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By Root 1142 0

committed persisted to the end of the war, feeding off the testimony of those serving in the field, and intensifying their rancour. On 26 April 1945, as opposition leader Robert Menzies told the House of Representatives in Canberra: “I happen to entertain650 the strongest possible view that it is wrong to use the Australian forces…in operations…which seem to me to have no relation to any first-class strategic object in this war.” More than a thousand Australians died in New Guinea in the last year of the war, along with 516 on Bougainville. Each loss was bitterly resented. Australian forces killed some thousands of Japanese, but to what end? “In both Australian and Japanese history651 the offensives of 1945 [in New Guinea] will endure as examples of splendid fortitude, but whether they should have happened seems likely always to be in dispute,” wrote the Australian official historian long afterwards.

In the final months, two Australian divisions were deployed in an amphibious assault on Borneo. There, too, dissension focused upon whether an operation ordered by MacArthur served any useful purpose. The nominal objective was to regain control of the Dutch East Indies’ rich oil fields. Yet it never seemed plausible that these could be made serviceable in time to assist the Allied war effort. The American blockade already ensured that Borneo’s oil was doing little good to the Japanese. The view was widely held that the only purpose of the operation was to keep other Allied forces off America’s pitch for the last round of the Pacific war.

On 1 May 1945, an Australian brigade group landed on Borneo’s offshore island of Tarakan. This was garrisoned by 1,800 Japanese, and possessed an airfield thought likely to be useful for Allied operations on the mainland. Rugged fighting followed. By the end of July, three hundred Japanese remained at large on Tarakan, and the Australians had suffered 894 casualties. The prized airfield proved beyond repair. Ninth Australian Division landed in Brunei Bay on 10 June, and secured the immediate coastal area by the end of the month, for the loss of 114 killed. On 1 July, 7th Australian Division carried out the last significant amphibious landing of the war at the Dutch oil port of Balikpapan, in the south-east of Dutch Borneo. Over the week that followed, the Australians secured twenty miles of coastal territory around the port, leaving special forces and guerrillas to hunt Japanese through the inland wildernesses. Some 229 Australians died, and 634 were wounded. Once more, it was impossible to believe that anything worthwhile had been achieved—and every man at Tarakan and Balikpapan knew it.

The Australian Army lost 7,384 dead fighting the Japanese in the Second World War. This was fewer of the nation’s warriors than died as prisoners having been captured in Malaya and at Singapore in 1942; slightly more deaths than the U.S. Marines suffered on Iwo Jima. For a people whose soldiers, sailors and airmen won such admiration in other theatres, it was a tragedy that in their own hemisphere the wartime experience was poisoned by domestic strife and battlefield frustration. Churchill bore a significant responsibility for his cavalier treatment of a nation which he continued to perceive as a colony, and for whose domestic difficulties he had no sympathy. Whatever the mitigating circumstances, however, it seemed perverse that, having won so much honour far away in the Mediterranean, Australia’s share of the Pacific war ended in rancour and anticlimax.

FIFTEEN

Captivity and Slavery

1. Inhuman Rites

WHEN BRITISH PRISONERS released from Japanese confinement began to return to England in the late summer of 1945, each one received a printed letter, signed by a government minister. “Welcome home,” it began. “You have suffered a long and bitter ordeal at the hands of a barbarous enemy.” Much has been written in recent years about the climate of racial hatred which distinguished the conduct of the Western Allies’ war with Japan from the conflict with Germany. Yet it was not until its ending that