A regular officer of the Royal Australian Engineers who joined the Militia in 1908, he was one of the original Anzacs during the First World War, participating in the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915.

As one of the Army's most senior officers, he succeeded General Sir Thomas Blamey as Commander in Chief of the Australian Military Forces in December 1945.

[12] He was evacuated twice for hospital treatment for enteric fever and for serious damage to his stomach lining from internal burns as a result of too much "Condy's crystals" disinfectant being put into drinking water.

[1] Sturdee was promoted to major on 28 August 1915,[7] and in September assumed command of the 5th Field Company, a unit raised in Egypt to support the newly formed 2nd Division.

[14] From then until the end of the campaign, he was responsible for all engineering and mining work at Steele's, Quinn's and Courtney's Posts,[11] three of the northernmost and most dangerous and exposed parts of the line.

[16] On returning to Egypt after the evacuation of Anzac, Sturdee assumed responsibility for the provision of hutting at the AIF reinforcement camp at Tel el Kebir.

To free up another division to participate, II ANZAC Corps organised "Franks Force" to take over a divisional frontage in the Houplines sector, and Sturdee became its Commander Royal Engineers (CRE).

[22] On 27 March 1918, Sturdee was seconded to General Headquarters (GHQ) British Expeditionary Force as a staff officer, remaining there until 22 October 1918.

[1] For his service on the Western Front, Sturdee was mentioned in despatches a second time,[23] and appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his work at GHQ.

[31] He had to supervise the raising, training and equipping of the new Second Australian Imperial Force units being formed in New South Wales, as well as the now-conscript Militia.

Instead, the government elected to adopt the British system, in which the Military Board (or Army Council as it was called there) continued to operate, with a separate GOC Home Forces.

[36] Sturdee attempted to defend the islands to the north of Australia to satisfy an allied agreement made during the second Four-Power Staff Conference at Singapore on 22 February 1941.

When there were doubts about the morale of one commander, Sturdee replaced him with a staff officer from Army Headquarters who volunteered for the position despite being well aware of the odds.

After the war Sturdee described the situation thus:I realised at the time [in 1941–42] that these forces [on Rabaul,Timor and Ambon] would be swallowed up ... but these garrisons were the smallest self-contained units then in existence.

[43] Commenting on Sturdee's forward defence strategy after the war, Colonel Eustace Graham Keogh wrote: Taking the prevailing circumstances into full account, it is hard to justify the detachments at Ambon and Rabaul.

Certainly it was highly desirable to deny the enemy access to them, but once command of the sea had been lost any forces stationed at those places could not be supported until the navy situation had been restored.

Under these circumstances, that the Chiefs of Staff sought, at high cost, to keep the Japanese military juggernaut as far as possible from Australian soil should be no great surprise.

[47] Official historian Lionel Wigmore concluded: It is now evident that the 7th Division would have arrived only in time to help in the extraction from Pegu and to take part in the long retreat to India.

In that event it could not have been returned to Australia, rested and sent to New Guinea in time to perform the crucial role it was to carry out in the defeat of the Japanese offensive which would open there in July 1942.

The Allied cause therefore was well served in sound judgement and solid persistence of General Sturdee who maintained his advice against that of the Chiefs of Staff in London and Washington.

On 18 October, Blamey issued an operational instruction that defined the role of the First Army: "by offensive action to destroy enemy resistance as opportunity offers without committing major forces.

The Commander in Chief responded by stating that "my conception is that action must be of a gradual nature" involving the use of patrols to determine Japanese strengths and positions before large offensives were undertaken.

[53] The situation on New Britain was straightforward enough; the enemy was known to be stronger than the Australian forces there—although it was not realised just how much stronger—and so the best that could be done was to eliminate small numbers of Japanese troops by aggressive patrolling.

[54] At Aitape, Stevens was tasked on the one hand with pushing the Japanese back far enough to protect the airfields;[55] but on the other, with not allowing the 6th Division to become heavily engaged since it might be required for use elsewhere.

The general policy is out of our hands, but we must conduct our operations in the spirit of the role given us by C. in C. [Blamey], the main essence of which is that we should attain our object with a minimum of Australian casualties.

On Bougainville, at a cost of 516 Australian dead and 1,572 wounded, Savige's troops had occupied much of the island and killed 8,500 Japanese; another 9,800 died from malnutrition and disease.

[59] Meanwhile, the 6th Division at Aitape and Wewak had lost 442 dead and 1,141 wounded while clearing the Japanese from the coast and driving them into the mountains, killing 9,000 and taking 269 prisoners.

[63] In November 1945, the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, informed Blamey that the government had decided to re-establish the Military Board and he should therefore vacate his office.

The proposal submitted to Cabinet called for national service, a regular army of 33,000 and reserves of 42,000, but the government baulked at the £20m per annum price tag.

[68] Over next fifty years, operations would be conducted by the new Australian Regular Army that Sturdee created, rather than the Militia or specially enlisted expeditionary forces.