Bougainville was one of the largest campaigns fought by Australians during the Second World War. More than 30,000 Australians served on the island, over 500 were killed and two Victoria Crosses were awarded. By 1945, Australia had been marginalised from the key battles that would defeat Japan, relegated instead to bypassed areas in Australia's Mandated Territory of New Guinea and Bougainville, and on Borneo. The necessity of these campaigns was debated in parliament while the press echoed such criticisms. Soldiers too had their own opinions. Brigadier Heathcoat ‘Tack’ Hammer, who commanded an infantry battalion at El Alamein and an infantry brigade on Bougainville, later commented: ‘everyman knew, as well as I knew, that the Operations were mopping up and that they were not vital to the winning of the war’. As this author has argued elsewhere, Bougainville was a necessary campaign. It fulfilled the Australian government's long-stated policies of maintaining an active military effort and employing Australian forces in Australian territory, and was conceived when the war was expected to continue until at least 1946.

Commanded by Lieutenant General Stanley Savige, the Australian operations on Bougainville were initiated in order to shorten the campaign in the Mandated Territories, with the ultimate goal of freeing up manpower. The alternative was to statically garrison the island indefinitely. Crucially, the campaign was initiated when the Australians mistakenly believed they outnumbered the Japanese. A Great War veteran, Savige had commanded a brigade in North Africa in 1941 and a division in New Guinea in 1943. A strong supporter of General Sir Thomas Blamey, Savige was no stranger to controversy.

Savige tightly controlled the campaign. He divided the island into three areas: the Central, Northern and Southern Sectors. In the Central Sector, the Australians crossed the Numa Numa trail over the island's mountainous spine. This was the ‘nursery sector’ where units gained combat experience before being deployed to more active areas. In the Northern Sector, the Australians followed the northwest coast towards Buka. The advance went well until a small force made a disastrous landing at Porton Plantation in June 1945. It was the only Australian defeat of the campaign. The main fight, however, was in the Southern Sector where the Australians advanced towards Buin, the major Japanese base on the island.

At a press conference on 17 February 1942, two days after the British surrender at Singapore, Prime Minister John Curtin announced that Cabinet had ordered ‘a complete mobilisation of all Australia's resources, human and material’, to meet the Japanese threat. As Curtin explained, the decision put ‘every human being in this country, whether he likes it or not … at the service of the Government to work in the defence of Australia’. Later that day, during a lunch time Liberty Loan drive in Martin Place, Sydney, Curtin spoke of the diversion of the nation's ‘money, machinery, buildings [and] plant’ to the war effort. ‘Nothing you have’, declared the Prime Minister, ‘shall be withheld if the Government says that that is proper for fighting a maximum war’. From the outset, the press referred to this as ‘the Government's plans for total war’.

The legal basis for such an unprecedented extension of economic and social management by the state had been established in September 1939, with the parliament's passing of the National Security Act. This provided the governor-general with authority to issue regulations ‘for securing the public safety and the defence of the Commonwealth’, a power the government wielded with moderation between 1939–41, but used extensively following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, between December 1941 and April 1943 the Manual of National Security Regulations index doubled in length, providing the Commonwealth with the means to direct people and their property in support of the war effort. By August 1944 the Manual comprised two volumes, spanning over 1500 pages. Its rules and regulations were administered by various government departments and covered activities as diverse as trading rabbit skins and storing wheat, to rationing, labour dilution, civil defence and measures to control the spread of venereal disease – but all had the purpose of maximising Australia's war effort. Through regulations issued under the National Security Act's authority the Commonwealth came to control where people worked, what they consumed, the information they received and a myriad of other things that Australians took for granted before the war. ‘In effect’, as David Lee puts it, ‘the whole productive system of the nation was placed under government control and direction and many of the incentives for individuals operating in a market system were suspended’. Never before or since has the Australian government had such control over the everyday movements and activities of white Australians.

When Gavin Long published the seventh volume of the official history Australia in the War of 1939–1945: The Final Campaigns in 1963, he ventured where few had gone before publicly by including an appendix on the Allied Intelligence Bureau – a secretive body responsible for some spectacular intelligence and special operations. Until then, few Australians knew much about the world of intelligence and special operations outside the closed circle of practitioners. But even then, while certain aspects of the special operations realm were revealed, significant elements of the Allied wartime intelligence apparatus remained largely unheralded. Sworn to secrecy, insiders understood that the secret of success lay in keeping successes secret. One of the ironies of this was that for decades afterwards historical accounts were incomplete and analysis of Allied victories deeply flawed. As a result, for generations few would really understand the wartime role played by the intelligence and special operations domains.

ULTRA TOP SECRET CODEBREAKING

More than a decade after publication of The Final Campaigns, and almost 30 years after the war's end, a retired Royal Air Force officer, Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham, published The Ultra Secret. This was a stunning revelation of how the German Enigma cipher machine functioned, how its codes were broken and how telegraphic traffic of the highest sensitivity was reported. The information was considered so sensitive it was described as being higher than simply ‘most secret’. It was ‘Ultra Top Secret’, or simply ‘Ultra’.

Possession of Ultra gave the English-speaking Allies an extraordinary insight into Axis planning and operations. Indeed, at the end of the war British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told King George VI at a meeting with Sir Stewart Menzies, who was head of MI6 (Britain's secret intelligence service), that ‘it was thanks to Ultra that we won the war’. Churchill may have been exaggerating, but Ultra did stave off several defeats early on from 1940 to 1942 and made a major contribution to the shortening of the war thereafter.

Ultra, in fact, was an ‘invaluable accessory’ in planning Allied strategic initiatives from 1942 to 1945. It is widely known now that Ultra was pivotal for the success of the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. Ultra was also crucial to Montgomery's successes against Rommel in North Africa in 1942.

Oboe 1 – the Allied campaign for the island of Tarakan off the northeast coast of Borneo– was the first of three major landings in Borneo by I Australian Corps. On 21 March 1945, MacArthur instructed the commander of I Corps, Lieutenant General Sir Leslie Morshead, to seize Tarakan and destroy the Japanese forces there. The Netherlands East Indies government was to be re-established and the oil installations conserved. As soon as the island's airfield was repaired, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) planned to move in several squadrons to support the next two landings at Brunei Bay and Balikpapan. Morshead allocated the 26th Brigade Group of the 9th Australian Division to assault Tarakan. The date of the landing was fixed at 1 May 1945. In contrast to earlier Australian campaigns, the Oboe operations would receive lavish support from Allied air and naval forces. But, despite this, Oboe 1 would prove to be far more difficult – and controversial – than expected.

AN ‘UNNECESSARY WAR’ IN BORNEO?

Tarakan has always been regarded as part of what journalist Peter Charlton called ‘the unnecessary war’: one of the 1945 campaigns that cost Australian lives in Borneo and the islands to no purpose. More specifically, Oboe 1 was criticised in the Australian official histories as a costly failure because of the severe problems and long delay in establishing an air base on the island to support the later Borneo landings, and the heavy casualties suffered by the Australian assault force. The campaign last received an in-depth examination in 1997 in Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy by Peter Stanley (co-author of this chapter). While this work qualified Charlton's interpretation by stressing that US evidence made the genesis and justification for the operation more plausible, it accepted the conventional view that ultimately the operation was not worth the cost: hence the ‘tragedy’ in the title.

Tarakan's enduring reputation as a futile campaign or wasted effort deserves to be examined afresh. By altering the thrust of historical enquiry, from the question ‘why did Oboe 1 happen?’ to ‘what good did it do?’ – and by re-examining the available literature and evidence – a new view of Tarakan emerges. The result of this approach has been both a reaffirmation of the essential narrative of the ground operations, but also a substantially new interpretation of the consequences of and justification for the campaign.

Writing of the work of Australian medical units among the people of Sarawak, Australia's official historian of the Second World War, Gavin Long, observed that it was ‘unique in the history of the AIF’. This epithet can be readily applied to the broader campaign conducted in British Borneo between March 1945 and January 1946 – the most multi-faceted set of operations conducted under Australian command during the Second World War. Not only did the British Borneo campaign share the extensive joint cooperation of the operations at Tarakan and Balikpapan, it also featured special and military civil affairs operations unprecedented in scale and scope during Australia's contribution to the war. The integration of these elements suffered from inadequate command and control structures and poorly coordinated objectives, but their presence clearly demonstrates a level of operational maturity not glimpsed in earlier Australian campaigns.

The campaign was also the most politically complex of those waged by Australia, and some of the difficulties in operational, and sometimes tactical, level coordination stemmed from the politico-strategic agendas underlying its direction. The use of ‘British Borneo’ in this chapter follows British Colonial office practice and refers to four separate territories: the Crown Colony of Labuan, a small island off the east coast of northern Borneo, and the protectorates of Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo. Prior to the Japanese occupation all three of the latter had different forms of government – Sarawak was ruled by the fourth of the Brooke family's paternalistic ‘white rajahs’, North Borneo was under control of a governor appointed by the directors of the British North Borneo Company, and Brunei by its hereditary Sultan with advice from a British resident. The Colonial Office had plans for post-war administrative reform in the territories, and with the deeply wounded British economy needing their supplies of oil, rubber and minerals, regarded the United States’ anti-colonial agenda with suspicion. Thus, at a time when the British Joint Chiefs questioned the military necessity of capturing Brunei Bay to secure a naval base they did not want – as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 – other elements of the British government were keen for an early return.

There was great public satisfaction and celebration in Australia when peace came on 15 August 1945, even though many Australians were unsettled by the devastation of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had brought the peace. Australians took pride and courage from the fact that they had faced up to their worst fear, invasion from Asia, that they had stared it down and fought it off. Australian sailors, airmen and soldiers had played crucial roles in the defeat of the Japanese, displaying professionalism, courage, ingenuity and endurance. They had defended their homeland and had protected their loved ones. Their victory was not for some abstract cause like ‘empire’, it was a victory for Australia and all its peoples. The fighting men and women of Australia had every reason to be satisfied and proud: Australians had defended their own.

Many of these men and women returned to their own homes exhausted and unwell. Much of the trauma that occurred in their homes went unreported and unremarked and much of it is only now being openly faced and discussed. In family histories and memoirs, and less directly in all sorts of general histories, we now read of difficulties in adapting to marriage again, of mental health issues that endured for years, and of troubles in the workplace and with alcohol. Family historians will tell, now, of the anger in many marriages after the war. For Australia's sake, many women had loyally accepted the absence of their husbands and had raised their children alone, they had managed the household and had taken all the decisions the home required. They had even worked outside the home where they could in paid employment or in the many ‘good causes’ war encouraged. Now these women were expected to accept, submissively, their husbands’ resumption of all responsibility for family and household matters and were also expected to leave the workforce.

Returning servicemen, after long and difficult years in the jungle, on the seas, in the air and, crucially, in captivity were now expected to put on their overalls, pick up their kitbags or put on their suits and pick up their briefcases to settle down to life as it was before the war.

Defeats in the Malayan, Papuan and Burma campaigns of 1942 convinced the Australian and Indian armies that new tactics and training were required for new and challenging environments. In particular, it became apparent that basic training had been woefully inadequate for the rapidly expanded armies, many of whom lacked a clear understanding of basic tactics, techniques and procedures. There were various pre-war manuals available, including Field Service Regulations, as well as branch-specific manuals such as Infantry Training: Training and War; these were still relevant and, with updating during the war, served as foundational resources.

The key lessons from the defeats of 1942 were the need for proper basic training and specialised training in jungle warfare for all the new units and formations. The latter, however, could follow only after foundational or basic training had been reformed and jungle warfare doctrine had been formulated. As the Australian jungle warfare manual stated in 1943,

The British Indian Army Manual of 1943 stated similar sentiments:

Training in jungle warfare was not a ‘black art’, but it did require some specialised thinking and training to adapt to the unique environment, even for veteran formations such as the 9th Australian Division.

By the end of 1944, both the Australian and the British Indian armies had become fully capable not only of operating in the jungle environment, but also of conducting open terrain, amphibious and combined arms operations against the Imperial Japanese Army in the Southeast and Southwest Pacific Command regions. They had, as institutions, integrated the knowledge that ongoing learning and adaptation were integral to their achievements. This chapter will analyse how and why these reforms came about.