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 fast and capable frigate that would go on to have one of the most eventful Falklands Wars of any ship in the fleet.

Command of Arrow herself passed from Barker to Commander William Davis in 1977, then to Commander James McPetrie in 1979, before Commander Paul Bootherstone took over in 1980 and was still in command when the war Barker had predicted actually broke out two years later.

Barker went on to command the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance in the South Atlantic, where in early 1982 he repeatedly warned the Ministry of Defence of growing Argentine intentions towards the Falklands, warnings that were dismissed in Whitehall as special pleading to save his own ship from the defence cuts that would otherwise have paid her off.

Barker's warnings deserve more weight than the word dismissed conveys, because they were about a decision, not just a mood. The 1981 Defence Review, the same one that cost HMS Apollo her missile refit, had marked HMS Endurance for disposal. Endurance was the only British warship permanently in the South Atlantic, and announcing that she was being withdrawn was, to anyone in Buenos Aires reading the signals, an announcement that Britain no longer intended to defend the Falklands. Barker said so, from the spot, repeatedly, and was told he was pleading for his own command. He was right, the ship was not withdrawn in the end because the war began first, and he spent the rest of his life being fairly restrained about it.

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 particularly relentless month of action.

The casualty had a name. Ian Britnall was on the after Sea Cat deck when the cannon shells came through, and a splinter went into his lung. He was flown off to the hospital ship Canberra and he recovered, which makes him the first British casualty of the Falklands war and one of the luckier ones. The ship took hits in the funnel uptake and about the superstructure and kept firing.

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 notably major rescue operation carried out in dangerous, exposed waters, for which her commanding officer, Commander Paul Bootherstone, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

It is worth knowing what Arrow was actually coming alongside. Sheffield had been hit by an Exocet that, on most accounts, did not detonate its warhead: what did the damage was several hundred pounds of unburnt rocket fuel igniting inside the ship. The missile had cut the fire main on its way through, so the pumps could not deliver water where it was needed, and the interior furnishings and cabling produced dense, black, poisonous smoke that made the compartments impossible to enter without breathing apparatus. Twenty of her people died. The ship did not sink for another six days. She simply became uninhabitable.

Which makes five hours alongside a considerably braver thing than it sounds. Two warships lying against each other in an open ocean swell will grind, and the fenders between them are not designed for it. Arrow had to hold that position while running hoses across onto a burning deck, taking men off, and remaining a stationary target in waters where a second Exocet or a submarine was entirely possible, which is precisely what the torpedo scare that ended the transfer was about. The last of Sheffield's people crossing by jumping the gap between two moving hulls, rather than going into water at a few degrees above freezing, is the detail that tells you what the sea state was like.

Arrow came alongside and stayed there for close to five hours, her own crew fighting Sheffield's fires from the deck while survivors made the crossing.

Radio operator Brian Winterburn, who had already spent around two hours helping battle the blaze below decks, later recalled how a suspected submarine contact and reports of torpedoes in the water forced a hurried final transfer; rather than risk the freezing South Atlantic, the last of Sheffield's crew simply jumped the gap between the two ships, and remarkably every one of them made it across.

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 submarine deserves a proper introduction, because ARA San Luis had by some distance the strangest war of anybody. After Santa Fe was crippled and captured at South Georgia in late April and General Belgrano was sunk on 2 May, the Argentine surface fleet went into harbour and stayed there. San Luis did not. For the rest of the campaign she was the only Argentine naval unit at sea at all, one German-built Type 209 diesel boat of about twelve hundred tons, operating alone against a task force, and she survived the entire war.

She should also have sunk somebody. Her fire-control computer had failed before she sailed, so her attacks were made in emergency manual mode by a crew who were largely inexperienced, and every torpedo she fired lost its guidance wire within moments of launch. The reason was not discovered until afterwards, and it is the sort of thing that would be rejected from a novel: somewhere in maintenance, the polarity of the power cables running between the boat and her torpedoes had been reversed. The gyros in the SST-4s therefore spun up backwards, and the weapons tumbled off their proper heading the instant they left the tube. Her attacks on Arrow and on HMS Alacrity (F174) were properly set up, properly aimed and, thanks to a wiring error, harmless.

The effort spent looking for her is the other half of the story. The Americans supplied the Royal Navy with two hundred Mk 46 torpedoes during the war and something like fifty of them were used; in all, more than two hundred anti-submarine weapons were dropped or fired by British ships and helicopters, at contacts which on investigation turned out to include whales, wrecks and flocks of seabirds. Not one of them touched her. She went home undamaged, having twice got inside the screen of an anti-submarine frigate, and Arrow is alive because of a reversed pair of wires.

Arrow was called on for firefighting a second time on 8 June, helping tackle the blaze aboard the frigate HMS Plymouth after she was hit by Argentine bombs in Falkland Sound, a second reminder within five weeks of how often this particular ship found herself alongside others in trouble rather than fighting purely for herself.

Twice in five weeks is not a coincidence either. A Type 21 was fast, handy and could be got alongside another ship quickly, and a frigate's firefighting parties were among the best trained in the fleet, so Arrow kept being the ship sent. It is a peculiar sort of distinction. Her war consisted very largely of going to the aid of ships that had been hit, in the knowledge that whatever had hit them was still out there and that she was now stopped in the water next to a fire.

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.

The Goose Green bombardment ended in a way the tally does not show. Arrow's 4.5-inch mounting jammed partway through, which for a battalion attacking in the dark on an open ridge is a very serious thing to happen: naval gunfire was the only artillery 2 Para had beyond their own light guns, and when it stopped the attack lost its heaviest support. Her people cleared the turret and got it working again, and she stayed on the gun line past her allotted time, firing until dawn, when the risk of air attack finally drove her back to San Carlos. The figure of 135 rounds is not a measure of what she fired so much as what she was able to fire.

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.

The repairs were cruder than the phrase suggests. The cracking had begun during the campaign itself, and the answer at the time was to weld steel plates and girders straight onto the aluminium wherever it was opening up, which is not a thing anybody would have signed off in peacetime. Back home the fix was made permanent by welding a large steel plate down each side of the ship, so that a frigate built light and fast for the North Atlantic finished her Royal Navy career with a steel corset.

She was back in the ordinary run of things soon enough. Early 1985 found her spending three and a half months as West Indies Guardship, which is about as complete a change of scene from Falkland Sound as the Royal Navy had available.

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.

There is a neatness to where she had come from. Arrow was on her way home from a deployment to the South Atlantic when the Caribbean operation came up, which is to say that nine years on she was still doing turns on the station she had helped to win, and got diverted on the way back to go and take fifteen hundred pounds of cocaine off somebody.

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 went on to serve under Pakistani colours for almost three decades, well beyond most of her sister ships still flying the Royal Navy ensign.

She was finally decommissioned and expended as a target during the Pakistan Navy's SEASPARK 2022 exercise, a quiet, unglamorous end for a ship that had already survived cannon fire, Exocets and a torpedo attack four decades earlier.