HMS Galatea (F18): A Cod War Collision, Then Sunk as a Target Two Decades Later

Built on the Tyne

HMS Galatea was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the River Tyne, launched on 23 May 1963 and commissioned on 25 April 1964, a Leander-class general-purpose frigate and the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name.

The seventh of them is worth knowing about, because she went down in the worst month the Mediterranean Fleet ever had. HMS Galatea was an Arethusa-class light cruiser, and by November 1941 she was working out of Malta with Force K, the strike force that was tearing apart the convoys carrying fuel and men to Rommel in North Africa. Shortly before midnight on 14 December 1941, thirty miles off Alexandria, U-557 hit her with two torpedoes in quick succession. She turned over and sank in three minutes. Her captain, twenty-two officers and four hundred and forty-seven ratings died with her. About a hundred men were pulled out of the water by the destroyers Griffin and Hotspur.

The boat that did it lasted forty-eight hours. On her way back, U-557 was rammed by the Italian torpedo boat Orione, in error, and sank with all hands. Two ships and the better part of five hundred men inside two days in the same piece of sea, and one of them killed by his own side.

And that was only the start of the fortnight. Five days after Galatea went down, on 19 December, Force K itself ran into an Italian minefield twelve miles off Tripoli that nobody knew was there. The cruiser Neptune hit a mine at twenty-four knots, then two more as she tried to back out, and the destroyer Kandahar was mined going in to take her in tow. Both were lost. Aurora and Penelope were damaged. Neptune took a hundred and fifty New Zealanders down with her, still the heaviest single loss in the history of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Force K, which had been the most effective British formation in the Mediterranean, effectively ceased to exist in a single morning.

On the same date, Italian human torpedo teams got into Alexandria harbour and placed charges under the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, putting both of them on the bottom in shallow water and out of the war for months. Inside five weeks the Mediterranean Fleet lost the battleship Barham, a cruiser off Alexandria, a cruiser and a destroyer off Tripoli, and had its two remaining battleships disabled at their own moorings. That is the month the seventh HMS Galatea belongs to, and it is why the eighth had a slightly easier time of it in the Icelandic fishing grounds thirty-five years later.

She was originally armed with twin 4.5-inch guns, later replaced by an Ikara anti-submarine missile launcher, along with 40mm anti-aircraft guns and a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, a well-rounded fit typical of one of the Royal Navy's most successful and numerous postwar frigate classes.

Early Deployments

HMS Galatea was posted immediately to the Mediterranean upon commissioning in 1964, and joined the 27th Escort Group there in 1966 before returning to home waters with the Home Fleet. She took part in Kiel Week festivities in West Germany and Portsmouth Navy Days in 1968, the kind of flag-showing public engagements that made up a genuine part of a frigate's peacetime duties alongside her operational commitments.

HMS Galatea underwent a substantial refit and modernisation between 1971 and 1974, during which she received the Ikara anti-submarine missile system and Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles, upgrades that considerably enhanced her combat capability for the demanding decade that followed.

A Collision in the Third Cod War

HMS Galatea took part in the Third Cod War against Iceland between 1975 and 1976, the last and most serious of the postwar fishing disputes between Britain and Iceland, which saw repeated confrontations and collisions between Royal Navy frigates and Icelandic Coast Guard gunboats.

On 26 March 1976, HMS Galatea collided with the Icelandic Coast Guard vessel ICGV Baldur, sustaining damage to her bow. Baldur was something of a repeat offender, a gunboat with a reinforced, deliberately sharpened stern that saw off three separate Royal Navy frigates during the dispute, and Galatea's crew responded by closing up at their guns and formally warning Baldur away from any further interference with the British fishing fleet, one of numerous such incidents during a dispute that, while never escalating into a formal war, produced a remarkably alarming number of ship-to-ship collisions as each side manoeuvred aggressively to assert its position over contested fishing rights.

Baldur has now collected a considerable entry in this blog, and it is worth putting together. She rammed or was rammed by HMS Diomede three times in 1976, hit HMS Eastbourne in May of the same year and Galatea in March, which is five collisions with three different Royal Navy frigates inside a few months, from a single Icelandic patrol vessel with a strengthened stern and a captain who was not going to be moved. Britain had, at various points, twenty-two frigates committed to that dispute. Iceland had a handful of boats and no navy at all. The whole arc of how that ended, and why, is set out in the article on HMS Diomede (F16).

A Silver Jubilee and the Gulf

HMS Galatea took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review of 1977, serving as leader of the 1st Frigate Squadron for the occasion, a properly prestigious role marking twenty-five years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.

She returned to the Mediterranean for further patrols and exercises in 1978, and deployed to the Far East and the Persian Gulf on Armilla Patrol duty between 1980 and 1983, part of the Royal Navy's long-standing presence protecting British shipping interests in the Gulf. Her 1982 deployment came with a sting in the tail: fresh out of refit in Gibraltar just as the Falklands War broke out, sea trials found her not yet combat-ready, and she was sent east on Armilla Patrol instead of south, a disappointment one of her sailors later remembered bluntly, recalling that "morale took a nose dive, we all wanted to sail to the Falklands and help our fellow shipmates."

That disappointment is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a footnote, because it was very widely felt. In April 1982 something over a hundred ships went south, and a great many more did not, and the crews of the ones that did not spent the rest of their lives explaining it. Galatea had just come out of refit and her trials said she was not ready; sending an unworked-up frigate eight thousand miles into a shooting war would have been a good way to lose her. It was the right decision, and it was made by people who were not aboard her. That sailor is describing something a lot of the Royal Navy went through that spring.

The patrol she was sent on has a longer history than almost anybody realises, and it is still running. Armilla was set up in the autumn of 1980, within weeks of the Iran-Iraq war beginning, to escort British-flagged merchant ships through the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz while two belligerents attacked each other's tanker traffic. It was never a large commitment, generally one or two escorts and a Royal Fleet Auxiliary, on six-month deployments. What it has been is unbroken: there has been at least one Royal Navy ship on that station every day since 1980. In June 2011 the name changed to Operation Kipion and the remit widened to take in the Suez Canal and counter-piracy in the Indian Ocean, but it is the same commitment, and it is one of the longest continuous commitments the modern Royal Navy has ever taken on. Galatea was there in the second and third years of it.

The Gulf run itself was no gentle cruise either. Crossing the Indian Ocean, she was caught in a Force 12 storm that knocked out her steering, crew working in harnesses on deck to secure the hawse-pipe covers as waves streamed across the fo'c'sle, before calling at Bahrain, Karachi, Oman, Sri Lanka, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Mauritius and Diego Garcia along the way, her sailors finding time in Colombo to repaint rooms at a local children's orphanage.

Decommissioning and a Final Role as a Target

HMS Galatea was decommissioned in January 1987, closing out nearly a quarter century of service that had taken her from Cold War Mediterranean patrols through a particularly tense Cod War confrontation and on to the Persian Gulf.

Rather than being scrapped conventionally, she was sunk as a target ship during North Atlantic naval exercises on 21 July 1988, a fate shared by a number of retired Royal Navy vessels, whose hulls proved particularly useful for testing weapons and tactics even after their operational careers had ended, a quietly practical final contribution from a frigate that had served across some of the most operationally demanding decades of the Cold War.

Being expended as a target is a less ignominious end than it sounds, and the reason navies do it is worth explaining. There is no other way of finding out what a warship actually does when a modern weapon hits her. Models, tanks and computer simulations will tell you what should happen; only a real hull, of real scantlings, with real bulkheads, watertight doors, cable runs and fuel tanks, will tell you what does. Where the fire spreads, how the flooding progresses, whether the structure holds or folds, how long she stays afloat: all of it comes out of sinking exercises, and all of it goes back into how the next class is designed and how damage-control parties are trained. Every sailor in a modern frigate is safer because ships like Galatea were stripped, towed out into the North Atlantic and shot at until they sank.