Ships
- HMS Exeter (68) Captain from 11 March 1941 · In command when she was lost, 1 March 1942. He survived
Oliver Loudon Gordon was born on 26 January 1896, the son of W. M. Gordon, Assistant Colonial Secretary in Trinidad, in a family connected with Antigua and the British West Indies. He joined the Royal Navy as a cadet on 15 January 1909 and trained at Dartmouth. By the First World War he was a midshipman. He became an acting sub-lieutenant in 1915, a sub-lieutenant in 1916, and a lieutenant in 1917, with his seniority later fixed at 15 April 1917.
He was promoted lieutenant-commander on 15 April 1925 and commander on 30 June 1931. From 1932 to 1934 he served as navigating officer of the royal yacht Victoria and Albert. On 12 August 1934, while still a commander, he was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order. He reached the rank of captain on 30 June 1939.
In the autumn of 1940 Gordon took command of the submarine depot ship Maidstone. He left her in March 1941 for the heavy cruiser Exeter, assuming command on 11 March. The ship was then completing a long reconstruction after the damage she had suffered in the Battle of the River Plate. Under Gordon she ran trials off Plymouth, sailed for Scapa Flow late that month, and worked up before being sent out to the East.
By February 1942 Exeter was with the combined Allied force trying to check the Japanese advance through the Java Sea. On 27 February, in the fleet action that day, she was hit and forced out of the line with her speed cut. On 1 March, while she was still trying to get clear, Japanese cruisers and destroyers intercepted her. Gunfire and torpedoes sank her. Gordon was in command when Exeter was lost, and he survived. A Japanese warship took him from the water.
He remained a prisoner for more than three years, including a long stretch at Zentsuji camp on Shikoku, where many of the men were Allied officers captured in the early battles of 1942. The camp was at first kept up for show, and conditions there grew harder after 1942. He was freed at the end of the war. On 22 January 1946 he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath for his conduct in command of Exeter in her last actions against a much stronger Japanese force on 27 February and 1 March 1942.
Gordon returned to sea as captain of the light cruiser Cleopatra from January 1946 until January 1948. He was placed on the retired list on 10 July 1948. In 1957 he published Fight It Out, his account of the loss of Exeter and of the years that followed in Japanese hands. He died on 30 January 1973, at the age of seventy-seven.