William Tennant (Royal Navy officer)

Admiral Sir William George "Bill" Tennant KCB CBE MVO DL (2 January 1890 – 26 July 1963) was a British naval officer. He was lauded for overseeing the successful evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. Tennant subsequently served as captain of the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, when it searched for German capital ships in the Atlantic. He remained in this capacity when the Repulse was sunk by the Japanese along with HMS Prince of Wales in the South China Sea on 10 December 1941, three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He later aided in the setup of the Mulberry harbours and the Pluto pipelines, a crucial part of the success of Operation Overlord.

Biography
Born in Upton-upon-Severn and educated at nearby Hanley Castle Grammar School, Tennant joined the Royal Navy at age 15 in 1905, serving onboard HMS Britannia, eventually specializing in navigation in 1913. He later served in the First World War during the Gallipoli campaign and survived the sinking of his ship at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. After the war, Tennant joined the crew of HMS Renown and his future command, HMS Repulse, during the future King Edward VIII's royal tours in the 1920s. By 1932, Tennant had achieved the rank of Captain.

Dunkirk Evacuation
On 26 May 1940, Captain Tennant was dispatched on board the destroyer HMS Wolfhound to Dunkirk to aid in the evacuation of more than 300,000 British and French troops left stranded when France fell to the Nazis. Tennant's task was to organize these dispirited men and get them onto the boats waiting to take them. Tennant stayed right up until the last boats left on 2 June, patrolling the beaches of Dunkirk with a megaphone searching for British troops.

Tennant was lauded for his efforts at Dunkirk, and was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath on 7 June 1940. The ordinary sailors under his command took to calling him "Dunkirk Joe".

Captain of the Repulse
On 28 June Tennant became captain of the battlecruiser Repulse, taking part in battles against the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and later in the hunt for the battleship Bismarck.

Loss of the Repulse
Tennant and Repulse joined Admiral Sir Tom Phillips' Force Z, sent to Singapore to counter Japanese aggression in the Pacific, in December 1941. On 8 December, the day after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Singapore came under attack by Japanese air units, and Force Z departed for Malaya to attack a Japanese convoy, an operation that was cancelled shortly thereafter. Upon returning to Singapore, they received word of Japanese landings on Malaya, and Force Z - without air cover - made for Malaya to counter them.

On 10 December the Japanese attacked Force Z. Tennant ably managed to avoid nineteen torpedoes dropped from Japanese aircraft, but Repulse eventually succumbed to a pincer attack, taking five torpedoes; she sunk within twenty minutes, taking a great deal of the crew with her. The survivors, including Captain Tennant, were rescued by HMAS Vampire, one of the destroyers in Force Z.

Normandy
In June 1944, Tennant - now an admiral - was placed in charge of the naval side of the transport, assembly and setup of the two Mulberry harbours that provided port facilities for the coming invasion of Normandy. In August, he supervised the laying of the Pluto pipelines between France and England, which provided much needed fuel supplies for the ongoing conflict. For his efforts in the success of the Normandy invasion, Tennant was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by King George VI, and also received the United States Legion of Merit.

Post-war service
Tennant was promoted to Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1945 for his war service, and made commander of the America and West Indies Station after the war ended, and remained there until he retired in 1949 as a full admiral. In 1950, he was named Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire, serving until his death at the Worcester Royal Infirmary in 1963.

In popular culture
In the TV series Dunkirk, Captain Tennant is played by Adrian Rawlins.