HMS Ardent (F184): 22 Lives Lost Covering the Goose Green Landings

A Well-Armed Type 21

HMS Ardent was a Type 21 frigate built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, completed with four MM38 Exocet missiles fitted in the B position forward of her bridge, alongside a 4.5-inch main gun, a quadruple Sea Cat missile launcher, torpedo tubes and Oerlikon cannon. Powered by a combination system of Rolls-Royce Olympus and Tyne gas turbines, she was a remarkably capable frigate of her generation.

The name had been in this kind of trouble before, and the previous occasion is worth setting down. On 8 June 1940 an A-class destroyer called HMS Ardent was escorting the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious back towards Scapa Flow when the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau came up over the horizon. Ardent turned towards them. She laid a smoke screen between the battleships and the carrier, opened fire with her 4.7-inch guns and fired her torpedoes, every one of which missed. She was hit and stopped, hit again, rolled over and sank at about half past five in the afternoon. Two men survived out of a ship's company of a hundred and fifty-five, and they were picked out of the sea by a German floatplane three days later.

Her consort Acasta did the same thing and got closer to a result, putting a torpedo into Scharnhorst before she too was destroyed. Glorious went down with both of them. Forty-two years later a frigate wearing the same name went into an anchorage she could not defend, in support of a landing that had to happen, and was bombed to a standstill in two hours. That is not fate and it is not coincidence. It is simply what tends to happen to small ships that are put where the fighting is, and the Admiralty has never given the name Ardent to a vessel it expected to keep out of the way.

She was launched on 9 May 1975 and commissioned into the Royal Navy in October 1977, initially under Commander Anthony Provest and, from 1979, Commander Michael Bracelin, before Commander Alan West took command in 1980.

In 1981 she took part in Operation Armilla, escorting the merchant vessel Mary R. Koch through the Persian Gulf, routine work that gave no hint of what awaited her the following year.

Into Falkland Sound

Ardent sailed from Devonport for the Falklands on 19 April 1982, reaching Ascension Island on 3 May and departing again on 7 May.

On 21 May, she entered Falkland Sound in support of Operation Sutton, the main British amphibious landings, with the specific task of bombarding the Argentine airstrip at Goose Green, suppressing the Pucará ground-attack aircraft and napalm stocks based there, an important but exposed assignment that placed her squarely in range of Argentine air power operating from the mainland.

It is worth knowing what she was sent to suppress, because the aircraft in question is easy to dismiss and should not be. The FMA Pucara is a twin-turboprop, two-seat, Argentine-built ground attack machine: slow, tough, heavily armed with cannon, machine guns, rockets and bombs, and designed from the outset to loiter over a battlefield and work over troops in the open. Against a Sea Harrier it was hopeless. Against landing craft crossing an anchorage, or men wading ashore, or a beachhead with no cover on it, it would have been murderous. Goose Green also held the Argentine napalm stocks. Silencing that strip on the day of the landings was not a subsidiary task; it was one of the things that made the landings survivable.

As the ITN reporter Michael Nicholson put it at the time, "without Ardent they could not have got ashore."

Doing it, though, meant going where nobody could help her. The amphibious force was in San Carlos Water, where a dozen ships overlapped their guns and missiles into something approaching an umbrella. Bombarding Goose Green meant detaching south into Grantham Sound, alone, in daylight, within very easy reach of aircraft coming in low from the west. Michael Nicholson's line about the landings being impossible without her is accurate, and it is also the whole explanation of what happened to her. She was doing a job that had to be done from a position that could not be defended.

Wave After Wave

The attacks began around 4pm with an A-4 Skyhawk dropping two bombs that straddled the frigate without exploding, an early warning of the punishment to come.

A more serious assault followed from around 5:40pm, when three Argentine fighters attacked from the northeast, striking Ardent with cannon fire and three bombs that destroyed her Westland Lynx helicopter, wrecked her Sea Cat launcher, and set her hangar ablaze.

Her armament made it worse rather than better. Ardent was well armed by the standards of her class, completed with four Exocets in the B position, and an Exocet is an anti-ship missile: superb against a warship over the horizon and of no use whatever against an aeroplane. What she actually had for air defence was one quadruple Sea Cat launcher and a 4.5-inch gun. The second wave of attacks destroyed the Sea Cat and her Lynx and set the hangar alight within minutes, and from that point she was fighting off jet aircraft with a gun mounting and small arms. That is the context for what Lieutenant Commander Sephton did on her upper deck, and for the citation that followed.

A further wave of five Skyhawks arrived around 6pm, dropping a mixture of free-fall and retard bombs, with a pattern of two to four exploding at her port quarter.

A final attack, delivered by three Argentine Navy A-4Q Skyhawks, scored direct hits on the stern, at least two of which exploded, with further unexploded ordnance also penetrating the hull.

Amid the chaos, Lieutenant Commander John Sephton organised a last-ditch defence of the ship and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for what was recorded as extreme valour and self-sacrifice, and Able Seaman John Dillon received a George Medal for his part in rescuing shipmates from the wreckage.

All three Skyhawks were themselves shot down by Sea Harriers of 800 Naval Air Squadron as they withdrew: one, flown by Teniente de Fragata Márquez, exploded in the air under cannon fire, while the other two pilots, Capitán de Corbeta Philippi and Teniente de Navío Arca, were hit and ejected safely.

22 Men Lost

With uncontrollable fires developing in the stern, Commander Alan West, who would go on to serve as First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff from 2002 to 2006 and is today Admiral the Lord West of Spithead, gave the order to abandon ship.

Alan West's career after that morning is worth following, because it ran a very long way. He came home from the South Atlantic having lost his ship and twenty-two of his people, was appointed to the Distinguished Service Cross, and went on through a series of senior appointments to command the entire Royal Navy as First Sea Lord from 2002 to 2006. He then served as a security minister in government and sits in the House of Lords as Admiral the Lord West of Spithead. He is also, four decades on, one of the public voices behind the campaign to bring the last surviving Falklands warship, the former HMS Ambuscade, home from Pakistan. Some things a man does not put down.

The campaign he lends his name to needs the whole class's story to make sense of it. Eight Type 21s were built. Two were lost in the Falklands within twenty-four hours of each other, Ardent on 21 May and Antelope on the 22nd. The other six were sold to Pakistan in 1993 and 1994 and served on there as the Tariq class, which made them the last surviving British warships from that campaign anywhere in the world. The former HMS Ambuscade is the one still afloat, and the effort to bring her home is set out in HMS Ambuscade (F172).

The design argument that follows these ships everywhere, about the aluminium in their superstructures and what it did in a fire, is set out properly in the article on HMS Amazon (F169). What is worth adding about Ardent specifically is narrower. She did not go down because of what she was made of. She took something in the order of a dozen bombs across four separate attacks inside two hours, delivered at very low level by aircraft she had virtually nothing left to shoot back at, and the fires that finished her began in a hangar wrecked by cannon fire and a burning helicopter. No frigate built of any material would have shrugged that off.

The real weakness of the class at Falkland Sound was not metallurgy. It was that the Type 21 had been designed for an entirely different war: a comfortable, fast, good-looking general-purpose frigate for showing the flag east of Suez, carrying an anti-ship missile for a surface enemy over the horizon, a single gun and one short-range missile launcher. Sent to sit in a sound in daylight and be dive-bombed by aircraft coming over the hills with no radar warning at all, she was being asked to do the one thing nobody had drawn her for. She did it anyway, and the landings went ahead.

The surviving crew transferred first to HMS Yarmouth and then to the liner Canberra, while Ardent burned through the night before finally sinking at 6:30 the following morning, until only her skewed radar antenna remained visible above the water.

Twenty-two of her crew were killed and around 30 more were injured, one of the heaviest single losses suffered by any ship during the entire Falklands campaign, a stark reminder of just how costly the fight for Falkland Sound, later grimly nicknamed Bomb Alley, had become.

Ardent's story has been kept alive since by her own ship's association, which marked the battle's 40th anniversary in 2022 with the documentary Ardents: The Remarkable Men of F184, centred on the loss of Leading Marine Engineering Mechanic Stephen "Knocker" White, and by Mark Higgitt's book Through Fire and Water, now in its fourth edition.

She is still there. Ardent lies in Grantham Sound where she went down, and she is a designated war grave under British law, along with HMS Antelope, HMS Coventry and HMS Sheffield. Diving on any of them without licence is an offence. Twenty-two men went into the water off that ship on 21 May 1982 and some of them are still aboard her, which is why the association that keeps her memory going has outlasted the ship itself by more than forty years and shows no sign of stopping.