HMS Coventry (D118): "We Were the Sacrifice", the Destroyer Lost as a Decoy

Built at Cammell Laird

HMS Coventry was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 29 January 1973, launched on 21 June 1974, and commissioned on 20 October 1978 under Captain C. P. O. Burne at a cost of £37,900,000, the last of the first tranche of fourteen Type 42 destroyers built between 1972 and 1985.

Like the other early Type 42s, HMS Coventry had her bow shortened by 47 feet during design to reduce costs, a compromise that left her, along with her sister ships of the same batch, with notably poor seakeeping characteristics on trials, a design shortcut whose consequences would matter rather more than anyone might have anticipated four years later.

The shortcut had a longer history than the design office. Sea Dart had been conceived as the air defence weapon for a new generation of British aircraft carriers, and the ship built to carry it was the Type 82, of which HMS Bristol was the only one ever completed, because the carriers were cancelled in 1966 and the escorts went with them. The Type 42 was what the Navy could afford instead: the same missile system in a much smaller and cheaper hull. Then the Treasury took another forty-seven feet out of the bow. What that bought was a ship that could not keep her forecastle out of the water in a seaway and had no room left for growth, carrying a weapon designed for a fleet action in the open Atlantic.

China, the Gulf, and the Road to War

HMS Coventry's early career included a landmark 1980 deployment to the Far East, where she became the first British warship to visit the People's Republic of China in thirty years, sailing alongside HMS Antrim and HMS Alacrity, before being diverted en route home to six weeks of patrol duty in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War.

Through 1981 and into early 1982, HMS Coventry took part in a series of exercises culminating in Exercise Springtrain off Gibraltar that March, training that would, within weeks, turn out to be a direct rehearsal for war rather than merely routine peacetime practice.

Opening Shots of the Falklands War

HMS Coventry entered the Total Exclusion Zone around the Falkland Islands on 27 April 1982 alongside five other vessels, and quickly established herself among the most active ships of the entire campaign.

On 3 May, her embarked helicopter carried out the first Sea Skua air-to-surface missile launch ever fired in combat, striking the Argentine patrol vessel Alférez Sobral, and on 9 May, HMS Coventry became the first warship in history to fire Sea Dart surface-to-air missiles in anger, destroying two Argentine Learjets.

She was also credited with shooting down an Aérospatiale Puma helicopter over Choiseul Sound, a particularly formidable combat record accumulated in barely two weeks. Following the loss of HMS Sheffield and the damaging of HMS Glasgow on 12 May, HMS Coventry took on the primary air defence role for the task force until reinforcements arrived from Britain.

"We Were the Sacrifice"

On 25 May 1982, Argentina's national day, HMS Coventry and HMS Broadsword were deliberately positioned northwest of Falkland Sound as decoys, intended to draw Argentine aircraft away from the vulnerable amphibious shipping still landing troops and supplies at San Carlos.

Captain David Hart Dyke later acknowledged the deliberate risk in stark terms, saying he realised why the two ships had been given the assignment: 'if necessary, we were the sacrifice rather than other ships which were more important.' Their proximity to land badly hampered their radar's ability to distinguish incoming low-flying aircraft from the terrain behind them, a critical vulnerability that Argentine pilots would soon exploit.

The pairing had a name in the task force. After HMS Broadsword and her sisters proved what Sea Wolf could do, and after HMS Sheffield was lost, somebody worked out that a Type 42 and a Type 22 stationed together covered each other's weaknesses, and the combination was christened the Type 64 combo. The destroyer would engage a raid at long range with Sea Dart. If the aircraft got through, or came in off the land where Sea Dart could not see them, the frigate would put herself between the raid and the destroyer and use Sea Wolf at close quarters. The Type 22 had a pulse-doppler surveillance radar that could pick a target out against a land background. The Type 42 did not, which is precisely why the two ships were paired.

On 25 May it did not work, and the reason it did not is a single manoeuvre. Broadsword had a Sea Wolf lock on the incoming Skyhawks and was tracking them in. Coventry, taking her own avoiding action, turned across Broadsword's line of fire. The system dropped the target, and by the time anything could be done about it the aircraft were on top of both ships. Whether the turn was avoidable has been argued about ever since by people with more right to an opinion than most, and the honest answer is that two ships manoeuvring hard inside a few hundred yards, under attack from three directions, with seconds to decide, is not a situation in which anybody gets everything right.

HMS Coventry's own Sea Dart missiles claimed two more Argentine A-4B Skyhawks that day, flown by Capitán Hugo Ángel del Valle Palaver and Capitán Jorge Osvaldo García, before disaster struck. When the fatal raid came in low over the water, Broadsword's own Sea Wolf briefly had a lock on the attackers, only to lose it the moment Coventry turned across her line of fire; moments later Coventry fired a last, near-hopeless Sea Dart on what her crew called a "feasibility override", more in hope of deterring the attack than any real expectation of a hit, and the missile passed 300 to 500 metres wide. Two further waves of Skyhawks attacked at extremely low altitude, the first pair each carrying a single 1,000-pound bomb, the second a single aircraft, flown by Primer Teniente Mariano A. Velasco, carrying three 250-kilogram bombs that would each find their mark.

One bomb struck HMS Broadsword's flight deck, destroying her Lynx helicopter without detonating, while the second wave targeted HMS Coventry directly. Her port Oerlikon 20mm cannon jammed during the engagement, leaving her crew defending the ship with little beyond rifles and machine guns against modern jet aircraft, and a fault in the port lookout's aiming sight fed the main 4.5-inch gun the wrong elevation, sending its shells harmlessly beneath the incoming jets.

HMS Coventry was struck by three bombs above the waterline on her port side, all fitted with delay fuses that gave a few seconds of eerie silence before they went off. One struck below the bridge and detonated beneath the computer room and operations room, incapacitating senior officers at the very heart of the ship's command structure; a second tore through the main passageway, ruptured a hydraulic main and started fires; and a third, lodged in the forward engine room, tore open a hole below the waterline and breached the bulkhead separating her forward and aft machinery spaces, the start of catastrophic and unstoppable flooding.

Within twenty minutes, HMS Coventry had been abandoned and had completely capsized, sinking shortly afterwards.

Nineteen of her crew were killed, seventeen in the attack itself and two more during the abandonment, and thirty were injured; one further wounded crewman, Paul Mills, died on 29 March 1983, when X-rays finally revealed both the skull fracture he had suffered in the attack and a previously undiagnosed brain tumour. Among the dead was Kyu Ben Kwo, a laundryman who had turned down the chance to be sent home from Ascension Island and became the first Task Force casualty to be buried on the Falklands themselves. HMS Broadsword rescued 170 survivors from the water.

Legacy

Crew members of HMS Coventry received mentions in dispatches and commendations for their conduct during the sinking. The rescue effort in the water was led by Lieutenant Bill Fewtrell, Warrant Officer John Sheldon and Chief Petty Officer Aircrewman M. J. "Alf" Tupper of 846 Naval Air Squadron, who between them winched nineteen survivors up from the water; Tupper then went back down alone to gather the last stragglers from the life rafts, despite the very real risk of the sinking ship's own magazine exploding beneath him, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for it.

A memorial cross was erected on Pebble Island in honour of those who died. The fallen are also remembered at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and at the Falkland Islands Memorial Chapel, and for the war's fortieth anniversary in 2022 the Falkland Islands Government named 258 geographical features across the islands after individual casualties, HMS Coventry's dead among them.

Five months after the sinking, a Royal Navy Fleet Diving Team surveyed the wreck, finding her lying on her port side in around 100 metres of water, and Operation Blackleg later recovered classified material, personal effects and HMS Coventry's battle ensign, which was subsequently presented to her successor, a Type 22 frigate of the same name.

Divers also recovered the Cross of Nails, originally from Coventry Cathedral, which has since been carried aboard successive Royal Navy vessels and today resides aboard the Type 45 destroyer HMS Diamond.

That cross needs its story told, because it is not a decoration. On the night of 14 November 1940 the Luftwaffe burned the medieval cathedral at Coventry, and in the morning the cathedral stonemason found two of the charred roof beams lying in the shape of a cross, and a priest wired together three of the fourteenth-century nails from the roof to make another. The Cross of Nails became the symbol of a movement of reconciliation with Germany that Coventry has run ever since. A cross made from a cathedral burned by German bombers went to war in a British destroyer named after the city, went to the bottom of the South Atlantic with her, was brought up by Royal Navy divers, and is at sea today in another ship.

The wreck site remains protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act.

Captain David Hart Dyke later published his own account of the sinking in the book Four Weeks in May, later adapted into the BBC documentary Sea of Fire, and the loss of HMS Coventry has since featured in television documentary series and even in fiction, a lasting reminder of the price paid by ships deliberately positioned to draw danger away from others.