The airfield began modestly in 1936, built by the Dutch colonial administration to support the transport of oil and tin from Borneo's interior. It served a practical commercial purpose in a region whose wealth lay underground. But geography and resources made the airfield strategically irresistible. When Japan launched its campaign to seize the Dutch East Indies and its oilfields in early 1942, Manggar became a critical objective. Controlling the airfield meant controlling air operations across southern Borneo. In the final days before the Japanese arrived, the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Air Force scrambled three Lockheed Lodestars to Manggar between January 20 and 23, running evacuation and resupply flights to airlift BPM petroleum company personnel and remaining civilians to Surabaya. It was the last Dutch use of an airstrip they had built only six years earlier.

The Japanese did not waste time. Following their victory in the Battle of Balikpapan, the Sakaguchi Detachment began rebuilding Manggar Airfield on January 26, 1942 -- just two days after the battle. Allied bombardment damaged the strip the very next day, but repairs came fast. On January 28, nine Mitsubishi A6M Zeros of the 23rd Air Flotilla touched down at Manggar, and by the 30th, a headquarters had been established. The airfield grew into a major installation with two airstrips, operated jointly by the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Japanese Army Air Force. In February 1944, the 23rd Air Flotilla relocated the 381st Kokutai to Manggar, equipping it with the new Mitsubishi J2M Raiden interceptor -- a powerful fighter designed specifically to counter the high-altitude American bombers that were devastating Japanese positions across the Pacific. The 381st stationed two full squadrons at maximum strength: 36 front-line fighters and 12 in reserve, plus a night-fighter unit of 8 J1N1-S Gekko aircraft. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would later characterize the 381st as one of the finest fighter groups in the entire Japanese Navy.

The battle for Manggar Airfield began on July 2, 1945, when Australia's 2/14th Battalion advanced from the Balikpapan beachhead. They took a smaller airfield at Sepinggang with little difficulty and pressed toward Manggar, encountering only light resistance before arriving on the morning of July 4. At first the airfield appeared abandoned. The Australians advanced a kilometer unopposed. Then the hills above the strip opened fire. The Japanese had entrenched in the high ground overlooking Manggar, and they had teeth: two 6-inch coastal defense guns positioned north of the airfield, capable of devastating any force on the flat ground below. The Japanese garrison had been caught off guard by the speed of the Australian advance but held formidable defensive positions. For two days, Allied artillery and naval gunfire pounded the hillside entrenchments. On the afternoon of July 6, a patrol of just 13 men attacked and seized the heavily fortified coastal gun emplacements. It was a small-unit action of extraordinary daring. By the afternoon of July 9, with three tanks in support, all Japanese positions had fallen. The operation consumed over 500 rounds of naval gunfire and 12,000 rounds of artillery ammunition.

When the 2/14th Battalion secured Manggar Airfield on July 10, 1945, they found a graveyard of Japanese aviation. Scattered across the damaged strips and in revetments were aircraft from both the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Army Air Force: Mitsubishi Ki-51 reconnaissance bombers, a Nakajima Ki-84 Hayate -- one of Japan's best late-war fighters, presumably belonging to the 7th Air Division headquarters -- a Kawasaki Ki-48 light bomber, and at least one G4M1 medium bomber. These machines, some damaged by bombing, others apparently abandoned as fuel and parts ran out, told the story of a force that had been ground down over three years of attrition. The airfield was quickly repaired for Allied use, and on July 17, No. 18 Squadron RAAF arrived from Batchelor Airfield in Australia's Northern Territory, ready to fly operations from the same runways that Japanese Zeros had used three years before.

Today, no wartime remnants survive at Manggar. The airfield's two runways, the gun emplacements in the hills, the revetments where Raidens and Gekkos once sheltered -- all have been absorbed into Balikpapan's expanding suburban fabric. Houses stand where fighters scrambled. Streets run along former taxiways. The transformation is so complete that the airfield's exact boundaries can only be reconstructed from wartime aerial photographs and intelligence reports. Balikpapan's modern airport, Sultan Aji Muhammad Sulaiman Sepinggan International, sits about ten kilometers to the west on the site of another wartime airfield that the 2/14th Battalion captured en route to Manggar. That airfield survived in a different form. Manggar simply vanished, its strategic importance lasting exactly as long as the war that created it. The neighborhood that replaced it carries the name forward -- Manggar -- but nothing else of the airfield remains except the archival record and the soil beneath the pavement.