Not long after midnight —on 11 September, 1944—a submarine by the name of HMS Porpoise leaves Fremantle with 23 men. Each man has a cyanide pill in his pocket and each man knows only this: Operation Rimau is a top secret espionage mission.
The Rimau men are commandos, hand-picked after intensive training, but the details of the mission are so sensitive that they don’t know a damned thing about what will happen —who or what the final target will be—nor the terror and trouble they’ll face.
September 11, 2014 marks the 70th anniversary of the top secret espionage mission, Operation Rimau.
To commemorate the Rimau men, SBS Online has produced an online excusive interactive documentary: Operation Rimau, as told by Booker Prize nominated writer, M. J. Hyland.
Told in four chapters, Hyland charts the mission from its planning stages, through to its unique technology: the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ — a one-man submersible canoe designed by the British to attack targets at the height of the Pacific War, through to the gripping final chapter in Singapore.
The project draws from archive stills and video, records from the National Archive of Australia including original reports as well as interviews with Mr Norman Wallace, a Z Special Operative involved in the training and also Mrs Roma Page, wife of Captain Robert Page.
