July 18,1958: HMAS VENDETTA [II] and the question of sabotage in Australian dockyards - RAN.

3368. Sabotage of warships on the Australian waterfront, as elsewhere during the Cold War, was not unknown when the newly-completed Daring Class destroyer HMAS VENDETTA [II], leaving for her first trials, suddenly surged forward and crashed into the caisson of the Alfred Graving Dock at Williamstown Dockyard on July 15, 1958.

 

The photograph above shows the scene some time after the accident, when the drydock ahead has been flooded to equalize the pressure on the damaged caisson and prevent a collapse. A major disaster has been narrowly averted, as HMAS QUICKMATCH had been below in the drydock when the danger threatened. As it is, the damaged destroyer is being gingerly [and manually] pulled back, with a long gash in her bows.

 

The report we have had, from a former employee in the dockyard's draughting office, was that the telegraph signals to the ships engine room had been reverse wired, causing the ship to move forward when the signal for astern astern was given.

 

The question that arises is whether this was deliberate - an act of sabotage. The amount of time VENDETTA had taken to build, almost 9-1/2 years, was itself indicative of the in industrial and ideological warfare constantly waged on the Australian waterfront in the 1950s, and for many decades afterwards. An example of sabotage of RAN ships occurred on June 21, 1951 when someone at Garden Island dockyard cut the radar cables on the aircraft carrier HMAS SYDNEY [III] in refit just before she was leaving for Korea [ Colin Jones, 'Wings and the Navy, 1947-1953,' p74].

 

The same sort of thing had happened to HMS THESEUS in Britain the year before [Jones, ibid].

 

With their connection to Korean war service, the assumption is that these were ideological acts by dockyard workers with communist sympathies. A more petty kind of sabotage could be seen as 'make work' acts that prolong a job, and as we have a;lready seen, the 2,800 tons standard VENDETTA was already a prime example.

 

VENDETTA took Williamstown 3 -1/2 years longer to build than it would later take Northrop Grumman to build the US Navy's 101,000 ton super carrier USS RONALD REAGAN at Newport News, Virginia. VENDETTA'S 9-1/2 years construction time was more than three times as long as it took Scotland's John Brown's shipyard to build Australia's first flagship, the 18,800 ton battlecruiser HMAS AUSTRALIA [I] [which was exactly three years and two days from keel laying to commissioning. VENDETTA took more than twice as long as it took Browns to build the 42,000 tons HMS HOOD; or than Germany's Blohm and Voss took to build the 41,700 ton BiISMARCK; and twice as long as Japan's Mitsubishi Kure and Mitsubishi Nagoya shipyards took build both the 65,027 ton super battleships IJNS YAMATO and IJNS MUSASHI.

 

No wonder the Williamstown dockyard workers would have found it hard to let her go. As it was, the accident earned them another four months work. HMAS VENDETTA, laid down on July 4, 1949, was finally commissioned and out of Williamstown on November 26, 1958 - hence our calculation of a construction period of nine years, four months and 22 days.

 

The same concerns could have applied to the faulty construction of the survey ship HMAS COOK, six years in building, and the modernisations of the destroyer escorts HMAS PARRAMATTA, HMAS STUART and HMAS DERWENT, relatively modest modifications that each took from 4 years and two months to 4-1/2 years to complete, longer than it took to build the BISMARCK in its entirety, or all but one of the other great ships mentioned earlier [the RONALD REAGAN took over five years].

 

There should have been a Royal Commission.

 

Then there WAS a Royal Commission. But it was not about HMAS VENDETTA [II], nor HMAS COOK, nor HMAS PARRAMATTA [III], nor HMAS STUART [II] nor HMAS DERWENT [II]. It was the late Frank Costigan QC's Royal Commission into the Ships Painters and Dockers Union, a totally criminalised and murderous organisation [now de-registered] whose rival union executives and their hired gunnies were running company tax evasion schemes, drugs and other scams from out of the dockyard, the home turf for many years of some of the Melbourne underworld's most dangerous.

 

Not a pretty picture - but at least HMAS VENDETTA [II] went though her service life without further serious mishap once she had left.

 

Photo RAN Historical Section, it appears in Vic Cassells's 'The Destroyers; Their Battles and Their Badges' [Kangaroo Press, Sydney 2000] p.165.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Done