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World Battlefronts: Life and Death on Borneo

4 minute read
TIME

A frigate, with a small steamer, a few gunboats, a fort, a slight military force, and the English union jack, would constitute an establishment powerful enough, not only to protect the place, but to control all the neighboring evildoers. . . .

These words were almost a century old last week, and almost a hundred times as ironic as their author, Sir James Brooke, the first swashbuckling white Raja of Sarawak in Borneo, thought they ever would be. For last week evildoers with scant respect for the English union jack descended on his Sarawak.

They landed first at Miri, the center of Sarawak’s oil fields, which British sappers blew up. Then they landed at Kuching, the capital. They landed unresisted by so much as a British frigate.

Jamie Brooke’s grandnephew, Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, now Raja of Sarawak, said some bitter words on this matter in Australia, in ironic counterpoint to Grand-uncle Jamie’s complacency: “Brass hats . . . lah-di-dah old-school-tie incompetents, who are responsible for the fantastic position in Malaya, should be sacked immediately. When I left, I was given to understand that, should Sarawak be attacked, it would receive air support. The only protection over Sarawak today is Dutch.”

Dutch Philanthropy. The Dutch deserved even richer praise than this, but praiseworthily, they wanted no praise.

The Dutch were the only Allied forces which were aggressively, unstintingly carrying the fight to the enemy. This was partly because the Dutch had not yet been attacked. And yet the Dutch took the offensive without apparent regard for an attack which might strike them like forked lightning at any moment.

They dispatched several naval ships to Singapore. Dutch submarines harassed the Japanese supply lines for the assault on Malaya. Dutch planes attacked the Japanese attackers of Mindanao, the southernmost major Philippine Island. Dutch planes and submarines played a doomful tune on the hulls of Japanese ships heading for Raja Brooke’s Sarawak.

And yet the Dutch wanted no thanks. “This is not the moment,” said a wrathful Dutch official in Batavia, “to talk about one member of the ABCD front ‘helping’ another. The cooperation should not be seen as assistance, but as the expression of a common strategy whose effective application has become a matter of life and death.”

It was obvious to the Dutch that if the Japanese had an easy time in Malaya, if they took the Philippines, then the Dutch islands of Borneo, Java, Sumatra would be next on the list of the Mikado’s Lord High Executioner. And first to fall would probably be Borneo, of which the Brookes’ Sarawak is a small part.

Borneo is larger than Japan, three times as large as Great Britain. It is, in fact, the third largest island in the world.* Dutch industriousness and British imperiousness have only picked at the tasseled fringes of its wealth: its oil, rubber, hard woods, copra, coconuts, hemp, pepper, sago. In places red veins of iron ore crumble right out of the earth’s surface, but they have not yet been tapped. Coal is known to lie just under the surface, but it has not yet been mined. With all Sarawak’s natural wealth, some of Raja Brooke’s main sources of revenue are, according to the ultra-conservative Statesman’s Year Book, “customs, the Government opium monopoly, gambling, arrack and pawn farms” (ie) the Government farms out licenses for gambling, the sale of distilled rum, pawning).

Highways embroider no more than the coast of this huge treasure island. The only lines inland are rivers, leading into a mysterious, mountainous land of superstition and legend—the land of the Dyaks, the wild men of Borneo, who used to collect heads as Westerners collect stamps; who believe that their victims’ spirits enter their own bodies and add to their strength; who live, 50 families in a bunch, in communal houses up on stilts to be safe from orangutans, honey bears, rhinoceroses, elephants, snakes.

This is land the Japanese covet. To its taking they have given much thought. Long ago they sent in their advance guard of barbers, fishermen, photographers and loggers, who became bug-eyed at Borneo’s wealth and military secrets. Last week the Japanese had not yet made their all-out assault on Borneo. The preliminary landings were designed mainly to secure the southeastern rim of the China Sea, insuring communications with Indo-China, Thailand, Malaya. The Dutch expect a heavier blow.

The Dutch will not take that blow without trading blows of their own. They have set their submarines and planes a stiff quota: one Japanese ship a day. Last week, after 19 days of a kind of fighting that the first white Raja of Sarawak never pictured, even in nightmares, they were not far behind their quota. They had sunk 16.

*Larger: Greenland, New Guinea.

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