The Japanese commanders didn’t want to hand over the whole archipelago, but under pressure, they did. What they never managed to seize, though, was the whole of Indonesia. Western New Guinea remained partially free. The notorious detention camp for political exiles, Boven Digoel, stayed under Dutch control until the end.
Ironically, those who hated Dutch rule the most were forced to remain under it the longest. After the surrender, some Dutch officers refused to accept it. They turned to guerrilla warfare, but the local population gave them almost no support. Japanese forces hunted them down and eliminated every isolated group.
Only on the Bird’s Head Peninsula in northwestern New Guinea, a small commando unit kept resisting, supported by local Papuans, until American forces rescued them in 1944. Of the original sixty fighters, including one Ambonese woman, only fourteen survived. Their resistance was dramatic enough for a movie, but it had little effect on the course of history. In practice, it was mainly the Australians who did the heavy lifting in New Guinea.
They fought major battles like the Kokoda Track Campaign and the fighting around Buna and Gona in Papua. In November 1943, American Admiral Chester W. Nimitz captured the Gilbert Islands. Small, but strategically vital.
From there, he launched his island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, moving through the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands toward Japan itself. General Douglas MacArthur, starting from Guadalcanal, bypassed smaller targets and focused on major islands like New Britain and New Guinea. His ultimate goal was to retake the Philippines and Borneo, then use them as bases to attack Japan. These campaigns deliberately bypassed Java and Sumatra.
Strange, since those islands were initially the crown jewels of Japan’s expansion. But the primary Allied objective was to defeat mainland Japan as quickly as possible. The costly liberation of resource-rich Southeast Asian colonies was, militarily speaking, unnecessary. In late March 1944, MacArthur set his sights on Hollandia, now known as Jayapura.
This administrative center on New Guinea’s northern coast was a crucial piece in his strategy to advance on Japan. Backed by a colossal fleet of over two hundred ships and eight aircraft carriers, the assault opened with a devastating air raid that destroyed hundreds of Japanese aircraft on the ground. The defenders barely stood a chance. Nearly ninety percent of the Japanese garrison consisted of older, untrained conscripts.
The hammer fell on April 22nd. In one of the grandest amphibious operations of the entire war, fifty thousand American troops stormed the shore at Humboldt Bay. The eleven thousand Japanese soldiers avoided a major confrontation. They chose instead to melt away into the primordial jungle, bound by a code that forbade surrender, even among lower-tier reserve units.
Almost overnight, the quiet isolated government outpost, accustomed to just one mailboat a month, was swallowed by the colossal military machine. The harbor bustled with hundreds of ships, and two hundred fifty Dakota aircraft touched down daily with supplies. A metropolis of barracks, hangars, and camps materialized out of nowhere, housing one hundred fifty thousand American troops. The liberation of this first slice of the Dutch East Indies proved just how heavily the Allies relied on American might.
Within forty-eight hours, the first Dutch administrative unit landed, reestablishing a Dutch official presence for the first time since the Japanese takeover. The surviving Japanese forces endured a grueling trek west through the mountainous jungle to find reinforcements. They found themselves hunted. Local Papuans, incentivized by Dutch officials who offered twenty-five cents per dead Japanese soldier, pursued the fleeing troops.
These bounty hunters were required to bring back the severed ears of the enemy as proof of delivery. A grim trophy that some American soldiers also adopted, mailing Japanese ears home as souvenirs. The retreat through the forest turned into a full-scale massacre. The Japanese had to contend not only with the Papuan attacks, but also with a terrible shortage of food.
They’d had no choice but to leave most of their rations behind. Few were familiar with the tropical rainforest, and many tried to eat grass, roots, insects, and worms. Out of eleven thousand soldiers, ten thousand died. Cases of cannibalism occurred.
While the eyes of the world were glued to the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, the American war machine in the Pacific was stepping up its pace. MacArthur seized the island of Biak, immediately carving out massive airfields. By midsummer, Admiral Nimitz struck a catastrophic blow to the Japanese Empire, capturing Saipan and Guam in the Mariana Islands. From these new strongholds, monstrous American B-29 bombers could now strike the Japanese mainland directly.
A strategic disaster so absolute that it forced Japan’s Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, to resign in disgrace. By September, the Allied onslaught surged all the way to Morotai, the northernmost tip of the Moluccas. This island was the ultimate prize, a perfect launchpad for the liberation of the Philippines. The Americans landed mid-September, and within a few weeks, by early October 1944, they had secured the strategic airfield.
But fighting on the island actually continued until the end of World War II in August 1945. The Allies needed only the flat southwest of Morotai to build airfields and ports for the invasion of the Philippines. The island’s mountainous interior and dense jungle had no military value whatsoever, so MacArthur decided not to send troops in after the Japanese. The Allies dug in behind a heavily guarded perimeter around the airfields.
The remaining Japanese soldiers retreated into the jungle of the interior. Between September and November 1944, the Japanese army managed to transport thousands of additional reinforcements from nearby islands. They launched an exhausting guerrilla war, carrying out ambushes on Allied patrols and attempting to infiltrate and sabotage the airfields. The thousands of Japanese soldiers in the jungle became isolated.
Over the course of 1945, the struggle turned into a bitter fight for survival. The vast majority did not die from bullets, but from tropical diseases and sheer starvation. One Japanese soldier, Teruo Nakamura, managed to survive there on his own and was not discovered until December 1974, almost thirty years after the end of the war. The enormous island of Borneo had a Dutch Indies part, Kalimantan, and a British part, North Borneo, today part of East Malaysia and Brunei.
The harbor cities of Tarakan and Balikpapan were attacked by the Australians. These places were valued for their oil. Between May and July 1945, the Allies launched an attack on Borneo, starting with Tarakan. These landings were carried out by the Ninth Australian Division, veterans of Tobruk and El Alamein in North Africa, as well as New Guinea.
Tarakan was to be captured in three weeks, but the Japanese held on for two months. There were nearly nine hundred Australian casualties, including two hundred twenty-five killed. On the first of July, Balikpapan was attacked, the largest amphibious assault ever involving Australian forces. The troops were the 7th Division, veterans of the Middle East and New Guinea.
Balikpapan was one of the world’s richest oil centers and a major supplier of oil to the Japanese war machine. The Japanese were pushed out of the coastal area by the ninth of July, and three weeks after the landing, they abandoned their positions and withdrew to the rugged hills of the island. Of the eight hundred fifty Australian casualties, two hundred twenty-nine men were killed. Apart from Australians, Dutch KNIL units also took part in the reconquest at the end of April 1945.
Two months later, the Allies were shipping oil from there. Other areas only saw Allied soldiers after Japan had surrendered. Yet some saw Allied bombs before that. Jakarta was bombed by the Allies in September 1944.
In January 1945, Palembang on Sumatra was bombed because of its oil refineries. By accident, a mosque in Aceh was bombed in March. In South Sulawesi, a bomb fell in a Japanese internment camp for women. Meanwhile, the Dutch were eager to reestablish colonial rule.
In the remote Indonesian provinces that had been liberated since 1944—Western New Guinea, Morotai, Borneo—the Dutch tricolor was flying again. The people were grateful and gathered to sing the Dutch anthem. They were glad Japanese rule had come to an end. Yet on Java and parts of Sumatra, more densely populated and more politically aware, the situation was radically different.
Because when Japan surrendered on August 15th, Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno declared Indonesian independence two days later. They were not waiting for any Allied troops to liberate them whatsoever. First, the British went ashore.
Then the Dutch.
