HMS Arrow (F173): The First Ship Hit, and the Ship That Pulled Sheffield's Survivors From the Sea

A Frigate Built for Speed

HMS Arrow was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, laid down on 28 September 1972, launched on 5 February 1974, and commissioned on 28 July 1976 under her first captain, Commander Nick Barker. A Type 21 frigate displacing 3,250 tons and capable of 32 knots, she carried Exocet anti-ship missiles alongside a 4.5-inch gun and Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles, a genuinely fast and capable frigate that would go on to have one of the most eventful Falklands Wars of any ship in the fleet.

First Blood, on Both Sides

On 1 May 1982, Arrow became the first British ship to engage Argentine positions around Port Stanley airfield, and, in a piece of grim symmetry, was also the first British vessel struck by Argentine aircraft, taking cannon shell damage to her funnel and suffering one casualty. It was an opening that set the tone for what would become a genuinely relentless month of action.

Pulling Sheffield's Crew From the Water

Arrow's defining moment came just three days later, on 4 May, when she rushed to assist HMS Sheffield after the destroyer was struck by an Exocet missile. Arrow rescued 225 of Sheffield's 261 surviving crew, a genuinely major rescue operation carried out in dangerous, exposed waters, for which her commanding officer, Commander Paul Bootherstone, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

She was back in action on 6 May, shelling Argentine positions at Fox Bay on West Falkland, and had her own brush with disaster on 10 and 11 May, when the Argentine submarine San Luis fired torpedoes at her, one of which struck her towed decoy rather than the ship herself, a narrow escape that owed as much to the decoy doing precisely its job as to luck.

The Final Illumination Rounds of the War

On 28 May, Arrow provided naval gunfire support at the Battle of Goose Green, firing 22 star shells and 135 rounds of 4.5-inch high explosive during a 90-minute bombardment that helped pave the way for one of the war's pivotal land battles. She continued supporting operations into early June, and is credited with firing the final illumination rounds of the entire conflict, a fitting bookend for a ship that had opened the war under fire and closed it still hard at work.

She returned to Devonport on 7 July 1982 and required extensive hull repairs to address stress-related cracking in her aluminium superstructure, damage that reflected just how hard she, and ships like her, had been worked during the campaign.

From Falklands Veteran to Drug Interceptor

Arrow's postwar career included a rather different kind of action: in July 1991 she assisted the US Coast Guard in a Caribbean operation that recovered 1,500 pounds of smuggled cocaine, a world away from Falkland Sound but a reminder that a fast, well-equipped frigate had plenty of uses beyond conventional warfare. She was decommissioned on 1 March 1994 and transferred to Pakistan, recommissioned as PNS Khaibar with a Phalanx close-in weapon system replacing her original Sea Cat launcher, her Exocet missiles not included in the transfer. Pakistan went on to acquire all six surviving Type 21 frigates, and Khaibar has remained in active service long after her sister ships in Royal Navy colours were retired, a long, ongoing second career for a ship that had already lived through one of the most intense months any frigate faced during the entire Falklands War.