County Class Destroyer - Design Features

Design Features

The County class were designed around the GWS1 Sea Slug beam riding anti-aircraft missile system. Sea Slug was a first generation surface to air missile intended to hit high-flying nuclear-armed bombers and shadowing surveillance aircraft like the Tupolev Tu-95 Bears, which could direct missiles strikes against the British fleet from missile destroyers and cruise missile armed submarines. Even the turbo prop Bears were formidable targets for a missile like Sea Slug; the long range Russian turbo props flew 8 miles high at 575 mph and were barely within Seaslug GWS1s interception capability to catch. In some ways, the rapid firing six inch and three inch guns on the Tiger class cruisers represented a more realistic way of having a chance to hit these targets in the 1960s but represented an old fashioned approach, while Sea Slug represented the application of more fashionable 'white heat' science. As such, Seaslug had a range of some 27 km with a ceiling of 17,000 m travelling at a speed of over 1,000 km/h. Everything about the Sea Slug was on a grand scale, from the missile itself (six meters long and weighing two tons) to its handling arrangements and electronics systems; even fitting a single system aboard a ship the size of the "Counties" was a challenge. The enormous missile was stowed horizontally in a large magazine that took up a great deal of internal space. On the last four ships, some of the missiles were stored partly disassembled in the forward end of the magazine to enable the complement of missiles to be increased. These missiles had their wings and fins reattached before being moved into the aft sections of the handling spaces and eventually loaded onto the large twin launcher for firing. The electronics required for the Sea Slug were the large Type 901 fire-control radar and the Type 965 air-search radar. These required a great deal of weight to be carried high up on the ship, further defining the design. Sea Slug could also be used in the surface to surface role, and was a highly effective system in its day.

Short range air-defence was provided by the Sea Cat anti-aircraft missile, which made the "Counties" the first Royal Navy warships to be armed with two different types of guided missile.

As constructed, the County-class ships were armed with a pair of twin 4.5in gun mountings. The second batch of four ships (Antrim, Fife, Glamorgan and Norfolk) were refitted in the mid 1970s - this saw their 'B' position turrets removed and replaced by four single MM38 Exocet launcher boxes. This was partly to counter the continuing threat of Soviet gun and missile armed cruisers, but also because the two twin 4.5 mountings, forward on the County class destroyers were cramped, hot to fire with the heat from the upper gun firing felt by the gun crew in the turret below and, in particular, the forward twin turrets on the County class had small magazines, only 250 shells each compared with 450 shell capacity for 4.5 inch shells in the magazines of the Leander class frigates. This made the County-class ships the only Royal Navy ships to be fitted with three separate types of guided missile. It also left the un-refitted ships as the last Royal Navy vessels to be able to fire a broadside from multiple main armament turrets. The last multi-turreted broadside was fired from London on her return from deployment in the West Indies in 1981 prior to handover to the Pakistani Navy.

Antrim and Glamorgan both served in the Falklands War; Antrim was the flagship of Operation Paraquet, the recovery of South Georgia in April 1982. Her helicopter, the Westland Wessex HAS.Mk3, nicknamed "Humphrey", was responsible for the remarkable rescue of 16 SAS men from Fortuna Glacier and the subsequent detection and disabling of the Argentinian submarine Santa Fe. Whilst at San Carlos Water, a 1,000 lb (450 kg) bomb hit Antrim, but did not explode. Glamorgan, after many days on the "gun line" bombarding Port Stanley airfield, suffered a land-based Exocet strike at the end of the conflict, which destroyed her aircraft hangar and the port Sea Cat mounting. Skillfull handling by the Glamorgan's 46 year old Captain averted disaster; he reacted rapidly to the visual detection of the incoming Exocet and manoeuvered the large destroyer just enough that the Exocet missed the Seaslug magazine, which was vulnerable and potentially lethally explosive, by a foot.