Jack Tredrea was just 24 years old when he parachuted from the gloomy belly of a Liberator aircraft into the remote, jungled interior of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, not far east of Singapore. It was March 1945 and Jack was part of a secret Australian military operation aimed partly at recruiting the island’s indigenous Dayak people to fight the Japanese. Yet he spoke no Dayak languages and had little idea of what he would find on the ground below. Decapitation by headhunting Dayaks? Capture by Japanese and a slow death under torture?

I first met Jack in September 2014 when he was 94 years old. A retired tailor with soft blue eyes and a shy smile, it was hard to imagine him having operated alone behind Japanese lines for months during the brutal Pacific War. I had come to his immaculate home in Adelaide to interview him about Operation Semut, his World War II special operation in Borneo.