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 two men in those cockpits are worth following, because their lives went in opposite directions from the same ninety seconds. Luciano Guadagnini was a first lieutenant. His Skyhawk was hit by Antelope's 20mm fire on the run in, and he struck her mainmast as he passed over her. He was killed. The bomb he had already released was the one that stayed in the ship, and it is the bomb that eventually destroyed her, so a man who died flying into a frigate's rigging sank her anyway, two days later, by proxy.

The flight leader who broke off was Captain Pablo Carballo, callsign Cruz, and a Sea Cat had gone off under his port wing. He got the aircraft home to Rio Gallegos, which given what a Sea Cat does at close range is its own small piece of flying. He went on to become one of the best-known Argentine veterans of the war: he published Dios y los Halcones, God and the Hawks, in 1983, an account of the air war told largely by the men who flew it, and expanded it twice more over the following twenty years.

His subsequent career reads oddly against all of that. He commanded the Argentine Air Force's weapons test centre at Córdoba, took a master's degree in strategy at the United States Air Force Air War College in Alabama, ran the national civil aviation institute, retired as a Commodore on 2 April 2001, and then went back to teaching young pilots at the military aviation school. Twenty years after San Carlos, the man who had attacked Antelope was lecturing in a classroom, having been through an American staff college on the way. His wingman did not come home from the sortie at all.

The reason neither bomb went off is the single most important fact of the entire air campaign, and it is not luck. To get through the missiles and the guns the Argentine pilots had to attack at extremely low level, running in below masthead height. A bomb dropped from that low simply does not have the time of flight it needs for the fuse to arm before it arrives, so it goes through the ship and out the other side, or lodges in her, inert. Thirteen bombs struck British ships in the course of the campaign without exploding. Had even half of them worked as designed, the arithmetic of the whole war changes.

It is worth sitting with what that meant for the men aboard. It was not a fault the Royal Navy could rely on, and nobody knew from one attack to the next whether the next bomb would be the one that had been released a hundred feet higher. Ships went on fighting in San Carlos Water with live ordnance sitting in their hulls, waiting for somebody to come and deal with it. Antelope is what happened when somebody did.

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 two men deserve naming properly, because they were not sailors and they did not have to be there. Staff Sergeant James Prescott and Warrant Officer Class 2 John Phillips were Royal Engineers, bomb disposal specialists, and they went aboard a frigate with two live thousand-pound bombs in her to try to make her safe. Three remote attempts to withdraw the fuse failed. On the fourth, using a small charge, the bomb detonated. Prescott was killed instantly and was awarded a posthumous Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, the citation noting that he had persevered knowing perfectly well how dangerous the bomb's condition was. Phillips lost an arm and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Neither decoration is easy to come by.

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.

What happened to Tobin afterwards is not in the story as it usually gets told, and it should be. He was an air warfare specialist by trade, a fighter controller in HMS Victorious and HMS Aisne in the 1960s and in HMS London in 1970, then ashore at HMS Dryad and the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment working on military data links, then in command of the small patrol craft Beachampton and Wolverton out of Hong Kong. He had HMS Ark Royal after staff training, was promoted commander in 1978, taught on the directing staff of the Staff College at Greenwich, and took Antelope in early 1981. Sixteen months later he walked off her last.

A Board of Inquiry followed, as one always does, and it found Tobin and two of his officers negligent. The Commander-in-Chief dismissed the findings, so no court martial was ever convened and the matter ended there. That is the correct outcome and it does not undo the fact of it: the captain who took his ship into Bomb Alley on air defence duty, was hit twice by aircraft attacking below masthead height, had two live bombs in his hull, lost a man of his own and an Army bomb disposal NCO who had come aboard to help, got the rest of his ship's company off and left the ship himself last of all, then had to sit in front of a board and account for his negligence. She and one of her sisters were lost in that anchorage in two days. Nobody had a manual for it.

About five minutes after his departure, Antelope's missile magazines began exploding; watching from HMS Fearless's bridge, Royal Marine Ewen Southby-Tailyour described it as “a majestically awful sight”, and the moment, captured on camera by Press Association photographer Martin Cleaver, produced the burning, broken silhouette that became one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the entire war.

The photograph is worth a paragraph of its own, because it did a great deal of work. Martin Cleaver was a Press Association photographer embarked with the task force, and what he caught was the missile magazines going up in the dark, a sheet of white fire rising out of a black silhouette. It ran everywhere. For a British public eight thousand miles from the fighting, with no live television and news that arrived days late, that single frame was the war. It is still the image most people summon when the Falklands are mentioned, and a good many of them have never known which ship it is.

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, Royal Marine Corporal Alan White was commended by the Task Force Commander, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, 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; Foxtrot 7 herself survives today, preserved at the Royal Marines Museum in Portsmouth.

Antelope's wreck lies in about 80 feet of water in San Carlos Water still, now a protected site under Falkland Islands law; visiting Royal Navy divers periodically replace the White Ensign that flies over her.

The casualty figure that usually gets quoted for Antelope deserves a moment's care. One member of her ship's company died, Steward Mark Stephens, killed by the first bomb as it came aboard. The second man who died was Prescott, an Army bomb disposal NCO who came aboard afterwards to deal with what the first attack had left behind. Two deaths in a ship that was blown open, burned out and sank is a remarkably light toll for what happened to her, and it is a toll that includes a soldier who was not part of the crew at all.

She was not alone in that anchorage either. HMS Ardent had been sunk the day before, in the same water, doing much the same job, at a cost of twenty-two lives. Two Type 21s lost in two days out of a class of eight, and both of them in San Carlos. The design questions that followed, about aluminium and about how quickly fire spread in these ships, are dealt with in the account of HMS Amazon, the sister who was not there.

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, for the loss of just two of her crew, on a single day in May 1982.