Tom Stieghorst
Pity poor Sandakan.
For fifty years, this seaport was the capital of British North Borneo and one of the most important towns in southeast Asia.
That was before the Japanese occupation during World War II. What Japan didn't ravage, Allied bombs left in ruins.
After the war, the downtown was rebuilt, its streets lined with stolid four-story concrete buildings with metal casement windows that time has not improved. There are things worth visiting for, such as the nearby orangutan rehabilitation center, one of four in the world, but not much of Sandakan proper is very appealing.
I was in Sandakan on a Silversea Cruises voyage through this part of the world, and my visit to Sandakan, my first to Malaysia, got me thinking about how uniquely destructive WW II was to many of the world's seaports.
During WW I, much of the firepower of modern explosives was focused on the battlefield. The sea war was conducted at sea, with horrendous shipping casualties from submarine attacks. But the airplane had not yet been adapted to become much of a weapon yet. By the time WW II started, aerial bombardment had become a key tactic, and seaports with their strategic quays, piers and naval docks, had become targets.
On July 27, 1943, a fleet of 787 Royal Air Force bombers devastated Hamburg, Germany, home to both Nazi submarine pens and the Blohm and Voss shipyard. Hamburg was perhaps the German city most targeted in Allied bombing.
When German submarine pens in the port of St. Nazaire, France, proved immune to aerial attack, Allied forces dropped leaflets urging the evacuation of the town and then bombed every civilian structure in the vicinity, leaving rubble behind.
Other big cruise ports that were scarred by WW II bombing include Le Havre, the jump-off to Paris, which was rebuilt as an experiment in modern architecture; Livorno, the port for Italy's much visited Tuscany area (and tours to Florence and Pisa); and Southampton, the busiest cruise port in the United Kingdom and the home of Carnival U.K.
The U.S., relatively protected by its geography, had only one port significantly damaged. That, of course, was in Hawaii, where the U.S. Pacific fleet sat at anchor in Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.
Some of these bombing targets have recovered from their injuries better than Sandakan has. But all would be much more attractive places to visit absent the manmade disasters inflicted on them eight decades ago.