Ships
- HMS Indefatigable (10) Captain from 1 September 1943 · Relieved on 1 November 1945
Quintin Dick Graham was born in Antrim, in the north of Ireland, on 4 July 1895, the son of Ogilvie B. Graham. He joined the Royal Navy as a cadet on 15 May 1908 and became a midshipman on 15 January 1913. The First World War caught him in the junior ranks. He was made an acting sub-lieutenant on 15 January 1915, a sub-lieutenant on 30 September 1915, and a lieutenant on 30 December 1916. He stayed in the service after the Armistice and advanced by seniority through the years of peace.
He was promoted lieutenant-commander on 30 December 1924 and commander on 31 December 1930. From 7 April 1931 to 14 December 1932 he served as squadron torpedo officer with the Battle Cruiser Squadron. In March and April 1936, still a commander, he held a short command of the battleship Ramillies. Promotion to captain came on 30 June 1937. His first sustained command in that rank was the sloop Bridgewater, which he had from February 1938 until 27 March 1939.
On 30 June 1939 he became captain of the light cruiser Arethusa, and he was still in her when Britain went to war. In February 1940 she returned to Scapa Flow after convoy cover and operations in northern waters. Later that year she took part in bringing Polish troops out of France as the campaign on the Continent ended, and for that service Graham received the Polish Cross of Valour, awarded on 21 October 1941. He also received the Czechoslovak War Cross of 1939. He left Arethusa on 14 May 1941.
On 30 November 1942 he took command of the aircraft carrier Unicorn. The New Year honours of 1943 appointed him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and on 4 May 1943 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. On 1 September 1943 he was appointed captain of Indefatigable, an Implacable-class fleet carrier still completing on the Clyde. His appointment to Unicorn ran on the books until 14 October, while the new carrier became his work from the first of September. A mention in despatches followed on 23 May 1944.
Indefatigable had been laid down by John Brown and Company at Clydebank on 3 November 1939 and launched on 8 December 1942. Under Graham she was commissioned for trials at Glasgow on 8 December 1943, with the last of her outfitting to be done at Rosyth, and on 24 December she left the builder's yard for Greenock. While she was completing, a deception known as Operation Bijou was used to give the impression that the carrier was already in service. She entered commission with the fleet in May 1944. That summer, with the Home Fleet, her aircraft attacked the German battleship Tirpitz in the Norwegian fjords during Operations Mascot and Goodwood, and they raided other targets along the Norwegian coast. Smoke screens and bad weather held the harm done to Tirpitz to light damage.
Early in 1945 Indefatigable went east with the British Pacific Fleet. In Operations Lentil and Meridian her aircraft struck oil refineries on Sumatra and disrupted the fuel reaching Japanese forces. From late March she joined the United States fleet for Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa, and flew strikes against the Sakishima Islands and Okinawa. Her aircraft at that stage of the war included Seafires, Avengers and Fireflies. On 1 April 1945 a kamikaze hit her flight deck. The armoured deck kept the damage from opening the ship up. Twenty-one men were killed and twenty-seven wounded. Graham had the fires mastered and enough repair done that she was ready to operate aircraft again within about forty minutes, and she kept flying through the rest of the operation, a stretch of about two months. A bar to the Distinguished Service Order, gazetted on 23 October 1945, marked that command. The published citation covered the carriers that had worked with the United States Pacific Fleet in the capture of Okinawa and the Nansei Shoto from 26 March to 20 April 1945.
Graham was still in Indefatigable when Japan surrendered. The ship reached Sydney on 18 September 1945 and began a refit. He was relieved on 1 November 1945, after commanding her from the fitting-out period at Clydebank through the Norwegian strikes and the Pacific campaign. The Navy placed him on the retired list on 5 July 1946. He died at Titchfield, in Hampshire, on 2 September 1968, at the age of seventy-three.