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, construction beginning that December, 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. 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.

A Global Career

HMS Intrepid, based at Devonport and later Portsmouth, spent 32 years in service carrying out truly varied duties around the world, including disaster relief following the devastating 1970 Bhola cyclone in what is now Bangladesh, one of the deadliest tropical cyclones in recorded history, and supporting the British withdrawal from Aden in 1967, part of the broader retreat from empire east of Suez that defined so much Royal Navy activity during that period.

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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. 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.

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.

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. Following Ministry of Defence approval for disposal in February 2007, she departed Portsmouth on 13 September 2008 bound for dismantling in Liverpool, closing out the career of a ship 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.

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