HMS Brave (F94): Shielding American Carriers Through the Gulf War's Minefields

A Type 22 Frigate for the Modern Fleet

HMS Brave was ordered on 27 August 1981 and built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, laid down on 24 May 1982, launched on 19 November 1983 and commissioned on 4 July 1986, spending most of her first commission as a trials ship helping to prove the systems and procedures of the Type 22 class. It was not until she completed Basic Operational Sea Training at Portland in the autumn of 1987 that she properly joined the frontline fleet, going on to lead the 9th Frigate Squadron.

She was fitted with a GWS25 Mod 3 Seawolf missile system for close-range air defence, four MM38 Exocet anti-ship missile launchers, twin 40/60 Bofors guns and STWS torpedo tubes, a well-armed general-purpose frigate built for exactly the kind of high-tempo, high-threat deployments she would eventually see in the Gulf.

Built Around an Engine Nobody Else Had

The phrase "trials ship" is doing a great deal of quiet work in that first paragraph. Brave was not simply the newest hull available for whatever the Navy happened to want tested. She had been ordered with the Olympus and Tyne combination that drove every Type 22 before her, and she was delivered with something else entirely: two Rolls-Royce Spey SM1A gas turbines sitting where the Olympus should have been. The substitution was deliberate, made so that the fleet could accumulate real sea experience with a new engine before committing to it wholesale, and the first two production marine Spey modules entered Royal Navy service aboard her in August 1985, the better part of a year before she was commissioned. There is a pleasing symmetry in the name, too. Rolls-Royce's earlier Proteus turbine had powered the 55-knot Brave class fast patrol boats, and it was those boats that first persuaded the Admiralty that gas turbines could drive proper warships at all.

The Spey was an aero engine sent to sea. Rolls-Royce took the TF41 version of the Spey turbofan, deleted the bypass air, added a free power turbine designed specifically for marine work and arrived at 12.75 megawatts, a figure chosen because it matched the shaft power of the Leander generation of frigates and because the Spey could produce it at a lower turbine temperature than anything else in the Rolls-Royce range, which left room to uprate it later. It burned roughly half the fuel of what had gone before. What it could not do was match the Olympus for sheer output, so Brave was simply slower than her sisters, and the company's own account of that, given in a paper to the Institute of Marine Engineers, is a small masterpiece of understatement: the loss of speed was "inevitable but acceptable", since "minor variations in maximum speed are less significant in modern naval operations". Her half-sister HMS Boxer, first of the Batch 2 ships, kept her Olympus and kept her knots.

Exercising With Four Navies in the Gulf of Thailand

In 1989, HMS Brave deployed to Southeast Asia, taking part in exercises in the Gulf of Thailand alongside the navies of Australia, whose frigate HMAS Darwin took part, as well as Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore, a particularly wide-ranging demonstration of multinational naval cooperation in a region of growing strategic importance, and useful practice in coalition operations that would prove directly relevant only two years later.

An Engine Change Without Coming Off the Line

In November and December 1989 the Navy took the trial to its logical conclusion and changed her engines again. Out came the two SM1As and in went the uprated SM1C: 18 megawatts apiece, a forty per cent increase in shaft power, and a fuel burn that had improved from 0.396 to 0.372 pounds per brake horsepower hour, all of it inside a module of exactly the same physical size as the one it replaced.

It is usually written up as a refit at Devonport, and the Rolls-Royce paper says as much, but at the meeting where that paper was read a Commander R F James of the Ministry of Defence stood up and corrected the record. Brave had not been in refit at all. The engine change was carried out during a normal programmed maintenance period, with the ship held at operational notice for sea throughout, which is to say she could have been ordered to sail while it was going on. He wondered aloud whether some sort of record had been set by increasing a warship's available power by some fifty per cent while she remained operational, and called the whole exercise an object lesson in project management. Thirteen months later she was on her way to the Gulf.

The trial paid for itself twice over. The four Batch 3 Type 22s that followed, HMS Cumberland among them, were built with the Spey and Tyne arrangement as fitted in Brave rather than the Olympus of the earlier ships, while the remaining Batch 2 ships reverted to Olympus and Tyne. The Spey then went on to become the boost turbine of the Type 23 Duke class, which is still the backbone of the frigate force. For a ship whose career is usually summarised in a single line about the Gulf, that is a substantial piece of inheritance.

She was back at sea in the new year. The following spring she departed Portsmouth as part of Task Group 318.1, escorting the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, HMS Glasgow and HMS Cumberland on a deployment to the western North Atlantic, supported by RFA Fort Grange and RFA Olna, before returning home on 28 June 1990, just months before she would be called on for a rather more serious deployment.

Flagship in the Gulf War

HMS Brave departed Portland on 15 January 1991 for Armilla Patrol duties in company with HMS Exeter, HMS Brilliant and RFA Bayleaf, later joined by HMS Manchester, relieving HMS Gloucester, HMS Cardiff and HMS Brazen on station as the Gulf War began in earnest. She sailed as flagship for Commodore Christopher Craig, the Senior Naval Officer Middle East, who commanded the Royal Navy's entire sea-based task group from her decks, a force that by his own account also included the hospital ship RFA Argus and four logistics landing ships keeping the fleet supplied with ammunition, food and water.

Her duties included providing anti-missile defence for American aircraft carriers and battleships operating in the Gulf, alongside sonar tasking and mine-watching in waters that Iraq had heavily seeded with sea mines.

The mine threat she watched for was very real. Royal Navy minehunters worked throughout the campaign to clear safe channels through Iraq's minefields, work that in due course allowed the American battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin to close the coast and bombard Iraqi positions with their own guns, the wider mine-clearance effort that HMS Brave's own watch-keeping contributed to, even though the actual sweeping was somebody else's job.

HMS Brave came close to mines dispatched by Iraqi forces on more than one occasion during the campaign, a dangerous hazard for any ship operating in the confined and heavily mined waters of the northern Gulf, and her work protecting far larger American warships from missile attack placed her squarely at the sharp end of coalition naval operations.

Home Waters, and a Final Role as a Target

HMS Brave's later years took her rather further afield than "sonar patrol duties around British waters" suggests. She was on station in the Caribbean by December 1995 and spent the early months of 1996 as West Indies Guardship, a job that mixed disaster relief, drug interdiction and the occasional spell of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy. She was warned at one point that she might be needed off the Turks and Caicos Islands to support the Governor in the event of civil disturbance, and warned separately that she might be sent south to relieve HMS Northumberland in the Falklands.

What actually stopped her was neither. At the end of March 1996 she paid a three-day visit to Port of Spain in Trinidad, and the harbour filled with jellyfish. Not a few of them: an enormous swarm of small ones, thick enough that the surface of the water disappeared from view and the saltwater intakes clogged as fast as the strainers could be cleared. Teams worked around the clock for three days and lost. Generators failed, firemain pressure fell away, the air conditioning gave up and the temperature between decks reached 52 degrees Celsius, which is why a good part of the ship's company ended up sleeping on the upper deck. Her commanding officer personally led a dive team onto the hull to try to clear the intakes, with only limited success, and in the end Brave shifted to a cleaner anchorage with the help of RFA Oakleaf. By her own ship's account she was glad to leave "not a moment too soon". There is no battle honour for it, but not many frigates have been fought to a standstill by an invertebrate.

She was relieved as West Indies Guardship by HMS Argyll that May, the same ship that would help send her to the bottom eight years later, before HMS Brave herself was decommissioned on 23 March 1999.

Rather than being scrapped, she was towed out of Portsmouth on 27 July 2004 alongside her own sister ship, HMS Boxer, and expended as a target days later, sunk by the submarine HMS Sceptre and the frigate HMS Argyll, fittingly the same ship that had relieved her in the Caribbean eight years earlier, during a live-fire exercise. Her hull was put to a final, useful purpose testing modern weapons systems, closing out a career that had taken her from multinational exercises in the Gulf of Thailand to hazardous mine-watching duty protecting American carriers and battleships during one of the defining conflicts of the early 1990s.

There is one last thread worth pulling on. The frigate that fired on her was HMS Argyll, a Type 23, and the Type 23s go to sea behind Rolls-Royce Speys of precisely the sort Brave had been built to prove. She spent her first years demonstrating that the engine worked, and her last afternoon demonstrating what happens to a hull when a ship using it takes a proper shot at you. The Navy got its money out of her twice.