HMS Alacrity (F174): The Frigate That Dodged Torpedoes in the Dark

A Quietly Adventurous Peacetime Career

HMS Alacrity, built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, was a Type 21 frigate completed with Exocet anti-ship missiles fitted from new, and even before her most famous year she had picked up an unusual claim to fame. In 1977 she took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, and in 1980, on deployment to the Far East, she became the first British warship to enter China's Yangtse River since 1949, a small but genuinely notable piece of Cold War-era naval diplomacy.

South to the Falklands

Alacrity departed Devonport on 5 April 1982 under the command of Commander Christopher Craig, bound for the South Atlantic as part of the task force assembled to retake the Falkland Islands. She was in the thick of it almost immediately: on 1 May she was damaged by an Argentine bomb, and her embarked Lynx helicopter carried out an attack on the settlement of Islas Malvinas and the Argentine vessel Forrest.

Her most dramatic moment came on the night of 10 to 11 May, when she was sent through the dangerous waters of Falkland Sound specifically to draw out any Argentine ships, or at least confirm the strait was clear of mines. She found rather more than she bargained for, running into the Argentine naval transport Isla de los Estados and sinking the roughly 3,000-ton supply ship with her own 4.5-inch gun in a short, sharp night action. On her way back out of the Sound that same run, she survived being fired on by two SST-4 torpedoes launched from the Argentine submarine San Luis, both of which missed, a narrow escape in a war that had already claimed several British ships to far less dramatic circumstances.

Alacrity's war was not over. On 25 May, the day Britain lost the container ship SS Atlantic Conveyor to an Exocet strike, she took bow damage while manoeuvring to rescue survivors from the stricken vessel, adding a rescue mission to an already eventful campaign.

A Long Cold War Coda

Like most of her class, Alacrity suffered from the Type 21's well-known hull cracking problems through the mid-1980s and needed welded steel plating to keep her sound. She continued in service through the rest of the decade, including humanitarian relief work off Montserrat in 1989 following the devastation of Hurricane Hugo, a rather gentler kind of deployment after the violence of 1982.

A Second Career as PNS Badr

Alacrity was transferred to Pakistan on 1 March 1994 and recommissioned as PNS Badr, with her original Sea Cat missile system replaced by a Phalanx close-in weapon system as part of her modernisation. She went on to serve Pakistan for almost two more decades, taking part in exercises such as Inspired Union in 2008, before finally being decommissioned in April 2013, more than forty years after her keel had first gone down on the Clyde, a career spanning a Chinese river, a South Atlantic war, a Caribbean hurricane, and two navies.