HMS Broadsword (F88): The Frigate That Watched HMS Coventry Sink Beside Her

Leading a New Class

HMS Broadsword was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, her keel laid on 7 February 1975, launched on 12 May 1976, and commissioned on 3 May 1979, the lead ship of the Batch 1 Type 22 frigates.

Displacing 4,400 tons, she carried two GWS25 Seawolf missile launchers, four Exocet anti-ship missile launchers, twin 40mm Bofors guns, 20mm Oerlikon cannon, Mark 46 torpedo tubes and a Lynx helicopter, a formidable and versatile fit that made the class one of the most capable general-purpose frigates in the Royal Navy.

Even while still on sea trials in 1979, HMS Broadsword was called into service as command ship for the large rescue operation mounted after storms devastated the Fastnet yacht race that August, a striking first taste of real operational demand before she had even formally joined the fleet. Working alongside HMS Anglesey and HMS Scylla, she helped coordinate what became the largest peacetime rescue operation Britain had ever mounted: some 4,000 people, 15 helicopters and 14 RNLI lifeboats searching more than 10,000 square miles of the Celtic Sea after a sudden, savage storm scattered a fleet of 303 racing yachts. 125 sailors were pulled from the water alive, though 15 competitors and six more from a spectator vessel lost their lives.

What came out of that weekend is the reason it still matters, and it reached a great deal further than yacht racing. The Royal Yachting Association and the Royal Ocean Racing Club held a joint inquiry and produced a seventy-four page report that went at the whole thing: the forecasting, the hull designs, watertight integrity, rig strength, steering gear, liferafts, lifejackets, harnesses, watchkeeping, tactics, radio discipline and the conduct of the search itself.

The findings changed the sport permanently. Stability requirements were tightened, and the screening system the RORC devised became the starting point for ISO 12217-2, the standard that is now used both to enter offshore races and by British designers to satisfy European rules on recreational craft, which means the modern production yacht owes part of its shape to that storm. Companionways, washboards and hatches had to be strong enough to survive a knockdown and had to open and secure from both sides. Emergency steering became a requirement, because a great many of the worst-hit boats had lost their rudders. Harnesses had to take a two hundred kilogram load. VHF radio became compulsory, and crews entering ocean races now have to pre-qualify.

The hardest lesson was the simplest. A number of the yachts abandoned that night were found afterwards still floating, and several of the people who died had left them for liferafts. The advice that came out of it, and which is still taught, is that you do not step off a boat until you are stepping up into something else, because the boat is almost always the better raft. Broadsword was on sea trials, not yet even a commissioned warship, and she spent her first real employment coordinating the search that produced all of it.

Sheffield, Ardent and a Ship Running Out of Helicopters

Broadsword's own war had begun days before her famous pairing with Coventry. Sailing with the 1st Carrier Battle Group, she flew firefighting equipment across to HMS Sheffield after the destroyer was struck by an Exocet missile on 4 May, one of the first ships to render aid.

On 21 May, during the San Carlos landings, one of Broadsword's own helicopter crews rescued HMS Ardent's doctor after he was blown over the side by bomb blast, and Broadsword then gave air cover while HMS Yarmouth pulled the rest of Ardent's survivors from the water as the frigate burned and finally sank. Two days later, on 23 May, Broadsword's flight crew had just landed on HMS Antelope when the frigate herself was hit, close enough to the flight deck to leave little room for comfort.

During the fighting in Bomb Alley, both of Broadsword's own helicopters were put out of action. She and HMS Brilliant were the only two ships in the task force still fitted to operate a pair of aircraft, so Brilliant lent Broadsword one of her own Lynx helicopters to keep a flight going, the very aircraft that would take the brunt of the damage a few days later.

Paired With HMS Coventry

HMS Broadsword deployed to the Falklands War in 1982, and on 25 May was paired tactically with HMS Coventry for the third time in the campaign, the two ships working together so that HMS Broadsword's shorter-range Seawolf missile system could engage any Argentine aircraft that evaded HMS Coventry's longer-range Sea Dart missiles.

It is worth being clear about why the two ships were working together at all, because it was not defensive. The pairing was bait. Coventry and Broadsword were stationed north of Pebble Island deliberately in the open, to pull Argentine aircraft away from the ships unloading at San Carlos, with Coventry's long-range Sea Dart to engage them on the way in and Broadsword's short-range Sea Wolf to catch anything that got through. It had worked twice already. The arrangement asked one ship to advertise herself and the other to be quick enough to save them both, and on 25 May neither half of it functioned.

When Argentine aircraft attacked that afternoon, HMS Coventry was unable to achieve a missile lock on the first pair of attackers, and HMS Broadsword's own Seawolf system shut down at the critical moment.

The Sea Wolf failure was not a fault so much as a limitation. The system had been designed to kill a single sea-skimming missile flying a straight line, and it did that superbly; presented with aircraft manoeuvring hard in pairs at low level it could lose its picture and reset itself, which is precisely what happened here and had happened to HMS Brilliant on 12 May. The weapon that had been the whole justification for the Type 22 design chose the worst possible moment to think about it.

A bomb struck HMS Broadsword during this attack, tearing through her after section, shearing the nose clean off the borrowed Lynx and cutting a torpedo slung beneath it clean in two, before bouncing up through her helicopter deck and out of the ship, exploding harmlessly clear of the hull, an extraordinarily fortunate outcome that could very easily have proven catastrophic. Frantic damage control below decks and on the flight deck kept her fighting, the wrecked helicopter's own tail was salvaged to help repair one of the task force's other damaged aircraft, and the ship herself was properly patched up only later, by the repair vessel Stena Seaspread.

Coventry's Loss, and a Rescue

As a second pair of Argentine Douglas A-4 Skyhawks attacked, HMS Coventry manoeuvred to present a smaller profile to the incoming aircraft, but in doing so moved directly into HMS Broadsword's own field of fire, preventing HMS Broadsword from engaging the attackers herself.

HMS Coventry was struck by the Skyhawks' bombs and sank, one of the most grievous single losses of the entire Falklands War, and HMS Broadsword's crew turned immediately to rescue, pulling 170 survivors from HMS Coventry's crew from the freezing South Atlantic waters.

What followed was very quick. Coventry took her bombs, listed, and capsized completely in under an hour. Nineteen of her ship's company were killed, seventeen in the ship and two more in the act of abandoning her. Broadsword, herself just holed and with a wrecked helicopter on her deck, put her boat and her Gemini in the water and began towing life rafts clear of the capsizing destroyer, which had a magazine in her and could have gone up at any moment. They took off a hundred and seventy people. It is one thing to read that a ship rescued survivors and another to picture a frigate that had been bombed twenty minutes earlier sending her boats alongside a rolling hull to do it.

The destroyer's own account of that afternoon, from her side of the water, is in the article on HMS Coventry (D118), and the title of it is a quotation from one of her people rather than an editorial judgement.

HMS Broadsword's own war record included shooting down an IAI Dagger outright and sharing credit for the destruction of an A-4C Skyhawk, a significant combat contribution set against the harrowing experience of watching her paired ship go down within sight of her own deck.

The Balkans, and Tragedy

The decade after the Falklands was, by comparison, a quiet one, spent on the routine cycle of NATO exercises, refits and general-purpose deployments that made up most of a frigate's working life.

HMS Broadsword went on to serve in the Adriatic during Operation Grapple in 1993, supporting United Nations efforts during the Yugoslav wars. Her service there ended in tragedy on 8 July 1993, just as operations were concluding, when a fire broke out in her aft auxiliary machinery room, killing two engineers who were on watch at the time, a devastating loss for the ship's company that stands as one of the gravest peacetime incidents in the Type 22 frigate's history.

The two men who died were Leading Marine Engineering Mechanic Mark Adrian Hunt, aged thirty, from Lancaster, and Marine Engineering Mechanic Roy Francis Ware, aged twenty-two, from Plymouth. They were on watch. It is worth writing their names down, because a machinery space fire at the end of an uneventful deployment is exactly the kind of loss that disappears from a ship's story, and Broadsword's story has rather a lot of competition in it.

By July 1994 she was serving as the Royal Navy's West Indies Guard Ship, before returning to the United Kingdom in March 1995 to be decommissioned.

A Long Second Career

HMS Broadsword was decommissioned on 31 March 1995 and sold to Brazil on 30 June that year for £116 million alongside three of her sister ships, renamed Greenhalgh in a ceremony at Plymouth. The name honoured Guarda-Marinha (Midshipman) Joao Guilherme Greenhalgh, who died defending Brazil's national flag after it was seized by a Paraguayan soldier during the 1865 Battle of Riachuelo, and was already the fourth Brazilian warship to carry it. Broadsword went on to serve Brazil for a further quarter-century.

She was finally decommissioned by Brazil on 10 August 2021 and sunk as a target near Rio de Janeiro on 13 September 2024, bringing to a close the career of the ship that had led an entire class of frigates, survived a bomb through her own flight deck, and rescued 170 sailors from one of the Falklands War's most costly single losses.