Leader of headhunter guerrillas did not get message that World War II was over
Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan’s surrender in mid-August 1945 and World War II was officially over, but no-one had told an Australian commando who was leading a platoon of headhunters against Japanese forces in the Borneo jungle.
Warrant Officer II Jack Tredrea, who has died aged 98, fought on, continuing to harass and ambush the enemy with rifle fire, grenades, parangs and a silent assault by poison dart propelled from a blowpipe.
Come the third week of October, and unaware that his radio had come to grief in a river, the Allied authorities put a stop to it. Major Tom
Harrisson, a
British officer commanding the
Special Operations Executive campaign in
Borneo, sent a runner with a written order: ‘‘The war is over, Tredrea, get out the best way you can.’’
Tredrea paid off his fighters and travelled home by riverboat and aircraft, reverting to his peacetime calling as a tailor of suits for the good burghers of Adelaide.
Jonathan ‘‘Jack’’ Tredrea was born in Adelaide and left school the day he turned 14 to work as a messenger boy for a bespoke tailor. He showed some promise as an Australian rules footballer, playing for the South Adelaide club, building muscle and stamina by cycling round the suburbs with deliveries.
Volunteering for military service, Tredrea served initially as a medic in the Australian
6th Cavalry Field Ambulance. This equipped him with skills that, a few years later, would make him a revered figure among the Kelabit people of Borneo.
Seeking adventure, he answered a notice calling for volunteers to serve in a ‘‘special unit’’. The senior officer who interviewed him had been a customer of the tailor’s, and Tredrea was soon dispatched to Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast, for training that changed him from a cutter of cloth to a cutter of throats.
Tredrea found that he had volunteered for the elite, top-secret Z Special unit. There followed a year of intensive instruction in weaponry, unarmed combat, languages, surveillance, sabotage, living off the land and jumping out of aircraft. His assignment, at the end of that year, was Borneo. A sea approach was too hazardous, so in late March 1945 two
B-24 Liberators took off with a payload of eight Z Special paratroopers.
Tredrea’s task was to recruit sympathetic inhabitants and lead them, as a trained guerrilla force, against the occupying Japanese. He jumped out of the aircraft with a sub-machinegun, six grenades, medical supplies and a cyanide pill, which was to be swallowed in the event of capture and interrogation by the Japanese.
His medical expertise brought him immediate success. A village head man asked Tredrea to treat an old friend afflicted by a large lump in the groin. In the absence of any anaesthetic, Tredrea ordered two men to hold his patient down, lanced the growth, removed what he described later as ‘‘masses of pus’’ and packed the wound with sulfa powder.
The old man made a spectacular recovery and Tredrea, his reputation established, soon had his guerrilla recruits. ‘‘They were incredibly brave, but they could give your position away because they were so impulsive,’’ he recalled in 2014. ‘‘You had to control them, or they’d go on the attack with their parangs and their blowpipes. They really were headhunters.’’
Describing a typical ambush of a Japanese patrol, he added: ‘‘By the use of blowpipes, we used to quietly pick off the Japs from the rear of line. ‘Pfft!’ ’’
Back in Australia after the war, Tredrea was awarded the Military Medal for ‘‘remarkable energy, unselfishness and devotion to duty’’.
Meanwhile, in 1943 he had married Edith Anna Bongiorno. Their first daughter, Leonie Pinkerton, became a bookkeeper and died of cancer in 1997, aged 53. Their second daughter, Lynnette Behn, worked as a taxation consultant and survives him. Edith died in 2006.
Both daughters had some taste of the commando life. Their father introduced them to the art of the blowpipe, although without the poison. He also placed mattresses by the back veranda and trained them to leap off the roof, landing with a paratrooper’s roll.
Between 1993 and 2017 Tredrea made seven trips back to the Borneo highland territory in what is now Sarawak, Malaysia. On one visit he was reunited with three women who, as teenagers 70 years earlier, had served as porters in his jungle campaign.
He gave them silver necklaces bearing the Z Special emblem. His gift for the wider Kelabit community was 45 sets of replica medals to honour those who had served under his command and had continued fighting for two months after it was all supposed to be over. – The Times
‘‘You had to control them, or they’d go on the attack with their parangs and their blowpipes. They really were headhunters.’’
Jack Tredrea on his Borneo guerrillas