HMS Antrim (D18): The Flagship That Retook South Georgia

A Destroyer Built for the Missile Age

HMS Antrim was a County-class destroyer launched on 19 October 1967 and first commissioned in 1970, serving in home waters and the Mediterranean during her early years, the kind of steady peacetime rotation typical of the class. In the mid-1970s she was updated to reflect changing naval priorities, with her aft gun turret removed and replaced by four MM38 Exocet anti-ship missile launchers, joining her existing Sea Slug and Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles, twin 4.5-inch guns, torpedo tubes and Oerlikon cannon to make her a genuinely well-rounded, modern warship. In 1976 she represented Britain at the royal wedding celebrations in Stockholm, a rather more glamorous assignment than most of what awaited her.

Retaking South Georgia

When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, Antrim, under the command of Captain Brian Young, was chosen as flagship for the recovery of South Georgia, the first major British objective of the conflict. On 25 April 1982, her embarked Wessex helicopter took part in the rescue of 17 SAS personnel stranded on the Fortuna Glacier after a failed reconnaissance insertion, and in a genuinely notable piece of naval history, helped disable the Argentine submarine Santa Fe, in what is recognised as the first anti-submarine operation conducted exclusively by helicopters, without a single surface ship or fixed-wing aircraft involved in the actual attack.

A Bomb That Didn't Go Off

With South Georgia secured, Antrim moved on to support the main landings at San Carlos Water, where her guns fired around 400 rounds in support of troops ashore. She had her own extremely close call during the air attacks on the landing force, when a 1,000lb bomb passed straight through her Sea Slug missile magazine without detonating, a piece of good fortune on the same scale as the failures of ordnance that spared several other British ships that day, and one that could very easily have ended in a repeat of the catastrophe that befell HMS Antelope and HMS Ardent.

A Chilean Retirement

Antrim was decommissioned from the Royal Navy in 1984 and sold to Chile on 22 June that year, recommissioned as Almirante Cochrane. She went on to serve the Chilean Navy for over two decades, receiving refits during the 1990s to keep her relevant, before finally being decommissioned in December 2006 and towed to China for scrapping, closing out a career that had begun replacing a gun turret with missiles in the 1970s and ended, via South Georgia and San Carlos Water, on the other side of the world under a different flag entirely.