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.

The Counties were the Royal Navy's first purpose-built guided missile ships, and everything odd about them follows from the missile they were built around. Sea Slug was a beam rider, nineteen feet long and weighing two tons, and it needed a magazine to match. That magazine ran fore and aft through the ship and took up something like a third of her length. It is the reason a vessel rated as a destroyer displaced six thousand two hundred tons standard, which is larger than most cruisers of the Second World War, and carried a ship's company of around 471. Eight of them were built between 1959 and 1970, and no two navies have ever agreed on what to call them.

The machinery was equally unusual and rather more successful. COSAG, combined steam and gas, meant two sets of boilers and steam turbines working alongside four gas turbines on the same shafts. The steam plant gave economical cruising, the gas turbines could be started in minutes and run up for a sprint or for leaving harbour in a hurry, and the combination gave thirty knots. The Tribal-class frigate HMS Ashanti had taken the arrangement to sea first, in 1961, and the Counties put the same idea into a very much larger hull. It pointed directly at the all gas turbine ships that followed.

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 notably 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 Operation Paraquet, the recovery of South Georgia and the first major British objective of the conflict.

On 21 April an SAS reconnaissance troop was put down on the Fortuna Glacier by three Wessex helicopters, only to be trapped there by 100mph winds and treacherous crevasses. The rescue attempt the following day went badly wrong: as the helicopters flew back up the glacier in blinding, whited-out weather, both of the Wessex helicopters from the tanker RFA Tidespring crashed.

The Fortuna Glacier episode deserves its full weight. South Georgia in late April is not a place to put men down from helicopters: the glacier runs to well over a thousand feet, the winds come off it in katabatic gusts that can reach a hundred miles an hour, and the crevasses are hidden under snow bridges. The SAS troop chose it precisely because no sane person would expect an approach from that direction, which is a reason that works right up until the weather closes in. When it did, the men on the glacier were in immediate danger of freezing to death, and the first two helicopters sent to get them out flew into whiteout and crashed.

Antrim’s own Wessex, flown by Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley, went in once more and lifted everyone off in a single, grossly overloaded flight, carrying around seventeen men back down to the ship in a widely admired piece of flying.

What Ian Stanley then did was fly the same route a third time, in the same conditions, in the only remaining aircraft, land on a glacier in whiteout, and lift out every man from all three parties in one load. A Wessex HAS.3 is not built to carry seventeen people. Getting off a glacier at that weight, in that air, is a matter of running the machine along the surface until it will fly rather than lifting off in any conventional sense. Stanley was appointed to the Distinguished Service Order for the South Georgia operation, and four days later he found the Santa Fe.

Four days later, on the morning of 25 April, the same Ian Stanley spotted the Argentine submarine Santa Fe on the surface near Cumberland Bay and opened the attack with depth charges from Antrim’s Wessex, in what is recognised as the first anti-submarine “kill” achieved entirely by helicopters.

Lynx helicopters from HMS Brilliant and Wasp helicopters from HMS Endurance and HMS Plymouth followed up with torpedo runs, cannon fire and AS.12 missiles, and Santa Fe’s captain nursed his crippled boat into the jetty at Grytviken, where her crew scrambled ashore.

The submarine had a history of her own. Santa Fe had been built in the United States as USS Catfish, a Balao-class boat completed in 1945, modernised in the 1960s and transferred to Argentina in 1971. She was thirty-seven years old, on the surface, and running men and stores into Grytviken when Stanley found her. What put her out of the fight was not a warship at all but a handful of helicopters of three different types flying from four different ships, which is why the action is generally logged as the first submarine defeated by helicopters alone. She was left half-flooded alongside the jetty at Grytviken, where she stayed long after the war was over.

With her destroyed and the garrison shaken by naval gunfire from Antrim and Plymouth, the Argentine forces at Grytviken surrendered that same afternoon without further fighting.

The surrender that followed the same afternoon produced one of the better signals of the war. Captain Young sent home: be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Jack in South Georgia, God save the Queen. It is a very old-fashioned form of words for 1982, and it was read out in Downing Street that evening. South Georgia was the first British objective of the campaign and the first to be recovered, three weeks before anybody landed on the Falklands themselves, and it was taken with no British deaths at all.

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.

That bomb is worth putting alongside the design. It went straight through the Sea Slug magazine, the compartment holding two-ton missiles and running a third of the length of the ship, and did not go off. Had it functioned as intended, the resulting explanation would not have been about aluminium or fire spread at all. Antrim was not a lucky ship so much as the beneficiary of a fusing problem, and there is a good case that she was the luckiest of the lot.

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.

The name was not retired when she gave it up. Almirante Cochrane went straight onto another former Royal Navy ship, the Type 23 frigate HMS Norfolk (F230), which Chile bought in the same period, so the Chilean Navy has carried it continuously from one British-built hull to the next. Who Thomas Cochrane was, and why a country that fought a war of independence against Spain names its ships after a Scottish peer who had been thrown out of the Royal Navy over a stock exchange fraud, is set out there.

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.

The four years between her paying off and that tow are not empty, and what happened in them is worth recording. She was laid up at Talcahuano, the main base of the Chilean Navy and the site of the ASMAR dockyard, when at half past three in the morning on 27 February 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 8.8 struck off central Chile, one of the largest ever recorded anywhere. The waves that followed reached something like ten metres and went straight through the base and the shipyard.

Ships were lifted off their moorings and dumped: the missile boat Chipana, the service barge Pisagua, the ferry Sobene, three floating docks shoved bodily onto the piers with a brand-new submarine inside one of them, and Almirante Cochrane. Laid up at the same base was another old Royal Navy ship, the former Leander HMS Achilles (F12), by then the Ministro Zenteno, who was carried several miles from her berth and had to be scuttled the following month. The damage to the base was put at somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million dollars before anybody counted the shipyard, which could not work at full capacity again for a year.

Cochrane came off better than Zenteno. She was recovered, sold, and towed away for breaking in China on 11 December 2010, nine months after the wave. So the flagship of the South Georgia operation, a ship that survived a thousand-pound bomb passing through her missile magazine, was finally finished off by an earthquake in the southern Pacific while sitting quietly at a wall with nobody aboard. Very few warships get an ending that arbitrary, and after Fortuna Glacier and Grytviken and San Carlos it seems a poor sort of reward.