HMS Argonaut (F56): Hit Twice, Powerless, and Still Signalling "We Can Still Fight"

A Frigate That Saw a Bit of Everything

HMS Argonaut was a Leander-class frigate built by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on Tyneside, launched on 8 February 1966 and commissioned on 17 August 1967 as the fifteenth of the class's twenty-six ships, under her first commanding officer, Commander B.L. Spark, entering service with the class's familiar armament of twin 4.5-inch guns, a Sea Cat missile launcher, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar and a Westland Wasp helicopter.

A 1980 modernisation considerably sharpened her teeth, adding four Exocet anti-ship missiles, a second Sea Cat system, twin 40mm Bofors guns, and a Westland Lynx helicopter in place of the Wasp.

Her fifteen years before the Falklands War were notably varied: she escorted the liner Queen Mary on her final Atlantic crossing in 1967, became the first flagship of NATO's newly formed Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 1968 and carried out further NATO duties through to 1975, served on the Beira Patrol enforcing the embargo against Rhodesia in 1969, took famine relief supplies to Fiji during a round-the-world deployment that same year, saw fishery protection duty during the Second Cod War in 1973, and deployed to the Persian Gulf on the Armilla Patrol in 1981.

A Very Bad Day at San Carlos

On 21 May 1982, Argonaut was providing close escort for the amphibious force during the opposed landings at San Carlos, stationed near Fanning Head to guard the northern approaches. At 10:15 that morning, Argentine pilot Lieutenant Guillermo Crippa attacked in an MB-339 with cannon fire and rockets, damaging her Type 965 radar.

Crippa's attack is one of the strangest single sorties of the war. He was flying an Aermacchi MB-339, which is a jet trainer with some weapons bolted on rather than a strike aircraft, from the airstrip at Port Stanley, and he came over the amphibious force alone, in daylight, into the middle of a fleet that was expecting exactly this. He attacked Argonaut with cannon and rockets, got a good look at the entire invasion force on his way through, and flew home to report what he had seen. It was the only MB-339 sortie the Argentine naval air arm flew against the landings, and it did more damage as reconnaissance than as an attack.

Worse followed at 13:37, when six A-4 Skyhawks swept in and struck the ship with two bombs.

Neither bomb itself exploded, but the one that punched into her Sea Cat missile magazine set off two of the missiles stored there, killing two sailors outright, while the second lodged in her boiler room, knocking out all power and steering and very nearly leaving her to drift onto the cliffs at Fanning Head before a quick-thinking officer got an anchor over the side in time.

The detail of what those two bombs did is worth setting out, because neither of them exploded and they still very nearly finished her. The forward one went into the Sea Cat magazine and set off two of the missiles stored there, which killed Able Seaman Iain Boldy and Able Seaman Matthew Stuart and flooded the compartment. The after one came to rest in the boiler room and took out the power and the steering with it. So Argonaut was, within a second or two, a ship with no propulsion, no steering, a flooded magazine, a fire, two dead men and two live thousand-pound bombs sitting inside her, drifting towards the cliffs at Fanning Head. The anchor that went over the side at that moment is the reason there is anything else to write about.

With HMS Plymouth supplying emergency electrical power, Argonaut's commanding officer, Commander Christopher Layman, sent a signal that has since become something of a small piece of Falklands War folklore: we are damaged and have lost power but we can still fight, a particularly defiant message from a ship that had just been hit twice and left dead in the water.

The man who sent it had a career worth following. Christopher Layman joined the Navy in 1956 and served thirty-five years, and the list of his commands is unusual for the sheer spread of it: the minehunter HMS Hubberston (M1147) from 1968, the frigate Lynx from 1972, Argonaut from 1981, HMS Cleopatra (F28) straight afterwards, and then HMS Invincible (R05) from 1984. A four-hundred-tonne wooden minehunter and a twenty-thousand-tonne aircraft carrier, and everything in between.

He got the DSO for San Carlos. As a rear admiral he went back to the South Atlantic as Commander British Forces Falkland Islands, which must have been an odd homecoming, and finished at NATO headquarters through the three years in which the Soviet Union came apart. He was afterwards made Gentleman Usher of the Green Rod, an officer of the Order of the Thistle, which is the sort of appointment that sounds invented and is not.

And then he wrote a book. Layman is the author of a full account of the wreck of HMS Wager, the storeship of Anson's squadron that went ashore in Patagonia in 1741 and produced the most notorious mutiny and the most contested survival story in the history of the Royal Navy. There is something entirely fitting about the officer who kept a bombed and burning frigate off the rocks at Fanning Head spending his retirement on the definitive account of a captain who lost his ship on a lee shore and then lost his crew.

Towed to Safety, Bombs and All

The following day, three Landing Ship Logistics vessels towed the crippled Argonaut into San Carlos Water, where she remained with both unexploded bombs still lodged inside her.

Lieutenant Peter Morgan, the ship's diving officer, dived twice into the flooded Sea Cat magazine to survey the damage and make temporary repairs, fully aware the unexploded bomb was still sitting close by, work that later earned him the Distinguished Service Cross.

An Army Royal Engineers team removed the fuze from the boiler-room bomb on 23 May, after which the ship's company ditched it over the side, while the bomb in the Sea Cat magazine proved far harder to shift and was not finally removed until 28 May, a full week after the attack, by a Fleet Clearance Diving Team under Lieutenant Commander Brian Dutton.

Getting the bombs out took a week and is a job worth understanding. The boiler room one was dealt with first, on 23 May, and then simply tipped over the side. The one in the Sea Cat magazine was very much harder. It was surrounded by the remains of the ammunition it had landed among, in a flooded compartment, in a ship that had to stay afloat and preferably stay useful. Members of Fleet Clearance Diving Team 1 spent 26 May clearing the ordnance around it, then spent the following day cutting access holes through the ship's structure to make a route out for the thing, and on 28 May Lieutenant Commander Brian Dutton and his team lifted a live thousand-pound bomb out through those holes and disposed of it.

It is worth reading that alongside what happened to HMS Antelope two days later, when an attempt to defuse a bomb aboard a frigate in the same anchorage detonated it, killed the man doing the work and destroyed the ship. Argonaut's people knew that had happened. They finished the job anyway.

Repairs and sonar upgrades were completed back at Devonport by June 1982, restoring her to full service remarkably quickly given the scale of the damage she had absorbed.

From Warship to Rescue Ship

Argonaut's postwar career took a properly eclectic turn.

Fitted with a new Type 2031 towed array sonar, she spent time patrolling the Iceland-Faroe Gap tracking Soviet submarines before, in July 1987, rescuing the adventurer Richard Branson and his co-pilot Per Lindstrand from the Irish Sea after their Virgin Atlantic Flyer, the first hot-air balloon to cross the Atlantic, ditched close to the Scottish coast, a rescue that must have felt very different from combat duty in Falkland Sound.

The balloon rescue deserves its own note, because it was a genuine record attempt and it very nearly ended badly. The Virgin Atlantic Flyer was the first hot-air balloon to cross the Atlantic, carrying Richard Branson and the Swedish engineer Per Lindstrand, and the crossing itself worked. The landing did not: they came down off the coast in bad conditions, lost their remaining fuel tanks, and ended up in the water separately. Argonaut was one of the ships that went to get them. Five years after being bombed twice in Falkland Sound, the same hull was fishing a record-breaking balloonist out of the Irish Sea, which is about as fair a summary of a frigate's working life as anybody could write.

She represented the Royal Navy at the 75th anniversary commemorations of Gallipoli in 1990, and in her final major operation before decommissioning, played a part in the arrest at sea of Roderick Newall, a former Army officer wanted over the murder of his parents in Jersey five years earlier, taken into custody off his own yacht in the Atlantic approaches south-west of Gibraltar in August 1992.

That last operation deserves a good deal more than a subordinate clause, because it is one of the strangest arrests the Royal Navy has ever been asked to make. On the night of 10 October 1987, Nicholas and Elizabeth Newall took their two sons out to dinner on Jersey to mark her forty-eighth birthday. That was the last time anybody saw them alive. Later that evening they were bludgeoned to death in their own house, and the bodies were taken away. All the police had was the blood.

The elder son, Roderick, was a lieutenant in the Royal Green Jackets; the younger, Mark, was a financier. Nothing was proved for five years. Then, on the afternoon of 5 August 1992, a hundred and fifty miles south-west of Gibraltar, HMS Argonaut closed on an ocean-going yacht called Austral Soma. The States of Jersey police had asked for the Navy's help and got it. Newall agreed to come across, got into a small boat, and rowed himself the short distance to the frigate, where he was arrested and taken to Gibraltar for extradition.

He went on denying it, in total, for six years from the night itself. Eventually he confessed, and took detectives to a spot on the island where he and his brother had buried their parents. It is a bleak story and it has no naval content at all beyond the fifteen minutes in which a Leander-class frigate served as a floating police station in the middle of the Atlantic approaches. But it was the last thing Argonaut did before she paid off, and a ship that had spent 21 May 1982 with two unexploded bombs inside her ended her working life by giving a man a place to be arrested.

She was decommissioned from the Royal Navy on 31 March 1993 in a paying-off ceremony with a Royal Marines band in attendance, and left Portsmouth Harbour under tow bound for Spain, where she was finally broken up on 25 January 1995, bringing an end to a career that had survived two bomb hits, rescued a world-record balloonist, and represented Britain at a First World War commemoration, all in the space of a single working life.