HMS Decoy (D106): Fifty-Four Years of Service Across Two Navies

Built by Yarrow

HMS Decoy was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, her keel laid on 22 September 1946, launched on 29 March 1949, and completed on 28 April 1953, a Daring-class destroyer displacing 2,610 long tons standard, armed with three twin 4.5-inch gun mounts and three twin Bofors 40mm mounts, and capable of a particularly impressive 34 knots on 54,000 shaft horsepower.

There had been a Decoy immediately before her, and she had a more eventful decade than this one had in sixteen years. The previous ship of the name was a D-class destroyer of 1932 who spent the 1930s on the China Station, was in the Mediterranean when Italy came into the war, helped sink two Italian submarines in the first weeks of it, and in May 1941 took the King of Greece off the south coast of Crete after he had walked over the White Mountains with a platoon of New Zealanders. She was then handed to the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Kootenay and took part in the destruction of three U-boats inside six weeks in the summer of 1944. Her story is told in the article on HMS Decoy (H75). The keel of this one went down in September 1946, the same year the old ship went to the breakers.

What the Darings were, and why the Admiralty spent a while refusing to call them destroyers at all, is set out in the article on HMS Dainty. One detail is worth repeating here because it turned out to matter: the eight British ships were deliberately built in two halves, four wired on the old direct current system and four on alternating current, as a straight experiment to settle which way the Royal Navy should electrify its ships. Decoy was one of the AC four. So was Diana. Those are the two that Peru bought, and the two that were still at sea in the twenty-first century.

Coronation, Suez and a Grounding

Within weeks of commissioning, HMS Decoy took part in the June 1953 Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead, before deploying to the Mediterranean Fleet in September 1954. She served as part of the Royal Navy's force during the 1956 Suez Operation, under the command of Captain Peter Hill-Norton, who led her through this period of genuine international crisis.

Decoy was one of three Daring-class destroyers, alongside HMS Duchess and HMS Diamond, that carried out the main naval bombardment ahead of the landings, their combined eighteen 4.5-inch guns firing for around half an hour to clear dug-in Egyptian T-34 tanks, buried to their turrets on the beaches, out of the way of the advancing troops. Decoy herself carried a Royal Artillery officer whose job was to coordinate the fall of shot from an army spotter plane circling overhead, a genuinely collaborative piece of gunnery between two different services.

There is a specific reason it was three destroyers doing that shooting rather than a cruiser. Ministers in London had prohibited the use of any naval gun of a larger calibre than 4.5 inches at Port Said, on the reasoning that a city of a couple of hundred thousand people was about to be fought over in front of the world's press, and had cancelled the planned bombardment of the town outright immediately before the landing. That ruled out the 6-inch guns of the cruisers, which were the fleet's real weight of fire, and left the ships carrying 4.5-inch mountings as the only ones permitted to open fire at all. A Daring carried six of them. Three Darings therefore had between them the heaviest permitted armament in the assault force, which is how a class designed to fight the Japanese ended up as the artillery for an amphibious landing in Egypt. The politics of that restriction are set out in the article on HMS Barfleur (D80).

The target is worth picturing too, because it explains why the guns were wanted. Egyptian T-34s had been dug into the beaches at Port Said with only their turrets above the sand, which is a very economical way of turning a medium tank into a concrete pillbox: almost nothing to hit, a gun that can still traverse, and no need to worry about the engine. Field artillery cannot be landed until the beach is taken, and the beach cannot be taken while the tanks are firing along it, so the job falls to whatever is floating offshore. Half an hour of eighteen 4.5-inch guns, corrected by a Royal Artillery officer sitting in Decoy's operations room listening to a spotter in a light aircraft overhead, is the answer to that problem, and it is a genuinely difficult piece of gunnery: the ship is moving, the aircraft is moving, the target is the size of a garden shed and the friendly troops are about to run past it.

Hill-Norton went on to rather bigger things than a single destroyer: he later became First Sea Lord, then Chief of the Defence Staff and an Admiral of the Fleet, and eventually chaired NATO's Military Committee, a fair distance to travel from coordinating 4.5-inch salvoes off Port Said.

On 4 September 1957, HMS Decoy ran aground at Portland Harbour due to a failure of her steering gear, an embarrassing but evidently not disabling incident, since she returned to Mediterranean service with the 5th Destroyer Squadron that same month, remaining until July 1958.

Missile Trials and Far East Service

Between 1960 and 1962, HMS Decoy underwent trials for the Sea Cat missile system, valuable experimental work for the Royal Navy's transition toward guided weapons. She recommissioned on 9 April 1963 and joined the 21st Escort Squadron, alongside HMS Berwick, HMS Dido, HMS Corunna and HMS Cavendish, before a major refit led to a further recommissioning on 15 August 1967 for general service, including deployments to the West Indies and the Far East.

Seacat is worth a note, because Decoy was helping to prove the thing that made her own guns obsolete. It was the first British shipborne guided weapon designed for close-range air defence, and its great commercial virtue was that it had been drawn up to drop straight onto the mountings that already carried a twin Bofors: same deck ring, same magazine space, no rebuilding. That made it cheap to fit and it went everywhere, into frigates, destroyers, carriers and assault ships, and was sold to a dozen other navies. It was never very good. It was slow, it was command-guided by an operator with a joystick watching the missile through binoculars or a television camera, and its combat record in 1982 was thin. But it was the first step from a gun that throws a shell at where an aeroplane might be towards a weapon that follows one, and Decoy spent two years finding out how it behaved at sea.

A New Life as BAP Ferré

HMS Decoy was decommissioned and sold to Peru in 1969, alongside her sister ship HMS Diana.

Cammell Laird at Birkenhead carried out an extensive modernisation between 1970 and 1973, fitting eight Exocet MM-38 surface-to-surface missiles and rebuilding her foremast to carry Plessey AWS-1 radar, before she was commissioned into the Peruvian Navy in April 1973 as BAP Ferré, named in honour of Diego Ferré, a hero of the War of the Pacific.

Diego Ferré Sosa had joined the Peruvian Navy as a midshipman in 1866 and was a First Lieutenant aboard the ironclad monitor Huáscar when he was killed at the Battle of Angamos on 8 October 1879, fighting alongside the celebrated Rear Admiral Miguel Grau, a defeat still honoured in Peru as one of the navy's defining moments. It made for a suitably determined namesake for a British-built destroyer about to begin a second career on the other side of the world.

Peru's SIMA dockyards at Callao continued upgrading the former HMS Decoy through the 1970s: removing her original Squid anti-submarine mortar and installing a helicopter landing deck between 1975 and 1976, and fitting two OTO Melara twin 40L70 Dardo compact guns with associated fire-control systems between 1977 and 1978, keeping the ship truly combat-relevant decades after her original British construction.

BAP Ferré later tested her Exocet missile system against the decommissioned Peruvian vessel BAP Villar, herself a former American Fletcher-class destroyer, USS Benham, transferred to Peru back in 1960, putting her upgraded weaponry through realistic live trials against a genuine, if elderly, warship rather than an empty hulk.

A Fifty-Four Year Career

BAP Ferré, the former HMS Decoy, was finally decommissioned on 13 July 2007, bringing to a close an extraordinary fifty-four years of continuous naval service split between two navies on opposite sides of the world, from a Coronation fleet review off Portsmouth to Exocet missile trials in the Pacific, a remarkable working life for a single hull.

It is worth setting the two halves of that career side by side. She served the Royal Navy for sixteen years and Peru for thirty-four. Almost everything anybody would now call her armament, the Exocets, the helicopter deck, the Italian close-in guns, the modern radar, was fitted after Britain had finished with her. The hull, the machinery and the three twin 4.5-inch turrets were British and 1940s in design, and they were still working in 2007, which is a considerable compliment to Yarrow of Scotstoun and to whoever looked after her at Callao.