About SRD – Z Special Unit

For some it started out as a boy’s own adventure. Australian, Kiwi and British servicemen undertaking boring garrison duties during WWII were given an opportunity for “exciting work” behind enemy lines.

With no idea what they were getting into, they soon found themselves immersed in a top secret world of intrigue, espionage and covert operations, where each man found himself issued with a deadly suicide capsule they must take if ever captured by the enemy.  Others found themselves, as junior soldiers, commanding what were essentially, their own private armies of native guerrillas. “The Z Men” is the untold story of the operatives of Z Special Unit.  Prepared by the toughest training and the best technology of their day, the Z Men waged a bitter, top secret war behind Japanese lines in the deadly jungles of the Pacific during WWII.

Established in 1942 as an Australian Section of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, and the direct forerunner of today’s elite SAS, Z Special Unit was a top secret Allied commando unit tasked with intelligence gathering, guerilla warfare, sabotage and raiding operations against the Japanese-held islands to Australia’s north. Between 1942 and 1945, the organisation conducted almost 200 operational missions. Some of these were stunning successes, while others were tragic failures.  During their forays behind enemy lines, Z Special operatives accounted for 2100 enemy killed or captured for a loss of seventy one ZSU personnel.

The Series

70 years later, the triumphs, sacrifices and failures of these brave men remain largely unknown to the general public.  Told principally through re-enactment, dramatised from research and the oral histories of the participants, each episode of this multi-part series will tell the story of a specific Z-Special Unit operational mission – in Singapore, Timor, Borneo and Indochina (as Vietnam then was) respectively.

The stories will be enhanced with on-video interviews with mission participants, telling in their own words the remarkable true stories of the Z Men. From the barbarism suffered by Timorese civilians under Japanese occupation to the almost unbelievable culture shock suffered by Z Men living and working with Dyak head-hunters in Borneo, each episode will convey the tension and dramatic turns, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, as these young men pursued their tactical objectives, providing for the audience the thoughts and feelings that ran through their minds at the time. The memories and terrible aftermath of this very personal war continue to haunt these veterans to this day.