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. Her early career took in a wide variety of genuinely useful work: she served on the Beira Patrol in 1969 and 1970, helping enforce sanctions intended to stop oil supplies reaching Rhodesia, assisted in rescuing the crew of the RFA Ennerdale after she struck rocks off the Seychelles in June 1970, and took part in cleanup operations after the tanker Pacific Glory caught fire that October.

Rammed, Rammed, and Rammed Again

Andromeda's most physically punishing period came during the Second and Third Cod Wars with Iceland, the escalating dispute over fishing rights that saw Icelandic gunboats deliberately colliding with Royal Navy frigates sent to protect British trawlers. Andromeda was struck by the Icelandic gunboat Óðinn in 1973, by Týr in 1975, and by Þór in 1976, the last of these leaving a 12-foot dent in her hull serious enough to require repairs at Devonport. It is a genuinely 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. 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 genuinely 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

Andromeda was sold to the Indian Navy in 1995 and recommissioned as INS Krishna, serving as a training vessel with a reduced armament of Bofors and Oerlikon guns rather than her original missile fit. She remained in Indian service until 24 May 2012, when she was finally decommissioned, in a small but pleasing piece of symmetry exactly 44 years to the day after her original launch. She was subsequently sunk in the Bay of Bengal for target practice, 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.