HMS Exeter (D89): Three Kills in the Falklands, Then Guarding Battleships in the Gulf

Built on the Tyne

HMS Exeter was built by Swan Hunter on the Tyne, with construction beginning on 22 July 1976 and the ship launched on 25 April 1978, sponsored by Lady Joan Mulley.

A Type 42 destroyer of the Batch 2A variant, the first of the modified Batch 2 design, she displaced 4,820 tonnes, measured 125 metres in length, and could reach a top speed of 28.7 knots powered by a combined gas-or-gas turbine arrangement of Rolls-Royce Olympus and Tyne engines producing 36 megawatts.

Her armament centred on the Sea Dart missile system alongside a 4.5-inch gun, Phalanx close-in weapon systems and Stingray torpedoes, backed by a Lynx helicopter, and she carried the distinction of being the first British warship to combine the 1022, 992Q and 1006 radar systems in a single fit.

That radar fit is the most consequential thing on the page, and it is worth explaining why. The earlier Type 42s carried the Type 965, the large double-bedstead aerial that had been designed in the 1950s to find high-flying Soviet bombers over open ocean. Against an aircraft coming in at fifty feet, using islands and hills as cover and lost in the clutter of the returns from the sea and the land behind it, the 965 was close to useless, and that is precisely how the Argentine Air Force chose to attack. Exeter was the first ship to carry the Type 1022 instead, a set with far better performance against low, fast targets in clutter. It is the reason she saw two Skyhawks coming in low on 30 May when other ships did not, and it is one of the clearest examples in modern naval history of a single sensor deciding what a ship could and could not do.

She commissioned on 19 September 1980, and briefly sported an experimental turquoise hull coating below the waterline during her early service, later repainted in the standard brick red and black following the Falklands conflict.

Rushed South After Sheffield

HMS Exeter was deployed from the Caribbean to the South Atlantic during the Falklands War as a direct replacement for HMS Sheffield, lost to an Exocet missile strike earlier in the conflict, a grim reminder of exactly what kind of threat she would be facing.

The word replacement in that sentence carries more weight than it looks. HMS Sheffield had been lost on 4 May and HMS Coventry on 25 May, both of them Type 42s, both doing the same job. The area air-defence destroyer was stationed out ahead of the carriers, on the threat axis, deliberately in the most exposed position in the force, because that is where a ship with a long-range missile system has to be if she is going to shoot at anything before it reaches the ships she is protecting. Exeter was sent south knowing that two ships of her own class had already been destroyed doing exactly what she was going out to do, in the same water, against the same aircraft. She then went and stood in the same place.

Under the command of Captain Hugh Balfour, HMS Exeter operated on the outer ring of the carrier battle group's screen, providing area air defence using her Type 1022 radar and Sea Dart missile system.

Her combat record proved formidable. On 30 May 1982, in what turned out to be the last air-launched Exocet attack of the war, two Argentine Super Etendards came in from the south, the opposite direction the fleet had been warned to expect, with Exeter herself the first to detect their targeting radar and alert the rest of the force. The Etendards fired at least one Exocet and turned for home, but four escorting A-4 Skyhawks pressed on regardless; Exeter shot down two of them with Sea Dart, and the surviving pair "came far too close" for comfort, in one crew member's own words.

The Exocet itself passed directly astern of Exeter and on towards HMS Andromeda, a nearby Sea King helicopter fleeing to hide behind Andromeda's own hull while a second sat squarely in Exeter's line of fire without stopping her crew firing past it. Almost everyone in the operations room had already hit the deck when the last Sea Dart of the engagement was fired from under a desk, the controller having taken cover along with everyone else; whether that missile actually destroyed the incoming Exocet, or whether it simply ran out of fuel or was fooled by chaff, remains disputed among historians to this day, though nobody aboard Exeter much minded which explanation was correct once it became clear the missile had missed. Captain Hugh Balfour marked the occasion with a large single malt from his own steward, and, by most accounts, so did most of the rest of the ship's company shortly afterwards.

On 7 June, she destroyed a Learjet 35A that had been shadowing the task force on a reconnaissance mission over Pebble Island, denying the Argentine military valuable intelligence on the British fleet's movements. All five men aboard were killed, among them Vice Commodore Rodolfo De la Colina, the squadron's own commander and, at the time of his death, the highest-ranking Argentine officer to die in the entire war; a memorial near Pebble Island's Marble Mountain still commemorates the crew today.

The Learjet engagement deserves its own note, because of the numbers involved. The aircraft was at something in the order of 39,000 feet, cruising in what its crew had every reason to believe was untouchable airspace, well above the altitude at which the Argentine air force had learned to expect trouble. Most accounts describe the shot as being at or beyond the published envelope of the weapon. A ramjet missile designed in the early 1960s to stop Soviet bombers over the North Sea reached up seven miles and killed a business jet over the South Atlantic, and the man aboard it was the most senior Argentine officer to die in the entire war. There is a memorial to the five of them near Marble Mountain on Pebble Island, put up by the islanders.

On 13 June, in one of her most significant single actions, HMS Exeter shot down an Argentine Canberra B.62 bomber west of Stanley using Sea Dart, an impressive tally of confirmed kills for a single destroyer across barely two weeks of active combat.

Three kills is a substantial share of what the whole system achieved. Twenty-six Sea Darts were fired in anger during the campaign for eight confirmed kills, so Exeter alone accounted for well over a third of the total, in about a fortnight, from a ship that had arrived after the war was half over. What Sea Dart actually was, and the one thing it later did that no other missile has ever managed, is set out in the article on HMS Edinburgh (D97).

Shielding American Battleships in the Gulf

HMS Exeter returned to front-line combat service nearly a decade later, taking part in Operation Granby, Britain's contribution to the 1991 Gulf War, under the command of Captain Nigel Essenhigh, who would go on, over the following decade, to rise all the way to First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, the professional head of the entire Royal Navy, from 2001 to 2002.

Her role this time involved providing defensive air cover for American battleships and the mine-hunter group operating in the northern Persian Gulf, protecting them from hostile aircraft and missile threats using the same Sea Dart system that had proven so effective in the South Atlantic nearly a decade earlier, a notably striking demonstration of just how much continued value the Type 42 design still offered in a completely different theatre and a completely different kind of coalition warfare.

It is worth pausing on the incongruity of that duty. In 1991 the United States Navy brought USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin into the northern Gulf to bombard Kuwait, two battleships laid down in 1941 firing sixteen-inch shells at targets ashore, in the last naval gunfire support mission either of them would ever carry out. Sitting over them, watching for the aircraft and missiles they had no realistic way of dealing with themselves, was a British destroyer whose own air-defence system had been designed in the 1960s. Two generations of obsolete-looking warship, kept in service well past the point anybody had planned for, doing between them a job neither had been designed for and doing it perfectly well.

The Last Falklands Veteran

HMS Exeter continued in service through routine NATO deployments across the 1980s and 1990s, and underwent a major refit at Rosyth in the autumn of 1998, covering machinery overhaul, hull repairs, and upgrades to her radar, sensors and Sea Dart weapons system.

She deployed on Armilla Patrol duty in the Persian Gulf between September 1999 and February 2000 under the command of Paul Bennett, later a Rear Admiral, continuing the long tradition of Royal Navy presence in the region.

By the mid-2000s, HMS Exeter had become the very last remaining Royal Navy ship in commission to have served in the Falklands War, a distinction she carried with evident pride, attending the 25th anniversary commemorations at Newquay in Cornwall in 2007.

She also served as the centrepiece for the launch of the James Bond novel Devil May Care in May 2008, a considerably lighter duty than her earlier combat record but a particularly fitting one for a ship that had, by then, become something of a national institution in her own right.

Decommissioning and a Quiet Controversy

HMS Exeter was placed in extended readiness at Portsmouth on 30 July 2008 and formally decommissioned on 27 May 2009, closing out nearly three decades of service that had included two of the most significant British military operations of the late twentieth century. She was put up for auction on 28 March 2011 and towed to the Leyal Ship Recycling facility in Turkey on 23 September 2011 for scrapping.

Her disposal was not without controversy: a number of her former crew members protested the Ministry of Defence's failure to properly inform them the ship was being scrapped, feeling that a vessel with such a distinguished combat record, and such personal significance to the men who had served aboard her, deserved rather better notice than a quiet administrative announcement.