HMS Achilles (F12): From Cod Wars to a Chilean Tsunami

A Modern Frigate for a Cold War Navy

By the time this third HMS Achilles came along, the name had already been attached to a Warrior-class armoured cruiser and a Leander-class light cruiser that fought at the River Plate, which is a lot to live up to for a general-purpose frigate. She did her best regardless.

Built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, she was laid down on 1 December 1967, launched on 21 November 1968, and commissioned on 9 July 1970 with the pennant number F12, a member of the workmanlike Leander class that formed the backbone of the Cold War Royal Navy's frigate force.

She belonged to the last and widest of the three Leander batches, the broad-beam group, given a wider hull and the heavier Y-160 machinery because the class kept being asked to carry more equipment than the original 1959 design had allowed for. Twenty-six Leanders were built for the Royal Navy in all, and by the 1980s many of them had been gutted and rebuilt around Exocet or Sea Wolf missiles. Achilles was not. She stayed in the gun group with her twin 4.5-inch turret where it had always been, which made her look old-fashioned by 1990 and, as it turned out, made her exactly what somebody else wanted.

She was a solidly equipped ship for her era, just under 3,000 tons fully loaded, capable of 28 knots, and armed with a twin 4.5-inch gun mount forward, Sea Cat missiles for air defence, and a Westland Wasp helicopter, later upgraded to the more capable Lynx as her career progressed alongside extra Seacat launchers, 40mm guns and torpedo tubes.

A Decade of Showing the Flag

Achilles spent her first years doing the sort of long-distance, flag-showing work that filled much of the peacetime Royal Navy's calendar. She deployed to the Far East in 1970, escorting the carrier HMS Eagle, and returned there for a lengthy nine-month deployment in 1974 and 1975 with Task Group 317.2, taking in ports across Africa and Asia and joining exercises with the Brazilian Navy along the way.

That run of good fortune came to an abrupt halt in November 1975, when she collided with the supertanker Olympic Alliance in the Dover Strait, a mishap serious enough to require a new bow and keep her in repair until March 1976.

It happened at thirty-nine minutes past midnight on 12 November 1975, in fog, about seven miles due north of Cap Gris Nez in the north-east traffic lane, roughly thirteen miles south-east of Dover near the Varne lightship. Olympic Alliance was not a small ship: 220,000 deadweight tons, registered in Liberia and owned through a Panamanian company, despite the Onassis-flavoured name that has led a good many accounts to call her Greek. Three of Achilles' crew were injured and her bow was wrecked.

The tanker came off worse in the way that matters. A cargo tank was opened up and roughly two thousand tons of Iranian crude went into the Channel. By half past one HM Coastguard at St Margaret's Bay had the pollution report, and by the following day oil had reached more than thirty kilometres of coastline around Dover and Folkestone. Six vessels were spraying dispersant within hours, and the Under-Secretary of State for Trade was on his feet in the Commons that same afternoon assuring the House that the chemical in use was far less toxic than the one that had killed so much marine life after the Torrey Canyon.

The naval inquiry that followed was not gentle. Two French trawlers were found to have caused the tanker to swerve into the frigate's path, which spread the blame about a bit, but Achilles' officer of the watch was reprimanded for hazarding his ship through negligence, and her captain, who had been in his cabin at the time, was reprimanded as well. There is no clause in a captain's commission that lets him be asleep.

Patched up, she was straight back to work that same year in the Third Cod War, spending a week on patrol as part of the increasingly tense fisheries dispute with Iceland that saw Royal Navy frigates shadowing and occasionally nudging Icelandic gunboats around the North Atlantic, and was also quietly sent to Belize on a more low-key deployment.

The Falklands, the Gulf, and a Historic First

The 1980s kept Achilles busy in rather more varied fashion. She served as West Indies guardship, took a turn patrolling the Falkland Islands in the aftermath of the 1982 war, and was deployed to the Persian Gulf as tensions in that region simmered through the decade.

In 1989, by then a veteran of nearly twenty years' service, she joined the training squadron and picked up an unusual historical footnote: she became the first Royal Navy warship to visit East Germany, a small but pointed symbol of a Cold War that was, by that point, visibly ending.

The port was Rostock, and the visit is a good deal more pointed than one sentence makes it sound. Rostock was one of the three main bases of the Volksmarine, the East German navy, along with Warnemünde just up the coast and Peenemünde, and for forty years it had been about as closed to the Royal Navy as anywhere in Europe. Achilles went in during June 1989 while HMS Bristol called at Gdynia in Poland at the same time, the two visits arranged as a pair, and a minister was still explaining to the Commons the following February that ship visits have a useful role in lessening tensions between East and West.

They had rather more than a useful role, as it turned out. The Berlin Wall came down five months after Achilles left Rostock. The German Democratic Republic ceased to exist on 3 October 1990, and the Volksmarine ceased to exist with it: most of its ships were scrapped, sold off cheaply or given away, and its officers were, with a handful of exceptions, simply told their careers were over. So the first Royal Navy warship ever to visit East Germany was also very nearly the last, because within sixteen months there was no East Germany to visit. It is a strange thing to have on a ship's record and Achilles got it in her final year.

She had one more thing to do before she went. December 1989 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the River Plate, and Achilles hosted the dinner. The Achilles who fought that action was the light cruiser, largely New Zealand-manned, who took her share of Graf Spee's fire off Montevideo on 13 December 1939; the frigate hosting her anniversary dinner had a month left in the Royal Navy. Some of the men at that table had been aboard the cruiser. Both ships, incidentally, ended up in South American navies, the cruiser sold to India as INS Delhi and the frigate to Chile.

She was decommissioned in January 1990, not long before the world she had spent two decades patrolling changed completely.

Sold South, Renamed Ministro Zenteno

Rather than being scrapped, Achilles was sold to the Chilean Navy in 1991 and recommissioned under the name Ministro Zenteno, after José Ignacio Zenteno, the independence-era soldier and statesman who served Chile's first Supreme Director, Bernardo O'Higgins, as Secretary of War and Navy and helped assemble the country's first national naval squadron.

Chile was a natural buyer. The Chilean Navy already operated two Leanders of its own, Almirante Condell and Almirante Lynch, built for it by Yarrow at Scotstoun and delivered in 1973 and 1974, which is to say by the same yard on the same river that had built Achilles a few years earlier. Buying a third gun-armed Leander meant common machinery, common spares and crews who already knew the ship. Her sister HMS Ariadne, the very last Leander built, followed her south in 1992 as General Baquedano.

The name was not new to the Chilean list either. A protected cruiser called Ministro Zenteno had served the Chilean Navy from 1896, so the old Leander was taking on a second-hand name in a second-hand ship, which is about as economical as naval tradition gets.

It is a small, pleasing coincidence that a ship named Achilles ended up serving alongside vessels named for Chilean naval history, given that one of her own predecessors, the 1905 armoured cruiser HMS Achilles, had a sister ship called HMS Cochrane, named after the British-born admiral who once commanded Chile's own navy.

Naval nomenclature has a way of quietly looping back on itself.

Ministro Zenteno served the Chilean Navy for a further fifteen years, gaining four Exocet anti-ship missiles in the mid-1990s and losing her original Sea Cat system in 2001 as her armament kept evolving under her new flag, before finally being decommissioned in August 2006, by which point she had spent 36 years in uniform under two different flags.

Ended by an Earthquake, Not an Enemy

Her actual end came in a manner no amount of naval planning could have anticipated. Laid up at Talcahuano after decommissioning, she was struck by the tsunami that followed the devastating magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake of 27 February 2010, and was washed several nautical miles from her berth towards the nearby coastal town of Dichato by the force of the wave.

Too badly damaged and too much of a hazard to navigation to be salvaged, she was deliberately scuttled the following month, the job carried out by the crew of the Chilean patrol vessel Piloto Pardo. A frigate that had spent two navies' worth of service dodging Icelandic gunboats, patrolling contested waters, and showing the flag on four continents was, in the end, undone not by an adversary but by the sea itself.

What happened at Talcahuano that morning needs setting out, because Achilles was one casualty among many and the base itself very nearly did not survive. Talcahuano is the principal base of the Chilean Navy and the site of the ASMAR dockyard, and the waves that came in behind the earthquake reached something like ten metres. The base and the yard were both flooded. The bill came to somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million dollars before anybody counted the shipyard, which could not work at full capacity again for a year. Ships were carried off their moorings and dumped: the missile boat Chipana, the service barge Pisagua, the ferry Sobene, and a decommissioned destroyer laid up at the same base.

That destroyer was HMS Antrim (D18), the County-class flagship of the South Georgia operation in 1982, sold to Chile in 1984 as Almirante Cochrane and paid off in 2006. So two former Royal Navy ships, laid up at the same base at the far end of the world, were wrecked by the same wave on the same morning. Cochrane was got off and sold, and was towed away to China for breaking that December. Achilles was not, and was scuttled instead. Twenty years earlier both of them had been in commission in the same fleet.

The most extraordinary part of the day happened to somebody else. Three of the base's floating docks were picked up and shoved bodily onto the piers, and one of them, the Young, had a submarine inside it: the Carrera, one of the two brand-new Scorpène boats Chile had taken delivery of in 2005 and 2006 and about as valuable a single object as the Chilean state owned. The dock was sitting on land, too heavy to lift, with the submarine in it. The answer was to cut away part of the pier, work steel plates in underneath, add rollers, and slide dock and submarine back into the sea. It took four months and it was finished on 14 July 2010. Achilles had by then already been sunk on purpose, and there is something fitting about a forty-year-old frigate being the thing they gave up on in order to save everything else.