HMS Campbeltown (F86): Carrying a Borrowed Bell From the Most Daring Raid of the War

The Last and Largest of the Type 22s

HMS Campbeltown was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 4 December 1985, launched on 7 October 1987, and commissioned on 27 May 1989, one of the Batch 3 Type 22 frigates, larger than their predecessors and fitted with improved close-in weapons systems reflecting hard lessons learned during the 1982 Falklands War. She carried a 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun, two Sea Wolf anti-air missile systems with 72 missiles between them, two quadruple Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers, torpedo tubes, 20mm guns and a Goalkeeper close-in weapon system, a genuinely formidable and comprehensive combat fit reflecting the class's final and most capable iteration.

A Bell Borrowed From Pennsylvania

HMS Campbeltown carried a name laden with history. The original HMS Campbeltown, a Town-class destroyer, achieved lasting fame for her role in the St Nazaire Raid of 1942, when she was rammed into the dry dock gates at St Nazaire and detonated with a delayed-action explosive charge, destroying the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast large enough to service the German battleship Tirpitz, one of the most audacious and successful special operations of the entire war. In tribute to that legacy, the ship's bell from the original HMS Campbeltown, held by the town of Campbelltown, Pennsylvania, which had donated fifty American destroyers including the original Campbeltown to Britain under the 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement, was loaned to this later frigate for the duration of her service, a fitting and genuinely moving link between two ships separated by nearly half a century.

A Wreath Over the Kursk

HMS Campbeltown visited Arkhangelsk in August 2001 for the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of the Arctic Convoys, a fitting deployment given her wartime namesake's own service in that era, and on 28 August 2001, she laid a wreath in the Barents Sea near the site where the Russian submarine Kursk had been lost the previous year, a solemn gesture of respect across former Cold War lines. She went on to serve as part of NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic in early 2004, and between 2007 and 2008 completed a seven-month deployment to the Persian Gulf, supporting Operation Calash against piracy and smuggling and Operation Telic securing Iraqi territorial waters.

Decommissioned, and a Bell Comes Home

HMS Campbeltown entered refit at HMNB Devonport in September 2008 and was eventually decommissioned on 7 April 2011, following a final emotional visit to the town of Campbeltown in Argyll that March and a final entrance to Plymouth on 31 March. She was laid up at Portsmouth before being sold to the Turkish company Leyal for demolition in July 2013, towed to Turkey that October and arriving at the Aliağa ship-breaking yard on 29 October 2013. The borrowed bell from the original wartime HMS Campbeltown was returned to Pennsylvania after decommissioning, and a new bell was cast for her successor, the Type 31 frigate HMS Campbeltown, with the original frigate's own bell now on display in Campbeltown's local museum, a tangible link between three generations of ships bearing one of the Royal Navy's most storied names.