HMCS Restigouche (H00)
_CT-284.jpg) The restigouche
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The HMCS Restigouche (H00) was a destroyer in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II . She was put into service in 1932 as HMS Comet (H00) for the Royal Navy and belonged to the C-Class of the Royal Navy with only five ships (instead of the usual nine) . The British Labor Government wanted to document its readiness for disarmament by halving the usual class size. Because the class did not fit into the structure of the Royal Navy , their ships were left to the Canadian Navy from 1937.
With her sister ship Crusader , the HMS Comet was handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy in Chatham on June 15, 1938 and at the same time renamed HMCS Restigouche . During the war, the ship was primarily used on the North Atlantic to secure British trade. A few months after the end of the war, HMCS Restigouche was removed from the list of active warships and scrapped from November 1945.
History of the ship
The later HMCS Restigouche (H00) was ordered on July 15, 1930 from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as part of the 1929 construction program. The ship was laid down on September 12, 1930 and was named HMS Comet when it was launched on September 30, 1931. The keel was laid and launched on the same day as the sister ship HMS Crusader .
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The HMS Comet was the 13th ship of the Royal Navy with this name since 1695. The last newbuilding with the name was a 1910 Fairfields special destroyer of the Acorn class , which sank on August 6, 1918 in the Mediterranean after a collision in tow.
The new Comet was completed on June 2, 1932 and first came to the "2nd Destroyer Flotilla" at Home Fleet . During the Abyssinia crisis , the destroyer was relocated to the Mediterranean in August 1935 in order to observe the behavior of the Italian fleet with the flotilla from September for six months in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean . After the return and overhaul, the ship was used to monitor neutrality in the Bay of Biscay in the early phase of the Spanish Civil War . From December 1936, the destroyer served as an escort ship for the aircraft carrier Glorious in the Mediterranean. The destroyer was then handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy and commissioned as HMCS Restigouche on June 15, 1938 during the overhaul in Chatham . She began her acceptance tests on August 20, and from October she moved together with the sister ship Ottawa via Halifax to Esquimalt on the Pacific coast, where she arrived on November 7. At the time, the four C-class destroyers were the largest and most modern units in the Royal Canadian Navy. In November 1939, the Restigouche moved as the last of the four destroyers used in the Pacific to Halifax , Nova Scotia .
War missions
On December 15, 1939, the Restigouche arrived in Halifax and was then used as an escort for convoys in the North Atlantic . In May 1940, the ship moved with St. Laurent and Skeena to Plymouth for use from the British Isles because the submarine danger there was much greater and the ships were therefore needed there more urgently.
The following month, HMCS Restigouche was involved in the evacuation of British troops from northern France. On June 23, she accompanied the Arandora Star cruise ship to Saint-Jean-de-Luz to evacuate Polish troops and British refugees who were cut off in the farthest corner of southwest France ( Operation Ariel ). When used immediately prior to the entry into force of the French surrender to the Flakkreuzer HMS Calcutta and the HMCS Fraser collided Fraser on June 25, 1940 in the Gironde in poor visibility with the cruiser and broke. Despite the darkness and heavy seas, the Restigouche was able to rescue 117 of the Canadian destroyer's men.
This was again followed by deployments with convoys in the Atlantic Ocean. In the spring of 1941, the Canadian ships were moved back to the east coast of Canada in order to strengthen the security of the merchant ships in this area. The anti -submarine and anti-aircraft armament was reinforced for this purpose at the expense of the main guns and the torpedo tubes.
The destroyer was assigned to a Canadian escort group, which escorted the convoys to the middle of the Atlantic. From June 16 to 18, 1942, the Restigouche defended the ONS 102 convoy with 48 ships against the German submarine group "Hecht", which was working together for the first time as planned and was already working with five corvettes and a USN destroyer and two Coast Guard cutters had attacked two convoys with relative success. The Restigouche peilte with high-frequency direction finding signals from the contact boat on which the guided escorts the boats pushed away and two also damaged. The convoy lost only one ship of 5627 GRT. From October 16 to 19, the Restigouche, together with the former US destroyer HMCS St. Croix and four corvettes , defended the convoy ON.137 of 40 ships, the submarine groups "Panther" and "Wotan" with a total of 21 U -Boats attacked. The convoy only lost one straggler. From October 30th the defense of SC.104 (42 ships) with the "Escort Group C.4" against the newly formed U-Group "Veilchen" of up to 18 submarines followed. In addition to four corvettes, other destroyers or corvettes were also used for security at times. Despite the good guidance of the escorts with radar and Huff-Duff, the convoy lost eleven ships by November 6, before the air security by Liberators from Iceland, led on site by the Restigouche , forced the attackers to abort their operation.
It was not until the summer of 1944 that the tasks were changed, when the ship was ordered back to Great Britain to help protect the landing operation in Normandy . Newly formed support groups, four to six of which were constantly in action, were supposed to prevent German submarines from advancing into the invasion area and against the supply convoys. The Restigouche formed the Canadian "14th SG" with HMCS Qu'Appelle , Saskatchewan and Skeena. The focus of operations was in the English Channel and the Biscay , where the destroyer was hunting German submarines and outpost boats . In the repeated skirmishes, the flotilla to which he belonged succeeded in sinking several outpost boats, for example on August 12 with Support Group 14, reinforced by the HMCS Assiniboine and the hunt destroyer HMS Albrighton , when they brought three armed fish steamers south of Brest sunk. The Restigouche was damaged several times. The relocation to the Canadian Atlantic coast took place in December 1944.
For the first three months after the end of the war, HMCS Restigouche was used as a passenger transporter between Newfoundland and Canada to return military personnel to their homeland. On October 5, 1945, the Restigouche was decommissioned, removed from the list of active warships and sold for demolition. The scrapping took place from November 1945.
Renewed use of the name
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From June 1958 to August 1994 there was another Restigouche in the service of the RCN. She was the lead ship of a series of seven Destroyer Escorts of 2390 ts that were built in Canada.
literature
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-009-7 .
- MJ Whitley: Destroyers of World War Two. Arms and Armor Press, London 1988, ISBN 0-85368-910-5 .
Web links
- Chronicle of naval warfare 1939–1945
- Service history HMCS Restigouche
- HMCS Restigouche (H 00)
- HMCS RESTIGOUCHE (1st) (H00)
Individual evidence
- ^ Rohwer: Chronicle of the naval war. P. 245
- ^ Rohwer, p. 293
- ^ Rohwer, p. 295f.
- ^ Rohwer, p. 456
- ^ Rohwer, p. 472
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