HMS Meteor (G73): Lewisham's Destroyer, PQ 18, the Russian Convoys and a Last Fight in the Ligurian Sea

Built at Linthouse

HMS Meteor was laid down at the Linthouse yard of Alexander Stephen and Sons on the Clyde on 14 September 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, and launched on 3 November 1941. The M Class were a repeat of the Ls, with six 4.7 inch guns in enclosed twin mountings, and like all the destroyers of the time they took longer than planned to build; she was completed on 12 August 1942, at a cost of £462,337.

The London borough of Lewisham had already adopted her after its Warship Week in March 1942.

She was the eighth ship of the name since 1797. Earlier Meteors had served at the Dardanelles in 1807 and in the Crimean War, and the last, a destroyer, had been badly damaged at the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915. Her badge was a simple white meteor on a blue field.

Her first captain, who stayed with her for more than two years, was Lieutenant Commander Dermod Jewitt.

Straight into PQ 18

She joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet, and within a month of her completion she was at sea with the fighting escort of PQ 18. After the destruction of PQ 17 in July, the Admiralty sent the next convoy to Russia with a far stronger escort than any before: the escort carrier Avenger, the AA cruiser Scylla and sixteen fleet destroyers in addition to the close escort.

On the way north Meteor, Marne, Martin and Milne went with Scylla to refuel in the anchorage at Lowe Sound in Spitsbergen before rejoining the convoy for the run past the North Cape. PQ 18 lost thirteen ships, but the German torpedo bombers lost so heavily that they never attacked a convoy in such numbers again. Meteor came home with the escort of QP 14.

Torch and ONS 154

At the end of October 1942 she sailed from Scapa Flow in the screen of the battleships Nelson and Duke of York, which were going south to reinforce Force H for the landings in North Africa, and through November and December she screened Force H in the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic convoys to Gibraltar.

On 28 December, while she and Milne were escorting a military convoy to Gibraltar, they were detached to help the westbound convoy ONS 154, which had run into two U-boat packs, Spitz and Ungestüm, north of the Azores. The convoy's small Canadian escort was overwhelmed, and fourteen merchant ships were lost in two nights.

Meteor and Milne reached it on the 29th and helped drive off the night attacks that followed, until their fuel ran so low that on the 30th they had to leave for the Azores with two of the Canadian corvettes.

The Long Haul to Russia

In 1943 she screened the Home Fleet's cover for convoy JW 53, and in the spring, when the Battle of the Atlantic reached its crisis, she was one of the Home Fleet destroyers lent to the Western Approaches for convoy work. In July she hunted U-boats in the gap between the Faeroes and Iceland, and after a refit on the Tyne she was back in the Arctic for the winter.

In December 1943 she took JW 55A to Russia and sailed home with RA 55A. On 25 December, when most of the fleet destroyers were sent to reinforce JW 55B against the Scharnhorst, she stayed with the homeward convoy, and so missed the battle the next day in which Duke of York sank the German battlecruiser.

At the end of January 1944 she joined JW 56B, which was attacked by the Werwolf pack using the new acoustic homing torpedoes; Hardy was hit and had to be sunk. On 30 January the U-boat U-314 was sunk with all forty nine men south-east of Bear Island.

At the time the kill was credited to Meteor and the destroyer Whitehall, and that is how most British accounts record it; later research in the German records gives it to Inconstant instead.

In February she sailed with JW 57, during which Mahratta was torpedoed and lost with almost all her company, and in April she went to Kola with the large force, led by the cruiser Diadem with the escort carriers Activity and Fencer, sent to bring home the merchant ships of RA 59.

Among the passengers she carried back were seventeen men of the United States Navy who had just handed over the cruiser Milwaukee to the Soviet Navy.

In June she screened the Home Fleet as it stood guard in the north against any attempt by German heavy ships to interfere with the Normandy landings, and at the end of the month she, Matchless and Musketeer took stores and mail to the British ships at Kola.

She escorted JW 59 in August and JW 60, with Rodney in company, in September, and with their return convoys she had made something like a dozen passages to or from Russia.

The Ligurian Sea

In October 1944 she was refitted at Devonport for service abroad, and in November she sailed for the Mediterranean, now under Lieutenant Commander Richard Pankhurst. After a spell in the Aegean she moved west to patrol the Ligurian Sea, where the Germans still held the Italian coast from the French border to La Spezia and used it to send out minelayers and small craft at night.

In the early hours of 18 March 1945, on patrol off the northern tip of Corsica with the destroyer Lookout, she was directed onto three German torpedo boats, former Italian ships, returning from laying mines off Cape Corse. Lookout came in fast from ahead and opened fire by radar, and in a short, sharp night action two of the German ships, TA24 and TA29, were sunk; Mason credits TA24 to Meteor.

The third escaped. The British destroyers picked up the survivors, more than two hundred of them. It was one of the last surface actions fought by the German navy in the war.

Piyale Paşa

In August 1945 Meteor visited Turkey with the cruiser Ajax, and she went back with Marne the following month. She came home to pay off at Devonport, was refitted by Yarrow at Scotstoun in 1951 and was laid up at Penarth in 1953.

A proposal to convert her into a Type 62 aircraft direction frigate was dropped, and she was sold to Turkey with her sisters Marne, Matchless and Milne. After a refit by Palmers at Hebburn on the Tyne she was handed over at Portsmouth in September 1959 and renamed Piyale Paşa, after the sixteenth century Ottoman admiral.

She stayed on the Turkish Navy's active list until 1972, when she was sold for breaking up.

Her eight battle honours, from Dardanelles 1807 to Mediterranean 1945, include Arctic 1942-44, Atlantic 1942-43, North Africa 1942 and Aegean 1944. Her sister Marne, whose stern was blown off by U-515 in November 1942, also has her history told on this site.