HMS Plymouth (F126): The Frigate That Survived Four Bombs in One Afternoon

A Devonport-Built Type 12

HMS Plymouth was a Rothesay-class, or Type 12M, frigate, built fittingly enough at Devonport Dockyard in the very city she was named for.

Laid down on 1 July 1958, she was launched on 20 July 1959 by the Right Honourable Nancy, Viscountess Astor, the trailblazing first woman to sit in the House of Commons, and completed on 16 June 1961, one of twelve Rothesay-class ships built as improved successors to the earlier Whitby class, all of them named after British coastal resorts.

On paper she was a solid, dependable anti-submarine frigate built for exactly the kind of long, unglamorous Cold War patrol work the Royal Navy expected to spend most of its time doing: two boilers driving twin shafts for a top speed of around 28 knots, twin 4.5-inch guns in a single turret forward, 40mm guns aft, and two triple-barrelled anti-submarine mortars, all packed into 2,800 tons and crewed by 250 men.

She also inherited a set of battle honours going back rather further than her own steel: Porto Farine 1655, Santa Cruz 1657, Lowestoft 1665, the Four Days' Battle of 1666, Orfordness 1666, Solebay 1672 and Texel 1673, all fought by earlier ships of the name against the Barbary corsairs and the Dutch. It was, by the standards of a name with that much previous form, a fairly quiet two decades before 1982 came along and gave her a battle honour of her own.

First to the South Atlantic

Not that she had been idle before then. Within a year of commissioning she was leading the Fourth Frigate Squadron in the Far East on SEATO exercises, and the next fifteen years took her through the 22nd and 29th Escort Squadrons, tours off Thailand, Singapore and Australia, and repeated stints on the Beira Patrol, the Royal Navy's long, thankless blockade of oil shipments to Rhodesia off the East African coast.

A 1966-69 conversion refit at Chatham gave her a flight deck for a Wasp helicopter in place of her forward mortar and Sea Cat missiles in place of her 40mm guns, and she marked the modernisation by taking part in the first public demonstration of an AS12 missile firing in June 1969. The 1970s brought a genuinely global itinerary: Mombasa at Christmas 1969, the Cook Bicentennial and ANZAC Day commemorations in Australia in 1970, a West Indies patrol in 1972 that saw her arrest illegal fishermen off the Bahamas and stand by a grounded Chilean freighter for a week, TASMANEX 75 and Trinidad's Republic Day celebrations, and a 1978 deployment to Canada and the eastern United States alongside HM Ships Ajax and Active.

That 1978 deployment was followed by a major refit intended to buy her a further ten years of life, and when she recommissioned on 23 January 1981 it was as leader of the new Sixth Frigate Squadron out of Rosyth, which is why, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, it was a Scottish-based frigate that found itself in the thick of it rather than one from her native Devonport.

Plymouth, under the command of Captain David Pentreath, was taking part in the fleet exercise Springtrain off Gibraltar on 2 April 1982, fully stocked and provisioned for a long-anticipated West Indies deployment the ship's company had already said their farewells for, when she was diverted south instead. She would not see the West Indies that year. She was thrown almost immediately into Operation Paraquet, the operation to recapture South Georgia.

The Santa Fe episode is usually told as a single dramatic strike, but it was really a relay. On the morning of 25 April, a Wessex helicopter from HMS Antrim, flown by Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley, found the Argentine submarine on the surface near Grytviken and crippled her with depth charges, wrecking a ballast tank and a fuel tank and leaving her unable to dive. As she limped back towards harbour, Plymouth launched a Wasp of her own, joined by two more from HMS Endurance and a Lynx from HMS Brilliant, and between them they finished the job with AS12 missiles, cannon fire and a torpedo run, wrecking her periscope and riddling her conning tower.

Every ship in that relay has an account of her own here: HMS Antrim (D18), whose Wessex opened the attack and whose article sets out why it is logged as the first submarine defeated by helicopters alone, HMS Endurance (A171), and HMS Brilliant (F90).

With Santa Fe abandoned at Grytviken's jetty, HMS Antrim and Plymouth turned their own guns on the Argentine positions ashore, a demonstration bombardment that put 269 4.5-inch shells over the hills above King Edward Point without a single one aimed to kill. It did not need to be. Lieutenant Colonel Guy Sheridan, leading the scratch landing force of around 75 Royal Marines, SAS and SBS troops that went in afterwards, later noted drily that his men never fired a shot; the sight of their own submarine crippled and shells falling around them had already done the persuading.

There is one death in the South Georgia operation and it happened the next day, aboard the submarine Plymouth had helped to cripple. Santa Fe was lying half-flooded against the jetty at Grytviken and had to be moved, so some of her crew were kept aboard under Royal Marine guard to work her. Her captain, Horacio Bicain, passed an order by radio to trim the boat. Petty Officer Felix Artuso reached for the levers to do it. The Marine watching him had been told his job was to stop any attempt at scuttling, could not follow what he was seeing, and fired five shots. Artuso was killed instantly.

A British inquiry found no fault or negligence on the guard's part, which is almost certainly right and does not make it any better. He was buried with full military honours by the men who had shot him, in the old whalers' cemetery at Grytviken where Ernest Shackleton also lies, and he is still there. He is the only person killed in the whole recapture of South Georgia, and he was not killed in the fighting.

The Grytviken garrison surrendered that same evening, 25 April, and the following day, Monday 26 April, the separate Argentine detachment at Leith surrendered aboard Plymouth herself, in the ship's own wardroom. Its commander was Lieutenant Commander Alfredo Astiz, later notorious for his role in Argentina's "Dirty War", who wished the document to refer to "invading" British forces. Pentreath, witnessed by Captain Nick Barker of HMS Endurance, simply struck the word out before either of them signed.

Astiz is worth following to the end, because the word Pentreath struck out was the least of it. He had been a lieutenant at the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, the ESMA, one of the worst of the junta's detention centres. In December 1977 he infiltrated a human rights group under a false name, and twelve of its members were seized as a result, among them three of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns, Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet. They were tortured at ESMA and then, within days, put aboard navy aircraft and thrown alive into the South Atlantic.

Britain sent him back to Argentina as a prisoner of war in June 1982 without charge, as the Geneva Conventions required. France later convicted him in his absence and Argentina declined to extradite him. It took until 27 October 2011, thirty-four years after the nuns disappeared, for an Argentine court to sentence him to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. He signed the surrender of Leith in a British frigate's wardroom and complained about the wording; nothing else he ever signed cost him anything like as little.

Escort, Air Defence, and a Very Bad Afternoon

Three weeks and a great deal more waiting later, Plymouth led the amphibious assault into San Carlos Water on the night of 20/21 May, the first ship of the whole task force to enter it, escorting the landing craft in to their beaches. For the rest of that day she helped fight off the air attacks that followed, and later took the crippled frigate HMS Argonaut under tow after she had been hit and left dead in the water.

As the campaign moved into San Carlos Water and the main amphibious landings, Plymouth settled into the punishing routine so many of the task force's escorts endured: air defence duty by day, when Argentine air attacks were at their most dangerous, and escort, bombardment or patrol work by night. Her young ship's company, in Pentreath's own words, grew up almost overnight, watching HMS Ardent and HMS Antelope go down at close quarters and burying some of their dead at sea from Plymouth's own deck, all while standing to against air attack by day and the threat of surface and submarine attack by night.

The ships in that week have their own articles too, and between them they tell the San Carlos story better than any single one can: HMS Argonaut (F56), whom Plymouth took in tow, HMS Ardent (F184) and HMS Antelope (F170), both of whom Plymouth's people watched go down.

A brief spell with the carrier battlegroup out to the east brought a new kind of scare on 30 May, when Argentine Etendard strike aircraft fired Exocet missiles at the force; the attack was driven off without loss, and by the night of 1 June Plymouth was back at San Carlos and back on the routine that would nearly finish her a week later.

That routine caught up with her on 8 June 1982. While alone off West Falkland, outside the protection of San Carlos's land and sea defences and attempting a daylight bombardment, Plymouth was attacked by five Argentine Dagger fighter-bombers. It later turned out these same aircraft had actually been tasked to hit the landing ships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram at Fitzroy that day; whether by luck or Argentine opportunism, Plymouth drew the attack instead, and Pentreath himself later credited that with sparing the amphibious shipping an even worse day than the one it already had.

Four bombs struck home, along with a heavy weight of cannon fire.

None of the four exploded, which given how many British ships in the Falklands were sunk or crippled by bombs that did go off was an extraordinary piece of fortune, but the impacts alone still did real damage. One bomb hit the flight deck and detonated a depth charge sitting there at readiness, starting a fire below decks that took the ship's own firefighters ninety minutes, and help from nearby ships, to put out. A second passed clean through the funnel without exploding. Two more wrecked the anti-submarine mortar and its handling equipment aft before punching out through the mortar well, one of them leaving a hole large enough for Leading Weapons Mechanic David Clark to be photographed grinning through it once the shooting had stopped.

Five of the crew were injured and evacuated by helicopter; all recovered. Plymouth's own gunners claimed two Argentine aircraft destroyed and two more damaged in return.

It remains one of the more remarkable survival stories of the entire campaign: a single frigate absorbing four unexploded bombs in one attack and staying afloat, still capable of fighting on. Hurried repairs overnight and through the following day left her floating, moving and fighting again, and she sailed that night for more thorough repairs from naval personnel aboard the support ship MV Stena Seaspread, two hundred miles east of the islands, before returning to the gunline off Port Stanley by 14 June, the night before the Argentine garrison surrendered.

Plymouth entered Stanley Harbour on 17 June, the first British warship to do so, and helped establish naval control of the port before finally leaving the Task Force on 21 June for the eight-thousand-mile voyage home, breaking the passage with a four-day stop in Gibraltar before an unbelievable, and entirely unexpected, homecoming at Rosyth on 11 July.

Across the whole campaign Plymouth fired 909 four-and-a-half-inch shells and nine Sea Cat missiles, a rate of engagement that reflects just how relentlessly she and her fellow escorts were called upon; Captain Pentreath was awarded the DSO, two of her men received the BEM, and two more were mentioned in despatches.

The Last Type 12 Standing

The war did not end her career. Plymouth spent the following six years on much the same rotation of West Indies deployments and home patrols she had known for two decades: Exercise Coral Fringe that winter, senior ship of the Dartmouth Training Squadron in 1984, West Indies Guard Ship duty in 1985, and a final refit that year in which her Cheverton motor boat was removed and extra 20mm guns fitted.

That refit had a genuine tragedy attached to it. Working up at Portland afterwards, in the last week of training, a fire broke out in her boiler room. It killed two of her engine room branch, Chief Petty Officer Marine Engineering Artificer Philip Nixon and Leading Marine Engineering Artificer Colin Tracey, on Friday 25 July 1986. Plymouth returned to Rosyth under her own power for permanent repairs within ten days, a grim postscript to a ship whose whole reputation had been built on surviving damage rather than causing it.

She sailed on regardless: Gibraltar in April 1987 and the Mediterranean the following month, then further home patrols before a final West Indies deployment from that November taking in some twenty ports across North, Central and South America, and finally decommissioning on 28 April 1988 as the last Type 12 frigate still in service, a fitting enough distinction for a ship that had already outlasted most of her sisters in rather more dramatic circumstances than a simple retirement parade. In twenty-seven years she had been commissioned eight times under sixteen different commanding officers and steamed over half a million miles.

A Museum Ship's Long, Difficult Afterlife

Rather than heading straight for the breakers, Plymouth was bought from the Ministry of Defence by the Warship Preservation Trust, a charity run largely by former naval officers and volunteers, and first opened to the public in her own namesake city that same summer, moored at a berth donated by Associated British Ports and staffed almost entirely by unpaid help. She moved on to Glasgow in 1990 and settled at Birkenhead Docks on the Mersey from 1991, where she would remain for the rest of her existence.

For years she offered visitors a rare chance to walk the decks of a genuine Falklands veteran and see, close up, the kind of damage a modern warship could take and survive: the very hole David Clark once grinned through was, for a while, part of the tour.

That preservation effort came to an end when the Trust closed in 2006, and despite various campaigns to save her, no lasting solution to fund her upkeep was ever found. A scrapping deal reported in 2012, on the eve of the Falklands conflict's thirtieth anniversary, prompted Captain Pentreath himself, by then long retired, to voice his sadness publicly, while Martin Slater of the HMS Plymouth Association called the timing "very insensitive". The outcry bought her two more years, but not a future.

She was towed from Vittoria Dock at Birkenhead on 20 August 2014, bound for Turkey, where she was broken up at Aliaga later that year. Peel Ports, which had inherited responsibility for the berth she had occupied for over two decades, put it plainly at the time: they had no expertise in preserving historic ships and, with her condition worsening at the quayside, felt they had no practical choice left but to dispose of her responsibly.

A Survivor's Story, Even at the End

It is a slightly bittersweet fact that a ship tough enough to survive four unexploded bombs in a single afternoon, and to carry on serving after a boiler-room fire that killed two of her own, could not in the end be saved from the scrapyard by peacetime funding alone.

Her battle honours board tells its own quiet story of continuity: a name that had already seen off Barbary corsairs and the Dutch by 1673 simply added one more line, Falkland Islands 1982, to a list three centuries in the making.

HMS Plymouth's war record, though, speaks for itself: present at the very first British victory of the Falklands conflict, and still afloat after an attack that by rights should have finished her, she remains one of the genuine survivor stories of the entire campaign.