HMS Falmouth (F113): The Frigate That Rammed an Icelandic Gunboat at 22 Knots

Built by Swan Hunter

HMS Falmouth was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson, her keel laid down on 23 November 1957, launched on 15 December 1959, and commissioned on 25 July 1961, a Rothesay-class anti-submarine frigate displacing 2,560 tons at full load. She measured 370 feet in length with a 41-foot beam, and her Babcock and Wilcox boilers driving English Electric turbines produced 30,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 29 knots.

Her original armament included twin 4.5-inch guns, a twin 40mm anti-aircraft mount, two Limbo anti-submarine mortars and twelve torpedo tubes, a well-rounded fit for a frigate designed primarily around convoy and fleet escort duties.

She belonged to the middle generation of a hull that dominated the postwar Royal Navy. The Rothesays were the Type 12M, twelve ships built as a slightly improved version of the Whitby class, and they in turn were the direct ancestors of the Leanders; the same basic lines, drawn to a 1951 requirement about keeping up high speed in heavy weather, ended up carrying something like seventy warships over more than twenty years. What made that hull so good is set out in the article on HMS Eastbourne (F73). It is worth holding on to, because a hull designed to be driven hard into a North Atlantic sea is also, as it turns out, a hull that can survive being driven into another ship.

HMS Falmouth joined the 20th Frigate Squadron at Londonderry in August 1961, and suffered an early setback on 5 December that year when she was badly damaged in a collision with the oiler RFA Tideflow in Lyme Bay, a rough start to what would prove an eventful career.

That collision had a sequel that the record usually leaves out. Falmouth and the fleet oiler RFA Tideflow came together during an anti-submarine exercise off Portland in foul weather, and the damage to the four-month-old frigate was serious. The Royal Navy does not treat that sort of thing as bad luck. On 31 May 1962 her commanding officer, a Commander, and one of her lieutenants were brought before a court martial at HMS Drake in Devonport, charged with hazarding their ship.

The Commander was acquitted. The Lieutenant was found guilty and reprimanded, and then appealed, and both the conviction and the sentence were quashed. So the ship's first significant contact with another vessel put two of her officers in front of a court and ended with nobody carrying anything on their record. Fifteen years later the same ship deliberately struck a foreign government vessel twice at over twenty knots, and the difference between the two cases is not seamanship but policy: one was an accident in an exercise, and the other was what the ship had been sent there to do.

The Far East and the Beira Patrol

HMS Falmouth became leader of the 30th Frigate Squadron from December 1963, and deployed with it to the Far East Fleet between September and December 1964, and again between June and December 1965.

She took part in the Beira Patrol, the long-running Royal Navy operation to enforce an oil embargo against the white minority government of Rhodesia, patrolling off Mombasa in January 1967 as part of the effort to intercept tankers attempting to deliver fuel to the Mozambican port of Beira.

What that patrol actually achieved over its nine years, which was close to nothing, is set out in the article on HMS Eskimo (F119). Falmouth was one of seventy-six warships that took a turn at it.

HMS Falmouth underwent an extensive modernisation at Portsmouth Dockyard from August 1968 through to 6 January 1971, receiving a hangar and flight deck for a single Westland Wasp helicopter along with a Seacat missile launcher, upgrades that considerably enhanced her anti-submarine and self-defence capabilities for the demanding decade that lay ahead.

Ramming Speed in the Third Cod War

HMS Falmouth's most dramatic moment came on 6 May 1976, during the Third Cod War against Iceland. Her opponent was no flimsy fishing boat: the Icelandic gunboat V/s Týr was a brand new, ice-strengthened 1,500-ton patrol vessel built in Denmark only the previous year, with a crew of 22. With Týr attempting to cut the fishing nets of the trawler Carlisle, Captain Gerald Plumer ordered HMS Falmouth to ram the Icelandic vessel at over 22 knots, a remarkably aggressive manoeuvre that came close to capsizing his own ship in the process.

The first ramming left Týr heavily damaged, but after the Icelandic gunboat succeeded in cutting the trawler's nets anyway, HMS Falmouth rammed her a second time. Reduced to a single working propeller shaft and shadowed home by the tug Statesman, Týr's own commanding officer, Captain Gudmundur Kjaernested, ordered his crew to man her guns regardless, hopelessly outgunned as they were, purely to deter Falmouth from trying a third time.

The collision left HMS Falmouth herself with serious structural damage to her bow, serious enough to require repairs in Portsmouth dry dock, a truly costly encounter for both sides in a dispute that, whatever its diplomatic subtleties, was fought with real ships taking real damage. Týr herself proved remarkably resilient: she served on for another forty years after her double ramming, through NATO exercises and Arctic sovereignty patrols, and in 2015 personally rescued more than four hundred people during an EU counter-migrant deployment in the Mediterranean, a strikingly different use for the same hull that HMS Falmouth once tried twice, and failed twice, to sink.

It is worth being precise about what ramming a ship actually involves, because the phrase makes it sound like a decision rather than a physics problem. Falmouth was 2,560 tons at 22 knots, which is a very great deal of kinetic energy, and she was aimed at a 1,500-ton vessel built the previous year in Denmark with an ice-strengthened hull, because that is what a ship that works the Denmark Strait in winter needs. The result was almost exactly what an engineer would predict. Tyr, built to survive being squeezed by pack ice, was badly hurt and stayed afloat. Falmouth, whose bow was designed to go through water rather than through steel, came away with structural damage serious enough to need a dry dock at Portsmouth. She very nearly went over doing it: at that speed and that angle a frigate heels alarmingly, and the manoeuvre came uncomfortably close to capsizing the ship that was carrying it out.

She was also not the only ship in that state, and by the spring of 1976 the Royal Navy was running out of frigates that were not in a dockyard. The collision arithmetic of the Third Cod War is set out in the article on HMS Diomede (F16), and it is not a comfortable set of numbers for a dispute between two members of the same alliance.

What the Navy did about it is the detail worth having. Two elderly frigates were pulled out of reserve and had wooden protection bolted onto them, on the straightforward reasoning that timber crushes and steel tears, and that a ship whose job is to be hit is better off with something soft on the outside. It is a very old idea and it looked faintly absurd on a 1950s warship. In the event the dispute was settled before either of them reached the fishing grounds, and they were kept on for a while to cover the gaps left by ships that were still being welded back together.

The longer conclusion was that the whole approach was wrong. Sending a two and a half thousand ton anti-submarine frigate, with a full fleet armament and a crew of well over two hundred, to shoulder gunboats away from trawlers is an expensive way to bend a bow. What was wanted was something small, tough, cheap to run, manoeuvrable and with hardly any weapons at all, and the Navy went and borrowed a design from the civilian Scottish fishery protection service to get it. The result was the Island class, whose story is told in the article on HMS Alderney (P278). Falmouth's bow, in other words, is part of the reason those ships exist.

And the man on the other bridge deserves naming properly, because in Iceland he is a household name and in Britain he is a footnote. Gudmundur Kjaernested served through all three Cod Wars and was at the centre of most of the serious incidents; by 1976 he was the Icelandic Coast Guard's most experienced and most celebrated officer, and he is regarded there as a national hero. His ship had just been rammed twice by a frigate half again her size, had one screw left and was being shadowed by a British tug. He ordered his guns manned. Tyr mounted a single elderly deck gun against a ship with two 4.5-inch, and there was never the remotest possibility of a gunnery duel; the point was to make it clear that a third ramming would be answered, and it was not attempted. He also, in the middle of all that, cut the trawler's warps, which is what he had come to do.

Following the UK's expansion of its Exclusive Economic Zone to 200 nautical miles in January 1977, HMS Falmouth deployed to the North Sea, protecting British fishing stocks and the growing number of oil platforms and installations that had, by the late 1970s, become just as important a national interest to defend as fishing rights had been during the Cod Wars themselves.

The irony in that sequence is worth stating out loud, because it is total. Falmouth spent the spring of 1976 ramming an Icelandic patrol vessel that was enforcing a two-hundred-mile fishing limit Britain refused to recognise. Britain conceded that limit in June. In January 1977, seven months after the ramming, the United Kingdom declared a two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone of its own, and Falmouth was sent to the North Sea to enforce it, against foreign fishermen, in exactly the way Tyr had been enforcing Iceland's. The whole arc of the three Cod Wars, and how Britain lost all of them, is set out in the article on HMS Diomede (F16).

Saved by the Falklands

HMS Falmouth left active service in 1980 and transferred to the Standby Squadron at Chatham, and by early 1982 she faced disposal amid the defence budget cuts of the era, the same round of cuts that nearly saw the Royal Navy's South Atlantic capability stripped away entirely.

Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 abruptly reversed those plans, and HMS Falmouth received a refit, though she ultimately did not take part in the Falklands War itself.

She went on to conduct South Atlantic patrol operations between May and September 1983, and deployed to the Middle and Far East between March and August 1984, a particularly active final stretch of service for a ship that had so nearly been scrapped just two years earlier.

The End

HMS Falmouth was decommissioned in July 1984 and laid up as a stationary training ship at HMS Sultan that December, providing several more years of quiet, useful service training naval personnel before finally being scrapped in Spain from 4 May 1989 onwards, closing out the career of a frigate whose service had ranged from enforcing sanctions off East Africa to a properly dramatic ramming duel in the North Atlantic.