Talk:Battle of Tarakan (1945)

Changes 23/11/05
Grant, thanks for the changes. I've made the following minor modifications:
 * Seperated the OOB out of Section 3 (I agree that moving it to the end is an improvement)
 * Replaced 'Bde Grp' with Brigade Group for clarity's sake.

I have reservations over including the statement that "The invasion of Tarakan also liberated the civilian population from a brutal occupying army". While it is true that the invasion freed the Tarakanese from the Japanese, this came at the cost of high civilian casualties, including heavy damage to the Island's only large town. Given that the war was almost over at the time of the invasion, it's hard to see how the Tarakanese were made better off. --Nick Dowling 11:13, 23 November 2005 (UTC)


 * "Brutal" will probably be considered non-NPoV, even though it was true. And the locals possibly did not want the Dutch to come back. But, I think it's OK to say the area was liberated from Japanese occupation. French civilians suffered terrible casualties on D-Day, but most were glad to see the back of the Germans. And there is no evidence to say that the Japanese imperial forces were regarded with affection in any country that they captured. Grant65 | Talk 00:39, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Nick, just wanted to say I love your work ;-) Grant65 | Talk 11:47, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Grant. I'm blushing! --Nick Dowling 10:03, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Local casualties
Any info on local/native casualties? i see only allied/ japaniz stats. kawaputra 18:05, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
 * That's a very good point. I'll try to dig something up. Given the scale of the pre-invasion bombardment these would have been very considerable. --Nick Dowling 07:43, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Not a "Pyrrhic" victory
A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with devastating cost to the victor, leading eventually to the victor's downfall. Allied casualties were relatively light, and the Australians won not only the battle, but the war. There may have been errors of strategy or tactics in the battle (the possibility of which are discussed later in the article), but the results are in no way Pyrrhic. MayerG (talk) 06:38, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't see how 800 casualties were light, especially given that they were mainly suffered by the roughly 4000 Australian infantrymen, but I take your point. I've strengthened the wording as it is the consensus view that taking Tarakan wasn't worth the cost - see the final para of the article, which cites two excellent sources (including the editor of the Official History of Australia in WW2). --Nick Dowling (talk) 07:26, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Oil restart contradiction
In the construction problems section it says that oil production did not restart until after the war, but in Aftermath it says substantial production was underway by October.--Charles (talk) 21:48, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The war ended in August 1945, so there's no contradiction. Nick-D (talk) 22:32, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Question
Did the Americans bomb the air strip after it was captured by the Australians? My father was there and he says they did. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.14.198.55 (talk) 01:48, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Updated external link; basically a "minor edit" but editors of similar pages may find use in comment
The article has an External Link to Operations instructions no 99, Tarakan Island, March 1945. I followed the old link on american-divisions.com and found this notice:

"Warning: This website will be deleted February 1st, 2019. All content is already moved to TracesOfWar.com. Please update your links!"

So I updated the link. I hadn't ever heard of TracesOfWar.com, and I had to dig into it a bit to find the correct new link. Oaklandguy (talk) 05:46, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

climate and reliable sources
I yield to the wisdom of the people managing/owning this page. I only wanted to point out that the cited source is basically one individual guessing the average temperature ("about") when he probably means there was a minimum temperature ("at least") that interfered with operations. This type of source may well be extremely authoritative about military events, but there is plenty of meteorological data that contradict his guesstimate. I think we should cut the source from that sentence and describe the climate as it is, not as someone "sort of remembers" it. Martindo (talk) 14:33, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
 * What sources describe the climate on Tarakan in 1945 more precisely? (The "someone" in question here was at the time the lead historian at the Australian War Memorial who visited Tarakan while researching the book, so presumably wasn't guessing). Nick-D (talk) 08:50, 17 April 2019 (UTC)