Sydney Rowell
Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Fairbairn Rowell, (15 December 1894 – 12 April 1975) was an Australian soldier who served as Chief of the General Staff from 17 April 1950 to 15 December 1954. As Vice Chief of the General Staff from 8 January 1946 to 16 April 1950, he played a key role in the post-Second World War reorganisation of the Army, and in the 1949 Australian coal strike. However, he is best known as the commander who was dismissed in the Kokoda Track campaign. As a young officer, Rowell served at Gallipoli but was invalided back to Australia with typhoid fever in January 1916. The end of the war found Rowell junior in rank to his contemporaries with more distinguished war records, but he managed to catch up in the post-war period. Rowell spent five years with the British Army or at British staff colleges, establishing valuable contacts with his British counterparts. In 1939 he was appointed chief of staff of the 6th Division and later I Corps, serving in that capacity in the Battle of Greece and the Syria-Lebanon campaign. In 1942 he commanded I Corps in the Kokoda Track campaign but was sacked. His subsequent rise to become Chief of the General Staff demonstrated that the circumstances of his dismissal in 1942 were indeed extraordinary. Early life Sydney Fairbairn Rowell was born on 15 December 1894 at Lockleys, South Australia, the fourth son of James Rowell, an English-born soldier and orchardist who served as a senator from 1916 to 1922, and his Australian-born second wife Zella Jane née Williams. He acted as an 'unofficial batman' to his father, who was colonel commanding the South Australian Brigade from 1907 to 1911. Rowell was educated at Adelaide High School and was one of the first cadets to enter the Royal Military College, Duntroon when it opened in 1911. First World War On 15 September 1914 Rowell and his classmates were commissioned as first lieutenants in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). At the time, Rowell's class had not yet completed its military training. The AIF's commander, Major General William Throsby Bridges, decided that regimental duty would rectify that deficiency, so he allotted the Duntroon cadets as regimental officers of the AIF, rather than as staff officers. The cost of this decision was high; of the 134 commissioned in time to serve at the front, 42 were killed and 38 wounded. Cadets were posted to units being formed in their home states, so Rowell was posted to the 10th Infantry Battalion. When he discovered that the 3rd Light Horse Regiment was to be commanded by his cousin, Lieutenant Colonel F. M. Rowell, Sydney obtained permission to swap places with another member of his Duntroon class Lieutenant Eric Wilkes Talbot Smith. It was a fateful decision; Smith was fatally wounded on Anzac Day. Rowell contracted pneumonia and did not embark with the main body of the 3rd Light Horse Regiment. Instead, he left with its First Reinforcements on HMAT Thirty-Six on 21