World Battlefronts: Life and Death on Borneo

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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.