HMS Sluys (D60): The British Destroyer That Ended Up Fitted With Soviet Missiles

Built at Birkenhead, Just Too Late

HMS Sluys was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 28 February 1945 and commissioned on 30 September 1946, a Battle-class destroyer that arrived just after the war she had been designed to fight had ended, joining the 5th Destroyer Flotilla with the Home Fleet instead.

A Brief Peacetime Career

Sluys's Royal Navy service was modest and largely uneventful, highlighted by escorting the aircraft carrier HMS Vengeance on a diplomatic visit to Norwegian ports in 1947. She was decommissioned into reserve in 1953 after barely seven years of active service, a common enough fate for a class of destroyers built for a war that finished before most of them saw action.

Rebuilt and Sold to Iran

After a three-year reconstruction by Vosper Thornycroft, Sluys was sold to Pahlavi Iran in 1967 and renamed Artemiz, receiving modernised weaponry including Sea Cat missiles and updated radar systems, a substantial second career under a very different flag.

Occupying the Tunb Islands

As Artemiz, the former Sluys took part in Iran's occupation of the Tunb islands in the Strait of Hormuz on 30 November 1971, a significant and still-disputed episode in the region's history. Further refits followed in Cape Town during 1975 and 1976, adding Standard missile launchers, before a remarkable 1985 refit carried out by Russian shipyards replaced her remaining British systems with Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns.

A Genuinely Unusual Final Chapter

Renamed Damavand following that Soviet-era refit, the former HMS Sluys was finally stricken from Iranian service around 1996, closing out a career that took her from the Home Fleet's peacetime patrols to a geopolitical flashpoint in the Persian Gulf and finally to a genuinely unusual mix of British hull, American missiles and Soviet weaponry, a combination few Battle-class destroyers ever came close to matching.