County class destroyer

Ships of the class

Eight vessels were built in two batches between 1959 and 1970, the later four vessels carrying the improved Seaslug GWS2 and updated electronics requiring rearranged mastheads. The major identifying feature was the Batch 2 vessels' prominent "double-bedstead" AKE-2 antennas of the Type 965 air-search radar, and their taller foremast carrying the Type 992Q low-angle search radar.

Ships' names

Four of the "Counties" took names used by the famous three-funnelled interwar County-class cruisers: London, Norfolk, Devonshire and Kent. (The last of these, HMS Cumberland, had survived until 1959 as a trials ship). Devonshire, Hampshire, Antrim and Kent also inherited the names of Devonshire-class armoured cruisers of the First World War.

Four of the new ships were named after counties containing a Royal Navy Dockyard; these were: Devonshire (Devonport Dockyard), Hampshire (Portsmouth Dockyard), Kent (Chatham Dockyard), and Fife (Rosyth dockyard). Glamorgan and Antrim were named after the counties in Wales and Northern Ireland which contain the port cities and regional capitals of Cardiff and Belfast (by analogy to London, England). Norfolk commemorated the county of Nelson's birth, and the important 19th-century ports of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn.

Three of the ships' names have been subsequently re-used: HMS London was a Type 22 frigate, in RN service from 1987–99, and now serving with the Romanian Naval Forces as Regina Maria. HMS Kent and HMS Norfolk are Type 23 Frigates, in service with the Royal Navy and the Chilean Navy (as Almirante Cochrane).

Design features

The County class was designed around the GWS1 Seaslug beam riding anti-aircraft missile system. Seaslug was a first-generation surface-to-air missile intended to hit high-flying nuclear-armed bombers and shadowing surveillance aircraft like the Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear", which could direct strikes against the British fleet from missile destroyers and cruise missile-armed submarines. Bears were formidable targets for a missile like Seaslug; the long-range Soviet turboprop aircraft flew at an altitude of 7.5 miles, at 572 mph (921 km/h) and were barely within the engagement capability of Seaslug.

The Seaslug system was a large weapon. From the missile itself-6 m (19 ft 8 in)-long and weighing two tons, to its handling arrangements and electronics systems—even fitting a single system aboard a ship the size of the Counties was a challenge. The missile was stowed horizontally in a large magazine that took up a great deal of internal space. On the last four ships, some of the missiles were stored partly disassembled in the forward end of the magazine to enable the complement of missiles to be increased. These missiles had their wings and fins reattached before being moved into the aft sections of the handling spaces and eventually loaded onto the large twin launcher for firing. The electronics required for the Seaslug were the large Type 901 fire-control radar and the Type 965 air-search radar. These required a great deal of weight to be carried high up on the ship, further affecting ship layout. According to the Royal Navy architect, "Sea Slug did not live up to expectations" and was obsolete by 1957. Its ineffectiveness and dangerous missile fuel degraded the value of the class, which had potential as command ships, having more operations room space than later Type 42 destroyer and ADAWS and the MIL-STD-6011 communications system.

In 1960, because US-designed missiles were seen at the time to be superior to the Seaslug, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) proposed a County class armed with the US Tartar missile and two additional modifications: hangar space for three Wessex helicopters and a steam propulsion system, rather than the combined steam and gas system used in the County class. However, the RAN instead decided to proceed with the Perth class (a modified version of the US Charles F. Adams class). Two different reasons have been put forward for the Australian decision: according to an Australian history, British authorities would not allow a steam-propelled variant of the County, whereas, according to a British account, the re-design required to accommodate the Tartar missile would have taken longer than the RAN deemed to be acceptable.

The US Terrier missile had some support amongst the RN staff, but consideration was not given to acquiring it for the second batch of four ships, as the County class were 'shop windows' for advanced UK technology, and it was vital for the British missile and aerospace industry to continue the Seaslug project, to allow the development of the much improved Sea Dart missile. Following problems with the original version, a reworked Action Data Automation Weapon System (ADAWS) was successfully trialled on HMS Norfolk in 1970. In the mid-1960s the County missile destroyers were assets; their impressive appearance and data links, feeding off the carriers' Type 984 radar, projected effective capability during the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation. The Mark 1 Seaslug was operationally reliable and proved useful as a missile target for the new Sea Dart missiles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (The supersonic Mark 2 version proved less effective for this.) There are questions as to whether it was ever fully operational and there were problems with missiles breaking up when the boosters separated. Inaccuracy, primitive beam-riding guidance and lack of infrared homing or a proximity fuze in the Mk 1 made it of limited value. Short-range air defence was provided by the GWS-22 Seacat anti-aircraft missile system, which made the Counties the first Royal Navy warships to be armed with two different types of guided missile.

Batch 2 improvements

As constructed, the County-class ships were armed with a pair of twin QF 4.5-inch gun mountings. The second batch of four ships (Antrim, Fife, Glamorgan and Norfolk) were refitted in the mid-1970s – their 'B'-position turrets were removed and replaced by four single MM38 Exocet surface-to-surface anti-ship-missile launcher boxes. This was partly to counter the continuing threat of Soviet gun- and missile-armed cruisers, but also because the two twin 4.5 mountings, located forward on the County-class, were cramped and hot to fire, with the heat from firing the upper gun being felt by the gun crew in the turret below; also, the forward twin turrets had space for only small magazines – only 225 shells for each gun, two-thirds of the magazine capacity for the same guns in the Leander (Type 12L) frigates. This made the County-class ships the only Royal Navy ships to be fitted with three separate types of guided missile: Seaslug, Seacat and Exocet. It also left the un-refitted ships as the last Royal Navy vessels able to fire a broadside from multiple main armament gun turrets. HMS London fired the last Royal Navy broadside on 10 December 1981 in the English Channel, after returning from its final deployment in the West Indies. It had also fired off the last Seaslug Mk 1 stocks that year, as targets for Type 42 Sea Dart workups, prior to her hand-over to the Pakistani Navy. Sold by the British Government 23 March 1982, she sailed without notice from Portsmouth in late May 1982 for Pakistan during the Falklands crisis, and consideration may have been given to reclaiming it for war service.

Possible development

It was suggested by Vosper Thornycroft that the Counties could have been developed for the anti-submarine role by replacing the obsolete Seaslug GWS system with a larger hangar and flight deck and the possibility of removing Seaslug and rebuilding the missile tunnel as storage for extra Lynx helicopters Certainly, these arrangements as originally installed to operate a single Wessex anti-submarine helicopter were problematic, with a hangar so cramped it took an hour to get the aircraft either in or out again, during which evolution the port Seacat launcher was unusable. However it was determined that beam-restrictions would still limit the Counties' helicopter operation in RN service to the obsolescent Wessex, as they were too narrow to handle the far more capable Sea King HAS. The Chilean navy, however, did convert two of the four ships they purchased along these lines.

1982 Falklands War

Antrim and Glamorgan both served in the Falklands War; Antrim was the flagship of Operation Paraquet, the recovery of South Georgia in April 1982. Her helicopter, a Westland Wessex HAS Mk 3, nicknamed "Humphrey", was responsible for the remarkable rescue of 16 Special Air Service operators from Fortuna Glacier and the subsequent detection and disabling of the Argentinian submarine Santa Fe. In San Carlos Water, Antrim was hit by a 1,000 lb (450 kg) bomb which failed to explode. Glamorgan, after many days on the "gun line" bombarding Port Stanley airfield, was hit by an Exocet launched from land at the end of the conflict. It destroyed her aircraft hangar and the port Seacat mounting. Fortunately, her captain's prompt reaction to visual detection of the incoming Exocet narrowly averted a hit on the fatally vulnerable Seaslug magazine, by turning the ship so as to give as little target as possible (the stern) to the incoming weapon. The ship suffered fourteen deaths, injuries, and was lucky to survive with extensive damage and flooding. Had the missile hit a few inches higher, the above waterline magazine would have blown in an explosive fireball and many of the crew may have been lost.

Disposal

All eight of the class had short Royal Navy careers, serving on average less than 16 years. Only London of the first batch was transferred (to Pakistan) and served further, while the other three Batch 1 ships were decommissioned by 1980 with Hampshire being immediately scrapped in 1977, Devonshire sunk in weapons testing in 1984. Kent would serve as a floating (though immobile) accommodation and training ship in Portsmouth harbour until 1996. The four ships of Batch 2 however would be operated for 16 to 23 more years after sale to the Chilean Navy, in which they all received extensive upgrades and modernisation.

Construction programme

The ships were built at the major UK yards, with some of the machinery coming from Associated Electrical Industries of Manchester, Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company of Wallsend-on-Tyne, John I. Thornycroft & Company of Southampton, Yarrows of Glasgow, and the Wallsend Slipway and Engineering Company, Wallsend-on-Tyne.