HMS Aisne (D22): The First Warship Launched After Victory in Europe

Launched Just Too Late

HMS Aisne holds a small but genuine distinction: built by Vickers-Armstrongs at High Walker on the Tyne, she was launched on 12 May 1945, making her the first warship launched by Britain after Victory in Europe had been declared just four days earlier. It was a strange moment for a warship to enter the water, timed almost exactly to miss the conflict she had been designed to fight. She would not actually enter service for nearly two more years, finally commissioning on 20 March 1947, well into a peace that showed no immediate sign of needing another Battle-class destroyer.

That did not make her useless. A capable postwar fleet destroyer, she carried five 4.5-inch guns, eight Bofors anti-aircraft guns, ten torpedo tubes and a pair of Squid anti-submarine mortars, more than enough to earn her keep in a Royal Navy quietly settling into its new Cold War role.

A Career of Steady, Unspectacular Service

Aisne joined the Home Fleet on commissioning in 1947, and spent the following two decades in the sort of varied, dependable service that made up the bulk of the postwar destroyer force's working life. She was temporarily laid up in 1950, before joining the 4th Destroyer Squadron in 1951 for a mix of Mediterranean and Home Fleet deployments. In 1953 she took part in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the Royal Navy, before returning to the Mediterranean with her squadron through 1954 and 1955.

Reinvented for the Missile Age

Like several of her sister ships, Aisne was converted in 1959 into a radar picket, fitted with Sea Cat guided missiles and updated anti-aircraft weaponry in place of some of her older gun armament, adapting her for a role focused on airborne early warning rather than traditional gunnery duels. In this new form she went on to serve with the 7th Destroyer Squadron and the 23rd and 30th Escort Squadrons between 1962 and 1968, taking her to the Mediterranean, the Far East, and the West Indies in a final decade of genuinely global service.

A Quiet Finish

Aisne was decommissioned in 1968 and scrapped by Thos. W. Ward at Inverkeithing in 1970, twenty-five years after she had first slipped into the water as, quite literally, the first new warship of the peace. She never fired a shot in the war that shaped her design, but she gave the Royal Navy two solid decades of exactly the kind of steady, adaptable service that peacetime fleets actually run on.