HMS Diomede (F16): Four Collisions in the Cod Wars

Laid Down at Yarrow

HMS Diomede was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow, laid down on 30 January 1968, launched on 15 April 1969, and commissioned on 2 April 1971, a Leander-class frigate that would go on to spend a considerable portion of her career in one of the more unusual conflicts the postwar Royal Navy ever found itself fighting: the Cod Wars against Iceland.

The phrase Cod War undersells it, and the numbers are the reason it happened at all. Iceland had no army and no navy to speak of, and it had cod. Its fishing waters were the entire national economy, and it kept pushing the fence out: four miles, then twelve in 1958, then fifty in 1972, then two hundred on 15 October 1975, which was the first time any country in the world had claimed such a distance. Britain had a distant-water trawler fleet out of Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood that had worked those grounds for a century and could not simply move somewhere else. Neither side had anywhere to retreat to, which is generally how small disputes become long ones.

The Second Cod War and the Far East

HMS Diomede took part in the Second Cod War against Iceland in 1972, a dispute over fishing rights that saw Royal Navy frigates repeatedly shadowing and shielding British trawlers from Icelandic gunboats, before joining the 3rd Frigate Squadron then based in the Far East.

What made a frigate necessary was a piece of ironmongery about the size of a garden gate. The Icelandic Coast Guard had designed a trawl warp cutter, a toothed grapnel towed astern on a wire, and it worked beautifully: a gunboat crossed a trawler's stern, the cutter took the warps, and several thousand pounds of net and catch went to the bottom. It cost the Icelanders almost nothing and cost the trawler owners a fortune, and by the spring of 1976 the trawlers were refusing to fish at all without a warship standing over them. That is the job Diomede was doing. It required her to put some three thousand tons of frigate physically between a gunboat and a trawler's wires, repeatedly, at close quarters, in the North Atlantic in winter, which is a tactic with only one likely outcome.

And she was not allowed to shoot. Iceland was a NATO ally, so the rules were non-lethal throughout: no gunfire, no boarding, nothing but seamanship and steel. The most that was ever said was said by HMS Brighton to the gunboat Thor, to the effect that opening fire would be a terminally unwise thing to do. Two older frigates were sent north with wooden fenders bolted to their bows, which is the most eloquent summary of the whole business anyone produced. The Royal Navy was fighting a campaign it was forbidden to win, against opponents who knew it.

In 1974, she deployed with Task Group 317.2 to the Far East and Pacific, causing some controversy back home along the way by visiting apartheid-era South Africa and conducting military exercises there. Diomede, together with the nuclear submarine HMS Warspite, called at Simonstown while the rest of the task group visited Cape Town; on the homeward leg the group avoided South Africa altogether, instead exercising with the Brazilian Navy, before Diomede returned to the United Kingdom in June 1975.

The timing of that visit was more pointed than it looks. The Royal Navy used Simon's Town under the Simonstown Agreement of 30 June 1955, by which Britain handed over the base and command of the South African Navy and got in return the right to keep using the place, along with an arms deal covering six anti-submarine frigates, ten coastal minesweepers and four seaward defence boats for £18 million. By the 1970s the arrangement was an embarrassment to a Labour government that had no wish to be selling warships to an apartheid state, and on 16 June 1975 Britain abrogated it unilaterally. Diomede came home that same month. She was among the last Royal Navy ships to use the base under an agreement that was, by the time she tied up in Britain, no longer in force.

Colliding Three Times in the Third Cod War

HMS Diomede joined the Fishery Protection Squadron in 1976 for the Third Cod War, the final and most intense of the three Cod War disputes with Iceland, and it was during this deployment that she earned her most distinctive service record: colliding three separate times with the same Icelandic patrol vessel, ICGV Baldur. The first came on 12 February 1976, after Diomede gave chase and the two ships came together; the second followed on 10 March, the very same day Baldur had already dodged several collision attempts by HMS Mermaid.

The third and most serious collision came later that month, when Baldur struck Diomede's port side and tore open a gash twelve feet long, fortunately well above the waterline. It was enough to knock her out of the conflict and send her home to Rosyth for repairs, in the company of a great many other dented Royal Navy hulls: the Third Cod War saw more than fifty collisions in total, and fifteen of the twenty one frigates deployed came home damaged, a serious piece of damage from what was, at least officially, a dispute between two NATO allies rather than an armed conflict.

Baldur was not quite the whole of it, either. Diomede also came together with the Icelandic vessel Tyr during the same deployment, which makes her tally four collisions with two different ships in a matter of weeks, and gives her a fair claim to being the most frequently rammed warship in the modern Royal Navy.

The thing about Baldur is that she was not a warship at all. She was the stern trawler Baldur EA 124, built in Poland for a fishing operator at Dalvik, a town of a couple of thousand people on the north coast of Iceland, and delivered to him in June 1974. She was eighteen months old when the Third Cod War began. The Icelandic state bought her off her owner, put a gun on her and gave her to the Coast Guard.

She was then used, with considerable skill, to hit Royal Navy frigates. Three of them went home to British dockyards for repairs on her account, one of them this one, and the plan for what to do with her afterwards had already been settled: she was to be handed to the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute and spend the rest of her life counting fish. She served the Coast Guard from 1975 to 1977 and that was that.

Which is the Cod Wars in one hull. On one side, three thousand tons of Leander-class frigate, gas turbines, Seacat, a 4.5-inch mounting and a hundred and eighty trained men, forbidden by NATO politics to use any of it. On the other, a two-year-old commercial trawler out of a small Icelandic fishing town, handled by people who had spent their working lives putting boats exactly where they wanted them in that particular sea. The trawler won.

The way it ended is the part worth knowing. Britain had the ships and lost anyway, because Iceland was holding something Britain could not replace: the airbase at Keflavik, which sat directly on the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap and watched every Soviet submarine going in and out of the Atlantic. Reykjavik threatened to leave NATO and close it. In the middle of the Cold War that was not a bluff anyone in Washington or London was willing to test, and on 2 June 1976, with NATO's Secretary General Joseph Luns mediating, Britain gave way. The warships came home, British fishing was sharply restricted for six months, and after that British trawlers could enter the two-hundred-mile zone only with Icelandic permission, which is a polite way of saying not at all.

The bill was paid ashore. Something like 1,500 British fishermen lost their jobs and perhaps 7,500 more went with them in the processing, ice, box-making and transport trades that had grown up around the docks. Grimsby had once had the largest fishing fleet in the world; Hull's distant-water fleet effectively ceased to exist. And the final irony took only six years to arrive: in 1982 the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea gave every coastal state a two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone as a matter of course. Iceland had not been unreasonable. It had simply been early, and it had a base the Americans wanted.

Jubilee, Gulf and the Falklands

HMS Diomede took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's twenty-five years on the throne in 1977, and was adopted by the borough of Langbaurgh in North Yorkshire the previous year. Like several of her Leander-class sisters, she was used as the fictional HMS Hero in the BBC television drama Warship.

She was in good company there, and in a great deal of it: Hero was played by a rotating cast of real frigates over the run of the series, as set out in the article on HMS Dido (F104). The producers wanted a frigate; the Royal Navy provided whichever frigate happened to be free.

She deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1982 and to the West Indies in 1983 accompanying the royal yacht HMY Britannia, before returning to the South Atlantic in 1987 for Falkland Islands patrols and visits to South Georgia.

A New Life as PNS Shamsheer

HMS Diomede was decommissioned on 31 May 1988, and was subsequently sold to Pakistan, renamed PNS Shamsheer, going on to serve for a further considerable stretch before eventually being scrapped in 2003, closing out a career that had taken her from an unusual conflict against a fellow NATO member to more conventional service protecting British interests from the Gulf to the South Atlantic.

The handover was brisk to the point of indecency. She paid off on 31 May 1988 and was in Pakistani hands by July, which is about eight weeks between striking one ensign and hoisting another; her sister HMS Apollo followed in October as PNS Zulfiquar. Both were given extensive refits between 1991 and 1993 and then worked on for another decade, so a hull laid down on the Clyde in 1968 was still going to sea in the Arabian Sea in the early 2000s. Diomede spent seventeen years in the Royal Navy and fifteen in the Pakistan Navy, which is a reminder that a well-built steam frigate was rarely worn out when its first owner gave up on it. It was merely expensive.