HMS Brilliant (F90): The Frigate Whose Missiles Held the Line at San Carlos

A Purpose-Built Anti-Submarine Escort

HMS Brilliant was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, laid down on 25 March 1977, launched on 15 December 1978, and commissioned on 15 May 1981, a Batch 1 Type 22 frigate built specifically for anti-submarine escort work, costing around £110 million.

Displacing 4,400 tons, HMS Brilliant carried two Seawolf missile launchers for close-range air defence, four Exocet anti-ship missile launchers, twin 40mm Bofors guns and two Lynx Mark 3S helicopters, a properly well-rounded fit that would be tested in earnest less than a year after she commissioned.

Three Skyhawks in an Afternoon

HMS Brilliant, under Captain John Coward, deployed to the South Atlantic for the Falklands War in 1982, taking part in Operation Paraquet, the recapture of South Georgia. On 25 April, her two Lynx helicopters joined those of HMS Antrim, HMS Plymouth and HMS Endurance in a scrambled multi-aircraft attack on the Argentine submarine Santa Fe as she tried to slip back into Grytviken harbour; Brilliant's own Lynx put in a Mk.46 torpedo run and strafed the casing with machine-gun fire, one contribution among several that damaged Santa Fe badly enough to force her crew to abandon her alongside the jetty, ending Argentine resistance at South Georgia without a shot fired ashore.

On 12 May 1982, HMS Brilliant and HMS Glasgow used a coordinated tactic to draw attacking Argentine aircraft within range of their air defence systems; when four A-4B Skyhawks from Grupo 5 attacked at low altitude, HMS Glasgow's Sea Dart system failed to engage, leaving Brilliant's own Sea Wolf missiles as the sole active defence.

She fired three missiles, destroying two Skyhawks outright, killing Lieutenants Mario Nivoli and Jorge Ibarlucea, and causing a third, flown by Lieutenant Oscar Bustos, to crash while manoeuvring to evade, killing him too.

A fourth Skyhawk escaped the engagement but crash-landed on return to base after its canopy was damaged, a devastatingly effective demonstration of the Sea Wolf system's capability, achieved at the cost of three Argentine pilots' lives, a sober reminder of what such a successful engagement actually meant for the men flying against her.

The other half of that afternoon is told a good deal less often. A second wave of Grupo 5 Skyhawks came in behind the first, and this time Sea Wolf let them through. The system had been built to kill a sea-skimming missile flying a straight line at the ship, and four aircraft weaving hard at low level was not the problem it had been designed for. The trackers lost the picture, the launchers swung back to the fore and aft position, and nothing was fired. The bombs went into the water around both ships, except for one. Dropped by Lieutenant Fausto Gavazzi, it struck HMS Glasgow about three feet above the waterline on the starboard side, went clean through her aft engine room and out the other side, and did not go off. Inside roughly ten minutes HMS Brilliant had proved what Sea Wolf could do and exposed exactly where it stopped working.

A Beer Barrel Bomb at Fox Bay

Two days after the Skyhawk engagement, HMS Brilliant pulled off one of the more improbable episodes of the whole war. On the night of 14 May 1982, Lieutenant Paul McKay flew one of her two Lynx helicopters low over West Falkland towards Fox Bay, where the Argentine supply ship Bahia Buen Suceso lay resupplying a garrison some 900 strong, defended by Roland and Tigercat missiles and anti-aircraft guns. An attempt to send in the ship's own fast raiding craft had already been ruled out as suicidal by the Special Boat Squadron, so the plan that remained, inspired by the 1940 Taranto raid, was to fly in low and drop a bomb down the ship's funnel.

The bomb itself was homemade: roughly 60lb of plastic explosive packed into an empty Courage beer barrel with a short fuse. McKay's pilot flew so low over the terrain that McKay could see boulders above the level of his own shoulder, before anti-aircraft fire from multiple directions forced a violent, evasive run over the target, McKay firing his own submachine gun from the cockpit as they went. The bomb was dropped and the helicopter escaped, damaged but still flying, though McKay would only learn later that the second Lynx providing cover had landed safely rather than being shot down, as he had feared throughout the flight home.

Bahia Buen Suceso never put to sea again, eventually finished off by naval gunfire and Sea Harrier cannon fire rather than bombs, since by then she lay too close to civilian homes to risk it. McKay was later commended for his "cool return of fire...killing and wounding a number of the enemy manning an anti-aircraft position," and nearly four decades on he traced and befriended one of the Argentine defenders he had wounded that night, a reconciliation he has described as finding "inner peace at last."

Hit at San Carlos, Then a Rescue

On 21 May 1982, during the amphibious landings at San Carlos, an Argentine Mirage V Dagger from Grupo 6 de Caza strafed HMS Brilliant with its 30mm cannon, scoring multiple hits. One shell penetrated the ship's operations room while fragments damaged the Sea Wolf launcher and the live missiles loaded within it, a remarkably dangerous strike that could easily have been far more costly than it was.

The damaged Sea Wolf nose cone and a section of hull plate from the attack are now on display at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.

On the night of 22 to 23 May, HMS Brilliant and HMS Yarmouth were sent to intercept the Argentine coaster Monsunen, running fuel and ammunition to the garrison at Stanley. A Lynx spotted her off Lively Island and radioed a surrender demand; when a second helicopter tried to put a Special Boat Squadron team aboard, it was met with machine-gun fire and forced to abort, and Monsunen escaped capture by grounding herself in a nearby inlet under heavy shelling, the only armed ship-to-ship engagement of the entire war.

Just days later, on 25 May 1982, HMS Brilliant responded swiftly after the container ship SS Atlantic Conveyor was struck by two Argentine Exocet missiles and set ablaze, launching boats to pull survivors from the water and providing medical care, rescuing twenty-four people from the stricken vessel.

For his part in the action, Coward was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, cited for "exceptional professional ability, stamina, leadership, initiative and personal bravery." He went on to reach flag rank, serving as Flag Officer Sea Training and later Flag Officer Submarines before retiring in 1994 as a Vice Admiral, an unexpected postscript to a career built on high-tempo naval command finding him, in later life, Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey.

Squadron Leadership and Later Deployments

HMS Brilliant went on to lead the 2nd Frigate Squadron in 1987.

Tragedy struck on 14 May 1989, when a Lynx helicopter from HMS Brilliant, flying her company towards Mombasa in Kenya for a spell of shore leave, suffered a catastrophic accident after a cabin door, its retaining ball bearings missing, detached in flight and struck the tail rotor, causing the aircraft to break apart; all nine men aboard were killed, among them Lieutenant Commander Christopher Fessey, a devastating loss for the ship's company that stands as one of the gravest peacetime tragedies in the Type 22 frigate's service history. A memorial to the nine now stands in the Mission to Seafarers chapel in Mombasa.

The First Wrens to Go to Sea

In October 1990 HMS Brilliant did something no Royal Navy warship had ever done. She took women to sea as part of her ship's company. The decision to end the rule that had kept the Women's Royal Naval Service ashore had been taken shortly beforehand, Brilliant was the ship chosen to prove it, and she sailed from Devonport on 8 October 1990 with the first of them aboard. There was no gentle settling-in period. Three months later she was on her way to the Gulf, which means the first women to serve at sea in the Royal Navy went to a war almost immediately, and the point that had been argued about for decades in committee rooms was settled at sea inside a single commission.

By the accounts of the women who were actually there, most of the fuss stayed ashore. Pippa Gregory, then a Leading Hand and one of the first aboard, has said that they were treated exactly as their male counterparts were, quite rightly, and that there were no special privileges of any kind. The rest of the fleet followed almost at once: seventy-five women joined HMS Invincible together in November 1990, a month after Brilliant sailed. It is one of the more consequential things any of these ships did, and it is not the sort of thing that gets a battle honour.

She deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Granby during the 1991 Gulf War, and took part in operations off the former Yugoslavia in 1994, enforcing United Nations arms embargoes during the Balkan conflicts.

That Adriatic patrol made her one of the more recognisable frigates in Britain for an unrelated reason: the BBC's fly-on-the-wall documentary series HMS Brilliant, six episodes following the ship's company through boarding operations, port visits and a disciplinary hearing, aired through the summer of 1995 and proved genuinely controversial for its frank look at mixed-gender crews at sea, an issue Episode 3, "Rocking the Boat," tackled head-on at a time when women had only recently begun serving aboard Royal Navy warships.

The series was made by the documentary maker Christopher Terrill, who went to sea with the ship for the deployment, and its six episodes remain about the most unguarded look at a Royal Navy warship anyone has been allowed to broadcast. "Rocking the Boat" went out on 9 August 1995 and put the argument about mixed crews on national television with both sides speaking their minds, which is precisely why it caused trouble; several of the women aboard felt they had been poorly served by the newspaper coverage that followed. Another thread of the series followed a mechanic up before the captain, accused of striking a superior officer, with the ship's own commanding officer hearing the case. That captain was James Rapp, who five years earlier had taken HMS Brazen to the Gulf, and who would go on to be a Rear Admiral and the Navy's Flag Officer Sea Training. There is a certain symmetry in the ship that first took women to sea being the one that ended up arguing about it on BBC One.

A Brazilian Retirement

HMS Brilliant was decommissioned in 1996 and sold to Brazil on 31 August that year, renamed Dodsworth with the pennant F47, continuing to serve in the Brazilian Navy for over a decade and a half after her Royal Navy career ended.

She was eventually sold for scrap and broken up at Aliağa in Turkey during July 2012, bringing to a close the career of a ship whose Sea Wolf missiles, on a single May afternoon in 1982, had done as much as any single weapons system in the Falklands War to prove the value of modern air defence at sea.