herkman, interesting take.
Many many years ago AURI 'moved' its bombers from around Djakarta and Surabaja well the east to Biak. Now we saw this as a defensive withdrawal away from us; we were based on your base at Butterworth.
Your Air Commander at Darwin, OTHO, saw it an an offensive deployment which would threaten Darwin. We didn't know this at the time. Not only that, he only found out by word of mouth when someone came through from Singapore.
At the time we replanned our missions to cover Biak and then recover to Darwin. For one reason or another Darwin was never told of this plan. It could have been in case they prepared to receive us thus blowing the opsec and we obviously didn't trust even Top Secret briefing to the Air Commander lest his actions were influenced by this knowledge.
Yes, we saw them as no real threat although they did seem to have a push towards one of our bombers with a Mig 21. They left the Hastings and Friendships that were doing leaflet drops on their own.