with something over 600 more wounded. For the largest amphibious operation Australia ever mounted, thrown against a prepared and fortified position, it was a remarkably careful and controlled piece of soldiering. The Japanese garrison, by contrast, was very nearly wiped from the map.

 More than 2,000 of the defenders fell in the fighting for the  town and the ridges, and only a few dozen were ever taken prisoner, most of them too badly hurt to fight on or to end things themselves. They had held their fortress  exactly the way their orders demanded that they hold it, to the last bunker and the last ridge, and very nearly the last man, and it had cost them almost everyone.

 By the standards of the Pacific War, it was a grimly familiar arithmetic. One more garrison fighting itself to destruction on one more island a long way from home. By around the 21st of July, some 3 weeks after the landing, the main fighting was over. The town was taken and the ridges were cleared and the Japanese who were still alive had broken up into small parties and slipped away into the jungle of the interior.

 But the mopping up that followed was its own long  ordeal, and in a quiet way, it was the crulest part of the whole affair. The great setpiece battle had been won, the objectives all taken, and yet scattered bands of the enemy still held  out in the deep bush, and someone had to go in on foot after them. The patrols went out day after day into the heat and the endless rain, hunting an enemy who would not surrender himself and would not come out  to fight in the open, taking the odd man to a sniper or a sudden ambush for ground that 

no one back home would ever hear of. It was the kind of soldiering that wins no headlines and earns no medals, carried out in the last weeks of a war that everyone on both sides already knew was as good as finished. And it went  on out there in the green steaming heat behind Balik Papan right up until the day the whole war simply stopped around them.

 What the seventh division had done at Balik Papan was by any fair measure a masterpiece of its own difficult craft. An opposed  landing on a fortified enemy coast is one of the very hardest things in all of war. The sort of  operation that can come apart into blood and chaos on the waterline in a matter of minutes.  The division had planned it and rehearsed it and then carried it off almost flawlessly, putting 20,000 men and  all their machines ashore through fire and smoke and breaking a dug-in garrison for a fraction of the

losses such a fight so easily might have cost. They had quietly become masters of the most dangerous thing that soldiers can ever be asked to do. By the third week, the whole shape of the operation stood finished on the ground. The town and the cleared ridges were firmly in Australian hands, and the airfields at Sepingan and Mangar had been taken and were being made ready to receive Allied aircraft.

 On any map spread out at headquarters, it was a clean and total success. Every single objective seized on or close to its planned timetable, and the enemy garrison destroyed where it stood. Judged only as a feat of arms set apart from every awkward question of why, Balik Papan was about as complete  and polished a victory as a single division could ever hope to win.

And then, six short weeks after they had waited ashore through the burning oil, the whole thing was made pointless in a single afternoon. On the 15th of August 1945, Japan surrendered. The war the  men had been fighting, the war that Balik Poppin was meant in some small way to help win, simply ended over their heads.

 The soldiers of the seventh division heard the news while they were still  out in the jungle behind the town, hunting stragglers through the rain, and for a great many of them, the timing of it landed like a slap across  the face. The bitter joke of it went deeper still than the timing. The oil, the whole reason Balik Poppin had ever been worth a landing, turned out to be of almost no use to anyone at all.

The refineries and the tank farms had been  so thoroughly and completely wrecked, first by the Japanese themselves and then by the 20-day Allied bombardment that they could not be coaxed back into any real production until long after the war was over and done with. The men had fought their way through fire for a prize that had already burned itself  down to nothing before they ever set a boot on the sand.

 None of this was hard to see, even at the time, for anyone who cared to look. Blame had seen it clearly before a  single shot was fired. The reporters who came ashore with the troops saw it too,  and a few of them quietly wrote it down. The oil could not be brought back into use in time to matter to the war and the garrison cut off and going  nowhere could have been left to wither away on a beach that no one ever had to storm at all.

 The one argument  still standing for Balik Pppen was that the plans were already drawn and the ships already loaded and in the end that was the argument that carried the day. Blammy, it turned out right all along. The soldiers  and the historians who came after picked the battle over for years and reached much the same hard verdict he had reached before it was ever fought.

 That Balik Papan had served no purpose the war actually needed serving. It had taken ground that did  not matter for oil that could not be used and it changed precisely nothing about when or how the Japanese Empire finally  fell. As a piece of cold strategy weighed on its own merits, it  was in the plainest possible terms a waste of good men.

Balik Papan never found an easy place in the national memory. And the reason was that same tangled contradiction at its heart. The other great battles had clean simple shapes that a country could take hold of and be proud of without complication. This one did not. It was a great victory and a pointless one at the very same time.

 a triumph of soldiering wrapped tightly around a hollow center. And there was no simple way to tell the story that did honest justice to both halves of it at once. So for a long time it was mostly not told at all, remembered by the men who had been there and passed over quietly by nearly everyone else. But a waste is a judgment about the men who ordered a battle and never about the men who went out and fought it.

 Nothing whatever about the pointlessness of Balik Poppin takes anything away from what the diggers actually did on that shore. They were handed a job that should never have been set for them. And they went out and did it better than anyone had any right to expect with a skill and a steadiness that held the cost of the thing down through the worst of the ridges.

 The failure at Balik Papen was a failure of command  made far away and high up. The performance on the ground was theirs  alone. The men who came home from it carried a particular kind of resentment afterward, something quieter than grief and a good deal harder to shake off  with the years.

 They had gone into a real battle with real fear in the barges and real loss on the ridges in the last few  weeks of a war that every one of them knew in his bones was already won. Some of them never quite forgave the decision that had put them there. They did not talk about it a great deal  in the way that whole generation did not talk about much of what they had seen.

 But the anger sat there underneath it all that their mates had been spent so very late and for so very little. Ask a bullik poppin man about it decades later and you might get a shrug and a hard dry little line about generals or you might get nothing back at all but a look. What you would never get from him  was so much as a flicker of doubt about the men who had been beside him on that coast.

 Whatever any of them privately thought about the reasons for the  battle, the diggers had done the thing itself, the only way they ever tried to do anything, looking after the man on their left and the man on their right, getting the job in front of them done and getting as many of each other home again as they possibly could.

 The waste had been somebody else’s doing. The mat ship was theirs and it stayed theirs. MacArthur went on from that beach to the great surrender ceremony and to his place in history as the towering commander of the Pacific War. Blamey, the Australian who had tried his level best to stop the battle before it began, took less of the credit and a good  deal more of the criticism in the years that followed in the way that so often happens to the man who turns out to have been right a little too early for anyone’s comfort. And

Balikapan itself slid  steadily to the very edges of the story. A clean victory that nobody quite  knew how to celebrate because the thing it had been fought to achieve had never in truth needed achieving. The  oil town was rebuilt in time and the smoke finally cleared off the ridges and the young men who had climbed and taken them grew old and gray at home  on the far side of the world.

 What they left behind them on that hot foreign coast was a neat row of white headstones and a hard simple truth that the histories took long years to say out loud. On the 1st of July 1945,  21,000 Australians carried out the finest landing their country ever made through fire and against  a fortress in a battle that never should have been fought at all.

 They did everything asked of them and they did it very nearly perfectly. It was the war around them that had already got it