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 helicopter in that list is worth explaining, because it was a new idea and a slightly desperate one. The Wasp came into service in 1963, the same year as Gurkha, and it carried no sonar, no radar worth the name and no way of finding anything by itself. It existed to answer a problem the Royal Navy called MATCH, the Manned Torpedo-Carrying Helicopter: sonar could now detect a submarine a good deal further away than any shipborne weapon could reach, so something had to carry the torpedo out to it. The ship found the target, the Wasp lifted off with a homing torpedo or a pair of depth charges under it, flew to a position the operations room gave over the radio, dropped, and came back. It was a small aircraft on a small deck in a big sea, flown by two men in a machine with very little margin, and it was the beginning of the arrangement that every frigate in the world now takes for granted.

The design she belonged to was an unusual one, and it was drawn for exactly the life she led. The Type 81 or Tribal class was built for colonial policing rather than for the North Atlantic: air-conditioned throughout so that she could work in the Gulf without modification, given a helicopter from the outset, and driven by a combined steam and gas plant through a single shaft, which is a compromise nobody would have accepted in a ship meant to fight submarines. Why the Admiralty made that bargain, and what it cost, is set out in the article on HMS Eskimo (F119). Seven were built, and between them they covered the last decade of Britain's presence east of Suez almost single-handed.

The Seychelles, Beira and Aden

HMS Gurkha deployed to the Middle East and appeared at Portsmouth Navy Days in the mid-1960s, before sailing from Aden to the Seychelles on 19 June 1966 to support the local police as a wave of strikes threatened to boil over into violence, 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.

The Aden withdrawal deserves rather more than a subordinate clause, because it was the end of something. Britain had held Aden since 1839 and had run the eastern half of its naval world from it; by 1967 the Emergency had made the place untenable, and the decision was taken to go. The last 3,500 men of the garrison came out in the final week of November, most by air through Khormaksar while the stores and vehicles went by sea, and the whole operation was conducted under the guns of a task force lying offshore that included aircraft carriers, commando carriers, destroyers, frigates and a submarine. Gurkha was part of that covering force. 42 Commando and 1 Para held the shrinking perimeter to the last, and Lieutenant Colonel Dai Morgan of 42 Commando was the final British serviceman to leave, on 29 November 1967. With him went the permanent British garrison east of Suez, and with it most of the reason ships like Gurkha had been built.

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.

On 7 May 1976, the Icelandic patrol ship Odinn tried to force HMS Gurkha into the path of the British trawler Ross Ramillies and collided with her in the attempt, one of numerous such incidents during a dispute in which Iceland's tiny coastguard fleet showed a remarkably determined willingness to take on Royal Navy frigates many times their size. Gurkha came off the better of the two: it was Odinn's own port propeller that was damaged, struck by Gurkha's stabiliser, and the Icelandic ship had to withdraw to port for repairs, a small consolation in a conflict where fishing rights, rather than any conventional military objective, were the prize.

The ship that hit her is still afloat, which is more than can be said for Gurkha. Odinn was built at Aalborg in Denmark in 1959, served the Icelandic Coast Guard for the better part of fifty years and took part in all three Cod Wars, and she was not simply a nuisance to the Royal Navy: over her career she towed something like two hundred vessels to safety and pulled the crews off a long list of ships that had gone aground on a coast that does not forgive mistakes. She was handed over to a preservation society in 2008 and now lies at the Reykjavik Maritime Museum, where visitors are shown round her; in May 2022 she was granted a fresh certificate of seaworthiness, which means the ship that put her propeller into a British frigate in 1976 could in principle still go to sea. Gurkha was scrapped in Indonesia. The tactics involved in these encounters, and what happened when a frigate did the ramming instead, are described in the article on HMS Falmouth (F113).

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.

The Gibraltar posting was less quiet than it sounds, and it is a useful illustration of what a war does to a fleet. Sending a task force to the South Atlantic in 1982 stripped the Royal Navy of very nearly everything it had; the ships that went were pulled off standing commitments all over the world, and those commitments did not stop existing because there was a war on. So a twenty-year-old frigate that had been earmarked for disposal was brought back into service, given a ship's company and sent to sit at Gibraltar so that somebody was there, and then sent to the Caribbean for the same reason. Reactivating ships already on the way out is what navies do when the accounts and the map disagree, and Gurkha spent her last two years being the answer to that problem.

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.

All three of the transferred ships went the same way, and it is worth recording what became of them. Zulu became KRI Martha Khristina Tiyahahu, named for a teenage Moluccan girl who fought the Dutch in the Maluku rising of 1817 and died a prisoner soon afterwards; Tartar became KRI Hasanuddin, for a seventeenth-century sultan of Gowa who spent his reign resisting the Dutch East India Company; and Gurkha became KRI Wilhelmus Zakarias Yohannes, for the radiologist. There is a pattern there worth noticing. A navy taking on three second-hand British frigates named after the martial peoples of the British Empire renamed every one of them after somebody who had resisted a European empire, or in the third case after a doctor. All three were stricken around the turn of the century, having given Indonesia another fifteen years of service out of ships the Royal Navy had finished with.

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 trading paint with an Icelandic gunboat over cod. Her new Indonesian name carried a nice surprise of its own: Wilhelmus Zakaria Johannes was no admiral or war hero but Indonesia's first radiologist, an X-ray pioneer who later became rector of the University of Indonesia before dying of a heart attack in the Netherlands in 1952, declared a National Hero in 1968, an unexpectedly gentle namesake for a frigate that had spent part of its career being rammed in the North Atlantic.

The name she carried had already been used up twice, and how it came back is worth telling. The first HMS Gurkha was a Tribal-class destroyer, bombed and sunk south-west of Bergen on 9 April 1940 with fifteen of her crew, the first British destroyer ever lost to air attack. When the news reached the Gurkha regiments, the officers and men subscribed a day's pay each towards a replacement. The Admiralty took an L-class destroyer then on the stocks at Cammell Laird, HMS Larne, and renamed her Gurkha; she was launched that July by Mary Churchill, seventeen years old at the time, and was torpedoed by U-133 off Sidi Barrani on 17 January 1942, sinking ninety minutes later. Two ships of the name gone inside two years, one of them paid for by soldiers, is a considerable amount of history to hand to a frigate commissioning in 1963.