Rupert Downes - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Downes held this post until 22 August 1944. Due to the run-down of the Army, the Second Army, always mainly a paper organisation, increasingly had less and less to do. Now nearly sixty, he then accepted an invitation to write the medical history series of the official history of Australia in the war. As part of this, in March 1945, he decided to accompany Major General George Alan Vasey to New Guinea, where Vasey's 6th Division had encountered an atabrine-resistant strain of malaria in the Aitape-Wewak campaign. On 5 March 1945, the RAAF Lockheed Hudson aircraft they were travelling in crashed into the sea about 400 yards (370 m) from Machans Beach, just north of the mouth of the Barron River near Cairns. Downes and Vasey were killed along with all nine other Australian service personnel on board. Their bodies were recovered and buried in Cairns War Cemetery with full military honours. Downes was survived by Doris, Valerie and Rosemary. A memorial service was held at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne on 9 March 1945. He became the third most senior Australian officer to die in the Second World War, after General Sir Brudenell White, who died in the Canberra air disaster in 1940, and Lieutenant General Henry Wynter, who died on 7 February 1945.

Downes' papers are in the Australian War Memorial. The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons established the triennial Rupert Downes Memorial Lecture in his honour. The subject of the Lecture is "related to some aspect or aspects of military surgery, medical equipment (military and civil), the surgery of children, neurosurgery, general surgery, medical ethics or medical history; these being subjects in which Downes was particularly interested".