Turn of the Wheel

Not since January 1942 had U.S. surface ships pushed through the Strait of Macassar, between Borneo and Celebes. The last time .they tried, the cruisers Houston and Marblehead were damaged and driven off by overwhelming Japanese air power. But by last week the wheel of Pacific war fortune had turned full cycle: an Allied invasion fleet steamed southward past captured Tarakan and into the Strait, brushing aside a Jap air attack.

Off Balikpapan (pop. 30,000), richest source of oil in all of oil-rich Borneo, the gunnery ships steamed back & forth for days, laying down the heaviest pre-invasion bombardment of the Southwest Pacific campaign. Overhead, where once heavy bombers of the Thirteenth Air Force had flown hazardous missions, unescorted, were clouds of Allied planes softening up shore defenses.

This week, as the final thundering rocket pattern scorched the beaches, rugged infantrymen of the Australian yth Division, veterans of the bloody Kokoda Trail, swarmed ashore. A spattering of enemy small-arms fire greeted them, but they quickly nailed down a beachhead a mile wide, half a mile deep. General Mac-Arthur went in with the fourth wave of the amphibious group under Rear Admiral Albert Gallatin Noble. Said the General: "I think today we settled the score of that Macassar Strait affair of three and a half years ago."

Macassar Strait,' he added, "is controlled by our surface craft as well as by air and submarine. . . . [We have] secured domination of Borneo."

Meanwhile, the Australian 9th Division, fanning out from Brunei, had captured another rich oilfield at Miri, and virtually ended the 21-day campaign for the northwestern part of the island. At Tarakan, where Borneo's liberation had begun on May 1, the first fruits of victory were gathered by the Allies: oil flowed again from wells that had been scorched by the Dutch in 1942, bombed by the Allies, scorched again by the Japs in 1945.

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