In the autumn of 1942, a British general stood on the Indian side of the Burma border with the remnants of an army that had just been driven out of the country. He had taken command of a force that the Japanese had ejected from Rangoon in March, and over the following weeks, despite being outnumbered all the way, he had brought it back 900 miles—some 1,400 kilometers—to India. His men had lost the battle, lost the country, and many had come to believe that the Japanese soldier was invincible in the jungle. Then news arrived from the other side of the war, and he decided to use it.

The news was about the Australians. At the eastern tip of New Guinea, thousands of kilometers from his position, Australian troops had met a Japanese force that had landed soldiers and forced them back to the sea. The general seized on this news and employed it with his men—British, Indian, and Gurkha soldiers who had never served alongside an Australian and were unlikely ever to do so. He made sure they heard what the Australians had done.

Years later, he wrote down his reasons and what he believed it proved, and his words remain available for anyone who cares to read them. They were published in his memoirs, Defeat into Victory, in 1956. The Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs republished the passage in its own account of the battle, alongside the operational record down to battalions and air force squadrons. So nothing about the fighting in this story should be accepted without scrutiny.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography fills in the rest of the man’s life—unexpected details about where he was living when the book came out, and what he actually told his army about the Australians is part of that detail. The question remains: why would a man who spent his career in the British and Indian armies reach for an example from outside his own ranks?

The rest of the story lies in places where he had seen Australians before, because he had been there long before, on the slope of a hill that almost killed him. It was on the Gallipoli peninsula in August 1915, and the scar of that battle stayed with him for life. Australians had been on that hill too. He was not Australian and never served in an Australian unit. His soldiers were British, Indian, and Gurkha. In the darkest months of his army, he took a victory won by another nation’s militia and volunteers from another country, in a bay most of his men had never heard of, and made it the talk of the camp. He could have stopped at a British or Indian battalion, or even one of the Gurkha regiments he had served in himself. But he did not.

Eleven years later, the same general arrived in Canberra and moved into Government House as Governor-General of Australia. The force he had taken command of in March 1942 had lost Rangoon, and with it the country’s only real port. Everything that followed was retreat. Japanese columns moved faster than the British and Indian units, bypassed them instead of breaking through, and kept appearing behind positions that were supposed to be safe. The main force came out the other side of the border with most of its men and very little else. In many of those units, what came out with the men was the belief that fighting the Japanese in the jungle was a lost cause.

The last of them reached India through the hills in May as the monsoon closed in behind them. They had left their transport and most of their weapons on the wrong side of the Chindwin River. The men arrived in the clothes they had worn for weeks, thin and sick with malaria and dysentery, and the camps waiting for them in India were not ready. The general walked among them and spoke to them. He did this for the rest of the war, communicating with as many of his soldiers as possible, one by one. He did it most often in the darkest conditions.

That belief was founded on evidence that lasted a full year. Hong Kong fell at Christmas, Malaya at the New Year, then Singapore in February. It was the largest surrender in British military history. The Dutch East Indies fell, then Burma. Almost everywhere the Japanese landed, they won. And the soldiers who had been defeated stopped expecting anything else. Men who had suffered such a defeat tended to talk about the enemy’s skill in the jungle, his night attacks, his habit of appearing behind them, far more than what their own forces could do.

But what appeared instead was a story from New Guinea. On the night of 25 August 1942, Japanese naval forces began landing on the northern shore of Milne Bay at the far eastern tip of the island. There were about 2,000 soldiers, most of them marines from the Special Naval Landing Forces—specifically the 5th Kure and 3rd Kure units and the 5th Yokosuka. They came for the airfields the Allies were building at the head of the bay. Their ships lay offshore behind them, and the plan was to reach the runways within days.

The garrison waiting for them was larger than the landing force. About 7,450 Australians were at Milne Bay, within roughly 9,000 Allied personnel in the area. There was the 7th Brigade of the Militia—the 9th, 25th, and 61st Battalions—part-time soldiers enlisted to defend Australia who never expected to see a Japanese marine. Beside them was the 18th Brigade of the Second Australian Imperial Force—the 2/9th, 2/10th, and 2/12th Battalions—volunteers who had already fought in the Middle East. Over the bay flew Kittyhawk fighter-bombers of No. 75 and No. 76 Squadrons of the Royal Australian Air Force, operating from the same airfields the Japanese had come to seize. They were joined by Hudson bombers of No. 6 and No. 32 Squadrons. The distance the fighters had to cover was short; the airfields they took off from were the target, and the fighting on the ground was so close to the runways that a pilot could be over the enemy within minutes of lifting off.

For 12 days, the fighting went back and forth along the narrow coastal strip between the mountains and the water, in rain and mud, and often at night. On the night of 6 September, Japanese warships returned to the bay and evacuated those they could reach. The landing force was finished and the operation was over. Australian casualties at Milne Bay were 353 killed, including 161 missing or presumed missing. The Australian commander, Brigadier Cyril Clowes, estimated Japanese losses at about 700 men.

Milne Bay was jungle and swamp and torrential rain. The Japanese landed light tanks on the shore, but they bogged down in the mud. The ground was muddy, the air hot and humid, and the soldiers who lost there were the same Japanese infantrymen who had driven his army 900 miles. Burma and New Guinea lie thousands of kilometers apart, and on the ground they could not look more different. This was the kind of country the general would have to take his men back into sooner or later if he wanted to retake Burma.

In Burma, between March and May, the Japanese had pushed a British main force back 900 miles and out of the country entirely. At Milne Bay, a Japanese landing force was put ashore from its ships in 12 days, while the airfields it came to seize were still in Australian hands. One army had spent three months retreating. The other had held and forced the enemy to leave. Both battles were fought against Japanese forces that had never, until that summer, been forced to abandon their objective and withdraw.

Twenty-seven years earlier, in July 1915, a British lieutenant had landed on the Gallipoli peninsula. He belonged to the 9th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, one of the wartime battalions formed from volunteers in the English Midlands. He was 23 then and would turn 24 within weeks. His name was William Slim, and he had been on the peninsula only a short time when British headquarters launched the offensive that was supposed to decide the whole campaign.

The objective was the Sari Bair range, the high ground rising behind the Anzac positions. Between 6 and 21 August 1915, Australian, British, Indian, and New Zealand troops under Major-General Alexander Godley climbed the valleys toward the peaks, most of it in darkness. The New Zealand Infantry Brigade moved on Chunuk Bair. The 4th Australian Brigade under John Monash got lost in a maze of steep gullies and broken hills and never reached its objective. The attack was spread across several columns, all climbing the same range on the same nights.

Slim’s battalion moved up to support the 1st Battalion of the 6th Gurkha Rifles, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Allanson, in the assault on a summit called Hill Q. The Gurkhas reached the top, and then the Allied warships offshore shelled the crest, driving them back down the height they had just climbed. Somewhere during that attack, Slim was hit in the chest by a bullet. The wound was severe, and he was carried off the peninsula.

The Gurkhas had advanced further up the range than almost anyone else in that offensive. And yet their own side’s fire had forced them back. The August offensive failed. By the end of the year, the entire Allied force had left Gallipoli, and the hills it had tried to take remained in Turkish hands. Slim recovered from the bullet and returned to the war in Mesopotamia, where he was wounded a second time.

After the war he joined the Indian Army, in a Gurkha regiment, and by 1942 he had spent nearly thirty years in uniform. He had joined the 6th Gurkha Rifles—the very regiment whose 1st Battalion he had been supporting on the morning he was shot.

In Defeat into Victory, Slim records that news arrived that was most welcome, and that he used it well to lift his soldiers’ spirits. In August and September 1942, he wrote: “The Australians at Milne Bay in New Guinea had inflicted on the Japanese the first unmistakable defeat on land. If the Australians could do it in conditions similar to theirs, his men could do it too.” Those were his words to an army that had lost everything it owned in Burma. He adds that some might forget it, but he considered it worth recording.

He was writing more than a decade after Milne Bay, and he had already won his victory in Burma. Yet he kept that sentence: “Of all the Allies, it was the Australian soldiers who first broke the spell of the invincible Japanese Army.” By the time he wrote those lines, he had commanded a full army and retaken Burma from the Japanese, and still he went back to 1942 and gave the first credit to the Australians.

You may hear it said that Milne Bay was not the first Japanese defeat on land at all, and there is something to that view. On 21 August 1942, four days before the Milne Bay landings, US Marines on Guadalcanal destroyed a Japanese attack at the Tenaru River. In December 1941, the first Japanese attempt to land on Wake Island was repulsed. Slim, however, chose his words carefully. He described Milne Bay as the first unmistakable defeat on land. After Tenaru, and after that first attempt at Wake, the Japanese came back and kept fighting. At Milne Bay, they went back to their ships and abandoned the operation entirely.

There is another thing to be clear about, and it is in the title of this account. Slim was not in a trench beside Australian soldiers at Gallipoli. His battalion climbed the Sari Bair range with the Gurkhas toward Hill Q in an attack that also included columns of Australian and New Zealand infantry on the neighbouring hills. Monash’s brigade was one of those columns. They all fell on the same range, in the same offensive, on the same August nights. That is the limit of the precision available. It is as close as the records allow.

The army Slim spoke of to the Australians did not surrender. It became the Fourteenth Army under his command, and his soldiers began calling themselves “the Forgotten Army” because the newspapers at home rarely bothered with them. In 1944 they stopped the Japanese invasion of India at Imphal and Kohima. In May 1945, Rangoon—the port the main force had lost at the start of the war—returned to Allied hands. The same men who had retreated from Burma in 1942 came back into it.

Slim reached Australia as Governor-General on 8 May 1953. He had just finished his term as Chief of the Imperial General Staff—the highest official post in the British Army—and he stayed in the job until 2 February 1960. As a commander, he carried a reputation as the general who spoke to his soldiers face to face, and in Canberra he never gave up the habit.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that early in his term he startled people with blunt remarks about anything or anyone in Australia he considered second-rate. The man who wrote that Australian soldiers had broken the spell of the Japanese Army was also the Governor-General who confronted Australians when he judged them wanting. Both are documented in the records.

He had seen Australian soldiers up close in one war, followed them from a distance in another, and then spent nearly seven years living among the people of the country that sent them. He first met them as a lieutenant in the 24th Battalion, and last saw them as the Queen’s representative in their capital. By then he was Field Marshal Sir William Slim.

Defeat into Victory was published in 1956, in the third year of his term. The Milne Bay passage—the one about the Australians breaking the spell—was printed while its author was living at Government House in Yarralumla, Canberra. That was 14 years after he read about the battle in a camp on the Indian border, and 41 years after a bullet went through his chest on Sari Bair.

So why does a man like that reach for an example from outside his own ranks—and what does it say about the armies we choose to remember?