The VC hero husband of the widow he embraced this week
WHEN Prince Harry met Daphne Dunne, a snowyhaired Australian pensioner, during a walkabout in Sydney in 2015, she clearly made an impression.
And no wonder. When he asked her about the Victoria Cross pinned to her coat, the story she told him was hard to forget.
The recipient of the VC — Britain’s highest military honour — was Daphne’s lost love, her first husband Lieutenant Albert Chowne. He was killed, aged 24, on March 25, 1945, just ten days after their first wedding anniversary.
Lt Chowne was her ‘Prince’, she says, who never came home but whom she never forgot. She and Albert (pictured right on their wedding day) had met at the David Jones department store in Sydney, where he was a shirt cutter.
When he enlisted in the Australian Army in May 1940, they were just friends who agreed to write to each other. It was through those letters that they fell in love.
‘ He was very romantic, very sincere and very loving. He was just a very good person,’ recalled Daphne, of the dashing young soldier she married in March 1944 when he came home on leave.
He was also very brave. Just how brave is made plain in the entry in the War Office’s own account, published in the London Gazette of September 6, 1945.
It details the ‘ superb heroism and self-sacrifice’ which resulted in the post-humous award of the VC ‘for most conspicuous bravery, brilliant leadership and devotion to duty’ during a fierce encounter on a narrow ridge near Dagua, on the north cost of Papua New Guinea, where the Japanese had an airfield. As part of 2/2 Australian Infantry Battalion, Lt Chowne and his comrades had helped to capture Dagua, but the enemy had retreated south to where they posed a great danger to the flank of the Australian troops, making it impossible for them to advance further. The leading platoon came under heavy fire from concealed machine guns and their commander was among the wounded. It was then that Lt Chowne took action. Without awaiting orders, he ‘ rushed the enemy’s position, ran up a steep, narrow track and hurled gre-nades, which knocked out two enemy light machine guns. ‘Then, calling on his men to follow him and firing his sub-machine gun from the hip, he charged the enemy’s position. ‘Although he sustained two serious wounds in the chest, the impetus of his charge carried him 50 yards forward under the most intense machine gun and rifle fire,’ the account continued. ‘Lieutenant Chowne accounted for two more Japanese before he was killed standing over three foxholes occupied by the enemy.’ His actions resulted in the capture of the ‘ strongly held’
enemy position, and paved the way directly for the continuance of the Division’s advance.
Lieutenant Chowne had earlier served at Tobruk in Libya and been wounded at el Alamein. He returned to Australia with his battalion in January 1943, before being deployed to Papua in July.
In March 1944, he was awarded the Military Medal for twice crawling close to enemy positions to direct mortar fire.
Described as fearless but selfeffacing by his comrades, on another occasion in Papua, he had carried out a one-man patrol in daylight, entering an empty hut and rifling through the belongings of Japanese soldiers, one of whom he shot when he was discovered.
back in Sydney, Daphne was working as a corporal in a finance office of the Australian Women’s Army Service. She remembers only too clearly the day an officer came over to tell her she was ‘wanted at home’. ‘My heart sank,’ she later recalled. ‘You were rarely sent home and it was never good news.’
Her mother, her sister — and a telegram — were waiting for her. Just a few days earlier she’d received a bouquet of red roses from Albert, which he’d arranged for her birthday. Now he was dead. She was still grieving deeply a year later when she heard about the VC.
‘ I am proud of him but it doesn’t make up for everything,’ she told the Sydney Morning Herald then. ‘I would rather he had remained just ordinary and was alive. He was a wonderful man and a grand husband. I have no plans for the future. It is all dead to me now.’
eventually, after ten years, Daphne did move on, marrying John Dunne, with whom she had a daughter.
but Albert retains a special place in her heart. She once said: ‘ You survive; you’ve got no choice. You have got to pick yourself up and start over again. I wanted him [Albert] to be as proud of me as I am of him. I still love him.’
Now 97, Daphne Dunne still takes part in Anzac Day, a national day of remembrance in April to commemorate all Australian and New Zealander servicemen and women.
No doubt she would have made her darling, heroic Albert extremely proud.