Chapter 378
5th March 1944
Off the coast of Borneo, near Balikpapan, aboard HMAS
Australia
“Sir,
Sydney is requesting permission to close the shore to better support the front.”
Rear Admiral O'Hara, RAN, looked at his long-suffering Staff Communications Officer, a Dutch Army Captain and forced himself not to rip his head off for something he could do nothing about.
“Captain Achterberg, you may tell Captain Charles, again, that he commands one of Her Majesty's Australian Cruisers and not a bloody gunboat on the Yangtse. He is to remain on station and cover the transports as he is bloody well ordered to!”
“Yes, Sir.” the Captain replied, but made no move to go about his duties. “There is also a message from General Granger, he says that Japanese resistance is lessening.”
That was something at least. O'Hara glanced at his wristwatch. Just after eight.
The first units of the joint Dutch/Australian 100th Division had landed north of the town two hours ago just after sunrise, and it had taken them almost half the time that had elapsed since to get more than half a mile inland. Japanese resistance here was fanatical, probably because they were hoping to delay the Allies in a place where there was at least a reasonable hope for support from the Phillippines up north, unlike in the South near Banjarmasin where the Japanese had withdrawn after setting fire to every well and oil infrastructure, never mind most of the city that had been the old Dutch administrative centre for the Island. It was too close to Java and unfortunately for the Allies the Japanese commander on the Island was someone who favoured sound tactical and strategic thinking over the Bushido code.
Unlike most of the men on this ship and in his Battlegroup he knew that what remained of the city would be in Allied hands by the end of the day, as a Dutch brigade should have landed there by now. Unfortunately with the city more or less on fire, they would be stuck there just as effectively as if the Japanese still fought it out.
Both landings that one and his were but a side show though. No, the main event would have started at about the same time as his, but on the other side of the Island. They had traded the high tide for semi-darkness in their approach, and there the full force of the Borneo Force would be used.
There, east of Kuching, the ANZAC Marine Brigade would land, backed up by two squadrons of British tanks, old Mathildas to be sure, but considering the state of what the Japanese called tanks, still deadly. There the ad-hoc CANZAC Carrier Group provided close cover with the British main force guarding against intervention by the Japanese fleet units around Formosa.
Ahead of
Australia the bombardment force made lazy circles off the coast. The biggest ship there was HMS
Repulse, her six fifteen inch guns thundering out half-salvoes at regular intervals on the co-ordinates provided by the troops on the ground. O'Hara had chosen the smaller cruiser as a flagship. For one, the Battlecruiser's guns were better employed shelling Japanese positions, secondly, his ship was not in the gunline and yet large enough for his purposes. The commander of the 100th Division was a Dutch Major General, a man who O'Hara didn't particularly like as a person but respected as an officer. He would have things well in hand, not content with sitting about and wait for the Japanese to withdraw northwards as the plan was. The entirety of this landing was more about denying Balikpapan to the Japanese than to re-take it for the Dutch, O'Hara was certain, though politics would prevent it from ever being admitted to.
And yet, the fight in French Indochina had shown that even small Allied forces could accomplish a lot, if properly handled. Who knew where the 100th would end up.
However the Japanese had no intention on making it easy. So far the idea was that the area around the city had been defended by a brigade belonging to the 37th Army, and even though they had to know that they were doomed especially since their road northwards was cut off and the Dutch seemed to be on the verge of reaching the bay and completing the encirclement of the city within the next two or three hours, they knew that the Japanese would make them pay dearly for every step they took forwards. What was worse, most of the civilian population had remained, and according to the Dutch there was a severe dearth of cellars deep enough to hide in.
'Still, needs must when the devil drives.' O'Hara thought and trained his binoculars towards the shore. By now it was too light to see the flashes gunfire easily, but he kept his binoculars trained on the shore. Since the start of the war in the Pacific the Japanese had shown many times how they fought, and he doubted that there would be much of the city left when the ground troops had rooted out the last of them from their holes. As if to underscore this the pillars of dark, black smoke from the refineries and generally the oil infrastructure in the area became easily visible. This and the sounds of battle as a constant din in the background gave the entire scene a hellish aura, and O'Hara was glad that he wasn't on shore with the soldiers, glad at having joined the Navy.
Ahead
Renown fired again and again, making O'Hara wonder how much ammunition she had left, even with the almost exclusively High Explosive shells she'd left Singapore with.
On shore the Australian and Dutch soldiers would be glad of her heavy shells though, because if there was one thing they had all learned from the past two years of war, it was that the Japanese would not die easy.
~**---**~
What O'Hara could not know was that the Japanese force was far more brittle than anyone could have suspected. When the Commander of the 37th Army had pulled his units back north and west, he had also withdrawn what little heavy Artillery the Brigade had had to begin with. What was more, the Brigade was a Forlorn hope in practicality, as the existing roads would not have allowed a speedy withdrawal even without the Allies cutting what roads the road that the Japanese had built with the sweat and blood of others. Additionally it's commander was known more for his ability to follow orders than any tactical brilliance or ability, and he had been told to hold the area as long as he could.
Luckily for the Allies, Infantry was not the only thing that had been allocated to the Division.
A shortage of LCTs in theatre meant that only a single squadron of them, with twenty-two Matildas of all types was landed in support of the Division. Of those most were of the Close Support variant, though eight where of the Frog variant, and in high demand everywhere because of their flame throwers.
However, what the Japanese may have lacked in heavy weapons and leadership, they tried to make up with sheer tenacity and will to fight. It ended up taking the Allies around seventy hours to fully secure what little was left of the town.
Japanese reaction to both landings was limited. When news of the landings reached the Combined Fleet on Formosa, most ships started to take up steam in order to go to sea, but Admiral Toyoda advised Tokyo that the American move towards Iwo Jima via the Marianas which everyone knew was coming presented the greater danger, as American planes stationed on that Island could attack the Home Islands directly. To prevent this the remaining strength of the Combined Fleet needed to be husbanded and would only strike out when the central core of the Japanese Empire was directly threatened.
It didn't help that the Japanese were beginning to really feel the fuel shortage. Originally the Southern Strategy had been adopted because the Manchurian sources were both hard to exploit due to the remoteness of the location, local climate and being very close to the Soviet Union, only to end up depending on those sources more than ever before when they failed to take all of the Dutch East Indies and the Allies did their best to interdict Japanese merchant traffic as best they could from the areas they still held.
Now the Soviets had either captured those sources or were close to doing so, leaving the Japanese with no real source of oil and an ever-declining stockpile that would last them little more than six months during continuous operations. In the light of this it is not hard to understand why the Japanese chose on a defensive posture for their fleet, even though Allied and American planners would suspect a trap right up to the point where the Battle of the South China Sea ended all serious threat by the Japanese fleet.
Up until that point which was still more than three months in the future at the time of the landings on Borneo, Admiral Cunningham would always have as many of his Carriers at sea as he could covering operations and generally Allied shipping in the South China Sea. The Japanese were forced to ignore this for want of fuel, and only the launch of Operation Jaywick would force their hand with all the consequences that entailed.
In the aftermath their fuel consumption was heavily curtailed.
However that did not mean that the Japanese did not respond at all to the renewed Allied attacks, it was just that Tokyo didn't have many good options. For reasons discussed above, no reinforcements could be sent from the homeland except for a trickle flown in by air, the Philippines were exploding into open insurrection at the time, in no small part due to the Special Operations Executive. In China the Soviets were about to renew their offensive towards Korea and the Japanese were busy preparing the to equal parts famous and fearsome Yalu River line at the time and also had to use what was left of the Kwantung Army to delay the Soviets for at least another two or three months.
Another idea floated in Tokyo was a limited attack into French Indochina with Japanese and Chinese State Forces in the southern provinces. This died on the grounds of the small number of Japanese units in anything like fighting trim in the south as well as the general unreliability of the collaborationist Army, a wise decision that still would not help the Japanese position in southern China come November 1944.
What was done instead was to be a coordinated effort by every bomber aircraft the Japanese had within range, or as coordinated as was possible between the two services. Both took it serious, with the Navy even contemplating using the two G8N prototypes, though that was shelved. Against this stood Allied aircraft from seven different Air Forces and Naval Air Arms, equipped with the latest aircraft Allied technology could provide, including among them the Hawker Sea Fury, which by then equipped most of the Fleet Air Arm's Fighter Squadrons after a herculean effort to build the planes and put them on the carriers into the hands of the pilots.
The aerial fighting that ensued did it's own to further deteriorate the quality of the Japanese pilot corps and inflicted only superficial damage to the Allies on Borneo.
tbc
