Philip Vian

Sir Philip Vian was one of the best-known British naval commanders of the Second World War. He came to public attention in February 1940 when, as a captain commanding a destroyer flotilla, he took HMS Cossack into Norway’s Jøssingfjord and freed nearly three hundred seamen held aboard the German ship Altmark. The action in neutral Norwegian waters made him a hero in a country weary of the Phoney War, and in Berlin it reinforced the conviction that Germany had to forestall the British in Norway. Vian went on to hunt the battleship Bismarck, take convoys through to besieged Malta, command the naval cover for the landings in Sicily, at Salerno and in Normandy and, at the end of the war, lead the carriers of the British Pacific Fleet. He was a hard, impatient commander who was difficult to work with, but exceptionally resolute in battle.

Early life and the First World War

Philip Louis Vian was born in London on 15 June 1894, the son of Alsager Richard Vian and Ada Frances, née Renault. Some sources give 15 July, but his service record in the British National Archives gives June. In May 1907, not yet thirteen, he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet and was educated at the naval colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth. After completing his training in 1911 he went on a training cruise in the cruiser Cornwall, cut short when the ship struck an uncharted reef off Nova Scotia. In January 1912 he joined the obsolete battleship Lord Nelson in the Home Fleet as a midshipman.

The war found him in the same ship. Later, from October 1914 to September 1915, he served in the old cruiser Argonaut, which patrolled East African waters in search of the German cruiser Karlsruhe. Frustrated by inactivity, he pressed for a posting to a destroyer, and in October 1915 he joined the modern HMS Morning Star. In her he witnessed the Battle of Jutland in 1916, although his ship took no active part in it. As a lieutenant he then served as first lieutenant of the destroyers Ossory and Sorceress.

A gunnery officer between the wars

After the war Vian specialised in gunnery and in 1919 obtained a first-class certificate at the naval gunnery school. From January 1920 he spent two years on loan to the Royal Australian Navy as gunnery officer of the Australian flagship, the battlecruiser Australia. He spent the following years as a gunnery officer in battleships and cruisers of the Mediterranean Fleet and in the Far East, including the heavy cruiser Kent, flagship of the China Station. He was promoted to lieutenant commander in 1924 and to commander in June 1929. In December of that year he married Marjorie Haig, with whom he had two daughters. In 1931–1933 he worked at the Admiralty analysing the results of gunnery practice.

In March 1933 he received his first command, the destroyer Active in the Mediterranean. Two minor accidents during this period did not harm his standing with the fleet commander, Admiral William Fisher, and in December 1934 Vian was promoted to captain. During the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935 he commanded a flotilla of destroyers brought out of reserve to reinforce Malta, and in the summer of 1936, while returning home with the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, he helped evacuate British subjects from Spain, then in the grip of civil war. From 1937 he was flag captain to Rear Admiral Lionel Wells in the cruiser Arethusa in the Mediterranean Fleet.

The Altmark

Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War Vian returned home and took over the 11th Destroyer Flotilla, made up of old ships from the First World War, which escorted Atlantic convoys from Plymouth and later from Liverpool. In January 1940 he moved to command the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, made up of new, heavily armed Tribal-class ships. As its leader, Afridi, was going in for a refit, Vian hoisted his pendant in HMS Cossack.

In mid-February the flotilla was ordered to find the German supply ship Altmark, which after the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee was trying to slip home to Germany along the Norwegian coast with prisoners from the ships the raider had sunk. On 16 February 1940 Vian’s destroyers caught up with her near Egersund, but the ship, escorted by Norwegian torpedo boats, took refuge in the Jøssingfjord. Vian asked the Admiralty for instructions and received an order from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to board the ship if the Norwegians would not agree to a joint escort to Bergen. The Norwegians refused. That evening Vian took Cossack into the fjord and, despite attempts to ram him and dazzle him with a searchlight, came alongside the Altmark; after a short fight in which seven Germans were killed, his sailors freed 299 prisoners. The cry “The Navy’s here!” went round the British press.

Norway and Germany protested at the violation of neutrality, and in Berlin the incident became an argument for speeding up preparations for the invasion of Norway. In Britain Vian became a hero. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), with a citation praising his “outstanding ability, determination and resourcefulness” and his “masterly handling of his ship in confined waters”.

Norway and the Bismarck

When Germany attacked Norway on 9 April 1940, Vian, now in Afridi, returned to Norwegian waters. In mid-April he covered the landing at Namsos of British troops who were to strike at Trondheim, and at the beginning of May their evacuation. On 3 May 1940 Afridi was sunk by German bombers. In October, back in Cossack, Vian attacked a German convoy off the Norwegian coast and was awarded his first bar to the DSO, although the success of the action had been exaggerated.

In May 1941 his destroyers Cossack, Maori, Sikh, Zulu and the Polish ORP Piorun were detached from a troop convoy and sent in pursuit of the battleship Bismarck, which had already been damaged by torpedo aircraft. On the night of 26–27 May, in a gale and darkness, Vian’s destroyers attacked the battleship with torpedoes again and again. They most probably scored no hits, but they kept contact, reported her position and denied her crew any rest before the morning engagement with the battleships of the Home Fleet in which the Bismarck was sunk. Vian received a second bar to his DSO.

In July 1941 the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, promoted him out of turn to rear admiral. That summer Vian visited Murmansk to assess whether British warships could be based there, and advised against it. In late August and early September he commanded the force that landed a Canadian–British detachment on Spitsbergen, destroyed the coal mines and evacuated the miners. On the way back his cruisers sank the German training ship Bremse.

The Mediterranean

In October 1941 Vian took over the 15th Cruiser Squadron at Alexandria. Its main tasks were to fight convoys through to besieged Malta and to intercept Italian convoys to North Africa. On 17 December 1941, while covering a convoy, he clashed with the Italian fleet in the inconclusive First Battle of Sirte. In March 1942 his flagship, the cruiser Naiad, was sunk by the submarine U-565.

On 22 March 1942 he fought his most famous battle. In the Second Battle of Sirte his cruisers and destroyers, sheltering behind smoke screens and threatening torpedo attacks, held off a much stronger Italian force including the battleship Littorio for several hours and saved the convoy from destruction by surface ships. The delay, however, meant that the merchant ships reached Malta within range of the German air force, which sank all four transports or destroyed them in harbour, and only a small part of their cargo reached the island. Even so, Churchill sent Vian his congratulations and the King knighted him (KBE). In June 1942 Vian commanded the escort of the convoy in Operation Vigorous, which was turned back by superior Italian forces and German aircraft. Exhausted, he was sent home in September, contracted malaria on the way and did not return to duty until early 1943.

Sicily, Salerno, Normandy

The doctors declared him unfit for sea service, and Vian was posted to the staff planning the invasion of France. He soon returned to the Mediterranean, however. In July 1943 he commanded one of the assault forces in Operation Husky, landing the 1st Canadian Infantry Division in Sicily. In September, during the landings at Salerno (Operation Avalanche), he commanded Force V, made up of five escort and light carriers whose aircraft covered the beachhead until the Allies captured airfields ashore. When the commander of the US Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, asked for the carriers to stay longer than planned, Vian, despite his dwindling fuel, is said to have replied that his carriers would stay “even if we have to row home”.

These services earned him one of the most important naval posts of the war. In the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 Vian, from the cruiser Scylla, commanded the Eastern Task Force, which landed the British and Canadian troops on Gold, Juno and Sword beaches and supported them with its guns. Under his command were battleships, a monitor, more than a dozen cruisers and dozens of destroyers. For planning and carrying out the landings he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB).

The Pacific

In November 1944 Vian took command of the 1st Aircraft Carrier Squadron and became second-in-command of the British Pacific Fleet under Admiral Bruce Fraser. In January 1945 his carriers struck the oil refineries at Palembang on Sumatra, an important source of aviation fuel for Japan. Then, as Task Force 57 operating alongside the US Fifth Fleet, from March 1945 they covered the invasion of Okinawa, attacking the airfields in the Sakishima Islands from which the Japanese could send aircraft against the invasion fleet. The British carriers, with their armoured flight decks, withstood kamikaze hits and were back in action within a few hours. In May 1945 Vian was promoted to vice admiral.

After the war

After Japan’s surrender Vian returned to Britain. In 1946–1948 he was Fifth Sea Lord, responsible at the Admiralty for naval aviation; in 1948 he became a full admiral, and until 1952 he commanded the Home Fleet. On leaving the service, on 1 June 1952, he was made Admiral of the Fleet. In retirement he sat on the boards of the Midland Bank and an insurance company, and in 1960 he published his memoirs, Action This Day. He died on 27 May 1968 at his home in Ashford Hill in Hampshire, on the 27th anniversary of the sinking of the Bismarck.

Significance

Vian belonged to a generation of officers who grew up in the shadow of Jutland and served through the whole of the Second World War, from convoy escort in 1939 to the carriers off Japan in 1945. Several episodes earned him his place in the history of the war, but for the road by which the war reached Scandinavia the first of them was the most important. The freeing of the Altmark’s prisoners was a minor operation, but it showed that neither side would hesitate to violate Norwegian neutrality, and it hastened German preparations for the April invasion. The later battles of Sirte, the cover for the landings in the Mediterranean and Normandy and the command of British carriers in the Pacific made him one of Britain’s most important naval commanders of the war, although to many Britons he remained for ever the man whose sailors called out to the prisoners: “The Navy’s here!”