HMS Edinburgh (D97): The 'Fortress of the Sea' That Fired the Navy's Last Sea Dart

Constructed at Cammell Laird

HMS Edinburgh was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 14 April 1983 and commissioned on 17 December 1985, a Type 42 guided missile destroyer and, notably, the largest ship ever built to that class's design, distinguished by an enlarged forecastle that set her apart visually from her sister ships.

The reason she was bigger is the most quietly damning story in the class. The Type 42 was originally drawn at roughly the length Edinburgh ended up being. Then the Treasury applied itself to the cost, and about forty-seven feet were taken out of the bow forward of the bridge, with the beam narrowed to match, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that a shorter ship is a cheaper ship. What came out was a destroyer that was cramped inside, wet on deck and an indifferent sea boat in the weather the North Atlantic actually produces, which the first ships demonstrated on their contractor's trials before anybody had fired a shot from one. The ninth hull, Manchester, was quietly lengthened again while she was building, and the last four ships, Edinburgh among them, were completed to what amounted to the original design. Edinburgh was not an enlarged Type 42. She was a Type 42 built the way the Type 42 had been meant to be built, sixteen years after somebody decided it cost too much.

She earned the nickname 'Fortress of the Sea', a fitting reflection of both her greater size and her substantial armament: a twin Sea Dart missile launcher carrying 40 missiles, a 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun, twin 20mm Oerlikon guns, two Phalanx close-in weapon systems for last-ditch defence against incoming missiles, and triple anti-submarine torpedo tubes, backed by a Lynx helicopter equipped with anti-ship missiles and anti-submarine torpedoes.

Her Phalanx fit was not quite right from the start. HMS Edinburgh was originally designed with a single forward-mounted Phalanx unit, a position that proved unsuitably wet in anything like a rough sea, and she was later retrofitted with wing-mounted units matching her sister ships, though she retained the distinctive enlarged breakwaters and raised bulwark that marked her out as the class's odd one out.

Sea Dart itself deserves a proper description, because it was a genuinely unusual weapon and there has been nothing quite like it since. Most surface-to-air missiles are rockets: they burn hard for a few seconds and then coast, losing energy all the way to the target, which is why their reach shrinks the further out you shoot. Sea Dart carried a jettisonable solid booster to get it up to supersonic speed and then lit a Rolls-Royce Odin ramjet running on kerosene, which kept pushing for the whole flight. A ramjet has no moving parts and cannot start from a standstill, so it needs the boost first; the payoff is a missile that arrives still accelerating and can still manoeuvre hard at the far end of its range. It was designed in the 1960s to shoot down Soviet bombers over a fleet, and it turned out to be good at things nobody had asked it to do.

Its combat record is worth setting out plainly, because it is usually reported as either a triumph or a scandal and it was neither. Twenty-six Sea Darts were fired in anger in the Falklands for eight confirmed kills, which is a mixed result and reflects the fact that the system had been built to engage high-flying bombers and was being asked to catch Skyhawks weaving between islands at fifty feet. Nine years later it did the thing no other missile system has ever managed. On 25 February 1991, off Kuwait, an Iraqi Silkworm was launched at the American battleship USS Missouri, and HMS Gloucester engaged it and shot it down: the first validated interception of a missile by a missile in combat at sea, and still the only one. That story is told in the article on HMS Gloucester (D96). Gloucester was a Batch 3, like Edinburgh, and the missile she used was already twenty-odd years old at the time.

Falklands Waters and the Gulf

HMS Edinburgh deployed to patrol Falkland Islands waters in 1998, making flag-showing visits to South American ports along the way, a role that would recur throughout her career given her size and prestige within the class.

She kept her Sea Dart crews sharp too. On 10 July 2001 the destroyer launched a live missile during a firing exercise, an entirely routine drill at the time that reads rather differently in hindsight, since it was the very same weapon system she would fire for the last time in Royal Navy service almost eleven years later. Three months on, on 11 October 2001, she was photographed shouldering through a heavy Atlantic swell, proof that the 'Fortress of the Sea' nickname was earned in bad weather as readily as in battle.

In September 2002, she sailed into the River Mersey to escort yachts completing the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, a considerably more festive assignment than most of her deployments.

HMS Edinburgh deployed to the Persian Gulf in January 2003 as part of the build-up to the Iraq War, supporting Royal Marines ashore and escorting the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean, before joining the Standing Naval Force Mediterranean in 2004 and taking part in Operation Active Endeavour, NATO's counter-terrorism operation monitoring Mediterranean sea lanes in the wake of the September 2001 attacks.

Centrepiece of the Falklands Anniversary

HMS Edinburgh deployed to the Falklands from autumn 2006 until June 2007, trialling the 'Sea Swap' system of rotating crews rather than the whole ship, a personnel management experiment aimed at keeping ships on station longer without wearing out their crews through extended deployments.

During this posting, HMS Edinburgh served as the centrepiece of the Falkland Islands' 25th anniversary celebrations of liberation from Argentine occupation in June 2007, a remarkably significant symbolic role for a Royal Navy destroyer to play, before returning to Portsmouth that August via Rio de Janeiro and Tenerife.

HMS Edinburgh deployed further afield between February and July 2008 as part of Operation Orion, taking in a long transit of the Indian Ocean, a visit to Singapore and operations in the Gulf, where she took part in the interception of a drugs cargo, a truly useful piece of practical maritime security work carried out well outside her home waters.

A Final Refit and the Last Sea Dart

HMS Edinburgh entered dry dock on 25 January 2010 for an extensive £17.5 million refurbishment carried out by BAE Systems, covering weapon and communication system updates, engine replacements and new foul-release hull paint estimated to cut fuel consumption by 15 per cent, a substantial investment in a ship by then approaching the later stages of her career.

She emerged from the refit in September 2010, completed sea trials, achieved formal fleet acceptance that October, and was rededicated in early November.

HMS Edinburgh completed Sea Dart missile firing trials in April 2011, clearing the way for an eight-month deployment to the South Atlantic that began the following month.

The deployment took her by way of Cape Town in July, where she called to support British defence firms exhibiting at a trade event, before a rough four-thousand-mile crossing to the Falklands that had her crew hanging on through mountainous Atlantic swell. She spent the following months based at Mare Harbour, patrolling British South Atlantic waters, before sailing south again in August to visit South Georgia, escorting soldiers of 2nd Battalion, the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment ashore for cold-weather training within sight of the old whaling station at Grytviken. A call at Simon's Town, near Cape Town, gave her ship's company the chance to take on the South African Navy at rugby, basketball and netball, honours finishing even, before Edinburgh turned for home by way of South America, the Caribbean and the United States, arriving back in Portsmouth in time for Christmas.

On 13 April 2012 she fired the very last operational Sea Dart missiles ever launched by the Royal Navy: seven missiles in all, launched singly and in salvoes at Mirach drone targets off the Benbecula range in the Outer Hebrides, an exclusion zone of some 3,750 square miles of ocean cleared for the occasion. Weapon Engineering Officer Lieutenant Commander Stephen Carbery called Sea Dart a system that "has been at the heart of maritime operations for three decades, defending units and task groups from air attack", a fitting send-off for a missile the ship nicknamed 'Fortress of the Sea' had the honour of firing last.

Which puts that April morning off Benbecula in its proper light. What Edinburgh was firing into the sea north-west of the Hebrides was not simply an obsolete missile being used up before disposal. It was the end of a weapon that had defended a fleet in the South Atlantic, made a piece of history in the Persian Gulf and stood the Royal Navy's air-defence watch for three decades, being fired for the last time by the last ship able to fire it. Seven rounds, singly and in salvo, into three and a half thousand square miles of cleared ocean, and then nothing. Sea Viper had already been to sea in the Type 45s by then, which is the right way for these things to happen; it is simply rare to be able to put a date on it.

One Last Patrol

There was still one deployment left in her. HMS Edinburgh sailed from Portsmouth on 24 September 2012 for what proved to be her final operational patrol, six months ranging across the North and South Atlantic in support of British interests, from counter-narcotics patrols off West Africa to reassurance visits to the UK's South Atlantic territories, taking in port calls in South Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas along the way, before returning to Portsmouth in March 2013 with her operational career now behind her. Commander Nick Borbone, her commanding officer, said before departure that he was "extremely proud of the way my ship's company has responded to the many challenges we faced during preparations for this operational deployment", a fair summary of a crew about to spend six months at sea in a ship already thirty years into her working life.

The timing gave the deployment an extra edge of finality. Her sister ship HMS York paid off on 27 September 2012, just three days after Edinburgh sailed, which meant that for the whole of this last patrol, and for the best part of a year afterwards, HMS Edinburgh was not merely a Type 42 destroyer; she was the only one left in Royal Navy service, quietly keeping the entire class's thirty-year story going single-handed until it was finally her own turn to stop.

The Last Type 42

HMS Edinburgh was decommissioned on 6 June 2013 at Portsmouth Naval Base, becoming the very last Type 42 destroyer to serve in the Royal Navy, closing out a class that had formed the backbone of British air defence destroyers since the 1970s, including service throughout the Falklands War. Commander Borbone told the assembled ship's company that these were "the final moments of HMS Edinburgh and the final moments of the Type 42, a class which has served the navy and the nation with distinction", a suitably understated send-off for a ship that had covered more than 793,500 miles in her career, the best part of two round trips to the Moon.

Her farewell tour took in the Pool of London on 7 May, a visit to her namesake city of Edinburgh from 15 to 21 May, a call at her builders, Cammell Laird in Birkenhead, and a stop at Lyme Regis on 29 May, before arriving at Portsmouth on 31 May and opening to the public on 1 and 2 June, giving the public a proper chance to say goodbye to the last of her kind.

The Edinburgh leg was the sentimental highlight of the tour. Her ship's company exercised the Freedom of the City with a parade through the historic streets on 17 May, before crowds were welcomed aboard for a final open day the following afternoon, complete with a performance from the Royal Marines Band, an appropriately loud way to say goodbye to a ship nicknamed for her size and her presence.

A campaign launched in May 2013 to preserve HMS Edinburgh as a museum ship at the Port of Leith ultimately proved unsuccessful, and she was towed out of Portsmouth on 12 August 2015 bound for scrapping in Turkey, bringing an end to nearly thirty years of service for the largest and, by most accounts, the most fondly regarded ship of her entire class.