HMS Gloucester (D96): The First Ship Ever to Shoot Down a Missile With a Missile

A Batch 3 Destroyer

HMS Gloucester was built by Vosper Thorneycroft at Woolston, Southampton, one of the later Batch 3 Type 42 destroyers, a variant that featured a lengthened hull giving improved seakeeping and endurance over the earlier Batch 1 and 2 ships of the class.

It is worth being exact about that lengthening, because it was not a refinement. It was a correction. The Batch 1 and Batch 2 ships were 125 metres overall and the Batch 3s went to 141, with roughly fifteen of those extra metres inserted forward and the bow raised, which is where the seakeeping came from, and the balance added aft to give a longer flight deck. The extra length forward did something else useful as well. On the earlier ships the Sea Dart launcher and the 4.5-inch gun sat almost on top of one another, which crowded their arcs and meant a single hit in the wrong place could take out both. The stretch pulled them apart.

The stretch then created a problem of its own, as stretches tend to. A longer hull works harder in a seaway, the Batch 3s were found to be flexing more than anybody wanted, and strengthening had to be added along the forward hull in later refits: something like fifty tons of steel in a single beam at deck level, which widened the ship by about two feet and left the class with a distinctive ledge running along the upper forward hull. You can pick a Batch 3 out of a photograph by it. Not many warships wear the fix for their own design in plain sight.

She was launched on 2 November 1982, christened by the Duchess of Gloucester, and would go on to serve for 29 years, eventually logging an extraordinary 787,928 miles at sea, roughly equivalent to circling the globe more than 31 times, a testament to just how hard a working destroyer's life can be.

The name she was given had been carried before, and heavily. The previous HMS Gloucester was a Town-class cruiser, launched in October 1937 and commissioned in January 1939, who collected five battle honours inside a year and was known through the Mediterranean Fleet as the Fighting G. On 22 May 1941, off Crete, she was caught by Stukas with her anti-aircraft ammunition all but gone and sunk, taking 722 of her 807 people with her, ninety of them Royal Marines. What that morning looked like from the bridge of the ship next to her is set out in the article on HMS Fiji (58), who dropped every raft she had for Gloucester's survivors and could not stop. Half a century on, the next ship of the name shot down an anti-ship missile aimed at somebody else. The Navy does not usually get to close a circle that neatly.

Her own first years are worth filling in, because they explain a good deal about February 1991. Gloucester commissioned on 11 September 1985 and sailed on her first deployment in January 1987, to the Armilla Patrol, the standing British commitment in the Gulf described in the article on HMS Amazon (F169). She spent that spring shepherding merchant traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, calling at Djibouti, Sharjah, Manama, Karachi, Mombasa and Naples, and was home by June. In January 1988 she went straight back out to the Gulf and did it again.

So the destroyer stationed alongside USS Missouri off the Kuwaiti coast three years later was not a newcomer to that water. She had been working the top of the Gulf on and off since 1987, in a ship whose radar picture up there was cluttered by land, by shipping and by an allied fleet, and her operations room had had four years to learn what normal looked like. That is not a small part of why eighty-nine seconds was enough.

The Gulf War: Missile Versus Missile

HMS Gloucester's defining moment came during the 1991 Gulf War, under the command of Commander Philip Wilcocks, when she achieved what remains a properly unique feat in naval history. On 25 February 1991, an Iraqi Silkworm anti-ship missile was launched toward the American battleship USS Missouri, then conducting shore bombardment operations off Kuwait.

The weapon coming at them had a longer history than the ship firing at it. Silkworm is the Western name for the Chinese HY-2 Hai Ying, which is a developed copy of the Soviet P-15 Termit, and the Termit is the missile that changed naval warfare: in October 1967 four of them, fired by Egyptian patrol boats, sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat, the first time a ship-to-ship missile had ever been used successfully in action and the moment every navy in the world realised that a small boat could now kill a large warship from over the horizon. What Iraq had dug in on the Kuwaiti coast in 1991 was a shore-launched descendant of that weapon: a two-tonne aeroplane with a half-tonne warhead and a radar in the nose, subsonic but very large, and running in at 605 knots at a few hundred feet.

Iraqi shore batteries had actually fired two Silkworms that morning; the first failed almost as soon as it left the launcher, but the second bore in on the American task group at around 605 knots. HMS Gloucester fired two Sea Dart surface-to-air missiles in response, less than 50 seconds after her radar first picked up the incoming threat, and in an engagement lasting just 89 seconds from detection to destruction, successfully intercepted and destroyed the missile before it could reach its target. Royal Navy spokesman Commander John Tighe told reporters at the time that one of the two Sea Darts scored a direct hit; by one detailed account of the engagement, the resulting blast was fierce enough that watching sailors aboard USS Missouri briefly feared Gloucester herself had been struck.

The confusion in those few seconds went further than that, and it produced one of the odder friendly-fire incidents of the war. As the Silkworm came in, Missouri fired chaff to seduce its radar, which is exactly the right thing to do. Two or three miles off her port side the American frigate USS Jarrett had her Phalanx close-in gun in automatic engagement mode, and the Phalanx, seeing a bloom of metal foil where nothing had been a moment earlier, did what it was built to do and fired at it. Several 20mm rounds went into Missouri, in the bulkhead above the deck on which the Japanese surrender had been signed forty-six years before. One American sailor was slightly injured. Between an Iraqi missile, a British missile, a battleship's chaff and an automated gun on an allied frigate, the ninety seconds off Faylaka Island had a great deal going on in them.

It was the first validated, successful missile-versus-missile intercept of its kind in combat, and it made HMS Gloucester the first ship ever to shoot down an enemy missile with a missile of her own under actual combat conditions, a distinction she held alone for more than thirty years until HMS Diamond intercepted a Houthi ballistic missile with Sea Viper in the Red Sea in April 2024, a genuinely remarkable achievement for a Sea Dart system that had been designed back in the 1960s. Her captain, Commander Philip Wilcocks, and her flight commander, Lieutenant Commander David Livingstone, were both awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the ship's Gulf War service, with her operations officer and flight observer Mentioned in Despatches.

Quite how remarkable that is takes a moment to appreciate. Sea Dart was conceived in the late 1950s and entered service in the 1970s to knock down Soviet bombers coming at a fleet from high altitude in open ocean; what it was being asked to do in February 1991 was pick a low-flying cruise missile out of a cluttered radar picture, close inshore, against a land background, with allied warships in the same few miles of water, and hit it before it covered the last stretch to the target. The system and how it worked are described in the article on HMS Edinburgh (D97). That an ageing British area-defence missile did in eighty-nine seconds what no weapon had ever done in action before or has done since says a great deal more about the people in the operations room than it does about the missile.

Beyond this headline moment, her embarked Lynx helicopter used Sea Skua missiles to account for three Iraqi fast attack craft, a T43-class minelayer and a Polnocny-class landing ship, while HMS Gloucester herself carried out repeated boarding operations to enforce the maritime exclusion zone and twice managed to avoid detonating Iraqi naval mines in her path. Between the missile intercept, the boardings and her Lynx's tally, she went on to spend longer in the Gulf combat area than any other coalition warship, a busy and productive war for both ship and aircrew alike.

The mines she avoided were not a minor detail either. Iraq had laid well over a thousand of them in the northern Gulf, of several different types and with no reliable record of where, and they proved by some distance the most effective thing in the Iraqi naval arsenal: a week before Gloucester's Silkworm engagement two major American warships were badly damaged by them in a single night, one of them the very ship coordinating the coalition's mine clearance. That story, and the British minehunters who spent the following months picking the field apart, is told in the article on HMS Bicester (M36). A destroyer operating that far up the Gulf was gambling every day, and Gloucester spent longer up there than anybody.

Humanitarian Work in Beirut

HMS Gloucester's later career included rather less kinetic, but no less important, work: in 2006, as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalated into full scale war in Lebanon, she became the first Royal Navy ship to help evacuate British citizens from Beirut, part of a wider multinational effort to get foreign nationals safely out of the country as the conflict intensified, a reminder that a warship's usefulness extends well beyond the missiles she carries.

The scale of that operation is worth recording, because it was the largest British evacuation since Dunkirk. Operation Highbrow ran from 15 to 22 July 2006, and Gloucester was the first Royal Navy ship in, sailing from Beirut on 18 July with 163 people aboard and making three runs to Cyprus in all, 766 of them by the end. York took 600, Bulwark took over 1,300 including 300 children, St Albans took 243, and a chartered Greek ferry took another thousand; between 3,500 and 4,400 people came out altogether. Bulwark's side of it is set out in the article on HMS Bulwark (L15). A ship built to fight the Soviet Northern Fleet spent a week of her old age running families to Limassol, which is the work modern navies actually end up doing more often than not.

She turned her hand to rather more unexpected work in 2010, intercepting a yacht in the middle of the Atlantic and seizing a cargo of cocaine worth some £4 million, proof that a Type 42 destroyer's usefulness by then stretched well beyond conventional naval warfare and into the rather less glamorous business of drug interdiction.

The End of a Long Career

Her final twelve months in service were spent largely on Falklands and South Georgia duty, carrying out photographic conservation surveys for the British Antarctic Survey, representing Britain at the Expo Naval trade fair in Valparaiso, Chile, and exercising alongside RAF Typhoon fighters over the islands, before one last outing on Exercise Saxon Warrior off the south west coast of Britain alongside French, Spanish and American warships.

HMS Gloucester returned to Portsmouth for the final time on 23 May 2011 and was formally decommissioned the following month under the command of Commander David George, one of the last of her class still in service as the Type 42 era drew to a close. "I cannot express how proud I am of the ship," George said on her return, noting she came in "having given the cream of the US Navy a run for their money" two decades earlier, "but she is 29 years old... and Gloucester's time has come to bow out with dignity."

She was laid up at Portsmouth for several years, gradually stripped of useful equipment, before finally departing under tow on 22 September 2015 bound for a Turkish breaker's yard, closing out the career of a destroyer whose single 89 second engagement in the Gulf secured her a lasting and notably unique place in naval history.