HMS Battleaxe (F89): Sidelined From the Falklands by a Broken Propeller Shaft

Launched by a Prime Minister's Wife

HMS Battleaxe was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, laid down on 4 February 1976 and launched on 18 May 1977 by Audrey Callaghan, wife of Prime Minister James Callaghan.

She commissioned on 28 March 1980 as a Type 22 frigate, displacing 4,400 tons at deep load and capable of 30 knots, armed with Sea Wolf and Exocet missiles alongside Bofors guns and torpedo tubes, and equipped to carry two Westland Lynx helicopters, a properly capable and heavily armed frigate for her era.

The most striking thing about a Type 22 of this batch is what she does not have. She was designed from the outset without a main gun at all. The reasoning was coherent enough at the time: the ship existed to hunt submarines in the North Atlantic and to defend herself and others against aircraft and missiles, and Sea Wolf plus Exocet plus two helicopters did all of that better than a 4.5-inch turret would. What she carried instead were two 40mm Bofors, which the Falklands veterans of the class regarded as an active nuisance because working them pulled people away from the Sea Wolf.

The Falklands demolished the reasoning inside a fortnight. Once soldiers were ashore, the single most valuable thing a frigate could do was put high explosive onto a hillside at night from ten miles out, and a ship with no gun could not do it at all. Her sisters Broadsword and Brilliant did a great deal in that war and none of it was naval gunfire support. The consequence went straight into the drawings: the four Batch 3 ships, Cornwall, Cumberland, Campbeltown and Chatham, were completed with a 4.5-inch Mark 8 on the forecastle, added specifically because of what the Batch 1s had been unable to do in the South Atlantic.

Missing the War Her Sisters Fought

When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, Battleaxe was held back at Gibraltar owing to propeller shaft problems, unlike her sister ships HMS Broadsword and HMS Brilliant, which both saw active service in the South Atlantic, a particularly frustrating turn of mechanical luck for a ship built for exactly that kind of deployment.

What she did have was, for its day, remarkable. Sea Wolf was the first naval missile system fast enough and accurate enough to hit something the size of an incoming shell, and it had demonstrated exactly that in trials before it went to sea. Against sea-skimming missiles and low-level aircraft it was the best point defence anybody had, and in the Falklands Brilliant used it to knock Argentine aircraft out of the sky at very short notice. A propeller shaft is what kept Battleaxe out of that, and it is difficult to think of a more galling reason for a ship carrying the best air defence in the fleet to spend a war alongside in Gibraltar.

She made up for it later that year, escorting HMS Illustrious between August and November, and returned to the South Atlantic for a further deployment between July and December 1983.

A Rescue, the Gulf, and the Balkans

Just after one in the morning on 2 July 1988, some 11 nautical miles south of the Mull of Kintyre, the periscope of the submarine HMS Conqueror struck the yacht Dalriada, owned by the Army Sail Training Association, which took on water and sank soon afterwards.

Conqueror herself was undamaged and surfaced at once, but it was Battleaxe, patrolling five miles away, who picked up the mayday and recovered all four of Dalriada's crew unhurt, handing them to the Donaghadee lifeboat for landing at Larne while a formal board of inquiry was convened that same day, a rather unusual rescue for a frigate to perform.

The Dalriada rescue has a strange resonance to it. HMS Conqueror is the only nuclear submarine ever to have sunk an enemy warship in action, having torpedoed the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in May 1982, and six years later her periscope went through the hull of a sail training yacht eleven miles off the Mull of Kintyre. A submarine at periscope depth is effectively blind astern and to a large extent above her, and a small wooden yacht under sail is close to invisible on sonar and on a periscope in a seaway. Nobody was hurt, which is the only reason it reads as an oddity rather than a disaster.

She was on Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, remaining on station until that November, and deployed to the Balkans between April and October 1995 as part of the United Nations peacekeeping naval blockade during the Yugoslav wars.

A Brazilian Second Life

Battleaxe was decommissioned on 30 August 1996 and sold to Brazil on 30 April 1997, recommissioned as Rademaker in honour of Admiral Augusto Rademaker, and has gone on to a long and notably active career in Brazilian service.

The man she was named for is worth knowing about. Augusto Hamann Rademaker Grünewald was born in 1905, of German and Danish descent, and served in the Brazilian navy from 1927 to 1964, finishing as head of the Central Command of the Atlantic Defence Zone. That is the naval career. The rest of it is politics.

He was Minister for the Navy from 1964, the year of the coup, until 1969, and picked up Transport and Public Works along the way. When President Costa e Silva had a stroke on 31 August 1969, the constitution said the vice-president should take over. The armed forces decided otherwise, and Rademaker became one of three officers, one from each service, who governed Brazil as a junta for two months until Emílio Médici was installed in October. He was then made Médici's vice-president and served the full term to 1974. He died in 1985.

So a frigate built at Scotstoun and launched by the wife of a Labour prime minister spent the second half of her life carrying the name of a man who had, for two months in 1969, been a third of a military dictatorship. Nobody in Glasgow or Portsmouth had any say in it, and it is a reasonable illustration of what happens to a ship's identity once she is sold: the hull is the same, and everything attached to it changes.

Rather charmingly, she crossed the Atlantic with several of her teeth still missing: her new crew received the ship without her Exocet missiles fitted, without her twin 30mm Oerlikon mounts and without her satellite communications system, all added later.

The condition she was handed over in is worth explaining, because it is normal rather than shabby. When a warship is sold on, the equipment that goes with her is negotiated item by item, and the sensitive or export-controlled parts, missiles, some electronics, satellite communications, are very often held back and supplied separately or replaced by the buyer. Brazil received a hull, machinery, sensors and a Sea Wolf system, and then spent three years fitting the rest and learning it. Firing her first missile in Brazilian colours in April 2000, after five months of testing, and killing a target at maximum range, is the moment the transfer was actually complete.

It took until April 2000, and five months of testing on her Sea Wolf fire-control system, before Rademaker fired a missile in Brazilian colours for the first time, destroying a SNIPE aerial target at maximum engagement range and proving the old Type 22 still had some bite left in her.

On the night of 30 November 2004, around 300 nautical miles off Cabo Frio during exercise FRATERNO, the Argentine frigate ARA Sarandi, then firing her 40mm guns at a towed target, accidentally hit Rademaker instead.

Three Brazilian sailors and an Argentine observer officer aboard, Commander Marcos Emilio Mateso, were wounded and flown to the Marcilio Dias Naval Hospital by the ship's own Lynx helicopter before Rademaker turned for Rio de Janeiro, docking in the small hours of 1 December.

A Brazilian Navy inquiry concluded in January 2005 that the cause was a fault in Sarandi's own weapons system, a sobering reminder that training exercises carry real risk even among allied navies, and one made only slightly stranger by the fact that Sarandi had been one of Rademaker's own partner ships on a previous FRATERNO exercise four years earlier.

In fact she had already been to Haiti earlier that same year, sailing from Rio on 28 May 2004 and reaching Port-au-Prince on 14 June as part of the UN stabilisation mission, where she spent her first fortnight ashore doing something rather removed from anti-aircraft missile work, supplying 20 tonnes of drinking water a day to peacekeeping troops until the UN could take over the job itself.

More recently, she took part in the search for the lost bulk carrier Stellar Daisy in April 2017, reaching the search area off Uruguay within days of the sinking, and that November joined the multinational hunt for the missing Argentine submarine ARA San Juan alongside the submarine rescue ship Felinto Perry and the polar vessel Almirante Maximiano, remaining in active Brazilian naval service to this day, a ship whose career, delayed at its most famous moment by a broken propeller shaft, has nonetheless gone on to see decades of varied and useful service under a second flag.

The San Juan search is worth a closing note. The Argentine submarine disappeared in the South Atlantic in November 2017 with forty-four people aboard, and the hunt for her became one of the largest international search operations ever mounted at sea, with ships and aircraft from a dozen countries including the ship that had once been Battleaxe. She was found a year later, imploded, on the seabed at around eight hundred metres. A British-built frigate, sold to Brazil, searching for an Argentine submarine, thirty-five years after a British submarine sank an Argentine cruiser, is the sort of thing that only happens if ships last long enough.

The San Juan was not the only thing she did that year, either, and the other one is harder to read. In July 2017, in the Brazilian Navy's MISSILEX 2017 exercise, Rademaker fired an Exocet into the frigate Bosísio and sank her. Bosísio was the former HMS Brazen, another Type 22 Batch 1, laid down on the Clyde within a few years of Battleaxe, sold to Brazil in 1994 and paid off in 2015. They had been sisters in the Royal Navy and then sisters again in the Brazilian one.

It was thorough. After the Exocet went in, Penguin missiles followed, then AF-1B jets put two hundred and thirty kilogram bombs into what was left, and two Niterói-class frigates finished the afternoon with their 4.5-inch guns. Using a paid-off ship as a target is entirely standard practice and it is the only way to find out what modern weapons actually do to a real hull. It is still an odd thing to have on a service record: the ship that missed the Falklands because of a propeller shaft eventually fired the Exocet that sank the ship she had been built alongside.

She is still there, and probably not for very much longer. She is past forty-five years old, has had fires aboard in recent years, and the Brazilian Navy is in the middle of a modernisation programme that will see the greater part of its existing fleet paid off by 2028, with Rademaker expected to be among the frigates going. When she does go, one of the last working Type 22s anywhere will go with her, more than fifty years after Audrey Callaghan broke a bottle on her bow at Scotstoun.