HMS Glamorgan (D19): Struck by an Improvised Exocet Launcher Off Stanley

Built on the Tyne

HMS Glamorgan was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, laid down on 13 September 1962, launched on 9 July 1964, and completed on 13 October 1966, a County-class guided-missile destroyer displacing 6,200 tons normal, rising to 6,800 tons at deep load.

She featured a combined steam and gas propulsion arrangement giving her a top speed of 30 knots, and carried the revised Seaslug GWS2 missile system alongside twin 4.5-inch gun turrets, Seacat missiles and, from 1974, Exocet anti-ship missiles fitted in place of her aft gun turret.

She could operate a single Westland Wessex helicopter from her flight deck and hangar.

HMS Glamorgan took part in Exercise Coral Sands off Queensland, Australia in October 1968, a multinational amphibious exercise involving Australian, New Zealand, American and British forces, and underwent a substantial £63 million modernisation between 1977 and 1980, fitting her with a computerised combat data system.

Flagship of the Task Force

HMS Glamorgan was conducting exercises off Gibraltar on 2 April 1982 when she was diverted to join the Royal Navy task force sailing south following Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands. She served as flagship for Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, commanding the carrier battle group, until 15 April, when he transferred his flag to HMS Hermes.

HMS Glamorgan's first action came on 1 May, joining HMS Arrow and HMS Alacrity in bombarding Argentine positions around Stanley, an engagement during which two 500-pound bombs fell close alongside, causing minor underwater damage. On 14 May, she supported British special forces during the raid on Pebble Island, and spent nearly the entirety of the following weeks engaged in continuous shore bombardment.

On 29 May, she fired a Seaslug missile, originally designed as an anti-aircraft weapon, directly at the Stanley airstrip, landing close to an Argentine radar site and killing one Argentine officer while wounding several airmen, an unconventional use of her main armament against a ground target.

An Improvised Exocet Launcher

HMS Glamorgan was detached in early June to protect shipping in the logistics area around 200 miles from the islands, but was recalled on the evening of 11 June to support Royal Marines during the Battle of Two Sisters.

It was there, in the early hours of 12 June 1982, that she came under attack from a truly improvised weapon: an MM38 Exocet missile, removed from the Argentine destroyer ARA Seguí and mounted on a makeshift trailer platform that Argentine personnel nicknamed 'ITB', assembled at Puerto Belgrano and flown to the Falklands aboard a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.

At 06:37, while steaming at around 20 knots some 18 nautical miles offshore, HMS Glamorgan was targeted by this improvised launcher. Two initial firing attempts failed, but a third missile successfully tracked and closed on the ship, visible to her own bridge and operations room crew as it approached.

HMS Glamorgan's captain ordered a high-speed turn away from the incoming missile, a manoeuvre that prevented a direct perpendicular hit but did not save her entirely: the Exocet struck her port side near the hangar at an angle, skidded across the deck, and detonated, tearing a hole 10 by 15 feet in the hangar deck and a further 5 by 4 feet hole in the galley area below, starting a serious fire.

Fourteen Killed

The missile's body penetrated the hangar door and struck the fully fuelled and armed Wessex helicopter parked inside, triggering a violent explosion and a severe hangar fire. Fourteen of HMS Glamorgan's crew were killed in the attack, and more than 30 wounded, six of the dead serving with 737 Naval Air Squadron.

Thirteen of the fallen were buried at sea that same evening, a grim but necessary ceremony carried out amid the ongoing danger of further attack, while Able Seaman David McCann later died of his wounds on 19 August 1982, months after the fighting had ended.

Despite the severity of the damage, HMS Glamorgan's crew had all fires extinguished by 11:00 that morning, a remarkably impressive display of damage control, though the ship and her surviving aircraft took no further part in combat operations for the remainder of the conflict.

Following the Argentine surrender on 14 June, just two days after the attack, HMS Glamorgan underwent extensive repairs in San Carlos Water before sailing for home on 21 June, arriving back at Portsmouth on 10 July 1982 after 104 days at sea. A memorial to the ship and her lost crew was erected at Hookers Point outside Stanley in 2011, a lasting tribute at the very islands she had fought to help recapture.

Repairs and a Final Deployment

Following further repairs and refit, HMS Glamorgan received new anti-submarine torpedo tubes, Bofors guns and a Westland Lynx helicopter to replace the one destroyed in the attack, returning to service in 1983.

Her final active Royal Navy deployment came in 1983 and 1984 on Armilla Patrol; while docked at Gibraltar en route to the Far East, she was hastily recalled to sea following the 23 October 1983 suicide bombings of the American and French barracks in Beirut, proceeding to the Lebanese coast to help evacuate British peacekeeping troops using her Lynx helicopter, before rejoining her task group for deployment to the Straits of Hormuz.

A Second Career in Chile

HMS Glamorgan was decommissioned by the Royal Navy in September 1986 and sold to the Chilean Navy on 3 October that year, arriving in Chile that December under her new name, Almirante Latorre.

She served on with the Chilean Navy for another twelve years, undergoing further modernisation between 1995 and 1996 that saw her Seaslug system retained for surface targets only and her Bofors guns replaced with Israeli Barak surface-to-air missiles.

Almirante Latorre was finally decommissioned in late 1998, and while under tow to be broken up, she sank in the South Pacific on 11 April 2005, an unplanned but somehow fitting final resting place at sea for a ship whose most famous single day had itself been defined by a desperate fight for survival in South Atlantic waters more than two decades earlier.