HMS Andromeda (F57): Rammed Three Times by Icelandic Gunboats and Still Standing

A Frigate for Every Occasion

HMS Andromeda was a Leander-class frigate built at Portsmouth, laid down on 25 May 1966, launched on 24 May 1967, and commissioned on 2 December 1968, armed with a twin 4.5-inch gun mount, Sea Cat missiles, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, and a Wasp helicopter.

Two things about that opening paragraph are worth expanding. Andromeda was the last warship ever built at the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth, which had been building and repairing warships since the reign of Henry VII and turned out the Mary Rose in 1511. Roughly four and a half centuries of shipbuilding, and a Cold War frigate closed the book. The yard went on repairing and refitting ships, and still does, but nobody has laid a keel there since.

The second thing is her shape. She was a Batch 3 Leander, one of the broad-beamed ships, with two extra feet of beam over the earlier members of the class. Two feet does not sound like a design decision worth noting until you consider what it buys, which is stability margin, which is another way of saying permission to add weight high up later. That is exactly why the broad-beamed ships were the ones chosen for the heaviest of the later conversions, and it is the reason Andromeda ended her Royal Navy career carrying a missile system nobody had thought of when she was laid down.

In 1969 she deployed to the Persian Gulf and Far East as leader of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla, serving on the Beira Patrol, the long-running blockade intended to stop oil reaching Rhodesia via the Mozambican port of Beira, working alongside the tanker RFA Ennerdale, which kept the patrol’s ships fuelled at sea.

The Beira Patrol deserves more than a clause, because it is one of the strangest things the Royal Navy has ever been asked to do. It was authorised by United Nations Security Council Resolution 221 in 1966 after Rhodesia declared independence, and it ran for a decade. Seventy-six Royal Navy ships served on it at one time or another, at a cost estimated at something around a hundred million pounds. In its busiest five years the patrol intercepted forty-seven tankers bound for Beira and allowed forty-two of them to carry on, because they were not in fact carrying anything for Rhodesia. It was finally wound up on 25 June 1975, when Mozambique became independent and undertook not to pass oil on.

Whether it achieved anything is not really disputed. Oil went into Rhodesia overland from South Africa throughout, in quantities the blockade never came close to touching, and the embargo failed as policy. The ships did their part of it faultlessly for ten years. It is the clearest naval demonstration you could ask for of the difference between executing an operation and achieving an aim, and a good many of the men who spent their twenties steaming up and down the Mozambique Channel in the heat worked that out for themselves at the time.

That connection turned dramatic on 1 June 1970, when Ennerdale struck an uncharted pinnacle of rock off the Seychelles while on her way to refuel Andromeda, was holed below the waterline, and sank within half an hour with a full load of oil aboard.

Andromeda was the first ship on the scene and helped rescue Ennerdale’s crew, all of whom survived; her wreck was later broken up with torpedo warheads delivered by helicopter, a Royal Navy bomb disposal job supported by the depot ship RFA Stromness.

Only months later, on the evening of 23 October 1970, Andromeda was drawn into a much larger disaster when the tanker Pacific Glory collided with another tanker, Allegro, six miles off the Isle of Wight after Allegro swerved to avoid a third vessel.

Pacific Glory caught fire, and while she was under tow the next morning a fresh explosion tore through her decks, killing thirteen of her crew in total before she finally grounded on a shingle bank and the blaze was put out. Andromeda took part in the large-scale clean-up that followed one of the worst tanker disasters in British waters at the time.

Rammed, Rammed, and Rammed Again

Andromeda was struck by the Icelandic gunboat Óðinn on 11 August 1973, by Týr on 28 December 1975, whose ramming damaged a guardrail and a chaff launcher, and by Þór on 7 January 1976, whose collision was the most serious of the three, leaving a 12-foot dent in her hull and damage to Þór herself, and requiring repairs at Devonport.

The tactics behind those three collisions are worth setting out. The Icelandic Coast Guard's method was to tow a cutter across a British trawler's warps and sever them. The Royal Navy's counter was to put a frigate physically between the gunboat and the trawler. That reduces the whole dispute to a game of chicken between a three-thousand-ton warship and a gunboat a third her size whose captain has considerably less to lose, and the gunboats did not blink. There were thirty-five ramming incidents in the third and worst of the Cod Wars alone. And the Navy could not answer any of it, because Britain and Iceland were both members of NATO and the guns were never going to be used. Andromeda simply had to take it, three times, and did.

It is a truly remarkable record: three separate ramming incidents by three different vessels over the course of a single ongoing dispute, and Andromeda came through all of them still afloat and still working.

A New Set of Teeth

After taking part in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review, Andromeda underwent a major modernisation between 1977 and 1980, gaining Exocet anti-ship missiles and the more advanced Sea Wolf point-defence missile system, upgrading her helicopter to a Lynx, and receiving new radar, transforming her from a fairly conventional 1960s frigate into a considerably more capable ship for the 1980s.

Escorting Invincible Through the Falklands

That modernisation proved timely. Andromeda entered the Falklands Total Exclusion Zone on 25 May 1982 and spent the war primarily escorting the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible, one of the two carriers whose air groups were essential to the entire campaign.

The date she entered the exclusion zone is the point. On 25 May 1982, Argentina's national day, the task force had its worst afternoon of the war: HMS Coventry was sunk off Pebble Island and the Atlantic Conveyor was hit by an Exocet with most of the campaign's heavy-lift helicopters aboard. Andromeda arrived that same day. What she brought with her was the one thing the fleet could not get enough of, which was Sea Wolf.

The whole air defence of the task force turned on a small number of ships. Sea Dart, carried by the Type 42s, engaged at range; Sea Wolf, carried by the Type 22s and by the five converted Leanders, was the last layer, fast enough to knock down a missile or a low-flying aircraft in the final seconds. Each carrier had a designated goalkeeper, a Sea Wolf ship whose job was to stay close alongside and shoot at anything that got through: Broadsword with Hermes, Brilliant with Invincible. The same principle governed the pairs detached from the group, one ship advertising herself with Sea Dart and the other standing between the threat and her sister, which is the arrangement that failed off Pebble Island and is described from the other side in HMS Broadsword (F88).

By the end of May there were very few Sea Wolf ships left undamaged and a great deal of ocean to cover with them, which is why a fourteen-year-old Leander that had spent the previous decade being rammed by Icelandic gunboats was worth sending eight thousand miles. She had come out of her conversion two years earlier carrying the newest air defence missile in the fleet, and in the last week of May 1982 that made her one of the more valuable hulls in the South Atlantic. She spent the war with Invincible and came home without a scratch, which for a ship in that role is the whole point rather than an anticlimax.

She came through the conflict without combat damage, returning to Devonport on 10 September 1982, her role less dramatic than some of the frigates further forward but no less important to the campaign's overall success.

A Global Postwar Career

Through the 1980s, Andromeda carried out repeated Armilla Patrol deployments to the Persian Gulf and visited ports as far afield as Djibouti, Singapore and Mauritius, the kind of remarkably global itinerary that characterised much of the postwar frigate fleet's working life. After a refit in 1990 and 1991, she was decommissioned in June 1993.

A Long Coda as INS Krishna

Her Royal Navy career did not end her working life. She was sold to India in 1995 and recommissioned as INS Krishna, and the important word in what followed is training: rather than serving as a front-line frigate she became a cadet training ship, taking young officers to sea and teaching them their trade. It is a good use for a well-built hull with a long career behind it, and it is why she went on for another seventeen years.

She remained in Indian service until 24 May 2012, when she was decommissioned at Mumbai, in a small but pleasing piece of symmetry exactly 45 years to the day after her original launch.

Her Indian career deserves the figures, because they are remarkable. She was commissioned as INS Krishna on 22 August 1995 and joined the First Training Squadron, and she stayed in it for the whole seventeen years. In that time she steamed something in the order of three hundred and twenty-three thousand nautical miles, which is roughly fifteen times round the world, and called at thirty-two ports in twenty-three countries. More than thirteen hundred officers of the Indian Navy did their sea training aboard her. A very large proportion of the Indian Navy's officer corps of the 2010s learned their trade on a hull built at Portsmouth in 1967.

She left Kochi for the last time on 17 January 2012 and sailed round to Mumbai to be paid off, which is a long way to go to be decommissioned and exactly the sort of thing a training ship would do. Consider what she had actually been through by then: the Beira Patrol, a sinking tanker off the Seychelles, a burning one off the Isle of Wight, three ramming attacks by three different Icelandic gunboats, a complete rebuild, the South Atlantic, the Gulf, and then seventeen years teaching young officers to take a ship to sea. Not many warships get four separate careers. Fewer still get to spend the last one doing the most useful thing a ship can do, which is making sailors.

Later that year she was towed out into the Bay of Bengal and sunk as a target during live-fire exercises, a fitting if slightly blunt final chapter for a ship that had already proven, three times over during the Cod Wars, just how much punishment she could actually absorb.