HMS Cardiff (D108): A Falklands Destroyer Marked by Tragedy and a Garrison's Surrender

A Sheffield-Class Destroyer

HMS Cardiff was built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering at Barrow-in-Furness and completed by Swan Hunter's Hawthorn Leslie yard at Hebburn, her keel laid on 6 November 1972, launched on 22 February 1974 by Lady Caroline Gilmour, and commissioned on 24 September 1979, a Type 42 Sheffield-class destroyer and the third Royal Navy vessel to carry the name Cardiff.

She was armed with a twin Sea Dart missile launcher, a 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun, 20mm Oerlikon guns and, in later configuration, Phalanx close-in weapon systems, alongside triple anti-submarine torpedo tubes.

In November 1979, still early in her career, she coordinated a search-and-rescue operation for the merchant vessel Pool Fisher.

War in the South Atlantic

HMS Cardiff was redeployed from the Persian Gulf to the South Atlantic between April and July 1982 for the Falklands War, and on 22 May engaged an Argentine Boeing 707 reconnaissance aircraft, TC-92, part of the Fuerza Aerea Argentina's dedicated shadowing unit, Task Element 17.1, firing two Sea Dart missiles at maximum range; the first fell short and the second missed as the Argentine aircraft took evasive action, and the 707 returned safely to base.

Across the whole conflict, HMS Cardiff fired nine Sea Dart missiles and one Mark 46 torpedo, a notably high operational tempo for a single destroyer during such a short and intense campaign.

Missiles were only half of it, and arguably the less useful half. Night after night the destroyers and frigates went in close to work the gunline, firing at Argentine positions around Stanley with their 4.5-inch guns to keep the defenders awake, disrupt movement and wreck what could be wrecked. In one harassment mission against the airfield alone, Cardiff put 277 shells ashore. The Mark 8 gun was automatic and could manage up to twenty-five rounds a minute, which means that somewhere below decks a magazine crew was moving a shell weighing the better part of six stone every few seconds, for as long as the mission lasted. It is exhausting, deeply unglamorous work, and it is what a destroyer actually spent most of that war doing.

A Devastating Case of Mistaken Identity

In the early hours of 6 June 1982, HMS Cardiff's crew mistakenly engaged and shot down a British Army Air Corps Gazelle helicopter, aircraft XX377 of 656 Squadron, believing they were firing on a low-flying Argentine Hercules transport aircraft. All four personnel aboard the Gazelle were killed: Staff Sergeant Chris Griffin and Lance Corporal Simon Cockton of the helicopter's own crew, and Major Mike Forge and Staff Sergeant John Baker of the Royal Corps of Signals, who were being flown out to service a rebroadcast station.

The tragedy resulted from a combination of poor coordination between Army and Navy units over aircraft movements in the area, and the fact that the helicopter's Identification Friend or Foe transmitter had been deliberately switched off after it was found to be interfering with other equipment.

A subsequent board of inquiry concluded that neither negligence nor blame should be attributed to any individual involved, and no action was taken against personnel, though the loss of four lives to friendly fire remains a remarkably sobering chapter in HMS Cardiff's history. The number 205 was later painted at the crash site as a memorial, marking that two of the passengers belonged to 205 Signal Squadron.

What that summary leaves out is how long it took to reach that conclusion. The loss of XX377 was initially put down to enemy action, and the families were told as much. There was no board of inquiry for more than four years. One was finally opened in October 1986, largely because Lance Corporal Simon Cockton's mother would not let the matter drop and because the Member of Parliament Tam Dalyell took it up on her behalf. The board took about a month to establish what had happened, and the Ministry of Defence's explanation for the delay was that it had not wanted to distress the relatives while the cause was still uncertain.

The board's findings are worth reading carefully, because they are less about individual failure than about the seams between organisations. 5th Infantry Brigade had told nobody that the flight was happening. The Gazelle carried an Identification Friend or Foe transmitter and it was switched off, having been found to interfere with other equipment. The board recorded its own view plainly: had the IFF been in use, there is little doubt that Cardiff would not have engaged the aircraft that night. Four men died because two services were working the same square of sky without a shared picture of who was in it, which is precisely the kind of failure that gets fixed afterwards and never in time.

Accepting a Garrison's Surrender

Following the Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982, HMS Cardiff was tasked with accepting the capitulation of the Argentine garrison at the settlement of Port Howard on West Falkland the following day, around 850 men of the 5th Motorized Infantry Regiment, including a company of 601 Commando, a formal and considerably less fraught duty that brought her active involvement in the conflict to a close.

The Gulf War and Later Service

HMS Cardiff went on to serve in the 1991 Gulf War, where on 24 January her embarked Lynx helicopter, callsign 335 of 815 Naval Air Squadron, sank an Iraqi minesweeper and damaged further vessels, generally reckoned the first successful British naval engagement of the entire war.

What her Lynx started that morning turned into one of the most one-sided campaigns any navy has fought. Over the following week Royal Navy Lynx armed with Sea Skua worked systematically through what was left of the Iraqi navy: four of them engaged seventeen vessels off Failaka island on 29 January, and the same day and the next produced the action that has become known as the Battle of Bubiyan, twenty-one separate engagements inside thirteen hours against Iraqi ships trying to escape north to Iranian waters. Twenty-one of the twenty-two that tried did not make it. Across the whole war the missile was fired twelve times and hit twelve times, and the Iraqi navy simply ceased to function as an organisation. There is no other example quite like it of a navy being taken apart by helicopters, and Cardiff's aircraft opened it.

The reason it worked so completely is worth stating, because it is not a story about a clever missile. A ship at sea can see about twenty miles; a helicopter flown off that ship with a radar in its nose can see very much further, can be moved about the sky at will, and can put a missile onto a target the parent ship never comes within sight of. The Iraqi vessels were fast attack craft, minelayers and landing ships, most of them well armed against aircraft coming in overhead and entirely helpless against something sitting outside their range and firing at them. It is the same argument that had sunk HMS Sheffield nine years earlier, run the other way round, and the Royal Navy had spent the whole of the intervening decade making sure it would be.

She subsequently served with the Standing Naval Force Mediterranean, conducted counter-narcotics patrols in the West Indies, took part in Operation Vigilant Warrior in 1994, and completed a final Armilla Patrol deployment in early 2003, during which she was credited with preventing over £2 million in smuggling and seizing more than 25,000 tonnes of illicitly traded oil.

Operation Vigilant Warrior, three years later, was the sequel nobody remembers because nothing happened. In October 1994 Iraq began moving Republican Guard formations south towards the Kuwaiti border in numbers that looked a great deal like the previous time, and the American and allied response was to put forces into the region as fast as they could physically be moved: aircraft, a carrier group, an armoured brigade's worth of pre-positioned equipment, and whatever ships were within reach. Iraq stopped, then withdrew. Cardiff was one of the ships within reach. Being present in overwhelming strength quickly enough that the other side changes its mind is the outcome every navy wants and the one that never makes the history books, and it is a fair description of most of what a destroyer does in a career.

The Final Years

HMS Cardiff was decommissioned on 14 July 2005 and eventually sent for scrapping at Aliağa in Turkey in November 2008. Her ship's bell was preserved and now resides in St John's Parish Church in Cardiff, a lasting link between the city and a destroyer whose career combined genuine wartime achievement with one of the more painful reminders of how confusing and unforgiving the fog of war can be.