Vice-admiral Dick Wildish
Engineer officer who served in the battleship Prince of Wales until her sinking by the Japanese
VICE-ADMIRAL DICK WILDISH, who has died aged 102, was a junior engineer officer in the new battleship Prince of Wales, from her building until her sinking in 1941.
He was the damage control officer in Prince of Wales when, with the battlecruiser Hood, she fought the German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen at the Battle of the Denmark Strait on May 24 1941. Prince of Wales was hit seven times by German shells and Wildish led efforts to make emergency repairs to the hull, after splinter damage from high explosive shells had burst on the armoured deck over the tiller flat (steering compartment), causing extensive flooding.
Pausing during the battle to ask about Hood, he was “aghast to be told she had just blown up”; there were just three survivors, and among the 1,415 dead was a cousin. When Prince of Wales returned to Rosyth, Wildish examined the damage and, prodding the oily bilges with a boathook, found an unexploded 15in shell, which had hit under the waterline and travelled 12ft through the hull but failed to explode. Gingerly Wildish helped to remove it; had it exploded he might have shared his cousin’s fate.
His experience prompted him to design an important piece of damage control apparatus, the “splinter box”, an open-sided steel box which could be fitted over holes and held in position with a strongback. Splinter boxes (now made of glass-reinforced plastic) are universal equipment today in warships of the world. Wildish received a £25 award for his idea.
After repairs, in August Prince of Wales took the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, to Newfoundland for a meeting with President Roosevelt at which the Atlantic Charter was signed. In September 1941 she took part in Operation Halberd, a convoy from Gibraltar to Malta, before she joined Force Z with the battlecruiser Repulse, with the intention of defending Singapore from the Japanese.
On December 10 1941 Wildish, as a junior engineer officer, was at his action station in the bowels of the ship when she was attacked by Japanese torpedo and high-level bombers in the South China Sea. Prince of Wales survived a first wave of bombing, but during a second attack torpedobombers scored two hits on the port side aft, which fractured the brackets holding the port outer propeller shaft. At high speed the shaft vibrated violently, causing shock waves throughout its length and wrecking the turbines in the engine room, which filled with seawater in 20 minutes.
Wildish supervised the evacuation of the flooded spaces, and continued to take turns with two other engineers to visit the control room until suffering from heat exhaustion. With all hope gone, they were ordered up through the armour to a casualty clearing station, where Wildish was revived with a welcome tot of rum administered by the ship’s padre.
Soon, however, a 1,200lb bomb exploded outside the armour, about 20ft from Wildish, causing carnage. Seriously wounded, with extensive burns, a shrapnel wound in his thigh and punctured eardrums, Wildish was guided to a Carley raft to float away and watch his ship go down.
Rescued by the destroyer Electra, he was treated at the Alexandra hospital in Singapore, but when it became overcrowded he was discharged as one of the walking wounded. He was grateful for the care he received at the hospital, and until the end of his life was bitter about the massacre of doctors, nurses and patients when the hospital was overrun by the Japanese in February 1942. The New Zealand doctor who had treated him was bayoneted to death, and postwar he formed a lasting friendship with the doctor’s son (who never knew his father).
Meanwhile, there was no respite for Wildish, who was ordered to prepare to blow up the Singapore fuel depot, before joining General Wavell’s staff on their retreat via Java to Ceylon. The voyage in the river-steamer Kedah was a near disaster, the vessel frequently breaking down and running out of steam. As she drifted 400 miles from Ceylon, even Wildish’s efforts to repair her machinery and boilers, which he filled with buckets of rainwater, were in vain, and she had to be towed into harbour.
Denis Bryan Harvey Wildish, known as “Dick”, was born at Milton Regis, Kent, on Christmas Eve 1914, the son of Rear-admiral Sir Henry William Wildish, who was knighted for his wartime service on the staff of the Commander-in-chief, Western Approaches, Admiral Sir Max Horton. Young Wildish entered Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1928, and when the Admiralty gave up on its ideas of a general list of officers, he volunteered to become an engineer, studying at the Royal Naval Engineering College, Keyham, from 1933 to 1936.
After Kedah, Wildish joined the destroyer Isis, which was under repairs in Bombay; she eventually deployed to the Mediterranean where Wildish took part in the sinking of U-562, the Allied landings in Sicily and operations in the Ionian Sea; he also escorted surrendered Italian submarines to Malta. He was mentioned in despatches.
Postwar he served in the aircraft carriers Implacable (1946-48) and Eagle (1954-56). He dismissed his other appointments as those of a “Whitehall warrior”, but he played a key role in important personnel and engineering reforms in the Navy. In Eagle he first realised that, without planned maintenance, operations would be interrupted by random breakdowns; later as Admiralty Engineer Overseer (1958-90) and Director of Fleet Maintenance (1960-64) he introduced regular upkeep and detailed planned maintenance schedules for all equipment.
Then, based on his experience in the officer planning section (1956-58), as Commodore, Naval Drafting (1964-66), and as Director General of Personnel Services and Training (Naval) and Deputy Second Sea Lord (1970-72), he devised a scheme, known as “harmony”, to reduce the rapid turnover of personnel and ensure a balance between operations, training and time with families; it was adopted by all three services.
Wildish was appointed CB in 1968. He was a cricketer, and as a fast sling-bowler at Lord’s for the Navy in 1937, two wickets in his opening over were followed by two wides to the boundary. One of his last matches was a Generals v Admirals match which was undecided until the last over, when a general hit a four off Wildish’s bowling.
On his retirement in 1972, Wildish and his wife moved to a 16th century cottage near Petersfield, where he planted a small vineyard and began to paint watercolours which were exhibited at the Armed Forces Arts Society.
His memoirs, D.B.H.W., were privately published in 2000.
While Prince of Wales was building at Cammell Laird’s Birkenhead yard, Wildish met Leslie Jacob, of the biscuit empire, at a dance. They were married in June 1941 and enjoyed a weekend honeymoon in a pub on the River Dee. His messmates joshed him when a newspaper carried a wedding picture under the headline “Bismarck Hunter Weds”.
They were not to meet again until Wildish returned to Britain in January 1944, and Leslie did not know for months whether her husband had survived the loss of Prince of Wales or the Fall of Singapore. Sixty years of deep love followed until Leslie predeceased him in 2009. He is survived by a daughter; another daughter predeceased him.
Vice-admiral Dick Wildish, born December 24 1914, died April 2 2017