HMS Glasgow (D88): Punched Through by a Bomb That Never Exploded

The Build: Swan Hunter

HMS Glasgow was built at Swan Hunter's yard in Wallsend, the sixth and final Batch 1 Type 42 destroyer, displacing 4,820 tonnes and powered by combined gas or gas turbines giving her genuine speed and flexibility. She carried the Sea Dart surface-to-air missile system, a 4.5-inch gun and, later, Phalanx close-in weapon systems, alongside torpedo tubes.

She was launched on 14 April 1976 by Lady Kirstie Treacher, wife of Admiral Sir John Treacher, though her construction was marked by genuine tragedy. On the night of 23 September 1976, while she was being fitted out at Swan Hunter's Neptune Yard, an oxygen cylinder valve had been left open in a badly ventilated part of decks three and four reachable only by timber ladders. The compartment became so oxygen-rich that men smoking nearby noticed their cigarettes burning down to the filter before they could even draw on them.

When an employee of contractor Telemeter Installations struck an arc to begin some welding, the enriched atmosphere turned an ordinary spark into an inferno, melting aluminium fittings at temperatures above 660°C and racing through painted surfaces and rubber-sheathed cabling strewn across the deck. Eight men were killed and six more injured. Swan Hunter's own safety officer had already circulated warnings about the fire risk of oxygen enrichment to his own workforce, but nobody had passed the same information on to contractors like Telemeter, an oversight for which the firm was later prosecuted and fined £3,000.

HMS Glasgow finally commissioned on 25 May 1979, the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, entering service carrying the memory of the men lost before she ever put to sea.

It is worth dwelling on how that fire happened, because it is a textbook case and it still gets taught. Oxygen enrichment is invisible, odourless and does not asphyxiate anybody; what it does is make ordinary materials burn in ways they normally cannot. Steel wool will burn. Painted surfaces burn like paper. Clothing that would smoulder in air goes up in a sheet of flame, and the men in that compartment noticed only that their cigarettes were burning down faster than they could smoke them. The prosecution turned on a failure of communication rather than of knowledge: Swan Hunter's own safety officer had warned his own people about exactly this hazard, and nobody had thought to tell the contractors working alongside them in the same hull. Eight men died in a ship that was not yet a ship, and the fine was £3,000.

Rammed by a Soviet Cruiser

HMS Glasgow's early Cold War service included a remarkably dramatic confrontation. On 27 May 1981, while shadowing Soviet naval exercises in the Barents Sea at a position later given in Parliament as 69°36' North, 34°20' East, she closed in on the Soviet cruiser Admiral Isakov, roughly twice her own size, gathering intelligence on new equipment, only for the Soviet ship to turn sharply into her. Glasgow's captain accelerated and manoeuvred clear, but not before the two ships traded a glancing blow that damaged fittings on her forecastle, a stark reminder of just how close and confrontational Cold War intelligence-gathering could become, even with both sides technically at peace.

The incident was serious enough to reach the House of Lords that October, where Lord Kennet pressed the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, on what had been said to Moscow. The reply was a small masterclass in diplomatic understatement: the matter had been "brought to the attention of the competent Soviet authorities", who confirmed only that "due notice has been taken of the contents of our representations", Whitehall's way of saying the exchange of notes had been frosty and had changed absolutely nothing.

The Falklands War

HMS Glasgow deployed to the South Atlantic following Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982, one of five Type 42 destroyers sent as part of the task force to retake the islands.

In the early hours of 3 May, her Lynx helicopter joined one from HMS Coventry in an attack on the Argentine patrol vessel ARA Alférez Sobral, which had opened fire on a British helicopter investigating her while she searched for the crew of a downed Canberra. Coventry's Lynx struck first with a pair of Sea Skua missiles, the first use of a sea-skimming anti-ship missile in the entire war, and twenty minutes later Glasgow's Lynx put two more into her, at least one hitting the bridge directly. Eight of her crew were killed, including her captain, Lieutenant Commander Sergio Gómez Roca, and eight more were wounded, yet the Sobral somehow stayed afloat, limping into Puerto Deseado two days later with a civilian trawler's help.

That engagement was a first, and it deserves noting. Sea Skua was a small helicopter-launched sea-skimming missile, rushed into service by British Aerospace for the campaign, and the attack on the Sobral was its first use in action anywhere in the world. The tactic it made possible was new too: a Lynx could stay below a ship's radar horizon, pop up, fire from several miles out and drop back down without ever coming inside the range of the target's guns. That the Sobral survived four hits from it, with her captain and seven others dead and her bridge destroyed, and still got herself into Puerto Deseado, says a great deal for the people left aboard her.

The following day, 4 May, it was Glasgow's turn to try to save lives rather than take them. She picked up two Exocet-capable Super Étendard aircraft on her long-range radar some 40 nautical miles out and immediately broadcast the warning codeword "Handbrake" to the whole task force. HMS Sheffield never acted on it: her own anti-air warfare officer was in the wardroom drinking coffee and his assistant had stepped away, so nobody went to action stations, launched chaff or called the captain to the bridge before an Exocet struck her amidships. Twenty of her company died, mostly from smoke inhalation, and she sank under tow six days later, the first Royal Navy warship lost to enemy action since the Second World War.

A Bomb That Passed Straight Through

HMS Glasgow's own brush with disaster came on 12 May 1982, while conducting shore bombardment operations alongside the frigate HMS Brilliant. Argentine A-4B Skyhawks attacked in two waves; in the first, Brilliant's Sea Wolf missiles shot down two of the attackers, Lieutenants Oscar Bustos and Jorge Ibarlucea. In the second wave, a bomb dropped by Lieutenant Fausto Gavazzi struck HMS Glasgow approximately three feet above the waterline on her starboard side.

Remarkably, the bomb passed clean through her aft engine room without exploding, an extraordinary stroke of fortune given the damage an actual detonation would almost certainly have caused. Even without exploding, the bomb still damaged her fuel systems and disabled both of her Tyne cruising engines, reducing her speed to just 10 knots and significantly limiting her ability to continue combat operations.

Gavazzi did not outlast the bomb he dropped by much: he was killed by Argentine anti-aircraft fire over Goose Green later that month, a bitter footnote given that his own weapon had failed to detonate.

The word remarkably in that sentence understates something that runs through the entire campaign, and it is arguably the single most important fact about the air war over the Falklands. Argentine pilots were attacking at extremely low level, at masthead height and below, because that was the only way to get under the missiles. The consequence was that their bombs had almost no time of flight, and a retarded bomb fuze needs a certain number of seconds after release before it arms. Estimates from the post-war assessments put the proportion of weapons delivered that way which arrived in a safe condition at up to half. Glasgow was one of a long list: Argonaut, Plymouth, which took four thousand-pounders and had none of them go off, Ardent, Sir Lancelot, British Wye. Lord Craig's verdict on it has never been improved on: six better fuses and we would have lost. Admiral Woodward admitted afterwards that at the height of the attacks in San Carlos Water he had been seriously considering telephoning London to say the thing could not be done.

And the men flying those aircraft knew all of it. Attacking a modern warship at fifty feet with a subsonic aircraft in daylight is close to the definition of a forlorn hope; the Argentine air force and naval aviators did it repeatedly, took very heavy losses doing it, and pressed home attacks that put bombs into British ships again and again. That the bombs mostly failed is not a reflection on the pilots. Fausto Gavazzi hit a destroyer three feet above the waterline from a Skyhawk at wavetop height, which is remarkable flying, and was shot down himself a fortnight later over Goose Green.

HMS Glasgow returned to the main task force and became the first warship involved in Operation Corporate to return home, arriving back in Britain on 19 June 1982, where she underwent repairs at Portsmouth Dockyard, a fortunate outcome for a ship that had, quite literally, had a bomb pass straight through her, and returned to the South Atlantic that August once the conflict was over.

A Long Postwar Career

HMS Glasgow resumed normal operations after her repairs, serving as West Indies Guard Ship from 31 March to 28 August 1987, a five-month deployment that took her from the North Atlantic down into the Caribbean, and underwent a major refit at Rosyth between 1991 and 1992 that included significant machinery replacements and weapons upgrades, replacing her older 20mm Oerlikon guns with modern Phalanx close-in weapon systems.

She deployed to the Persian Gulf for Armilla Patrol duty in 1991 in the aftermath of the Gulf War, joined NATO's Standing Naval Force Mediterranean in 1992, and continued a notably active career into her final years, joining the Australian-led INTERFET peacekeeping force off East Timor from 19 to 29 September 1999 before rounding out her sea time with Atlantic Patrol South duties in early 2004.

The End

HMS Glasgow's decommissioning was announced in July 2004, and she was formally decommissioned on 1 February 2005.

She remained laid up at Portsmouth for several years before finally being towed to Turkey for breaking up on 7 January 2009, closing out the career of a destroyer whose Falklands War experience, surviving an unexploded bomb passing directly through her hull, remains one of the more remarkable individual episodes of the entire conflict.