Ships
- HMS Swiftsure (08) Captain from 4 February 1945
Patrick Vivian McLaughlin was born in Gloucestershire on 7 April 1901 and was trained for the Royal Navy at Osborne and Dartmouth. On 26 September 1917 he was appointed a midshipman and joined the battleship Colossus while the Great War was still being fought. After the Armistice, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Jellicoe took him in the flagship for the long cruise through the Empire. He became a sub-lieutenant in 1921 and served in the cruiser Dragon, then as a lieutenant in Dublin from 1923. In May 1926 he qualified in gunnery, and that specialisation ran through the rest of his service.
He was promoted lieutenant-commander on 15 June 1930 and in January 1931 went out as Fleet Gunnery Officer on the East Indies Station. Promotion to commander followed on 30 June 1935. From December 1936 he held the fleet gunnery appointment on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, and he was still in that post as Europe moved toward war. On 1 March 1939 he took command of the new Tribal-class destroyer Mashona and spent the opening months of the war on North Sea duty. He left her on 23 January 1940, three weeks after his promotion to captain on the last day of 1939.
On 1 February 1940 he became captain of the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo. That spring she was in Norwegian waters, and on 28 May, off Narvik, German aircraft damaged her. A mention in despatches on 23 January 1941 recognised his courage and endurance under air attack there. He left Cairo on 14 January 1941 and spent the next two years at the Admiralty as Deputy Director of Naval Ordnance.
In May 1943 he was appointed to Spartan, a new light cruiser built for anti-aircraft work. He commissioned her for trials at Barrow-in-Furness in July, worked her up at Scapa Flow, and that autumn took her to the Mediterranean. In January 1944 she joined the covering force for the Anzio landing, Operation Shingle, and anchored off the beachhead to protect the shipping. At sunset on 29 January a German aircraft launched a radio-controlled Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb. It struck Spartan near the after funnel, started a severe fire, flooded the boiler rooms, and left her without steam or electrical power. About an hour later she was abandoned, and she then capsized in shallow water. Five officers and forty-one ratings were killed, and forty-two ratings were wounded. McLaughlin survived and was taken off by a boat from the destroyer Laforey.
He returned to sea on 4 February 1945 as captain of the light cruiser Swiftsure. The ship was already with the British Pacific Fleet. The next day, wearing the flag of Rear-Admiral E. J. P. Brind, she exercised her guns off Manus and sailed for Sydney, arriving on 10 February. Through the spring McLaughlin commanded her with the British carrier force in Operation Iceberg, the Okinawa campaign. Swiftsure screened the carriers against air attack and joined in the bombardment of Japanese airfields in the Sakishima Islands. In June she bombarded shore targets during the carrier raid on Truk, and on 26 June she reached Sydney for a short refit, going into dock at Cockatoo Island at the end of July.
When the war ended, Swiftsure carried Rear-Admiral Cecil Harcourt into Victoria Harbour on 30 August 1945 for the reoccupation of Hong Kong. Harcourt had chosen her as his flagship. McLaughlin received a Japanese naval envoy who came aboard that day. The Distinguished Service Order, gazetted on 11 June 1946, marked his service in the Far East. He remained captain of Swiftsure until late 1946.
On 7 January 1947 he became captain of Excellent, the navy’s gunnery school at Whale Island, and stayed there until January 1949. That month he was appointed a naval aide-de-camp to King George VI. Promotion to rear-admiral came on 8 July 1949. In February 1950 he joined the Ordnance Board as its senior naval member and naval vice-president, and in February 1952 he became president of the Board. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 1 January 1951. McLaughlin retired on 24 February 1953 and died on 8 June 1969.