The Bitter Little Battles

By far the greater part of the land fighting in the Pacific last week was being done by the Australians. Mostly they inched forward in bitter, forgotten little battles against a scattered but formidable array of Japs (best conservative guesstimate: 136,000--see map) bypassed in the westward sweep of the main battle. But the Aussies were punching ahead on new battlegrounds too.

Their most important and spectacular campaign was against an estimated 30,000 enemy troops on Borneo. It was also their most successful. Under the Corps command of dapper, dashing Lieut. General Sir Leslie ("Holy Terror") Morshead, onetime schoolmaster and hero of the siege of Tobruk, the 7th Division had secured the vital Balikpapan area within three weeks of its invasion. Last week the 7th beat down bitter resistance to take another first-rate military prize: the Sambodja oil field, 28 miles northeast of Balikpapan and one of the three major producing areas of eastern Borneo.

Now the 7th could concentrate on a much richer field--Samarinda, 36 miles away. With his 9th Division's firm hold on Tarakan and Brunei in the north (TIME, July 9), Morshead and his men, strategically at least, had secured Borneo for the Allies.

Cleanup in the Rear. No one could take more satisfaction from this success than General Morshead himself. He had come to the Borneo command from the torturous, far from finished battle of New Guinea, one of the rear-area wars where the Aussies are still busy at the grim cleanup.

On these islands every inch gained is costly. Even then progress cannot be measured in yards or miles gained along the twisting, rotting jungle paths; it can be measured only in dead Japs. On few of the islands are the Japs withering on the vine. They have to be knocked off. They have tremendous ammunition dumps and stockpiles of weapons, and they grow enough food themselves to get fatter and stronger than the Japs at home.

In the Wewak sector of New Guinea, 6th Division troops last week finally managed to breast the Prince Alexander Ranges, take a village and an important track (i.e., trail) junction. But progress promised to be slower now: behind imposing fortifications, the opposition of perhaps 70,000 remaining New Guinea Japs stiffened sharply.

With the Rain. On Bougainville, one of the oldest and most savagely contested battlegrounds of the Pacific, 3rd and nth Division troops were known to have killed 16,000 Japanese. Although outgunned 100 to one, the 11,000 remaining holdouts battled in fanatical hand-to-hand combat. Last week they took advantage of torrential rains which stalled real warfare to infiltrate the lines and keep the Aussies under constant attack.

On nearby New Britain, the 5th Division had stopped advancing, was trying simply to kill off all the remaining 25,000 Japs pocketed in the north.

There are many more of such backwash wars to be fought. In Celebes, Java, Timor, Halmahera and countless other Pacific Islands there are perhaps 165.000 Jap holdouts, isolated but still untouched by the Allies. There is little question that they are there to stay until the Aussies rout them out and kill them.

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