HMS Naiad (F39): Rammed by an Icelandic Gunboat, Then Sunk as a Blast Trial Target

Built at Scotstoun

HMS Naiad was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, laid down on 30 October 1962, launched on 4 November 1963 and commissioned on 15 March 1965, a Leander-class frigate displacing 2,500 tons standard and costing an estimated £4,750,000, one of a highly successful class that would go on to form the backbone of the Royal Navy's frigate force for decades. She also happened to be the 200th ship Yarrow had built for the Royal Navy, her steam turbines forged in the same Scotstoun yard and geared by Parsons Marine Turbine Works at Wallsend-on-Tyne, a tidy piece of shipbuilding trivia for a frigate whose own career would turn out to be anything but tidy.

The name had been in hard use rather recently. The previous HMS Naiad was a Dido-class anti-aircraft cruiser, commissioned in July 1940, and she spent her entire short career in the worst places available: the Western Approaches, then Malta from May 1941 as flagship of the 15th Cruiser Squadron, then Crete, then the Syrian campaign, then the Malta convoys, with Rear-Admiral Philip Vian's flag at her masthead.

At about eight in the evening on 11 March 1942, north of Sidi Barrani, U-565 put a single torpedo into her starboard side amidships. She sank in thirty-five minutes. Somewhere between seventy-seven and eighty-two of her company were lost, and the rest, including Vian, were picked up by the destroyer HMS Jervis. She had been in commission for twenty months.

Which is worth carrying forward. The frigate took the name back into the Mediterranean and then into the Persian Gulf, spent twenty-two years being rammed by Icelanders and shadowed by Russians without losing anybody, and was then deliberately set on fire and blown up by her own side for the benefit of the ships that came after. Of the two, the second Naiad had by some distance the better war.

Leading in Northern Ireland and the Far East

HMS Naiad became leader of the Northern Ireland Squadron in 1966, hosting a state dinner for the Duke of Edinburgh during Kiel Week that same year, before deploying to the Far East between 1970 and 1971, a tour that included service on the Beira Patrol, the long-running operation to prevent oil shipments reaching the breakaway Rhodesian regime via Mozambique.

A Ten-Million-Pound Rebuild

HMS Naiad underwent a major modernisation at Devonport between 1973 and 1975, a particularly expensive undertaking costing some £10,410,000, in which her twin 4.5-inch gun mount was removed entirely and replaced with the Ikara anti-submarine missile system, transforming her from a conventional gun-armed frigate into a considerably more specialised anti-submarine platform. Her single Seacat launcher, Limbo mortar and 20mm cannon stayed put, but the frigate that emerged in July 1975 was built to hunt submarines first and do everything else a distant second.

Ikara is worth a footnote. It was an Australian design and it worked by rocket: instead of lobbing a mortar bomb a few hundred yards, as Limbo did, it flew a homing torpedo out to a submarine ten or twenty kilometres away and dropped it in by parachute. What that bought was the ability to attack a contact the ship's own sonar could barely hold, at a range where the submarine could not shoot back. The system, the armoured zareba that housed it and the wider Leander conversion programme are described in the articles on HMS Aurora (F10) and HMS Cleopatra (F28).

Rammed in the Third Cod War

HMS Naiad's most dramatic moment came during the Third Cod War, the last and most serious of Britain's fishing disputes with Iceland, when on 24 April 1976 she was deliberately rammed by the Icelandic gunboat Týr while carrying out fishery protection duties, sustaining real hull damage in the collision, a stark illustration of just how physically confrontational the so-called Cod Wars could become despite never quite escalating into an actual shooting war between the two NATO allies. The damage was serious enough that her crew shored up the gash with an improvised concrete patch to keep the sea out until Naiad could reach Devonport for proper repairs, a suitably resourceful response to being rammed by a nominal ally. The dispute itself fizzled out barely a month later: with NATO leaning hard on both governments to make peace, British and Icelandic ministers met in Oslo that June and Britain accepted Iceland's 200-nautical-mile fishing zone, a limit that has held ever since and that most coastal nations now simply take for granted.

A Silver Jubilee and a Return to the Gulf

HMS Naiad took part in the Fleet Review at Spithead marking Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee in 1977, sailing past the Royal Yacht positioned between fellow Leander HMS Brighton and her own sister ship HMS Andromeda.

The following February she was operating in the North Atlantic with STANAVFORLANT, NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic, the alliance's permanent multinational squadron that kept a rotating handful of frigates and destroyers at sea year-round as a visible Cold War tripwire. She deployed again to the Far East in 1980, and that same year led the Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf following the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, a notably significant piece of regional presence at a moment of real instability.

Naiad had originally been earmarked for disposal in the early 1980s, but the extra operational demands placed on the fleet after the Falklands War won her a reprieve and a second major refit at Devonport between autumn 1983 and 1984, costing a further £10,400,000, very nearly matching the bill for her original Ikara conversion. The extended lease of life saw her serve with NATO's Naval On-Call Force Mediterranean in 1985 and rejoin STANAVFORLANT for a second stint in 1986, seeing out the decade exactly where a Cold War frigate was supposed to be: standing watch alongside her NATO allies.

Sunk as a Target

HMS Naiad paid off on 1 May 1987, and rather than heading straight for the scrapyard, was repurposed under the designation HUL-VUL, or Hull Vulnerability, and spent her retirement being deliberately shaken, set alight and blown up for the benefit of every warship that came after her. The trials ran in three distinct stages: fire, shock and blast testing at Portsmouth between July and October 1988; further shock and structural work at the Admiralty Research Establishment in Dunfermline during the spring of 1989; and a final round of blast and fragmentation trials back at Portsmouth that autumn.

Engineers used the old frigate to test ideas that would shape the next generation of Royal Navy ships, including the Wormald "Status" damage control system, blast-resistant control rooms, fire-hardened computer equipment and shock-absorbing deck designs. In the summer of 1989 Naiad even took part in a live-fire test of her own, with Sea Gnat and Super RBOC chaff fired off the coast of Scotland to see how well they could seduce a genuine incoming Exocet missile away from its target. Engineers also welded a large box-girder bulge along each side of her hull, a structural experiment aimed at working out whether the technique could add longitudinal strength to future ship designs without adding excessive weight.

She was finally sunk as a weapons target on 28 September 1990, closing out the career of a frigate whose final, unglamorous service nonetheless helped protect the crews of every Royal Navy ship that came after her.