HMS Diomede (F16): Three Collisions in the Cod Wars

Laid Down at Yarrow

HMS Diomede was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow, laid down on 30 January 1968, launched on 15 April 1969, and commissioned on 2 April 1971, a Leander-class frigate that would go on to spend a considerable portion of her career in one of the more unusual conflicts the postwar Royal Navy ever found itself fighting: the Cod Wars against Iceland.

The Second Cod War and the Far East

HMS Diomede took part in the Second Cod War against Iceland in 1972, a dispute over fishing rights that saw Royal Navy frigates repeatedly shadowing and shielding British trawlers from Icelandic gunboats, before joining the 3rd Frigate Squadron then based in the Far East.

In 1974, she deployed with Task Group 317.2 to the Far East and Pacific, visiting apartheid-era South Africa and conducting military exercises, before returning to the United Kingdom in June 1975.

Colliding Three Times in the Third Cod War

HMS Diomede joined the Fishery Protection Squadron in 1976 for the Third Cod War, the final and most intense of the three Cod War disputes with Iceland, and it was during this deployment that she earned her most distinctive service record: colliding three separate times with Icelandic Coast Guard vessels.

One of these collisions, with the Icelandic patrol vessel ICGV Baldur, left a twelve-foot gash along HMS Diomede's port beam, a serious piece of damage from what was, at least officially, a dispute between two NATO allies rather than an armed conflict.

Jubilee, Gulf and the Falklands

HMS Diomede took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's twenty-five years on the throne in 1977, and was adopted by the borough of Langbaurgh in North Yorkshire the previous year. Like several of her Leander-class sisters, she was used as the fictional HMS Hero in the BBC television drama Warship.

She deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1982 and to the West Indies in 1983 accompanying the royal yacht HMY Britannia, before returning to the South Atlantic in 1987 for Falkland Islands patrols and visits to South Georgia.

A New Life as PNS Shamsheer

HMS Diomede was decommissioned on 31 May 1988, and was subsequently sold to Pakistan, renamed PNS Shamsheer, going on to serve for a further considerable stretch before eventually being scrapped in 2003, closing out a career that had taken her from an unusual conflict against a fellow NATO member to more conventional service protecting British interests from the Gulf to the South Atlantic.