HMS London (F95): Flagship of the Gulf War Task Force

HMS London (F95)

Renamed at the Lord Mayor's Request

HMS London was ordered on 23 February 1982 under the working name HMS Bloodhound, with construction beginning at the Yarrow shipyard on 7 February 1983. She was launched on 27 October 1984 and commissioned on 5 June 1987, a Type 22 Batch 2 frigate that received her eventual name at the specific request of the Lord Mayor of London, a nice piece of civic diplomacy that gave the capital its own warship to follow with pride.

Flagship of the Gulf War Task Force

HMS London's most significant achievement came in 1991, when she served as flagship of the Royal Navy task force during the Gulf War, under the command first of Iain Henderson and then Mark Stanhope, a genuinely prestigious role that put her at the very centre of Britain's naval contribution to the campaign to liberate Kuwait. The following August she deployed to the Barents Sea, a striking contrast in operating environment for a ship that had so recently been leading a task force through the Gulf's heat.

The Balkans and a Medical Evacuation

HMS London operated in the Adriatic Sea during the Implementation Force operations in 1996, part of the international effort to enforce the peace in the former Yugoslavia, carrying an embarked Lynx helicopter. In March 1998, that same ship's flight carried out a medical evacuation during Exercise Strong Resolve, transferring an injured sailor to Lorient in France, exactly the kind of quiet, genuinely life-saving work that a frigate's embarked helicopter made possible. That September she relieved HMS Cumberland off Albania as part of Operation Swanston, supporting British nationals during unrest in the region.

A New Life as Regina Maria

HMS London was decommissioned on 14 January 1999, and was sold to the Romanian Navy in January 2003, her weapons systems stripped before transfer, arriving in Romanian service armed with two 30mm cannons and anti-submarine torpedo launchers, later supplemented by a 76mm Oto Melara gun added by her new operators. She commissioned into the Romanian Navy as Regina Maria on 21 April 2005, named for the popular early twentieth-century Romanian queen, though the purchase itself proved controversial back in Romania, with officials later claiming the country had paid three times too much for its two former Royal Navy frigates, a rather deflating postscript for a ship that had once led an entire Gulf War task force under the White Ensign.