Ships
- HMAS Vendetta (D69) Captain from 9 November 1944
Gilbert Sutherland Gordon (23 March 1914–18 October 1980) was an officer of the Royal Australian Navy, born at Moonee Ponds, Victoria, who entered the service as a cadet on 1 January 1928 and commanded the old destroyer Vendetta in the New Guinea campaign from 11 November 1944 to the end of May 1945. Earlier in 1944 he had commanded the corvette Castlemaine. He left the service in July 1947 as a lieutenant commander, and is buried at Glen Innes, New South Wales.
He was born at Moonee Ponds, a suburb of Melbourne, on 23 March 1914, according to uboat.net and the Naval Graves Project. Nothing in the sources examined here names his parents or describes his family or schooling. He entered the Royal Australian Navy on 1 January 1928, when he was thirteen years old, and the Naval Graves Project records that he was a graduate of the Royal Australian Naval College.
The sources examined here give no account of his years at the college or at sea before 1944. Uboat.net gives his dates of rank: acting sub-lieutenant on 1 September 1935, sub-lieutenant on 16 March 1936, lieutenant on 16 August 1938, and lieutenant commander on 16 August 1946. He had been a lieutenant for a year when the Second World War began; where he served in its first years is not recorded in the sources examined here.
On 23 June 1944, at thirty, he took command of the corvette Castlemaine (J244), a Bathurst-class ship built at Williamstown, Victoria, and commissioned in 1942. According to the ship's published histories she had been engaged on minesweeping and escort duties in northern Australian waters and then on the convoy run between Queensland and New Guinea, and in August 1944 she was assigned to survey duties in Australian waters. Uboat.net lists him in command until November 1944.
In November 1944 he went to the destroyer Vendetta, a V-class ship of 1917 that had served with the Royal Navy and then, as one of the "Scrap Iron Flotilla," in the Mediterranean, at Tobruk, Greece and Crete; after a long refit she had become an escort vessel. Her previous captain, Lieutenant Commander William F. Cook, wrote in a memoir published in the Naval Historical Review that after Operation Battleaxe, the landing at Jacquinot Bay on New Britain and the bombardment of Wide Bay in early November, he returned to Madang on 9 November and received a signal confirming that he had been appointed to the Nizam. "Lieutenant Commander Gilbert S. Gordon RAN arrived later on 9th November," he wrote, "and took over officially on 11th November." Cook was rowed ashore at four the next morning.
The ship's reports of proceedings, as summarized by uboat.net, show how Gordon spent the next four months. In November and December 1944 the Vendetta worked from Madang, Biak and Mios Woendi: she searched at night for the crew of a downed aircraft, escorted the American tanker Elkhorn to Morotai, accompanied the troopship General Harry Taylor, and guarded the submarine Stingray in and out of the area. On 19 December she met a group of fifteen American motor torpedo boats and the tender Acontius and brought them to Palau. On 9 January 1945 she took bombardment liaison officers aboard at Aitape and fired 206 four-inch rounds at three targets in the Matapau and Sowom area, with aircraft marking and spotting for her. On 12 January, on anti-submarine patrol off Humboldt Bay, she was ordered to give medical help to an American transport, and the ship's doctor, on arrival, could only certify that the patient had died in the meantime. Through January she escorted convoys between Biak and Morotai. On 14 February, when she took the Biak section of a convoy to Leyte, Gordon was at Mios Woendi attending a seamanship board, and the first lieutenant, Lieutenant M. Germaine of the Naval Volunteer Reserve, was in temporary command. She cleaned boilers, exercised her Hedgehog anti-submarine weapon and, in March, patrolled off Humboldt Bay before she was ordered to Australia for refit.
On 20 March 1945, at 0604, the ship grounded while entering Brisbane. She was refloated that afternoon and towed upstream by tugs. She was docked for inspection, and the damage, according to the report, was severe. Gordon is listed in command until 31 May 1945. The ship's later history records that, after repair and trials, she went back to Madang in August, supported arrangements for the surrender at Rabaul, reached Sydney on 3 October 1945, and was paid off on 27 November 1945.
The sources examined here do not say what he did in the months after he left the Vendetta. Uboat.net records that he was transferred to the Emergency List on 9 July 1947, and the Naval Graves Project that he was discharged on 8 July 1947 after service dating from 1928. Uboat.net's rank table also carries a retirement date of 8 December 1964. He died on 18 October 1980, aged sixty-six, and was buried in the Presbyterian section of the Glen Innes General Cemetery in northern New South Wales. No marriage, children or obituary have been found.