HMS Brazen (F91): Screening a Hospital Ship From Exocet-Armed Iraqi Jets

Completed Early for a War

HMS Brazen was a Type 22 frigate whose completion was accelerated by three months because of the outbreak of the Falklands War in 1982, the Royal Navy pressing to get every capable frigate into service as quickly as possible at a moment when the fleet's strength in the South Atlantic mattered more than the normal pace of a shipbuilding programme. Built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, she had been laid down in August 1978 and launched in March 1980, and for all the urgency she still did not commission until 2 July 1982, three weeks after the Argentine surrender, so the frigate rushed to war arrived just too late to fight in it.

She joined the fleet as the fourth and last of the Batch 1 Type 22s, behind HMS Broadsword, HMS Battleaxe and HMS Brilliant. Batch 1 was the design in its original and most austere form: Sea Wolf, Exocet, two Lynx, a hull built around sonar, and nothing bigger than a 40mm Bofors on the upper deck, because she had been drawn to hunt Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic and to do very little else. The Falklands changed the Navy's mind about that, as the story of her half-sister HMS Boxer explains, but Brazen was already built. All four Batch 1 ships would eventually end up under the same foreign flag, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a class of warship, and Brazen would be the one her own sister was eventually sent to sink.

The name itself had been in the Navy since 1781, when it went to a fourteen-gun cutter, and it has generally been handed to small, sharp ships. The holder immediately before her was HMS Brazen, a B-class destroyer, and she was lost on 20 July 1940 in the Channel off Dover during the convoy battles that opened the Battle of Britain. Junkers Ju 87s came at her in numbers; the near misses broke her back, a hit in the engine room finished it, and she went down having lost a single man, her gunners claiming three of the dive-bombers on the way. That is a difficult act to follow, and the frigate that took the name up again forty-two years later would find her own sharpest moment arriving out of the sky as well.

A Royal Flight Pilot on the Quiet Years

Her first decade was uneventful by comparison with what came later, but it did put a well-known name on her flight deck. In May 1984 Lieutenant HRH The Prince Andrew joined 815 Naval Air Squadron and went to sea in HMS Brazen as her Lynx flight pilot, a job he held until March 1986. He had been to war already, flying Sea Kings from HMS Invincible in the South Atlantic in 1982 while Brazen was still being finished on the Clyde, and the Brazen commission took in a Mediterranean deployment with NATO's standing naval force.

It is worth being clear about what the job was, because royal postings tend to attract a certain amount of eye-rolling. The flight pilot in a Type 22 flies the aircraft that does the ship's dirty work: dipping sonar, surface search, missile attack, everything the frigate cannot reach herself. There is very little ceremony in it and a great deal of night flying off a small deck in poor weather. Five years later the same flight, under a different pilot, would be sinking Iraqi warships with it.

Guarding a Hospital Ship in the Gulf

HMS Brazen served on the long-standing Armilla Patrol in the Gulf, a deployment that escalated into a full task force commitment during the 1991 Gulf War as part of Operation Granby, service for which she was awarded the battle honour Kuwait 1991, under the command of Commander James Rapp, who had taken the frigate over in 1989 and would later reach flag rank as a Rear Admiral and serve as the Royal Navy's Flag Officer Sea Training.

Her most dramatic moment came on 24 January 1991, when HMS Brazen was screening the auxiliary ship RFA Argus, then serving as a makeshift hospital and aviation support ship, as a pair of Iraqi Mirage F1 aircraft armed with AM39 Exocet anti-ship missiles made a run at the task force. Argus had been taken from her peacetime role as an aviation training ship and hurriedly converted, from October 1990, into a 100-bed Primary Casualty Receiving Ship, her Sea King helicopters repainted in desert camouflage, and beyond a few machine guns she carried no defensive armament of her own, which was exactly why Brazen's job of shielding her mattered so much.

The Iraqi jets were shot down by Saudi F-15C fighters before they were able to fire their missiles, a close call that could very easily have ended in the kind of Exocet strike that had already proved so devastating against other ships in earlier conflicts. The intercept was flown by Captain Ayedh al-Shamrani, guided onto the Mirages by an American AWACS and closing to visual range to down both with Sidewinder missiles within about thirty seconds of each other, a kill later picked over by sceptics who wondered why an aircraft built for shooting enemies down from miles out had been flown in so close, and whether a nearby, arguably better-placed pair of US Navy F-14 Tomcats had been waved off so a Saudi pilot, rather than an American one, got the credit. Whatever the politics behind it, the missiles never got airborne, and Argus and her escorts sailed on unscathed. HMS Brazen's own Lynx helicopter also saw action during the war, attacking Iraqi fast patrol boats operating in the Gulf.

That last line about her Lynx deserves rather more than a sentence, because the official record of it is remarkable. The London Gazette's citation for Brazen's Flight Commander sets out what the ship actually did: she played, in its words, a leading role in the Multi-National Force implementing United Nations sanctions against Iraq, and once hostilities began she provided air defence protection to Allied units while her helicopters assisted in the destruction of the Iraqi Navy. The Flight Commander was Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Pearey, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

On 29 January 1991, five days after the Argus scare, Pearey was captain of one of Brazen's aircraft in the far north of the Gulf, working with a Lynx from HMS Gloucester. He had already searched the water three miles off the Kuwaiti coast at under a hundred feet and gone to refuel on the American cruiser USS Mobile Bay when he picked up word there of possible enemy contacts and asked for permission to go and look. He found seventeen vessels heading south in support of the Iraqi assault on Khafji, called in Gloucester's Lynx, and between them they broke up the force. He kept pressing the attack to the very limits of the aircraft's range and endurance and flew eight hours that day, much of it low and close to enemy-held coast. The citation credits him with helping to prevent an Iraqi attack on Saudi territory from the sea.

He was up again the following day, attacking two Iraqi naval vessels in smoke and poor visibility a long way from any friendly ship, and closed to three miles to be certain what he was shooting at before he shot at it. On 8 February, hunting the small craft hiding in the inlets and creeks along the Kuwaiti coast, his aircraft diverted to investigate what looked like a mine and came under fire. He told the pilot to take evasive action and carried on with the sortie. RAF Jaguars, and Lynx flights from Gloucester, Cardiff and Brazen, between them accounted for a very large proportion of what was left of the Iraqi Navy in those few days. Sea Skua had been blooded in the Falklands nine years earlier, but the Gulf was where the little missile earned its keep, and it did so by helping to destroy an entire navy.

Aground in Patagonia, and a Rescue in the Adriatic

HMS Brazen ran aground in the Patagonian Canal on 11 September 1994, a serious incident that required four days to refloat her before she was repaired at the Chilean port of Talcahuano, work that took the best part of a month before she was fit to sail on.

The bill for it reached the House of Commons. Asked in November 1994 what the repairs would eventually cost, the Minister of State for Defence Procurement, Roger Freeman, told the House that the initial work had been done at Talcahuano, that Devonport Management Limited would finish the job at Devonport royal dockyard, and that the total was expected to be some £2.5 million. There is a small irony in the timing. The contract selling Brazen to Brazil had been signed eleven days before that answer was given, so the money was being spent patching up a hull the Ministry had already agreed to hand over to somebody else.

By late 1995 she was operating in the Adriatic Sea as part of a task group led by HMS Ark Royal supporting Operation Sharp Guard, the NATO and Western European Union enforcement of sanctions and an arms embargo during the Yugoslav wars, alongside fellow Type 22 frigate HMS Beaver; over its three years, Sharp Guard's patrol ships challenged more than 51,000 vessels, boarded upwards of 4,000 of them and diverted over 1,000 for inspection, and in early 1996 HMS Brazen rescued thirty Albanian migrants from a sinking vessel, a notably lifesaving intervention that stood in sharp contrast to the sanctions-enforcement work she was otherwise engaged in. She returned to Devonport for the final time in May 1996.

A Second Career, and a Role in Recovering Flight 447

HMS Brazen was purchased by the Brazilian Navy on 18 November 1994, part of a roughly $170 million deal that also brought over three of her Type 22 fleetmates and three River-class minesweepers, and, following her final Royal Navy deployments, was renamed Bosísio and commissioned into Brazilian service on 30 August 1996 under her first Brazilian commanding officer, Captain Sérgio Lima Duarte.

In June 2009, Bosísio took part in the international recovery operation for the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, a sombre and technically demanding mission that put her sonar and seamanship skills to a very different use than anything she had trained for as a Royal Navy frigate.

She was decommissioned on 23 September 2015 and spent her last two years as a hulk before being towed out that July to serve as the live target for the Brazilian Navy's Missilex 2017 exercise off Cabo Frio. A ship-launched Penguin missile opened the attack, then the frigate Rademaker, herself once the Royal Navy's own HMS Battleaxe, put in a strike of her own: the Exocet that had never quite caught up with Brazen over the Gulf twenty-six years earlier finally did. AF-1 Skyhawks followed with eight 230kg bombs, and with the hulk listing badly, the frigates Liberal and Independência settled the matter with their 4.5-inch guns and sent her to the bottom. It brought to a close a career that had spanned a Falklands-era rush to service, a Gulf War missile scare, an Adriatic rescue, and a significant contribution to one of the most closely watched air-crash investigations of the twenty-first century.