Word: balikpapan
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Southward from the Celebes Sea, toward Java and the rich oil wells of Balikpapan, the Jap drove last week. All had gone his way up to then in the Dutch Indies; nowhere had he been defeated in his Pacific battleground. Before him now was the final conquest of the Indies, perhaps a final grip on the Pacific world...
Before the main naval and air attack developed, the Jap reached his first objective, Balikpapan (where he found the wells, refineries, pipelines in scorched ruins, and Dutch troops ready to battle him ashore). But his convoy losses constituted a real defeat. His cruisers were reported in Macassar Strait only after the battle had well begun; he would scarcely have risked such valuable escorts unless he was hard-pressed. In that sector at least, he was definitely short of fighters to screen his own ships, bombers to attack the U.S. warships...
...malarial mosquitoes-all make land attack out of the question. Furthermore, the problem narrows down for practical purposes to one of covering distances between naval bases (marked on the map by the flags of the nations to which they belong) and storming of a handful of coastal towns: Balikpapan, Tarakan, Batavia, Surabaya, Macassar, Singapore and a few others...
After these preliminaries, the Japanese may easily attack the relatively unprotected Netherlands islands of Borneo and Celebes, boring down through the Strait of Macassar to take Tarakan, Balikpapan, Macassar. The Netherlanders have long anticipated such an attack. The Borneo oil ports have been mined and studded with artillery for several months, and oil wells outside both Tarakan and Balikpapan have been prepared for firing. Borneo refineries have been moved to Palembang on Sumatra. For about a year secret airfields have been under construction...