HMS Apollo (F70): The Cod War Collision With the Only Fatality of the Whole Dispute

The Penultimate Leander

HMS Apollo was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun on the Clyde, laid down on 1 May 1969, launched on 15 October 1970, and commissioned on 10 June 1972 as the penultimate Leander-class frigate built for the Royal Navy. A Batch 3B broadbeam Leander, she displaced just under 3,000 tons fully loaded, capable of 28 knots on twin steam turbines, and carried a fairly typical fit for her generation: twin 4.5-inch guns, a Sea Cat missile launcher, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, and a Westland Wasp helicopter.

A Collision With Consequences

Apollo saw her first significant action during the Second Cod War, the escalating dispute with Iceland over fishing rights, and it proved a genuinely grim milestone. On 29 August 1973 she collided with the Icelandic gunboat ICGV Ægir, and the collision resulted in the death of one Icelandic sailor, the only recorded fatality of the entire Cod Wars dispute across all three rounds of confrontation. It was a sobering reminder that even a conflict fought largely through deliberate, almost ritualised ramming could turn suddenly and tragically serious.

Jubilees and the Falklands

Apollo's career took a considerably more ceremonial turn in 1977, when she served as captain of the Second Frigate Squadron during Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review, coordinating warship anchorages for the occasion and receiving four Silver Jubilee medals for her ship's company. She was deployed to the South Atlantic in 1982 following the Falklands War, returning that October with hull damage sustained in heavy seas, and returned to the South Atlantic again in 1983, unglamorous but necessary presence duty in the war's aftermath.

A planned modernisation that would have fitted her with Exocet and Sea Wolf missiles was cancelled following the 1981 Defence Review, though she still received a substantial £11 million refit at Devonport between July 1984 and May 1985, which updated her radar and replaced her boat davits with a pole-derrick arrangement for inflatable boats.

A Long Second Career as PNS Zulfiqar

Apollo was decommissioned from the Royal Navy on 7 July 1988 and sold to Pakistan just over a week later, on 15 July 1988, recommissioned into the Pakistan Navy as PNS Zulfiqar that October. She underwent a further significant refit between 1991 and 1993, swapping her 20mm guns and Seacat launcher for twin 25mm mounts and replacing her Wasp helicopter with a SA 319B Alouette III, and went on to serve Pakistan for eighteen years before finally being decommissioned on 29 October 2006. She met her end on 12 March 2010, sunk as a target in the Arabian Sea by a Pakistani F-22P frigate, a P3C maritime patrol aircraft, and an Agosta 90B submarine, a fairly emphatic final exercise for a ship that had already survived a genuine wartime-style collision, two royal jubilees, and a war of her own before she ever reached Pakistani colours.