HMS Comus (R43): Damaged Over Korea, Then Off to Chase Pirates From a Reef

A Destroyer for the Far East

HMS Comus was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, her keel laid on 21 August 1943, launched on 14 March 1945, and commissioned on 8 July 1946, a C-class destroyer displacing 1,885 tons standard and up to 2,545 tons at full load, armed with four QF 4.5-inch guns, later reduced to three, twin 40mm Bofors mounts and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes.

The dates in that sentence are worth reading twice. She was ordered under the War Emergency Programme and laid down in August 1943 to fight the Kriegsmarine in the North Atlantic. She was launched in March 1945, with about eight weeks of European war left to run, and she was not commissioned until 8 July 1946, eleven months after the Japanese surrender. The whole later half of the emergency destroyer programme had the same problem: the ships arrived after the emergency. The result is that a destroyer designed around German torpedo boats and Focke-Wulf Condors never fired a shot at either, and instead spent every year of her working life east of Suez, shooting at North Korean aircraft, Malayan insurgents and, on one memorable afternoon, pirates.

The name is one of the odder ones in the Navy List and this was the fifth ship to carry it. Comus is the Greek god of festivity, revelry and, to quote one of the more delicate formulations, nocturnal dalliances, which is a peculiar quality to want in a warship and a very good one to have in a wardroom. There had been a 22-gun post ship of 1806, wrecked ten years later; an 18-gun sloop launched in 1828 as HMS Comet and renamed Comus in 1832; and a screw corvette of 1878 that gave her name to a whole class of them. Then, in 1914, a light cruiser, and it is that one who did the most with it.

The fourth Comus had a busy 1916. On the last day of February she was north of the Shetlands with the destroyer HMS Munster when they intercepted the German auxiliary cruiser Greif, a disguised merchant raider trying to break out into the Atlantic; the two of them sank her, and Comus stopped and picked her survivors out of the water. Three months later she was at Jutland under Captain Alan Hotham, and at around twenty to nine on the evening of 31 May she signalled the position of the German fleet back to Jellicoe. That report, with others coming in at the same time, is part of what the Commander-in-Chief was working from when he decided how to dispose the Grand Fleet for the night. A light cruiser passing a bearing is not the sort of thing that gets into the popular account of Jutland, and it is what light cruisers were for.

She served with the 8th Destroyer Squadron in the Far East from 1947 through to 1957, a full decade in one of the Royal Navy's most consistently demanding overseas theatres. Her pennant number changed from R43 to D20 in 1949 as part of a fleet-wide renumbering, and that same year she took on a quieter, less-remembered role, ferrying and supporting the crews of Royal Navy motor launches on river patrols during the opening phase of the Malayan Emergency, work that predated her better-known 1955 bombardment duty by the best part of six years.

The renumbering was the 1948 reorganisation of the whole pennant system, which is set out in the article on HMS Cheviot. In short, D became the letter for destroyers, which is why she went from R43 to D20 and why a British destroyer wears a D today.

Damaged by North Korean Aircraft

HMS Comus served during the Korean War between 1950 and 1951, and on 22 August 1950, was damaged in the Yellow Sea by two North Korean Ilyushin Il-10 attack aircraft, which holed her side and killed one of her ratings. It was a genuinely rare event: across the entire war only a handful of United Nations warships were ever hit by North Korean aircraft, Comus sharing that unwelcome distinction with the frigate HMS Black Swan and the cruiser HMS Jamaica, a reminder that North Korean air power, though ultimately overmatched, could still inflict real and occasionally fatal damage on Allied ships operating close to the coastline during the war's chaotic early months.

The damage was a good deal worse than being holed. The two aircraft bombed her and strafed her with cannon, and one bomb blew in the plating on her port side. A stoker was killed in number one boiler room. Her sea boat was smashed. She got herself to Kure in Japan, which by the account of men who were aboard was not a certainty, and went straight into dry dock for repairs that involved rebuilding the side of the ship.

The rarity of it is explained by what had happened to the aircraft. North Korea had been given ninety-three Il-10s in the late 1940s, a Soviet ground-attack machine of real quality and the direct descendant of the Il-2 that had done so much damage to the German army. Flown by the 57th Assault Aviation Regiment they were very effective indeed against South Korean troops in June and July 1950, and then American fighters found them, and American bombers found their airfields, and within a few weeks there were about twenty left. Comus was hit on 22 August. She was one of the last ships to be attacked by an air force that had effectively ceased to exist by the end of the month.

Chasing Pirates From a Reef

On 4 July 1951, HMS Comus went to the assistance of the British cargo ship Peterstar, which had run aground on Pratas Reef in the South China Sea and been boarded by pirates, a dramatic incident harking back to an older and more traditional kind of naval duty even amid the modern Cold War tensions of the Korean conflict.

Pratas Reef is a genuinely strange place to be boarded. Properly Dongsha, it is a ring of coral some fifteen miles across with a single low island on its western rim, sitting more or less on the shipping track between Hong Kong and the Luzon Strait with nothing else for a hundred miles in any direction. A ship that goes on it is stuck in the open sea, visible for miles and unable to move, which is precisely why anybody in the business of boarding ships would keep an eye on it. Piracy in those waters was not a curiosity in 1951. The Chinese civil war had just ended and had left the coast full of armed men, fast boats and no shortage of reasons, and dealing with it was a standing commitment of the China Station.

Contemporary reporting confirmed the grounded ship was subsequently reported safe, suggesting HMS Comus's intervention succeeded in resolving the situation, a reminder that piracy in the waters of the Far East remained a genuine, practical concern for merchant shipping well into the mid-twentieth century.

Bombarding the Malayan Emergency

In 1955, HMS Comus was engaged in the bombardment of Communist forces during the Malayan Emergency, the long-running counter-insurgency campaign fought against Communist guerrillas in British Malaya, adding naval gunfire support to a conflict fought largely in dense jungle terrain, where warships like HMS Comus provided a valuable, if unconventional, contribution against an enemy far removed from the naval engagements her class had originally been designed to fight. It was, in its way, a return to old ground: she had first lent a hand to the very same campaign back in 1949, supporting motor launch river patrols, before returning six years later to add her own 4.5-inch guns to the fight directly.

What naval bombardment actually contributed in Malaya is worth being straight about, because it has been argued over ever since; the standard academic treatment of it is titled, pointedly, "A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut?" The Royal Navy's coastal work in the Emergency was genuinely useful: stopping smuggling and piracy along a very long coast, and landing troops into places that could not be reached by road or river. The gunfire is harder to assess. A destroyer lying offshore firing 4.5-inch shells into a grid square of jungle at the army's request cannot see what she is hitting, cannot confirm afterwards what she hit, and is shooting at an enemy who moves at night and lives under a canopy a hundred feet thick. Comus was one of half a dozen British ships that did it, alongside Amethyst, Defender, Hart, Newcastle and Newfoundland.

The honest answer is that it did some good and a good deal less than the tonnage suggests. Where it worked was on the fringes: shelling a known camp near enough the coast to be reached, denying an area, making it impossible to rest in a particular valley, and reminding an insurgency operating in a peninsula that the sea belonged to somebody else. What it could not do was find people. Later figures from the same campaign give the flavour of the scale involved, the New Zealand cruiser Royalist firing eighty-six rounds at guerrillas at Kota Tinggi in July 1957 and a hundred and fifty-two at Tanjung Punggai the following February. The Emergency was ultimately won by police work, resettlement and patient patrolling in the jungle, and the guns were a supporting act. It is still a considerably better use for a destroyer built to fight the Kriegsmarine than lying in a basin at Devonport.

The End of Service

HMS Comus was withdrawn from active service and listed for disposal in 1955, and was eventually scrapped at John Cashmore Ltd's breakers yard in Newport, Wales, on 12 November 1958, closing out the career of a destroyer whose Far East decade had brought her into contact with everything from North Korean air attack to old-fashioned piracy on a South China Sea reef.