Anthropologist's work leads to recognition for secret WWII military troops

A secret Australian military unit which undertook commando missions during the Second World War will be honoured at The Australian War Memorial on Monday, thanks to the work of an anthropologist from The Australian National University (ANU).

 

Associate Professor Christine Helliwell of the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology said the story of Australia's elite Z Special troops, who operated behind enemy lines throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia, deserved to be recognised.

 

"They were really quite remarkable," Associate Professor Helliwell said.

 

"Most went in with little local language, or knowledge of local customs. In Borneo, the area with which I'm most familiar, they parachuted in to the middle of the jungle thinking they were likely to be killed by the locals.

 

"A lot of Z Special men were captured by the Japanese and tortured and beheaded. They had a very high attrition rate."

 

Dr Helliwell said due to the sensitive nature of their work, the Z Special soldiers were not immediately recognised upon their return.

 

"The problem was that when they came back from the war, under secrecy provisions they were not permitted to talk about what they'd done for 30 years," she said.

 

"The families of men who were killed in action or missing in action were never told what happened. Some of them have only found out in very recent years what actually happened."

 

Despite the lack of recognition, Z Special troops were involved in some of the best known Australian operations of the war, including Operation Jaywick.

 

"One of the first Z Special operations involved going into Singapore Harbour," she said.

 

"They sailed a Japanese fishing boat all the way from Australia to just off Singapore. They used collapsible canoes to paddle into Singapore Harbour at night and blew up a number of Japanese ships."

 

Associate Professor Helliwell stumbled upon the story of the Z Special operatives whilst working on a research project on indigenous memories of the Second World War in Borneo. After hearing stories about these troops from the local Dayak people, she managed to track down two living Z Special operatives, now aged 95 and 96.

 

A plaque dedicated to the Z Special Unit will be unveiled at the Australian War Memorial on Monday 1 August 2016.