HMS Gurkha (F122): Rammed by an Icelandic Gunboat in the Cod Wars

Built for East of Suez

HMS Gurkha was ordered under the 1955-56 Naval Estimates from John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, Hampshire, at a cost of £4,865,000, laid down on 3 November 1958, launched on 11 July 1960 and commissioned on 13 February 1963, joining the 9th Frigate Squadron in the Middle East.

A Tribal-class frigate measuring 360 feet in length and displacing 2,300 long tons standard, she used a combined steam and gas propulsion system giving her 27 to 28 knots on both engines together or a more economical 21 knots on steam alone, and carried two 4.5-inch guns, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar and a Westland Wasp helicopter, with her original 40mm Bofors guns later replaced by the Sea Cat missile system as the class was updated through the 1960s and 1970s.

The Seychelles, Beira and Aden

HMS Gurkha deployed to the Middle East and appeared at Portsmouth Navy Days in the mid-1960s, before sailing to the Seychelles in June 1966 to support the local police during a period of civil unrest, one of the countless small, unpublicised interventions that made up so much of late colonial and post-colonial Royal Navy service.

Between 1967 and 1968 she served on the Beira Patrol, the long-running Royal Navy operation enforcing an oil embargo against Ian Smith's breakaway Rhodesian regime by intercepting tankers bound for the Mozambican port of Beira, and also supported the British withdrawal from Aden and conducted operations in the Persian Gulf, a notably demanding and varied period of service east of Suez.

Rammed in the Cod Wars

HMS Gurkha deployed to the West Indies in 1975, but her most dramatic moment came the following year, in 1976, during the Third Cod War, the long-running dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights that saw Royal Navy frigates repeatedly squaring off against small but determinedly aggressive Icelandic patrol vessels.

HMS Gurkha sustained damage when the Icelandic patrol ship Odinn deliberately rammed her, one of numerous such collisions during a dispute in which Iceland's tiny coastguard fleet showed a remarkably remarkable willingness to take on Royal Navy frigates many times their size, in a conflict where fishing rights, rather than any conventional military objective, were the prize.

HMS Gurkha took part in the Queen's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, a rather more sedate occasion, before her final major operational chapter arrived in 1982: reactivated during the Falklands War, though not deployed to the South Atlantic itself, she took up duty as Gibraltar Guardship that October and later deployed to the Caribbean, useful service supporting the wider Royal Navy effort during a period when every available hull was in demand.

A New Flag in Indonesia

HMS Gurkha was decommissioned in March 1984 and sold to Indonesia the following month. Following a refit at Vosper Thornycroft's Woolston shipyard, the same yard that had built her more than two decades earlier, she was commissioned into the Indonesian Navy on 21 October 1985 as KRI Wilhelmus Zakarias Yohannes, alongside her sister ships HMS Tartar and HMS Zulu, which were transferred at the same time.

She remained in Indonesian service until being stricken in 2000, closing out a working life spanning nearly four decades and two navies, from enforcing an embargo off Mozambique to being deliberately rammed by an Icelandic gunboat over cod.