HMS Liverpool (D92): The First Royal Navy Ship Fired On Since the Falklands

The Build: Cammell Laird

HMS Liverpool was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and launched on 25 September 1980, christened by Lady Strathcona, wife of the Minister of State for Defence, going on to become the last Type 42 Batch 2 destroyer to remain in active Royal Navy service.

She commissioned in April 1982, just as the Falklands War was reaching its climax, and was prepared for deployment to the South Atlantic, but the conflict ended before she could sail, leaving her instead to serve as a trials platform for combat-derived enhancements identified during the campaign, remaining on station for six months before returning home in the spring of 1983.

A Varied Cold War and Post-Cold War Career

HMS Liverpool spent the following decades on a wide range of duties, monitoring Soviet naval exercises off Russia's northern coast in 1987, and deploying to the Persian Gulf in 1989, 1990 and 1993, alongside NATO service in the Mediterranean.

Following the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano on Montserrat in 1995, HMS Liverpool played a vital role in evacuating Montserratians to nearby islands, helping move families out of the threatened southern half of the island in a notably significant humanitarian operation carried out far from any combat zone.

What she was evacuating people from is worth setting out, because Montserrat is the most complete civil catastrophe any British territory has suffered in living memory. Soufriere Hills had been quiet for centuries. It came back to life on 18 July 1995, and about five thousand people were moved out of the southern half of the island almost at once. By December the capital, Plymouth, had been emptied of its four thousand inhabitants.

It got very much worse after she left. On 25 June 1997 pyroclastic flows came down off the mountain, killed nineteen people and wrecked the island's airport, and a further eruption that August buried most of Plymouth outright. The southern half of Montserrat became an exclusion zone and has stayed one. The capital is still there under the ash, still legally the capital and with nobody living in it, and about two thirds of the island's people, some seven thousand of them, never came back.

That is what the 1995 sailings were the beginning of. A Type 42 destroyer designed to shoot down Soviet aircraft over the Norwegian Sea spent part of that autumn ferrying families off a Caribbean island because a volcano had started up again, which is a fair description of what the Royal Navy actually does with its overseas territories most years.

Fired Upon Off Libya

HMS Liverpool's most dramatic moment came during Operation Unified Protector, the international intervention in Libya in 2011. On 12 May that year, she came under fire from a shore battery, becoming the first Royal Navy warship to be deliberately targeted since the Falklands War, nearly three decades earlier.

She returned fire with her 4.5-inch main gun, marking the Royal Navy's first use of that weapon in anger since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a particularly historic moment for a ship that had so narrowly missed her chance at combat back in 1982.

The wider campaign is worth putting round her gunnery. Operation Unified Protector was a NATO air and sea operation, and the Royal Navy's part in it ran from minehunters clearing the approaches to Misrata, where Gaddafi's forces had mined the harbour to stop humanitarian aid getting in, to HMS Ocean (L12), which put Army Apache attack helicopters into action straight off her deck for the first time. Liverpool was the gun.

Seven Months of Combat

HMS Liverpool went on to engage repeatedly during the Libyan campaign. On 28 June 2011, she fired warning shots at three small Gaddafi boats spotted laying mines near Misrata harbour, sending all three scurrying back to port, one crew abandoning their boat on the beach and fleeing on foot. On 3 August she was firing illumination rounds to support a NATO air strike near Zlitan when rockets were fired at her in return, and she answered with several salvos from her own 4.5-inch gun against the mortar and rocket position responsible.

Her most intense single engagement came on 16 August 2011, when she fired 54 shells from her main gun at a military convoy, destroying or severely damaging many of the vehicles within it.

Across more than seven months of operations off the Libyan coast, she fired over 200 rounds from her 4.5-inch gun in total, a remarkable operational tempo for a ship that, decades earlier, had come agonisingly close to seeing action in an entirely different conflict and missed it by mere weeks.

A Gun Preserved in a Museum

On 6 September 2011, with the campaign all but won, she escorted Colonel Gaddafi's own captured flagship back into Tripoli, a rather pointed piece of symbolism to close out seven months spent shelling his forces from just offshore.

HMS Liverpool was formally decommissioned on 30 March 2012, not long after returning from her demanding Libyan deployment, closing out the career of a destroyer whose most significant combat action had come, almost by chance, thirty years after she was originally built and commissioned with an entirely different war in mind.

Her Mark 8 deck gun, the very weapon that fired those 200-plus rounds off Libya, is preserved today at the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower in Gosport, a fitting permanent reminder of the ship's properly historic role.

The building her gun ended up in has a certain amount to say for itself as well. Explosion sits at Priddy's Hard on the Gosport side of Portsmouth Harbour, in a Grand Magazine put up in 1771 after the Board of Ordnance decided that keeping the Navy's gunpowder inside Portsmouth was asking for trouble. Everything the fleet fired came through there for the better part of two centuries.

The depot closed in 1988 and the site became a museum, now part of the National Museum of the Royal Navy, with a Sea Dart launcher standing outside it among the older mountings. So the 4.5-inch that fired more than two hundred rounds at Gaddafi's forces now sits a few hundred yards from where the fleet stored its powder in Nelson's time, next to the missile system her own class was built around. There are worse places for a gun to end up.