Two torpedoes at five hundred yards, in the dark, fired by the most junior commanding officer in the flotilla, ended a voyage of 516 days and 100,000 nautical miles. Sub-Lieutenant Robert Drayson had been left behind when his boat's previous captain went sick, and his MTB had been separated from the rest as they crossed the Channel. He approached the action alone from the shoreward side and caught the German raider Komet illuminated by a British star shell, running fifteen knots toward Cap de la Hague. He fired, turned, crash-started his engines, and ran. Both torpedoes struck. A huge secondary explosion lifted the stern of his boat out of the water. Komet sank with no survivors. There were no survivors at all.
She was launched on 16 January 1937 as the merchant ship Ems at the Deschimag A.G. Weser yard in Bremen, built for Norddeutscher Lloyd. The Kriegsmarine requisitioned her at the outbreak of war in 1939, took her to Howaldtswerke in Hamburg, and rebuilt her as a commerce raider. The Germans called her Schiff 45. The Royal Navy, when it learned what she was, called her Raider B. The conversion gave her six 15 cm guns hidden behind drop-away plating, a 7.5 cm gun, smaller anti-aircraft weapons, six torpedo tubes, an Arado 196 reconnaissance seaplane, and a small fast boat called Meteorit for laying mines. She was commissioned on 2 June 1940 under Kapitan zur See Robert Eyssen, with 270 men aboard.
Komet's route to her hunting grounds passed through politics as much as ice. Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and a separate commercial agreement, and the Soviets agreed to provide Germany with access to the Northern Sea Route across the top of Siberia. Secrecy was insisted upon. The Soviet Union still wanted to appear neutral. Komet was given a strengthened bow and an ice-suitable propeller, and disguised as the Soviet icebreaker Semyon Dezhnev for her run along the Norwegian coast. She received pilot help from the icebreaker Joseph Stalin as she crossed the Kara and Laptev seas. By autumn 1940 she was in the Pacific, painted up as the Japanese merchantman Manyo Maru, meeting the auxiliary cruisers Orion and Kulmerland in the Caroline Islands.
The three ships agreed to work the New Zealand to Panama trade route together, taking on each other's disguises as Mayebashi Maru, Tokio Maru, and Manyo Maru in turn. They sank the coaster Holmwood on 25 November 1940. Eyssen wrote in his war diary that he had been at sea for 140 days and had begun to feel depressed at not encountering the enemy. Then they reached Nauru. Five Allied merchant ships were anchored off the island waiting to load phosphate. Komet and Orion sank them all between 6 and 8 December, totaling about forty-one thousand tons. Komet took more than five hundred prisoners off the doomed ships, transported them several days, and put them ashore on Emirau Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. Then Eyssen tried to lay a minefield at Rabaul. The Meteorit boat broke down, and the plan was abandoned. He was promoted to Konteradmiral on 1 January 1941.
After Nauru, Komet ran south. She crossed the Indian Ocean looking for Allied whalers, found none, touched the Antarctic ice on 16 February 1941, then visited the French Kerguelen Islands in March, where she met the auxiliary cruiser Pinguin for a brief conference. Months of hunting in the Indian Ocean turned up nothing. She moved to the Pacific again, refueled from the German freighter Anneliese Essberger near the Tuamotu Archipelago, repainted herself as the Osaka Shosen Kaisha line's Ryoku Maru, and sailed for the Galapagos. There in mid-August 1941 she found three ships in five days. She sank the British freighter Australind, captured the Dutch Kota Nopan with her cargo of tin and manganese intact, and sank the freighter Devon. Then she went home around Cape Horn, slowly, disguised as a Portuguese tramp called S. Thome. Including the four Komet sank alone and three more in concert with Orion, her victims totaled 41,568 tons of Allied shipping. She had been at sea for 516 days.
The second raiding voyage never reached open water. Komet sailed from Vlissingen on 7 October 1942 disguised as a minesweeper, slipped through Dunkirk to Le Havre, and tried to break out into the Atlantic by hugging the French coast. British intelligence picked her up at every step. Four British destroyer and motor torpedo boat groups assembled west of the Cherbourg Peninsula to intercept. The night was dark, the sea moderate, and the MTBs lost touch with the destroyers crossing the Channel. Cottesmore opened fire just before one in the morning, star shells lighting up Komet and her four or five Type 35 torpedo-boat escorts. The escorts caught fire, some of the Germans fired on each other in the confusion, and the rest turned for the shore batteries. Then Drayson's lone MTB 236 came out of the shoreward darkness and made his run. He got the Distinguished Service Cross. The Allies lost two men wounded. Komet sank in two halves in fifty-five meters of water, and the wreck lay undisturbed until July 2006, when nautical archaeologist Innes McCartney found her.
The Komet wreck site lies off Cap de la Hague at roughly 49.73 deg N, 1.53 deg W, in fifty-five meters of water. The cape itself, with its lighthouse and the swift tidal race called the Raz Blanchard, is unmistakable from the air. Cherbourg-Maupertus Airport (LFRC) is twenty kilometers east. The Channel Islands of Alderney and Guernsey lie southwest. The strong tides of this corner of the Channel made navigation here lethal for both sides in 1942.