"Encounter" was badly damaged while refitting at Malta a few weeks after arriving in the Mediterranean and was briefly reassigned to Force H after her repairs were completed before rejoining the Mediterranean Fleet later in the year. Late in the year, the ship was transferred to the Eastern Fleet at Singapore and spent several months in early 1942 on convoy escort duties under the control of American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM). She was one of the Allied ships retasked to intercept Japanese invasion convoys during the Dutch East Indies Campaign in February 1942 and participated in the Battle of the Java Sea. "Encounter" was sunk a few days later in the Second Battle of the Java Sea on 1 March and most of her crew were rescued by a Japanese ship the next day. About a quarter of them died in captivity before the end of the war in 1945. The ship's wreck was discovered in 2007 and had been almost totally destroyed by illegal salvagers by 2016.