However, that was not to say the cruiser-sized destroyer was as yet any kind of well-oiled fighting machine because she was anything but. The Hampshire had been rushed to sea because the cupboard was completely bare and eighty percent of her crew were still painfully raw recruits. Although superficially she looked a mean, lean fighting ship; presently her fighting capabilities and her capacity to defend herself from attack were negligible. She had been sent to sea too fast, too many compromises had been made in her design and construction, and few of her planned weapons systems and hardly any part of her electronics suite — the big Type 965 air search bedstead apart — had actually been installed before she was commissioned.
Hampshire was the second ship in the first tranche of four County class guided missile destroyers scheduled to join the Fleet. The Counties had been designed and re-designed throughout the latter 1950s; their blueprints tugged this way and that by the old ‘gunboat’ adherents and dangerously eccentric ‘missile’ men at the Admiralty. The Counties had eventually been laid down as hybrid cruiser-destroyers, nearly twice the size of the preceding Daring class and by the command of the then First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten belatedly redesigned around the ‘beam riding’ GWS1 Sea Slug missile system. By then the role of the Counties had become the air defence of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, a task currently in the hands of the much smaller modified Weapon and Battle class vessels.
The story of the Counties was a sorry one; a cautionary tale which might have been a metaphor for the Royal Navy’s broader struggle to come to terms with its post-empire role in the World.
After many delays and false starts it was envisaged that the first batch of at least eight Counties would be commissioned in 1962 and 1963 with a missile system, Sea Slug, that was already obsolete and the accommodation of which dangerously compromised the battle worthiness of every ship it carried, with a equally obsolete mid-1950s radar suite.
Not that HMS Hampshire, had she been completed as specified — even with her already old-fashioned Sea Slug system — was not a potentially formidable adversary. As designed with her advanced COSAG — combine steam and gas — turbines, her two twin Mk 6 4.5-inch turrets forward, GWS Sea Cat launchers, the much derided Sea Slug launcher, and her anti-submarine helicopter she was hardly any kind of pushover. In fact, with her full armament set and competently handled by a well-trained and experienced crew her built-in obsolescence might have been greatly mitigated in any number of combat scenarios.
The problem was that within the Royal Navy everybody knew that too many compromises had been made to accommodate Sea Slug; and that practically none of those compromises ought to have been acceptable in a fighting navy in the 1960s. Basically, most of the aft third of the Counties above the waterline had had to be gerrymandered around the Sea Slug system and nobody thought that was in any way a very good idea.
If a future historian of post-1945 British naval architecture wanted a classic example of muddle-headed thinking, both in terms of what was required in a modern fighting ship and exactly what kind of enemy one thought one was fighting; the Armstrong Whitworth Sea Slug and its eventual deployment in the Counties was an object lesson.
The first problem with Sea Slug was its limited capability. It was a first generation surface-to-air ‘beam-riding’ missile installed in a ship expected to serve in an environment dominated by fast jets and hugely more capable second, third and fourth generation guided weapons. Even at the time of its operational trials in the mid-1950s high flying targets like the Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 which could fly at well over five hundred miles an hour were at the very ragged edge of Sea Slug’s ‘engagement envelope’. Basically, Sea Slug was subsonic and a target flying at high altitude at over five hundred miles an hour virtually had to fly — in a very straight line — right over the top of a County to be remotely endangered by Sea Slug.
The second problem was that the Sea Slug missile was gigantic, twenty feet long and weighing in at around two tons, and not even the cruiser size Counties were anywhere big enough to properly accommodate a single double launcher. Worse, because the missile’s propellant was inherently dangerous and unstable — a liquid oxygen petroleum Devil’s brew — and it was impossible to locate the missile magazine below the waterline, in battle a single unlucky hit by a relatively small round could easily result in the whole ship blowing up.
Thirdly, because Sea Slug was a first generation system it relied on big, heavy Type 901 fire control and Type 965 air search radars which needed to be mounted as high as possible in the ship, drastically reducing how much other vital war-fighting equipment could be installed in a superstructure that was of necessity, lighter in construction and therefore less resilient to than it otherwise would have been to battle damage.
In the event, HMS Hampshire had gone to sea with all the accumulated deficiencies and structural shortcomings caused by the need to accommodate Sea Slug; but without the questionable boon of actually having either a Sea Slug launcher installed in her stern, or any other missiles to shoot. Not only had she been commissioned in such an ungodly rush that she had no long-range air defence capability (Sea Slug); but there had not been time to wait for her short-range missile defence system (Sea Cat) to be delivered from Short’s factory in Belfast either. In addition, the need to weld steel cradles for the RAF’s super bombs — Grand Slams and Tallboys — on her helicopter platform had made it impossible for her to operate an anti-submarine and reconnaissance helicopter. Finally, her Type 901 fire control radar, although installed, was inoperable making it impossible to shoot her only ‘live’ weapons system — her 4.5-inch guns — in anything other than local line-of-sight mode.
Hampshire had left Malta thirty-nine hours ago, where every man onboard had been given the option of an eight hour run ashore. North of Bizerta, Tunisia, ground stations along the North African coast had begun to track the big destroyer’s progress. The ship had followed the coast, careful to stay at least twenty miles from land. Tonight the lights of Algiers glimmered distantly, their dim glow beneath the southern horizon illuminating the clouds. The weather was changing and Hampshire was running ahead of a sharp Mediterranean storm; on a smaller ship the crew would already have felt the gathering motion of the destroyer under their feet.
Many ships had reported distant ‘radar shadows’, contacts at the edge of their radar plots in these waters south and east of the Balearic Islands. It was known that several French and Italian warships had survived the October War, as had the entire, albeit antiquated Spanish Navy. The US Sixth Fleet had buzzed Spanish destroyers in this region in recent weeks but no allied vessel had been harassed in these waters, but the operational status of the surviving units of the French Fleet remained unknown; that fleet’s affairs having been very low on the priority lists of British and Commonwealth forces in the theatre of operations.