Thomas Wilkinson (VC 1942)

He steered a little ship into battle against the big convoy.

Thomas Wilkinson was born in Widnes, Lancashire, on 1 August 1898, one of nine children of William and Esther Wilkinson. His mother died when he was eight. At fourteen he went to sea in his father’s sailing vessel, beginning a maritime career that would span two world wars. During the First World War he served in the Blue Funnel Line’s Alcinous, employed as a troopship.

He joined the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company in 1922 and obtained his master’s certificate in 1936. Two years later he became master of Li Wo, a passenger river steamer built for service on the upper Yangtze. The Royal Navy requisitioned the vessel after the outbreak of the Second World War. Equipped with a small gun and machine guns, she became HMS Li Wo, with Wilkinson commissioned as a temporary lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve.

In February 1942, with Singapore approaching collapse, Wilkinson was ordered to sail for Batavia. Li Wo left Singapore on 13 February, already operating in waters dominated by Japanese aircraft and warships. The following day she encountered Japanese shipping in the Java Sea. Wilkinson called his crew together and announced his intention to attack despite the overwhelming disparity in size and armament.

His posthumous Victoria Cross citation records the decision to engage a convoy and continue the action until Li Wo’s limited ammunition was expended. The little vessel set a transport on fire and endured concentrated return fire before Wilkinson turned towards an enemy ship in a final attempt to inflict damage. He ordered the surviving crew to abandon ship and remained aboard as Li Wo sank. The citation was published in The London Gazette on 17 December 1946, issue 37819, pages 6125–6126 (https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/37819/supplement/6125). Its recognition followed the return of survivors whose testimony established the course of the action.

Wilkinson’s body was not recovered. He is commemorated on the Liverpool Naval Memorial, which records merchant seamen who served with naval forces and were lost without a known grave. His family later donated his Victoria Cross to the Imperial War Museum. His death ended a working seaman’s career that had begun in a family vessel and culminated in command of an improvised warship, far from the sheltered river service for which Li Wo had been designed.