[citation needed] The unit, part of the 9th Division, arrived in the Middle East in November 1940 and later joined the North African campaign, defending Tobruk for eight months in 1941.

He was commissioned as a lieutenant in January 1944 and he married Daphne Barton, a corporal in the Australian Women's Army Service, in March that year.

Although he was twice wounded in the chest, the impetus of his charge carried him forward 50 yards under intense machine gun and rifle fire and he accounted for two more of the enemy before he was killed.

On 8 May 2015, Chowne's widow, Daphne Dunne, was in the crowd at the Sydney Opera House when Prince Harry was farewelled from Australia by the public at the end of a month-long deployment with the Australian Army.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Dunne had a conversation with the prince and "she told him how her first husband Lieutenant Albert Chowne died aged 25 in 1945 – just a year after they married – in a heroic attack on a Japanese machinegun post in Papua New Guinea.

It went on to say: "She wed her second husband, Corporal John Dunne, who was captured in Malaya in 1942 and ended up in Changi POW camp ... (regarding the prince) In a show of affection as he leaned down towards her, she touched his face before he kissed her on the cheek."