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 genuinely capable and heavily armed frigate for her era.

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 genuinely frustrating turn of mechanical luck for a ship built for exactly that kind of deployment. 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

On 2 July 1988, Battleaxe recovered sailors from the yacht Dalriada after it collided with the periscope of the submarine HMS Conqueror, a rather unusual rescue for a frigate to perform. 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 genuinely active career in Brazilian service. In 2004 she was involved in a friendly-fire incident during exercise FRATERNO with the Argentine Navy, when a weapons malfunction aboard the Argentine ship ARA Sarandí injured four Brazilian crewmen and an Argentine naval observer and caused moderate damage to the ship, a sobering reminder that training exercises carry real risk even among allied navies. That same year she deployed to Port-au-Prince as part of the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti, and more recently took part in the search for the lost bulk carrier Stellar Daisy in April 2017 and, that November, the tragic search for the missing Argentine submarine ARA San Juan, 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 genuinely varied and useful service under a second flag.