'We were told ... that it could be risky business'

For decades, Barney Schinckel wasn’t allowed to talk about what he did during the Second World War.

“I swore when I got out of the Army I would forget all about it – where we went and what we did and all the rest,” he told The Naracoorte Herald in 2016.  “It was a secret mission and I couldn’t tell anyone – even my family and friends – we just blocked them off altogether.”

As a radio operator with the secretive Z Special Unit, Schinckel took part in Operation Agas 4, transmitting and receiving messages from behind Japanese lines in British North Borneo and Sarawak.

“We recorded just where all the Japanese were situated so we could direct our bombers to go in and blast them apart,” he said. “That was our main occupation, rather than going hand-to-hand fighting with them, we identified where they were and how many numbers. 

“The majority of our spy work was done from the southern end of the Philippines. We would patrol around the islands and let the Americans know where [the Japanese] had their equipment, and would record the shipping movements of the Japanese to the Philippines. It wasn’t scary so much … we just felt that we were putting in a bit of a war effort against the Japanese.”

The story of Agas 4 is one of the many told as part of a temporary exhibition, A matter of trust: Dayaks & Z Special Unit operatives in Borneo 1945, at the Australian War Memorial. Developed in partnership with the Australian National University and with the support of the Australian Research Council, the exhibition explores the work of Z Special Unit operatives in Borneo and the relationships they developed with the indigenous populations.

Today, the 95-year-old’s memory isn’t what it used to be. But to ensure his story was not forgotten, his family recorded it while driving around the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.

When the war broke out, Schinckel’s brother John joined the volunteer Light Horse Brigade, training with horses at Naracoorte and Mount Gambier, and Schinckel was determined to do his bit too.  He joined the Naracoorte platoon of the Volunteer Defence Corps in 1941 and later enlisted at the Keswick Barracks in Adelaide.

“Most families in the Naracoorte district had a son who had enlisted,” Schinckel said. “I joined up to the proper army the day that Darwin was bombed – the 19th of February 1942.  I was eighteen and a half and was called to the Australian Military Forces for training.  Initially they were to serve just within Australia, but from early 1942 they joined the AIF in serving overseas. The age limit for joining the Australian Imperial Forces was nineteen.

“For the first six weeks we trained at the Gawler Racecourse and spent our time crawling over the hills. This training was so you could sneak up on the enemy undetected.  We then moved to tents at Christies Beach for a week spent route marching to keep fit.  From there we went on to more tent accommodation at Clapham.  It was there that we did firearms drill. There was no firing of guns, just learning how to ‘slope arms’ and ‘present arms’. We would go for a march for a couple of hours and then come back and do some more.”

Schinckel was sent to Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria to join a motor regiment before being posted to Puckapunyal to the First Armoured Division.

“That meant that we were carted around in trucks versus marching everywhere,” he said. “But we still had to do marching, however. We were marching 10 to 15 miles per day, plus firearms drill, and it was there at Mount Martha that I had my 19th birthday and joined the AIF.”

At Puckapunyal, he joined the signals section and was taught how to send signals using Morse code on radios, as well as signalling using flags, and Morse code with lights.

“With the increasing threat of a Japanese invasion, we were sent to Mullewa – due east of Geraldton in Western Australia,” he said. “We travelled by train in cattle trucks … Every joint in the railway line would give you a bump, so trains have not appealed much to me since.

“We had straw palliasses to sit on during the day and to sleep on during the night [but] it was so hot that you would lose a stone and a half in weight while crossing the Nullarbor.

“The steam trains had to stop for water about three times on the way over the Nullabor [and because of the] rabbit plague in Western Australia. Rabbits would come up to the train to try to get water dripping from the steam engines.

“Mullewa is the second hottest place in Australia after Marble Bar – ironstone gravel country and as hot as Hades.  It was horrible, terribly hard country with many snakes and scorpions.  We had to check our bedding every night.”

It was at a camp about 10 kilometres out of Mullewa that the men were trained in unarmed combat. “We always had to walk everywhere and there were no worries about firing off guns during training,” Schinckel said. “There was nothing around for miles to hit … One day, I accidently stabbed [my friend] Merv Collins in the leg with a bayonet. We were practising jabbing with bayonets on rifles [and] he was meant to deflect the gun down, but Merv was either too slow or I was too fast and I stabbed him in the thigh. This was to be Merv’s only war injury.”

Once a month they were allowed to march into Mullewa for a beer.  “The beer was never too cold,” he said. “We would sweat all the way there and then there was a long queue to get a drink.  We would make a ‘Lady Blamey’ by tying string around [an empty] beer bottle neck.  We would then light the string and once it had heated up the bottle, plunge the bottle into cold water to crack the top off the bottle. This made a neat cut so you could then drink out of a ‘glass’ after it had been rubbed down by sandstone to smooth it off.”

Every week, they would have to jog about 45 miles to the coast and back. “I have never been fitter,” he said. “Our PT Instructor was Sergeant McKissick. He was tanned almost black and was a great barrel of a man.  We had daily PT classes of running and exercises, stripped to the waist – and ended up as brown as him, almost.  We would line up and march around the parade ground carrying our breakfast utensils.  If anyone rattled their food utensils, Sergeant McKissick would make us march around again. Sometimes we would march for up to an hour and then our breakfast – porridge or scrambled eggs made out of egg powder – would be cold.

“Our midday meal was flyblown cabbage and stew, often a bit undercooked, [and] tea was often leftovers from lunch. [But] we had to keep fit in case the Japanese invaded.”

Schinckel was near Mingenew in Western Australia when they called for volunteers for “special training”. 

“We were not advised as to what it actually was that was so special,” he said. “I volunteered and then found out it was for volunteers for Z Special.  Seven or eight others from the 101 regiment, including Merv Collins, volunteered with me. We were keen to get out from the area [and] were told that Z Special wanted radio operators and that it could be risky business.”

They were sent to Melbourne and then on to Fraser Island for training as “the realisation came that it might not be so pleasant”.

“Merv Collins was sent from Fraser Island to Morotai near the Philipines,” he said.  “This was American-occupied but still had pockets of Japanese hiding in the jungle, who would sneak into camps and steal food [but] I was sent down to Melbourne to the Australian Intelligence Bureau to work on decoding for a month.  Messages came in as Morse code in a jumble of letters and numbers [and] I was selected for my presumed aptitude for numbers.”

In 1944, he flew to Charleville in an Avro eight-passenger plane in preparation for heading to New Guinea. 

“There were planks on either side of the plane for seating and no seat belts,” he said. “I was very close to being airsick.  When we arrived at Charleville, it was stinking hot with ironstone gravel all around.  The others all went into a hut for a feed, but I felt so sick that I just walked around in the shade of the plane.

“From Charleville we flew on to Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea.  It had the biggest mosquitoes I have ever seen.  We then flew over Dutch New Guinea to the north side of Manus Island.  It had deep water inlets which were calm and sheltered and a perfect harbour.  The next day we flew on to Morotai, where Merv Collins was in charge of the signals.  The island was under US control.  They would put on pictures every night and it was thought that some Japanese would sneak in at night-time to see them from the fringe of the jungle.  The Japanese were short of food and were always trying to steal some.”

When a PT boat took Schinckel to Glebe Island at the bottom of the Halmahera Islands, he suffered once more.  “The first night I was seasick,” he said. “The next morning I was on galley duty for breakfast.  The galley was next to the bilge pump, [and] I was seasick and unable to eat for two days.”

Once they got to Glebe Island, they could see almost two hundred miles out to sea with a telescope and reported on any Japanese vessels.  “We listened to ‘Tokyo Rose’ on the radio [and] the Japanese sent a message to say that they knew Australian forces were on the island,” he said. “It made us very nervous, [and] it was especially nerve-wracking when the tree crabs would climb up palms and crack off the coconuts. They would crash to the ground and give us a terrible fright.”

Later, an American PT boat took them to an island off Sandakan, which they called Turtle Island after the turtle eggs they ate there; the whites of these eggs remained like jelly no matter how long they were cooked.   

“We had all the information about the Sandakan camp and the prisoners,” Schinckel said. “We even knew where the guards were positioned at night.  All we needed was for the US PT boat to take us up river at night [but] the US forces were scared of getting their boat stuck and refused to take us. Two days later the death march began.”

“At Semporna in British North Borneo, we were looking for Japanese. Some surrendered to us but there was no way of holding them,” he said. “Thirty to forty came in a boat desperate to surrender as they were starving and had no food.  Their brutality and their taking from the locals meant that the locals had no love for them and hid all their supplies … We sent them off back down the coast because we couldn’t cope with their numbers – there were only five of us in our party so we were unable to keep guard over them all.

“After the end of the war had been declared, there were still 300-plus Japanese on Sarawak, approximately 300 miles inland. They were hoping to live off the land and refused to surrender. General Wootten said that Rex Blow and four others were to go and get them to surrender. He said that they weren’t to take weapons, but they hid pistols on themselves.  They also took three Japanese interpreters with them. They sent one in and he was shot.  The same happened to the second interpreter. Luckily they surrendered to the third interpreter. 

“They were then marched down to the coast near Lawas. I stayed at Lawas to maintain radio contact while the rest of the party went upstream to get the Japanese.  If any of the Japanese were too weak to carry their own gear and walk, their fellow soldiers would hit them over the head to kill them rather than carry their gear for them.”

Schinckel returned to Australia on the Manoora about Christmas-time 1945, and remained in the army until his father’s birthday, 18 June 1946.  “I wasn’t allowed out earlier because I didn’t have a definite job lined up, but I was keen to leave,” he admitted. “Then one day the announcement was made at parade that I was to go back to Keswick Barracks for demobbing – I was given one set of clothes and a train ticket to Naracoorte.”

Schinckel’s work with Z Special was finally over. But it would be decades before he was allowed to talk about it.

A Matter of Trust: Dayaks & Z Special Unit Operatives in Borneo 1945 is on display at the Australian War Memorial until 16 September 2018. Join curators Robyn van Dyk and Christine Helliwell for a tour of the exhibition and hear stories of Z Special Unit and the Dayaks they served alongside at 11.30am on the mezzanine level in Anzac Hall on 4 September 2018.