HMS Avenger (F185): Fourteen Days South, and a War That Left No One Untouched

One of the Boy Racers

HMS Avenger was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, completed with Exocet missile launchers fitted in the B position forward of her bridge, one of the Type 21 frigates whose speed and sleek lines earned the class the affectionate nickname the Boy Racers. Her first two commanding officers were Commander Geoff Eades, from her entry into service in 1978, and Commander Peter Ford from 1979.

Following Captain Hugo White's appointment in 1981, she became leader of the 4th Frigate Squadron, a role she would hold, war notwithstanding, until 1986.

The Fastest Ship South

When the Falklands War broke out, Avenger departed the United Kingdom on 10 May 1982 and reached the South Atlantic by 25 May, covering the distance in just 14 days, the fastest transit achieved by any vessel involved in the entire conflict, a particularly striking demonstration of exactly the kind of speed that had given her class its nickname.

Fourteen days is worth converting into something you can picture. It is about eight thousand miles from Britain to the Falklands, so that transit means holding an average of something like twenty-four knots, day and night, for a fortnight, in the South Atlantic in autumn, without a proper stop. Machinery does not enjoy that and neither do the people running it. The Type 21s were the fastest general-purpose frigates in the fleet and it is the one thing about the class that nobody has ever argued with. Avenger sailed a fortnight after the first ships went south and arrived in time for the last three weeks of the war.

On 30 May she survived an Exocet missile attack that had been aimed at HMS Invincible, one of several close calls that punctuated the campaign for ships operating in the exposed waters around the islands.

The attack on 30 May was the last Argentine Exocet strike of the war, and it remains disputed to this day. Two Super Étendards, one carrying the final air-launched missile in the Argentine inventory, went out with four A-4 Skyhawks and attacked what they believed to be HMS Invincible. Argentina claimed a hit on the carrier. The British account is that the missile was decoyed away and that Avenger, which had put herself in the way, engaged it with her 4.5-inch gun. Two of the Skyhawks were shot down. What is not in dispute is that Invincible was undamaged and that the ship in the missile's path was this one.

In a small, poignant gesture during the campaign, divers recovered a 20mm gun from the wreck of HMS Antelope and it was mounted aboard Avenger, nicknamed Antelope's Avenger, a tangible link between two ships whose fortunes in the war had been very different.

A Heavy Cost Close to Port Stanley

On 11 June, during naval gunfire support operations near Port Stanley, a round from Avenger struck a civilian shelter, killing three people, the only British-caused civilian deaths of the entire war.

The three people killed deserve to be named, because they are the only civilians who died in the entire war and because they were the people the whole thing was being fought for. They were Mary Goodwin, Doreen Bonner and Susan Whitley, sheltering in a house at 7 Ross Road on the western side of Stanley in the early hours of 12 June. Two rounds were fired before the spotter on the ridge north of the town could stop the shoot. The second was an airburst.

The mechanics of how it happened matter, and they are not exculpatory so much as explanatory. Naval gunfire support works by a spotter ashore, often very close to the enemy and often in the dark, passing corrections to a ship that cannot see the target at all and is firing from a moving platform miles offshore. Every round is the product of a bearing, a range, a computer solution and a great deal of trust, and Stanley is a small town whose houses sit within a few hundred yards of the positions being shelled. The wonder is not that it happened once. The wonder is that in weeks of bombardment against targets that close to a civilian population it happened only once.

It remains a sobering footnote to a campaign fought, on the British side, with the explicit aim of liberating the islands' own civilian population, and a reminder that even carefully targeted naval gunfire support carried real and sometimes tragic risk to the people it was ultimately meant to protect.

Two nights later, on 13 June, Avenger was back in a naval gunfire support role that mattered rather differently, firing 100 rounds from her 4.5-inch gun alongside HMS Active and HMS Ambuscade in support of 2 Para's assault on Wireless Ridge, one of the last and most significant land battles of the war, fought on the approach to Port Stanley itself.

Avenger also developed a progressive hull crack during the deployment, later repaired with steel plating, physical evidence of just how hard the ship had been worked throughout the campaign.

Her commanding officer at the time went a long way afterwards. Hugo White took Avenger south, brought her home, and went on to become an admiral, Commander-in-Chief Fleet and then Governor of Gibraltar. The Ross Road shelling is not the kind of thing that appears in a service record, and it does not appear in his. It happened on his watch all the same.

A Close Call in the Gulf, and a Long Retirement

Avenger had a further brush with danger the following year: on 4 May 1983, Captain Peter Woodhead's Westland Lynx helicopter suffered a tail rotor failure off Muscat in Oman, though all four aircrew survived, Woodhead himself with a back injury.

She was decommissioned and sold to Pakistan on 23 September 1994, recommissioned as PNS Tippu Sultan, and went on to serve in Pakistan's 25th Destroyer Squadron for a remarkable further 26 years, before finally being expended as a target on 27 April 2020, bringing to a close the career of a ship whose Falklands service had encompassed both a genuine record for speed and one of the war's most difficult, sobering moments.

Twenty-six years is a long second career and it did not consist of tying up at Karachi. Between 1998 and 2008 she went through an extensive engineering modernisation and mid-life upgrade at Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works, at the end of which the Pakistan Navy reclassified her: she went in a general purpose frigate of 1978 and came out rated a guided missile destroyer. That is a very large amount of work to put into a hull already twenty years old, and it says something about both the design and about what a navy will do when it cannot simply order a new ship. The Type 21s were bought as a job lot in 1993 and 1994 precisely because they were fast, well-built and available, and Pakistan then spent a decade making them last.

What she was doing with it is the interesting part. As Tippu Sultan she patrolled the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, and she went into the Mediterranean as part of Combined Task Force 150, the multinational maritime security force set up after 2001 to work the same water against smuggling, piracy and the movement of weapons. That force has been commanded by Pakistan several times and has had Royal Navy ships in it throughout. So a frigate built on the Clyde, which had shot at an Argentine missile in 1982, spent part of the 2000s operating in a coalition alongside the navy that built her, under a different flag, on a task that did not exist when she was designed.

Her end has a certain symmetry that is hard to miss. On 27 April 2020 the Pakistan Navy expended her in a firing exercise in the Indian Ocean, hitting her with cruise missiles launched from a surface ship and from a helicopter, and released the film of it. Avenger's single most famous moment was putting herself between an anti-ship missile and an aircraft carrier and shooting at it with a 4.5-inch gun. Thirty-eight years later she was the target, and the missiles did not miss. Forty-two years after she was commissioned, having outlived the Royal Navy's entire Type 21 programme, she went down to exactly the weapon her generation had been built to survive.