Overcoming Geography, but still Struggling with Terrain: Balikpapan, 1945

Abstract

On 1 July 1945, following what one veteran later described as a ‘magnificent display of firepower’,1 troops of the 7th Australian Division landed on the shores of the eastern Borneo town of Balikpapan, now part of the province of East Kalimantan in Indonesia. It was the last major amphibious operation of the Second World War, the largest ever conducted under Australian command, and involved one of the longest direct projections of Australian force to secure a hostile shore. In a volume taking as its theme the relationship between strategy and geography, it is worth noting that Balikpapan is a little under 4000 kilometres from Kyushu, the most southerly of the Japanese home islands. Concurrent to the Australian landing at Balikpapan, United States forces were completing the mopping up of Japanese forces on Okinawa, just 550 kilometres from Japan. As Lieutenant General Frank Berryman, Chief of Staff of Australian Advanced Land Headquarters, noted in his diary immediately following the Okinawa landings, the US operations there had effectively bypassed the South-West Pacific theatre, and with it Borneo.