Ships
- HMAS Warramunga (I44) Captain from 5 March 1944
Commander N. A. Mackinnon of the Royal Australian Navy took command of the Tribal-class destroyer Warramunga on 5 March 1944. The ship, pennant I44, had been built at Cockatoo Dockyard in Sydney and had been in commission since November 1942. She was just finishing cover for the Allied landing in the Admiralty Islands. On that day her first commanding officer, Emile Frank Verlaine Dechaineux, flew to Sydney to take command of the cruiser Australia. Mackinnon inherited a destroyer already worked into Task Force 74, the cruiser and destroyer force in which Australian ships operated alongside the Americans.
The rest of March and the first part of April were spent at Milne Bay, where the boilers were washed through and the ship took a short maintenance period. On 14 April 1944 the task force sailed for Seeadler Harbour in the Admiralties. On 19 April it put to sea to meet the attack force bound for Tanahmerah Bay, Humboldt Bay and Aitape. Those landings opened the drive on Hollandia, and Warramunga screened and supported the assault with the other ships of the force.
In the months that followed, still under Mackinnon, Warramunga supported the landings at Wakde–Sarmi and at Biak, then turned to patrol and escort work. On 22 July 1944 she sailed for Sydney with Australia for refit and leave, and she was back with the force in August. On 15 September she took part in the landing at Morotai. After that operation the ships returned to Manus.
At Manus on 30 September 1944 Mackinnon fell ill and was admitted to the United States Navy hospital there. J. M. Alliston, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander serving in the cruiser Shropshire, came across and took the destroyer. Mackinnon rejoined Warramunga for a short time in October. When he was invalided south, Alliston returned, transferring at sea in a boatswain’s chair. The ship was then on the move from Hollandia toward Leyte Gulf, and Alliston commanded her into that operation. Dechaineux, by then captain of Australia, was killed when the cruiser was struck by a kamikaze aircraft during the Leyte fighting, a loss keenly felt in his old destroyer.
Warramunga under Mackinnon had moved with Task Force 74 from the Admiralties to Morotai, covering amphibious landings and filling the intervals with patrol and escort. His command closed with the illness at Manus. Alliston kept the ship through the Philippine campaign, and in April 1945 M. J. Clark assumed command.