Ships
- HMAS Vendetta (D69) In command, 8 December 1941
William George Whitting (born 14 July 1915) was a Royal Australian Naval Reserve (Seagoing) officer, born in Cardiff, Wales, who was a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant in command of the Australian destroyer Vendetta when the Japanese attacked Malaya in December 1941. The ship was then in dock at Singapore with her engines in pieces. Whitting and a skeleton crew of about twenty men helped defend the naval dockyard against air attack with her guns set up ashore, then, in the last days before the city fell, put the hulk in tow and brought her out. The 72-day voyage under tow, from Singapore through Sumatra, Java, Fremantle, Albany and Adelaide to Melbourne, ended on 15 April 1942 and has been described as the longest tow undertaken by an Australian warship. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and was later mentioned in despatches. He commanded the corvette Colac in 1943 and 1944, and retired from the naval reserve on 6 October 1945, at thirty.
The sources examined here give the date and place of his birth, 14 July 1915 in Cardiff, and nothing else about his family or boyhood. His parents, his schooling, the date of his emigration to Australia, and the ships in which he served before the war were not found. No source in hand says how he came to the sea or to the reserve.
The record places him as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve (Seagoing) from 15 April 1939, at twenty-three, and as a lieutenant from 24 September 1940, at twenty-five. When he joined the Vendetta, and in what capacity, is not recorded in the sources examined here. By the end of November 1941 he was her senior officer in Singapore.
The Vendetta was a V-class destroyer built at Govan and commissioned in 1917; she had been transferred to the Royal Australian Navy in 1933. In the Mediterranean from 1939, with the other old destroyers called the "Scrap Iron Flotilla," she had taken part in the Libyan and Greek campaigns and, from May 1941, in the supply runs to besieged Tobruk, where a published account says she made nineteen runs and brought in 4,263 troops. Her machinery was worn out by it. She arrived at Singapore on 12 November 1941 for an overhaul that required the removal of her turbines and boilers, and most of her crew of about 130 were drafted to other ships there. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Charles John Stephenson, left the ship too, according to a biographical note on her gunner. Uboat.net gives Whitting's command of her from 29 November 1941.
On 8 December 1941 Singapore was bombed. The Vendetta, her machinery spread out on the dock and her guns dismounted, could do nothing as a ship. Whitting, in a popular account published by Warfare History Network, "offered his services to the military authorities in Singapore." Her 12-pounder anti-aircraft guns were set up on the wharf astern of her, and her Lewis and Vickers machine guns were distributed in nests around Keppel Harbor. Whitting set two watches, day and night. According to the account, he took charge of the day watch of the guns while the ship's gunner, John Lace, took the Lewis guns. On 31 December 1941, the account says, fifty-four bombers flew over; on 21 January 1942, the worst day, a hundred and twenty-five took part in the raids, and twenty-seven of them were assigned to Keppel Harbor. Uboat.net records that on 21 January the 12-pounder, which had been mounted ashore near the ship and was manned by her crew under Whitting, shot down a Japanese aircraft. The published account describes a direct hit on the bomb bay of an approaching bomber.
The crew worked on the ship in the intervals of the raids, at the monsoon season's afternoon downpours, with the dock labourers deserting at the first alarm. On 23 January Whitting was ordered to prepare the ship for towing. The record describes the work as it was done by a skeleton crew: the ship's superstructure was ashore, her boiler rooms and engine rooms were stripped, the four-inch armament and ammunition lay at the Naval Base some twenty miles away. The gunner and the yeoman of stores went to the Naval Base, found the ship's guns in various states of assembly, and brought everything they could carry to Keppel Harbor. By 28 January, two four-inch guns had been assembled for self-defense, one forward and one aft, but their breech locks were in a workshop now in Japanese hands, so they could not be fired. The ship was docked for cleaning and painting on 28 January and left the dock on the 30th.
At 0700 on 2 February 1942 the Vendetta slipped her moorings and left Singapore in tow of the tug St. Just, with the old destroyer Stronghold as escort. The Japanese bombed the wharf where she had lain, in the account's words, two hours after she left. The following day, 3 February, aircraft found the tow and attacked in several waves, one of eleven bombers; between 100 and 120 bombs were dropped, and the ships suffered only minor damage from near misses. The Vendetta fired her guns throughout. On 4 February the tow reached the mouth of the Palembang River; on 8 February the sloop Yarra took over for Batavia, where they arrived on the tenth.
From Batavia the tow went on in the charge of an improbable vessel: Ping Wo, a former Chinese river steamer pressed into naval service. On 17 February, in convoy SJ 3, the ships left for Fremantle at an average speed that the published account puts at three knots. Without her engines the Vendetta had no electricity, no refrigeration and little ventilation; the account says the crew ate out of tins in tropical heat, slung their hammocks in the dark below decks, and passed the time sorting and cleaning the parts and equipment gathered at Singapore, smoking cigarettes taken from the stores there, and standing watch by the guns. The tow reached Fremantle on the night of 3–4 March. The Yarra, which had been her escort, and Stronghold and Electra were all lost in action against the Japanese in the weeks that followed; all but thirteen of the Yarra's 151 men died.
The hardest part followed. On 10 March the ship left Fremantle for Melbourne, still in tow of Ping Wo, which developed engine trouble on the second day. They put into Albany on the 15th and Whitting's ship was towed into harbor on the 19th in bad weather. On 24 March, the coastal steamer Islander took over the tow for the Great Australian Bight. The line parted on the 25th and again on the 31st, and with no new tow possible in the weather the destroyer, in the log's words, "was at the mercy of wind and sea." On 3 April, a new line was finally established and the ships made for Adelaide, which they reached on 6 April with the help of the tug Woonda. They left Adelaide on 10 April; the line parted on the 12th and again on the 13th, and each time was reestablished after a few hours. Early on 15 April a tug, the Tooronga, took the tow and brought the Vendetta into Port Phillip and Melbourne. She had covered about five thousand miles in seventy-two days, of which, according to the published account, forty were spent at sea under tow, and the tow line had parted five times.
The Navy recognized the voyage and the defense of Singapore together. The awards were announced on 5 January 1943 for the Vendetta "for courage, endurance and devotion to duty" while under Japanese air attack in dock at Singapore and during the tow. Whitting and the ship's gunner, John Lace, each received the Distinguished Service Cross, and two ratings received the Distinguished Service Medal. In the Australian Commonwealth Gazette and the London Gazette of 29 June 1943 Whitting, by then entered as "D.S.C.," also appears among those mentioned in despatches, with the notice "for courage, skill and initiative in salvage work."
Uboat.net gives the end of his command of the Vendetta as 10 May 1942. He was twenty-six, and had been her captain for a little over five months. The ship went into a refit that lasted until December 1942 and changed her into a dedicated escort vessel.
The sources examined here show his service after the Vendetta only in outline. Uboat.net lists him as commanding the minesweeper HMAS Colac (J242) from 11 June 1943 to August 1944. He is listed as retired on 6 October 1945, when he was thirty years old.
Nothing was found of his life after the war: no marriage, no children, no return to the merchant service, no date or place of death. The only portrait of him in the published accounts is a set of actions and no words: an officer of twenty-six who offered his dismounted ship's guns to the army, kept two gun watches in the docks of a doomed city, and then brought her out. The Vendetta herself served on in the Pacific until October 1945 and was scuttled off Sydney Heads in 1948; her mast stands at the RAN Heritage Centre on Garden Island.