HMS Intrepid (L11): Recalled From the Scrapyard for the Falklands

The Last Ship From a Famous Yard

HMS Intrepid was ordered on 1 May 1962 and built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 19 December that year, a Fearless-class landing platform dock and the very last ship the famous John Brown yard would ever build for the Royal Navy, a particularly significant milestone marking the slow decline of an industry that had once dominated British shipbuilding.

Getting her finished did not go smoothly. In 1965 the Admiralty had to record that Intrepid's completion was being held up because John Brown needed to shift shipyard labour off her and onto the Cunard liner taking shape a few berths away, the future QE2, whose keel had gone down that July. Her planned commissioning date came and went. There is something entirely characteristic of the period about an assault ship losing a fight for skilled tradesmen to a cruise liner, and within three years John Brown's Clydebank yard had been folded into the ill-fated Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, which was itself in liquidation by 1971.

She was launched on 25 June 1964 and commissioned on 11 March 1967, displacing 12,120 long tons at full load and capable of carrying between 380 and 400 embarked troops in normal conditions, expandable to 700 for brief periods, along with 15 tanks and 27 vehicles, deployed ashore using four LCM and four LCVP landing craft.

The trick that made her what she was happened at the back end. Intrepid and Fearless were the Royal Navy's first purpose built landing platform docks, and the entire point of the design was a floodable dock built into the hull. Pumping seawater into a bank of thirty nine ballast tanks sat the ship down by the stern until the dock flooded, at which point her landing craft could motor straight out of the back of her fully loaded, with no crane involved and no need to go anywhere near a harbour. Ballasted down with the dock flooded she displaced around 16,950 tons against 12,120 the rest of the time. Put another way, the Royal Navy had built a warship designed to partly sink herself before going into action, and then pump it all out again afterwards.

Her sister has an account here, and the pair of them really have to be read together: HMS Fearless (L10) was the amphibious flagship in 1982 and carried the landing force commander, while Intrepid carried the load. For thirty years the Royal Navy's entire ability to put an armoured force onto a hostile beach rested on those two hulls and their eight landing craft, and from 1976 onwards it usually rested on one of them, because the other was in dockyard hands.

Then there is the matter of her name. Intrepid's badge, approved in 1936, is a gold lion standing full face on a red field, beneath the motto Cela va sans dire, which translates as that goes without saying. The official explanation of the badge notes, without any apparent embarrassment, that intrepid is simply another word for fearless. Having ordered two assault ships, the Royal Navy had effectively named them the same thing twice and then given one of them a motto daring anybody to bring it up.

A Global Career

HMS Intrepid, based at Devonport and later Portsmouth, spent 32 years in service carrying out truly varied duties around the world. Her first proper test came in November 1967, when she formed part of the naval task group covering the British withdrawal from Aden, part of the broader retreat from empire east of Suez that defined so much Royal Navy activity during the period; the Queen's Own Hussars were among the units she carried clear, some of them ferried on to Dubai, as the last of a roughly 3,500-strong garrison left in the final week of the month, and her own radio equipment was pressed into service afterwards to relay word confirming that the submarine HMS Auriga had made it safely on to Singapore.

In March 1968 she was handed something a good deal more delicate. On the 29th the Foreign Office received a report that Iran was about to seize the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, two specks of rock in the Persian Gulf claimed by the Shah but under British protection on behalf of Ras al-Khaimah. Two minesweepers were sent past the islands in daylight on the 30th, and Intrepid, the frigate HMS Tartar, or both, were to steam by on the 31st while RAF Shackletons had a look from above. It was pure theatre, and known to be: the orders were that if Iran actually invaded, the ships were to do nothing whatever except report it to Whitehall, and the Ministry of Defence added for good measure that the situation was still very delicate and all provocative action was to be avoided. The genuinely awkward part, as the declassified record notes, is that Intrepid had only just finished conducting assault landings with the Iranians.

The following year brought a first that has aged rather better. In 1969 Intrepid became the first Royal Navy warship to be fitted with satellite communications equipment, taking a Skynet terminal to sea for trials on passage to the Far East and running further tests with it the year after. It was not the sort of thing that gets a ship into the newspapers, but it mattered a great deal. An amphibious flagship is only as useful as her ability to talk to London, and within thirteen years that would turn out to be very nearly the whole point of her.

Three years after Aden she was doing something rather different again. In November and December 1970 she led a task force out of Singapore alongside HMS Triumph, a former light fleet carrier by then rebuilt as a heavy repair ship, into the Bay of Bengal, carrying eight Wessex helicopters of 847 Naval Air Squadron and eight landing craft to help with relief efforts after the Bhola cyclone had torn through what is now Bangladesh, one of the deadliest tropical cyclones ever recorded. The effort had a codename, Operation Burlap, and a supporting cast that included the survey ship HMS Hydra and a string of Royal Fleet Auxiliaries, among them Sir Galahad, Stromness, Olwen and Resource. Her landing craft turned out to be the first transport capable of reaching some of the worst-hit islands in the Ganges Delta at all, an unglamorous job a very long way from anything resembling naval warfare, but quite possibly one that did more good than most of what she had actually been built for.

Then the cuts caught up with her. Intrepid came out of the operational fleet in 1976 as the defence budget contracted, and by June 1978 the Commons was being told she was under refit at Portsmouth dockyard and expected to complete later that year, while Fearless carried the amphibious role and the officer training alone. Intrepid returned to full service in 1979 so that her sister could take her own turn in dockyard hands, and by June 1980 ministers were listing her among the ships operating around the Straits of Gibraltar. It was a tidy enough arrangement with one obvious flaw: from then on the Royal Navy could realistically count on having exactly one working assault ship at any given moment.

Recalled From Retirement for War

HMS Intrepid had actually been earmarked for decommissioning under the 1981 Defence White Paper, a cost-cutting review that proposed significant reductions to the Royal Navy's amphibious capability.

By 1981 she had already been de-stored in preparation for disposal, and was reportedly lined up for sale to, of all possible buyers, Argentina, the very country whose invasion force she would shortly be sent to help evict. Had that sale gone through even a few months sooner, the Royal Navy would have had to try retaking the Falklands without one of only two ships in the entire fleet actually built to put tanks and troops ashore there.

There was also a stay of execution that almost nobody remembers. On 8 March 1982, answering a written question in the Commons, the Defence Secretary John Nott announced that he had decided to keep both assault ships in service after all, retaining what he called the existing capability to conduct flexible amphibious operations overseas, at a cost of roughly £3 million a year. The pair were to take over from two County-class destroyers as peacetime training ships for junior officers. That answer was given 25 days before Argentine special forces came ashore on East Falkland, and it is a fair bet that Nott never expected it to be the most consequential written answer of his career.

Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 changed everything: she was rapidly recommissioned for Operation Corporate, the task force assembled to retake the islands, a remarkably dramatic reversal of fortune for a ship that had, only months earlier, been heading for the scrapyard.

She sailed from Portsmouth on 25 April 1982 as part of the amphibious group, her recommissioning so rushed that weapons drills, damage-control training and helicopter deck work were still being worked up during the passage south past Ascension Island; by the time she left Ascension on 8 May to join the main task force in the exclusion zone, ship's company and embarked troops alike had had barely three weeks to turn a scrapyard candidate back into a working amphibious ship.

Into Bomb Alley

Her real armament was her landing craft. Intrepid carried four LCUs of around 100 tons apiece in the dock and four smaller LCVPs on davits, crewed by 6 Assault Squadron Royal Marines and known on the radio as Tango One through Tango Eight, in exactly the way that Fearless's craft, run by 4 Assault Squadron, were the Foxtrots. Nothing bolted to the ship herself was ever going to win a war. The Tangos, shuttling men, guns, ammunition and vehicles between anchorage and beach for the next six weeks, were how Intrepid actually fought.

The war reached her before the landings did. On the evening of 19 May a Sea King HC4 of 846 Naval Air Squadron was cross-decking special forces from HMS Hermes to Intrepid when it lost power on the approach and went into the sea. Bird feathers found floating afterwards pointed to an albatross strike, though nothing was ever proved. Twenty one men were lost, nineteen of them SAS, and eight survived. Among the dead was Flight Lieutenant Garth Hawkins, an RAF forward air controller attached to D Squadron and a month short of his fortieth birthday. It remains the worst single day the SAS has suffered since the Second World War, and it happened a few hundred yards short of Intrepid's flight deck.

HMS Intrepid, under the command of Captain Peter Dingemans, played a direct and vital role in the amphibious landings at San Carlos Water on 21 May 1982, offloading troops, artillery and armoured vehicles onto the beachhead that would serve as the springboard for the entire land campaign to retake the islands.

She sustained repeated air attacks during the landings but remarkably took no direct hits, a fortunate outcome given how many other ships in San Carlos Water, quickly nicknamed 'Bomb Alley' by the sailors serving there, were struck and in some cases sunk during the same operation.

None of that was particularly comfortable. Intrepid's own ship's company numbered around 500, yet at the height of the landings she was also carrying some 1,500 troops, and during the first week off San Carlos the ship spent more than 20 hours a day at action stations, which left rather less time than usual for anyone to enjoy the extra company.

A Night Run to Bluff Cove

By the start of June the land campaign needed shifting eastward in a hurry, and on 5 June Intrepid embarked the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards to take them round towards Bluff Cove. She never got close. With Exocet-armed aircraft still in play and Argentine positions ashore, nobody was willing to push one of the fleet's only two assault ships that far forward, so she flooded down, sent her loaded LCUs away roughly 35 miles short of the objective and turned back for San Carlos before first light.

What followed was one of the more wretched nights of the campaign. The landing craft had no charts for the run in and were relying on borrowed local knowledge, the sea got up, and the Guardsmen spent something like seven hours in open, flat-bottomed craft in a South Atlantic winter, taking freezing water over the bow every time the boats came down off a wave. Partway through, HMS Cardiff, on missile-trap patrol off Stanley and with no idea who was in front of her, lit them up with starshell to work out what they were. Cardiff had already shot down a British Gazelle by mistake that same evening, killing all four aboard, so the alarm felt in the landing craft was entirely reasonable. They got ashore. The coordination failures of that night were sorted out with some urgency afterwards.

Cardiff's side of that night is worth reading too, because it was a bad one for her as well: HMS Cardiff (D108) had shot down an Army Gazelle earlier the same evening, killing all four men in it, in the belief that she was engaging an Argentine Puma, and she then found four unidentified craft in her missile engagement zone with no notification that any friendly movement was taking place. That she illuminated them with starshell rather than firing is the reason the Scots Guards got to Bluff Cove. The problem was not carelessness on anybody's part. It was that the amphibious group and the carrier battle group were passing movement signals through different chains and neither was reliably reaching the other.

What Happened Three Days Later at Fitzroy

The same problem killed a great many people on 8 June, and the article's reference to Foxtrot Four is the edge of it. The move of 5 Infantry Brigade round to Bluff Cove and Fitzroy had to be completed somehow, and after the Scots Guards run of 5 June the remaining battalion, the Welsh Guards, went round in the landing ships RFA Sir Galahad and RFA Sir Tristram instead. On the morning of 8 June both were lying off Fitzroy in daylight, unloading slowly, with no air defence ship in company and a good deal of confusion ashore about who was supposed to be getting off and when.

Argentine A-4 Skyhawks found them in the early afternoon. Sir Galahad was hit and set on fire with troops and ammunition still aboard, Sir Tristram was hit and burned out, and forty-eight men were killed, thirty-two of them Welsh Guards. It was the heaviest British loss of life on any single day of the campaign, and the photographs of Sea Kings hovering in the smoke lifting men off a burning landing ship are among the images that fixed the war in the public mind. Sir Galahad was towed out and sunk in deep water afterwards and is a designated war grave. Foxtrot Four, one of Fearless's landing craft, was caught by Skyhawks separately the same day with the loss of six men.

None of that is Intrepid's fault and none of it is a criticism of her. It is the direct cost of the thing her own 5 June run had already demonstrated: that the fleet did not dare risk an assault ship forward, so troops had to be moved in vessels less able to look after themselves, at the end of a chain of communication that was not working. Intrepid came through the entire campaign without a scratch. The men she was trying to move round the coast did not, and the reason is the same in both cases.

After the Surrender

The war itself ended on 14 June 1982, when the Argentine commander, Brigadier General Mario Menéndez, signed the instrument of surrender ashore at Government House in Stanley with Major General Jeremy Moore, whatever a handful of persistent militaria listings still claim about paperwork supposedly signed on Intrepid's own deck.

What Intrepid actually did next was arguably just as important. Over 15 and 16 June she organised the collection of some 1,600 Argentine prisoners from West Falkland, where 150 men of 40 Commando had gone ashore at Port Howard to disarm around 730 of them while HMS Avenger did the same at Fox Bay with roughly 900 more, before all of them were ferried to the San Carlos anchorage for transfer aboard the requisitioned liners SS Canberra and MV Norland.

The frigate that did the Fox Bay half of that job is here as well: HMS Avenger (F185), who had arrived in the South Atlantic only a fortnight before the surrender and packed a remarkable amount into it. Sixteen hundred prisoners collected off a roadless island by helicopter and landing craft, and then ferried out to two requisitioned liners, is the sort of task that appears in no operational plan and has to be improvised by whoever is nearest with a dock in the back.

In the days that followed she extended much the same logistics effort to the islanders themselves, calling at 35 settlements across West Falkland and most of East Falkland with four Sea King helicopters of 846 Naval Air Squadron carrying out health checks, taking a census and running what her own crew nicknamed the "Sea King Supermarket," a helicopter stocked with flour, salt, tea, coffee, sugar and whatever else an isolated farming settlement had gone without for the previous ten weeks.

She sailed for home in late June with 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery embarked, marking the equator crossing with the traditional ceremony, and her crew found time on the way back to raise £6,000 for the families of the six men killed when the landing craft Foxtrot Four, one of sister ship HMS Fearless's own, was sunk by Argentine Skyhawks off Fitzroy on 8 June, a reminder that the bill for the campaign Intrepid herself had come through unscathed had still been paid in full by the ship next door.

A Different Kind of Cold War

Reprieve turned out to be rather more durable than anyone would have guessed in 1981. Between September 1983 and early 1985 she underwent a 19-month refit at Devonport in which her original Sea Cat missile launchers, of distinctly limited use against fast, low jets as the war itself had rather painfully demonstrated, were removed in favour of twin 30mm and single 20mm anti-aircraft cannon mounts.

From June 1985 until 1990 she took on a considerably gentler role, supporting the sea training phase of officer training run out of Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, ferrying successive intakes of officer cadets around home waters; the ship that had spent three frantic weeks in 1982 hauling tanks onto a fire-swept beachhead now spent much of the late 1980s shepherding trainees around the Channel and the Western Approaches instead. It was, give or take three years and a war, precisely the job John Nott had announced for her that March.

The role wasn't entirely sedate. In October 1986 she left Portsmouth for a deployment to the Middle East and the Gulf of Arabia with elements of 40 Commando Royal Marines embarked.

By the decade's end, in 1990, she took part in NATO's Exercise Dragon Hammer in the Mediterranean, one of her last major fleet exercises before reserve status finally caught up with her.

The End

HMS Intrepid was laid up in reserve from 1990, her wartime reprieve ultimately proving temporary, and was formally decommissioned on 31 August 1999.

The reason she never came back is quietly grim. Fearless emerged from an extensive refit in 1990 in good order. Intrepid, by then in poor material condition, was judged not worth the same money, and instead spent the following decade being taken apart from the inside to keep her sister running, with pumps, valves, fittings and spares crossing the harbour one at a time. On paper she remained an available ship. In practice the Royal Navy kept one assault ship at sea by slowly consuming the other, which is more or less what happens when a fleet is asked to do the same job with half the hulls.

She spent most of the following decade laid up at Fareham Creek near Portsmouth, and even after her final tow to Liverpool for dismantling, explorers who photographed her empty decks that November found paintings and newspaper cuttings left behind by her crew dating from before 1988, small personal traces of the working ship she had once been rather than the rusting hulk she had since become.

Following Ministry of Defence approval for disposal in February 2007, she departed Portsmouth on 13 September 2008 bound for dismantling in Liverpool, arriving four days later to be locked into the Canada Graving Dock. The contract went to Leavesley International, working with Technical Demolition Services of Birkenhead, and the job was done properly and at home rather than on somebody else's beach: around 96 per cent of her, some 11,000 tons of steel, iron and copper, was back in circulation by the following May. More than 300 of her former crew had signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to keep her instead, as a floating museum and a memorial to the campaign she had been hauled out of retirement to fight. It came to nothing, which by then was the customary outcome for old British warships.

So the ship de-stored for disposal in 1981, reprieved by a written parliamentary answer in March 1982, at war within four weeks of it, and then hollowed out through the 1990s to keep her sister at sea, went to the breakers in the end anyway, closing out the career of a vessel that had quite literally been recalled from the brink of retirement to play a decisive role in one of the defining conflicts of the late twentieth century. Cela va sans dire, promised the badge on her bridge: that goes without saying. For HMS Intrepid, remarkably little ever did.

There is a coda to the argument about half the hulls, and it is a bleak one. Intrepid and Fearless were eventually replaced by two new landing platform docks, HMS Albion (L14) and HMS Bulwark (L15), commissioned in 2003 and 2005. Two ships again, and again operated for most of their lives with one at sea and one in extended readiness, which is the polite modern term for the arrangement that hollowed Intrepid out in the 1990s. Both have now been withdrawn, and the fleet that in 1982 could barely find two assault ships now has none at all. Cela va sans dire.