HMS Antelope (F170): The Ship Behind One of the Falklands War's Most Iconic Images

The One Without Exocet

HMS Antelope was a Type 21 frigate built by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston, Southampton, her keel laid on 23 March 1971 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 17 July 1975. She was fitted out much like her sisters, powered by a combination of Rolls-Royce Olympus and Tyne gas turbines, armed with a 4.5-inch main gun, a quadruple Seacat missile launcher, torpedo tubes and a pair of Oerlikon cannon, and eventually carried a Lynx helicopter in place of her original Wasp. She had one curious distinction among her class, however: she was the only Type 21 frigate never fitted with Exocet anti-ship missiles, a gap that would have no bearing whatsoever on the manner of her loss.

Her peacetime service was unremarkable in the best sense of the word. She attended the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review for Elizabeth II and served with the 7th Frigate Squadron, the kind of steady, routine naval life that gave no hint of the events awaiting her in the South Atlantic five years later.

Into San Carlos Water

Antelope arrived in the Falklands operational area on 21 May 1982, assigned to air defence duties in San Carlos Water, the anchorage that British forces had turned into the focal point of the amphibious landings and, consequently, into a shooting gallery for Argentine air power. Two days later, on 23 May, four Argentine A-4B Skyhawks of Grupo 5 attacked the ship. The lead aircraft's pilot, Captain Pablo Carballo, broke off his run after a near-miss from one of Antelope's own Seacat missiles, but his wingman pressed home the attack and placed a 1,000-pound bomb into the ship's starboard side, killing Steward Mark Stephens.

A second pair of Skyhawks attacked moments later. One aircraft, flown by First Lieutenant Luciano Guadagnini, was hit by 20mm cannon fire and collided with Antelope's main mast as it passed, but not before releasing bombs of its own, one of which penetrated the hull amidships. Like the bomb that had already struck the ship, it failed to explode, a mercy that would prove to be only temporary.

The Bomb That Wouldn't Wait

With two live, unexploded bombs lodged in her hull, Antelope needed her ordnance disposed of before she could be considered safe, and two Royal Engineers bomb disposal technicians came aboard to attempt exactly that. Three attempts to withdraw the fuse of one bomb by remote means failed, and on a fourth attempt, using a small explosive charge, the bomb detonated. The blast killed Staff Sergeant James Prescott instantly and severed an arm of Warrant Officer John Phillips, a devastating cost for two men who had gone aboard specifically to make the ship safer.

The explosion tore the ship open from her waterline to her funnel, and the blast started major fires in both engine rooms. Commander Nick Tobin gave the order to abandon ship, and was himself the last man to leave. About five minutes after his departure, Antelope's missile magazines began exploding, a sequence of events that lit up San Carlos Water and produced some of the most widely reproduced photographs to come out of the entire war.

A Broken Silhouette, and a Rescue Worth Remembering

Antelope remained afloat overnight, but by the next day, 24 May 1982, her keel had broken and her superstructure had melted into a heap of twisted metal; she broke in half and sank, her burning, broken outline becoming, almost by accident, one of the defining images of the Falklands War. Amid the disaster, Corporal Alan White was commended for using the landing craft Foxtrot 7 to rescue 41 of her crew, a reminder that even the worst nights of the campaign produced genuine acts of quiet heroism alongside the losses.

Antelope's wreck lies in San Carlos Water still, now a protected site under Falkland Islands law, and San Carlos itself has since become known to British forces, with a certain grim affection, as Bomb Alley, a name earned in no small part by what happened to this one ship on a single day in May 1982.