HMS Birmingham (D86): The First Ship to Reload Sea Dart Missiles at Sea

A Birkenhead-Built Destroyer

HMS Birmingham was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 28 March 1972, launched on 30 July 1973 by Lady Empson, and commissioned on 3 December 1976.

The name carries one entry in the record that no other British warship can claim. On 9 August 1914, five days into the First World War, the light cruiser HMS Birmingham was patrolling in heavy fog off Fair Isle when she came upon a German submarine lying stopped on the surface. U-15's engines had broken down, and the men on Birmingham's bridge could hear hammering from inside the hull as her crew tried to get them going again. Birmingham opened fire and missed. As the boat started to dive, the cruiser put her bow through her and cut her in half. U-15 went down with all hands.

That is the first submarine ever destroyed by a warship, anywhere, and it happened in the first week of the first war in which submarines mattered. It was done by ramming because in August 1914 nobody had a weapon designed to attack a submerged boat and would not have one for a year yet: no depth charge, no hydrophone, no asdic, nothing. The answer to a submarine was to see her on the surface and drive over her. Another ship of the name, the 1936 cruiser, has her own article, HMS Birmingham (C19).

Set the two ends of that against each other and the century in between comes into focus. In 1914 a ship called Birmingham dealt with a submarine by hitting it with the front of the ship. In 1980 a ship called Birmingham became the first vessel in the Royal Navy to take a supersonic ramjet-powered surface-to-air missile aboard from another ship, on a wire, with both of them under way in the open sea. Sixty-six years, and the same name on the bow.

A Type 42 destroyer powered by a combined gas turbine propulsion system generating 36 megawatts, she carried twin Sea Dart missile launchers alongside a 4.5-inch main gun, a notably capable air defence destroyer built for exactly the kind of escort work the Cold War Royal Navy needed most.

The Type 42 exists because of a cancellation. Sea Dart had been designed for the Type 82, a large and expensive destroyer intended to escort the new aircraft carrier CVA-01, and when the carrier was cancelled in 1966 the escort went with it: exactly one Type 82 was ever built. The Navy still wanted the missile, so it asked for the same weapon system in a smaller and cheaper hull, and got the Type 42. To bring the price down further, forty-seven feet were taken out of the bow forward of the bridge on the first two batches. That saved money and it cost seakeeping, because a short, fine bow in a North Atlantic head sea buries itself, and a ship that is throwing green water over her forward gun is not a comfortable or a particularly effective one. The Batch 3 ships, built later, had the length put back. Birmingham was one of the short ones.

Sea Dart itself was an unusual weapon and a good deal cleverer than its age suggests. Most missiles are rockets: they burn hard, go very fast, and then coast to the target losing energy all the way. Sea Dart used a booster to get up to speed and then a ramjet, an engine with no moving parts that simply uses its own forward motion to compress the air it burns, which meant it was still under power when it arrived. That gave it long reach and, more importantly, energy to manoeuvre at the far end of its range, where a coasting missile has none. It was designed in the 1960s and it stayed in service until 2012.

It also has the single most impressive combat record of any British missile. On 25 February 1991 the American battleship USS Missouri was bombarding Iraqi positions in Kuwait when Iraq fired Silkworm anti-ship missiles at her. HMS Gloucester, a later Type 42, put two Sea Darts up and destroyed one of them with very little time to spare. It remains the only occasion on which a warship has shot down an enemy missile with a missile of her own in action, and it was done by a system drawn up when the Beatles were still together.

A First for Missile Resupply

In 1980, HMS Birmingham was one of the first ships to serve on the Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, pairing up with HMS Ardent, and achieved a genuine technical first in the process, becoming the first Royal Navy ship to replenish her Sea Dart missiles at sea.

The Armilla Patrol she helped start turned into the longest continuous commitment the modern Royal Navy has had. It began in October 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war made the Strait of Hormuz genuinely dangerous and Britain, which depended on the oil coming through it, decided that British-flagged merchant ships should not have to make the passage alone. What was meant as a short-term reassurance measure was still running, in one form or another, decades later. There is a melancholy footnote to her first patrol as well: the ship she paired up with out there in 1980 was HMS Ardent, who had less than two years to live.

It was a fiddly business: the bulky missile canister had to be hauled across horizontally from the RFA supply ship on a jackstay, clamped to a hydraulic arm and swung upright, before the missile itself was drawn out of the bottom of the canister and lowered into the magazine below, all while both ships kept station alongside each other under way.

Awkward or not, it meant destroyers on extended deployment no longer needed to return to port simply to rearm, considerably extending their practical endurance on station.

Replenishment at sea is worth appreciating in its own right, because it is the single capability that separates a navy that can go somewhere from a navy that can stay there. Two ships steam side by side about forty metres apart at a steady twelve knots or so, held there by nothing but the helmsmen, with wires and hoses strung between them, and pass across fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts, mail and people. Both ships are being pulled towards each other by the water flowing between the hulls the whole time, which is why the distance is held so precisely. Doing all that is routine. Doing it with a live surface-to-air missile swinging on the end of a jackstay is a rather different proposition, and it is why the first time anybody managed it was worth recording.

Guarding the Falklands, Then the Mediterranean

HMS Birmingham patrolled the Falkland Islands as a radar picket ship in 1984 alongside the frigates HMS Broadsword and HMS Ajax, part of the continuing British military presence maintained in the islands following the 1982 war.

She deployed to the Mediterranean with NATO's Standing Naval Force the following year, calling at Gibraltar, Palma de Mallorca, Naples and Messina, and after a refit at Rosyth completed a further Persian Gulf tour, returning home in March 1989 under the command of Commander Roy Clare, who would go on to run the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and later the Auckland War Memorial Museum, a rather different sort of command.

Standing By in Trinidad

HMS Birmingham deployed to Trinidad in 1990 during a period of serious political unrest on the island, part of the kind of rapid-response presence duty that a fast, well-armed destroyer was well suited to provide, offering reassurance and support to British nationals and interests during an uncertain and volatile situation.

The unrest in question was a great deal more serious than the phrase suggests. On 27 July 1990 the group Jamaat al Muslimeen attempted to overthrow the government of Trinidad and Tobago: a party of insurgents stormed the Red House, the parliament building, and took Prime Minister A. N. R. Robinson and most of his cabinet hostage, while a second and larger group seized the national television station and put their leader on air to announce that the government had fallen. The siege lasted six days and twenty-four people were killed before the insurgents surrendered on 1 August under an amnesty that the courts later upheld, to widespread and enduring anger. A British destroyer arriving off a Commonwealth island in those circumstances was not there for the ceremonial.

A Final Voyage to Spain

HMS Birmingham was paid off at Portsmouth on 10 December 1999 after 23 years of service, stripped of useful equipment at Devonport in early 2000, and sold for scrap, departing under tow for Spain on 20 October that year, closing out the career of a destroyer whose most notable legacy was arguably the technical innovation that let her, and every Type 42 destroyer after her, stay on station and stay armed for considerably longer than had previously been possible.

The class did not outlast her by very much. Fourteen Type 42s were built in three batches, Birmingham being one of the six short-hulled Batch 1 ships along with Sheffield, Glasgow, Newcastle, Coventry and Cardiff. Two of those six were sunk in the Falklands within a month of each other. The last of the whole class, HMS Edinburgh, decommissioned on 6 June 2013, thirty-seven years after Birmingham commissioned, and the type was replaced by six Type 45 destroyers, the last of which had been handed over to the Navy ten weeks earlier.

Fourteen ships replaced by six is the arithmetic that every discussion of the modern Royal Navy eventually arrives at, and it is not quite as damning as it sounds, because a Type 45 can do things a Type 42 could not attempt: her radar and her missile system are a generation and a half ahead, and one of her can defend an area that would have needed several of the older ships. It is also not nothing. A destroyer can only be in one place at a time however good she is, and there are still the same number of oceans.