HMS Bulwark (L15): From Evacuating Beirut to Rescuing Thousands in the Mediterranean

A Modern Amphibious Powerhouse

HMS Bulwark was built by BAE Systems Marine at Barrow-in-Furness, her keel laid on 27 January 2000 and launched on 15 November 2001 by Lady Walker, entering active service on 28 April 2005 following construction delays.

The name she was given carries something the Royal Navy has never much liked talking about. On the morning of 26 November 1914 the battleship HMS Bulwark was lying at buoy 17 in Kethole Reach, off Sheerness on the Medway, taking in ammunition. At 7.53am, with the ship's company at breakfast, she blew up. Around seventy-five tonnes of cordite went off at once. The forward third of the ship was lifted clear of the water and came apart, and wreckage fell across roughly three kilometres of river and shore. Seven hundred and forty-one men were killed. About a dozen survived.

The Admiralty inquiry, held at Sheerness that December under Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee, concluded that the probable cause was cordite charges stowed against a boiler room bulkhead and allowed to overheat. There was no enemy involved and there was almost nothing to bury. It remains the second worst accidental explosion in British history, behind only the battleship Vanguard, who went the same way at Scapa Flow in 1917, and it is a reminder that the most dangerous thing aboard most warships has always been their own ammunition. The name went on. It was carried next by the commando carrier HMS Bulwark (R08), the Rusty B, and then by this ship, and both of those spent their careers carrying Royal Marines, which is a better memorial than a plaque.

The second of the two Albion-class amphibious transport docks, HMS Bulwark displaced 19,560 tons and carried a crew of 325 alongside up to 405 Royal Marines, rising to 710 in an overload configuration, making her one of the Royal Navy's most significant tools for projecting amphibious force ashore.

She carried two 20mm Phalanx close-in weapon systems, 20mm GAM-BO1 cannon and general-purpose machine guns, a defensive rather than offensive armament reflecting her core role as a floating base for landing troops and equipment rather than a combat surface warship.

The interesting part of an amphibious transport dock is the part you cannot see from a photograph. The after third of the ship is a dock, and to use it the ship deliberately floods down by the stern until there is a pond inside her with an open door at the back. Four Landing Craft Utility sit in that pond and simply drive out. Four smaller landing craft hang on davits, two each side of the superstructure. Forward of the dock is a vehicle deck that will take six Challenger 2 tanks and thirty armoured personnel carriers, or something over sixty trucks, and above it a flight deck for helicopters. She carries 325 crew of her own and 300 Royal Marines, or getting on for 650 of them if the situation is bad enough and nobody minds the accommodation.

That combination is exactly why she kept ending up doing humanitarian work. A ship that can flood her own stern, run boats out of it, land helicopters on top and feed and berth several hundred extra people is, without a single modification, the best evacuation platform any navy owns. Beirut in 2006 and the Mediterranean in 2015 were not her designed role. They were her designed role used for something else, which is the argument for amphibious shipping in a sentence.

Piracy Patrols and a Wartime Evacuation

HMS Bulwark's maiden operational deployment in January 2006 took her to the Horn of Africa for counter-piracy operations, one of the earliest Royal Navy responses to what would become a major and sustained international effort against Somali piracy.

Just months later, HMS Bulwark was called into far more urgent service. Diverted to Lebanon on 15 July 2006 as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah escalated, she arrived off Beirut on 20 July as part of Operation Highbrow, the wider evacuation that eventually brought more than 4,500 British and other nationals to safety. Bulwark's own share of that effort saw her embark around 1,300 people, ferrying them out to Cyprus by landing craft through her floodable dock while her embarked Royal Marines, Merlin and Sea King helicopters, and visiting RAF Chinooks handled the shuttle runs ashore, a particularly significant humanitarian operation that demonstrated exactly the kind of rapid, large-scale evacuation capability an amphibious ship of her type could provide when a crisis erupted with little warning.

Flagship of the Fleet

HMS Bulwark served as the Royal Navy's fleet flagship from October 2011 until June 2015, a role of genuine prestige that placed her at the symbolic head of the entire fleet for close to four years, longer than most ships ever hold such a position.

What being flagship actually meant in those years is worth setting out, because it was a new job. The 2010 review had just paid off HMS Ark Royal and the Harriers and left the Royal Navy without a fixed-wing carrier for the best part of a decade, so the standing answer to the question of what Britain sends when something happens became the Response Force Task Group: an amphibious ship, escorts, support shipping and a Royal Marines force, held ready and exercised every year. Bulwark led it. She rejoined the fleet from refit in March 2011, took the flagship role over from Albion that October, went straight into Exercise Joint Warrior in Loch Eriboll, and then deployed on the annual Cougar task group cruises in 2013 and 2014, the second of which took her through the international mine countermeasures exercise in the Gulf. In between, in May 2014, she sat at Greenwich with her decks open to the public for the 350th anniversary of the Royal Marines, which for a ship whose entire purpose is putting Royal Marines ashore was about as fitting a berth as she was ever going to get.

Her career also has some odd gaps in it, and there is a reason for that. The 2010 defence review decided that keeping both Albion-class ships crewed and ready was more than the budget would carry, so one of them would be held at high readiness while the other sat in extended readiness, which is a polite way of saying laid up without a crew, and the two would swap over. It is why HMS Albion and Bulwark spent fifteen years taking it in turns to be the fleet's flagship and then to be alongside at Devonport with nobody aboard. Two ships, one of them working: a saving on paper, and a permanent argument about what happens if the crisis arrives during the wrong half of the cycle.

During this period, between April and July 2015, HMS Bulwark was deployed to the Mediterranean for Operation Weald, the Royal Navy's contribution to the escalating search and rescue effort off the Libyan coast, recovering over 2,900 migrants from the sea. All eight of her landing craft were converted into makeshift rescue boats, stocked with lifejackets, medical supplies and emergency provisions.

On 28 May alone she took in around 800 people as the designated "rescue hub" for a combined operation involving Italian, German and Irish naval units, among them 369 men, women and children, fifty of them small children, pulled from a single overcrowded wooden boat. "Some horrifyingly young," as her commanding officer, Captain Nick Cooke-Priest, put it afterwards, a properly substantial humanitarian effort that saw a warship built for amphibious assault repurposed for large-scale, lifesaving rescue work at a moment of acute human need.

A New Flag in South America

HMS Bulwark went on to take part in numerous NATO exercises and international deployments through 2016, continuing to demonstrate the versatility that had already seen her deployed for combat support, evacuation and rescue operations alike.

The argument about whether to keep them at all had been running since 2017, when the Ministry of Defence was reported to be considering paying both ships off early. The Commons Defence Committee took evidence and published it under the title "Sunset for the Royal Marines?", and among those objecting was the Member of Parliament for Devonport, Luke Pollard, who warned the committee that scrapping the two ships and cutting Royal Marine numbers could cost 1,300 dockyard jobs and would undermine the country's power projection. The ships survived that round. They did not survive the next one, and by the time the decision was finally taken, Pollard was a minister in the department that took it.

The eight years between that argument and her decommissioning are the part of her story nobody wanted. Bulwark went into uncrewed reserve at the start of 2017 and never went to sea again. Not once. Her refit at Devonport began in 2020 and simply kept going: between 2022 and 2024 alone, £72.1 million was spent on her, and by November 2024 the Ministry of Defence was still describing a considerable amount of work as outstanding before she could be made ready for sea.

So the decision announced on 20 November 2024 to dispose of both Albion and Bulwark was, on one reading, an admission of something that had already been true for seven years. A twenty-year career, and she spent the last eight of it alongside. Whether that is an indictment of the ships or of the way Britain funds its fleet is a question people in Plymouth have strong views about, and the sums involved suggest the ships were not the problem.

She was decommissioned by the UK government in March 2025, and on 10 September that year was officially sold to Brazil, renamed NDM Oiapoque. As of August 2026 she remains at Devonport in Plymouth, undergoing revitalisation and certification work ahead of transfer, already wearing her new Brazilian pennant number, G350, on the hull. An original target of incorporating her into Brazilian Navy service by the end of June 2026 has slipped, with the Brazilian Navy's own most recent guidance now pointing to delivery by the end of 2026 instead, giving a ship with an already remarkably varied career a substantial new chapter under a different flag entirely, even if that chapter is taking rather longer to begin than first planned.