HMS Comet (R26): Wilhelmshaven, Occupied Japan and the Home Fleet

Built at Scotstoun

HMS Comet was one of the Co group of the C Class destroyers, the last of the wartime emergency destroyers. She was built by Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde, launched on 22 June 1944, a fortnight after D-Day, and commissioned on 6 June 1945, a month after the war in Europe had ended.

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander William Fitzroy, who took her through her first eighteen months. She carried four 4.5 inch guns, a quadruple bank of torpedo tubes and Bofors and Oerlikon guns, and could make over 30 knots.

Scapa Flow and Wilhelmshaven

She worked up at Scapa Flow in June and July 1945, still on a wartime footing, as the war against Japan was expected to last into 1946. Her days were spent exercising against submarines and in gunnery practice, alongside British, Dutch and Polish ships: on one day in July she escorted the submarine Sportsman as she made practice attacks on the battleship Rodney and the Polish cruiser Conrad.

The surrender of Japan in August changed everything. That autumn Comet took part in the occupation of Germany, serving at Wilhelmshaven, the great German naval base on the North Sea, where the surrendered ships and dockyards of the Kriegsmarine were being taken over.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 19 September 1945.

Occupied Japan

Early in 1946 she sailed for the Far East to join the British Pacific Fleet, and served with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla, with Cossack, Consort, Contest and their sisters, from Kure in Japan.

Kure, once one of the Imperial Japanese Navy's main bases, was the headquarters of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, and the flotilla's destroyers patrolled Japanese waters and the coasts of China during the first years of the occupation.

The Home Fleet

She came home in 1948 for a refit in which she was fitted to lay mines, and from 1953 to 1957 she served with the 6th Destroyer Squadron of the Home Fleet, in the years of the Cold War exercises in the North Atlantic and North Sea. She was paid off in February 1958, and broken up at Troon in 1962. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.