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. She joined the fleet as one of the well-armed Batch 2 Type 22 frigates, purpose-built for exactly the kind of high-intensity naval operations that the Falklands conflict, and later the Gulf War, would go on to demand of her.

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. 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. 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. HMS Brazen's own Lynx helicopter also saw action during the war, attacking Iraqi fast patrol boats operating in the Gulf.

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. 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, and in early 1996 HMS Brazen rescued thirty Albanian migrants from a sinking vessel, a genuinely 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 and, following her final Royal Navy deployments, was renamed Bosísio and commissioned into Brazilian service on 30 August 1996. 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 finally sunk as a target during the Brazilian Navy's Missilex 2017 exercise that July, bringing to a close a career that had spanned a Falklands-era rush to service, a Gulf War missile scare, an Adriatic rescue, and a genuinely significant contribution to one of the most closely watched air-crash investigations of the twenty-first century.