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.

Firing Seaslug at an airfield is odder than it sounds, and worth explaining. Seaslug was a beam-riding anti-aircraft missile: the ship held a radar beam on the target and the missile flew up the middle of it, which works against an aeroplane and is a very strange way to attack a runway. What made it possible at all was that the beam could be laid on a fixed point ashore, and what made it worth doing was that a County carried a great many rounds she was never going to fire at aircraft and that a two-ton missile arriving at supersonic speed does considerable damage to whatever it lands on. What Seaslug was and why it shaped the whole class is set out in the article on HMS Devonshire (D02). It was designed in the 1950s to stop Soviet bombers over the North Sea, and it finished its operational life being used as an improvised long-range artillery round against a runway in the South Atlantic.

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.

The improvisation involved deserves rather more credit than the word makeshift conveys. An MM38 Exocet is a ship-launched weapon that expects a warship's fire-control system to hand it a target bearing and range before launch; taken off a destroyer and put on a trailer it has nothing to talk to. A team under Captain Julio Marcelo Perez took two missiles and a launcher off ARA Segui, mounted them at Puerto Belgrano with a generator and a set of calculating gear built for the purpose, and flew the whole assembly to the islands in a C-130. On the night, an Argentine Army RASIT battlefield surveillance radar, a device meant for spotting infantry crossing open ground, tracked Glamorgan; the bearings were converted by hand and dialled into the missile as voltages on potentiometers. The crews called it the ITB, Instalacion de Tiro Berreta, which translates roughly as the rubbish firing rig. It worked on the third attempt.

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.

The turn her captain ordered is the reason there is a ship left to write about, and the physics of it are worth understanding. An Exocet skims a few metres above the sea at close to the speed of sound with a small active radar seeker in the nose. Turning stern-on does two things at once: it presents the smallest radar cross-section the ship has, and it takes the ship's own speed out of the closing rate. Glamorgan could not outrun the missile, but she changed the geometry enough that the Exocet arrived at a shallow angle rather than square onto her side. Instead of punching through the hull plating and detonating inside the ship, it struck the deck edge, skidded, went through the hangar door and blew up there, above the waterline and outside the main machinery spaces. A perpendicular hit in the same place would very probably have been fatal.

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 that made her the first British warship of the conflict to survive an Exocet strike outright, though the ship and her surviving aircraft took no further part in combat operations for the remainder of the conflict.

The comparison with Sheffield is the one every naval officer drew afterwards, and the conclusions changed the Royal Navy. Sheffield was hit by an Exocet whose warhead did not go off; she was destroyed anyway, by a fire fed by unburnt rocket fuel and by materials that should never have been in a warship. Glamorgan was hit by one that did go off, and survived, because the explosion was in a hangar rather than in her guts and because her people got the fires out in under five hours. The lesson taken from both was the same: a modern warship is not killed by the explosion, she is killed by what burns afterwards. What followed was a thorough re-examination of cabling, insulation, furnishings and firefighting arrangements across the fleet, and, notably, the abandonment of the polyester and nylon working dress and anti-flash gear the Royal Navy had adopted shortly before the war, which had melted onto the skin of the men wearing it.

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.

A further memorial followed decades later and closer to home: on 10 July 2023, exactly 41 years to the day after her return to Portsmouth, a plaque was unveiled and a tree planted in the Royal Naval Association's Memorial Garden there, wreaths laid by Admiral Sir Ian Forbes, who had served as Glamorgan's own Operations Officer during the attack itself, and Vice Admiral John McAnally on behalf of the Association.

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.