HMS Sheffield (D80): The First Royal Navy Ship Lost in Action Since the Second World War

Laid Down at Barrow, With an Odd Twist of Fate

HMS Sheffield was built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering at Barrow-in-Furness, ordered in 1968 and laid down on 15 January 1970.

During construction an explosion killed two dockyard workers and damaged a section of her hull, which was repaired using steel originally intended for another vessel under simultaneous construction at the yard, the Argentine ship Hercules, an odd historical footnote given the nation Sheffield would one day find herself at war with.

She was launched by Queen Elizabeth II on 10 June 1971 at a cost of £23.2 million and commissioned on 16 February 1975, the first of the Royal Navy's new Type 42 guided missile destroyers and an early test platform for the Sea Dart missile system.

That footnote is larger than a footnote. Britain did not merely happen to have Argentine steel lying about at Barrow: it had sold Argentina the design. ARA Hercules was ordered in May 1970, four months after Sheffield was laid down, built at the same yard by the same people to essentially the same drawings, and completed in 1976; her sister Santisima Trinidad was built in Argentina to the same design with British assistance. So when the two navies met in the South Atlantic in 1982, both of them were operating Type 42 destroyers, and the Argentine ones had the same radar, the same Sea Dart and the same blind spots. British officers knew exactly what the enemy's destroyers could and could not see, because they were their own.

And the repair itself is stranger still. When the construction explosion tore a section out of Sheffield's hull, the fastest fix available was to take the equivalent plating from the Argentine ship being built alongside her, because the two were identical. Sheffield went to the Falklands with a piece of ARA Hercules welded into her.

It is worth being clear about what a Type 42 was for, because it explains the afternoon. She was a missile ship, designed round Sea Dart, to shoot down Soviet bombers at medium and long range over a fleet in the North Atlantic. She was not designed to defend herself against a sea-skimming missile fired from over the horizon by an aircraft she could not see, because in 1968 that threat barely existed. The Royal Navy knew the gap was there. The Phalanx close-in system that would have addressed it was in the procurement pipeline and had not arrived.

South to the Falklands

Captain James Salt took command of Sheffield on 26 January 1982. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands that April, she was ordered to join Task Force 317 on 2 April, reached Ascension Island on 14 April and entered the Total Exclusion Zone around the islands on 1 May, one of a small number of Type 42 destroyers providing radar picket and air defence cover for the task force.

She arrived for that duty straight from six months on Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf, an anti-submarine posting a world away from the low-level anti-ship missile threat she was about to face, itself a reflection of a wider Cold War Royal Navy that had spent decades focused chiefly on Soviet submarines.

Attack from the Air

On the morning of 4 May 1982, Argentine naval aviation detected the task force, and at around 11:04 two Super Etendard aircraft flown by Capitan de Fragata Augusto Bedacarratz and Teniente Armando Mayora launched AM39 Exocet missiles from twenty to thirty miles out, using the terrain and radar gaps between ships to close undetected.

The warning had, in fact, arrived nineteen minutes earlier: radar operators aboard HMS Invincible picked up the incoming aircraft well before the attack, but after a run of false alarms in the preceding days the contact was classified as spurious and no fleet-wide alert was raised. Sheffield's own equipment then suffered the worst possible piece of bad luck: at the exact moment of the attack she was transmitting on her satellite communications link, which blinded the masthead sensor that might otherwise have picked up the Exocet's own radar.

A separate warning from HMS Glasgow was not acted on in time either, and with the missile itself sighted only around thirty seconds before impact, one struck Sheffield's starboard side at deck level, tearing into the forward auxiliary machinery room. Sub Lieutenant Brian Clark, watching from the bridge, had just enough time to shout a warning over the main broadcast before it hit.

Like every Type 42 of her generation, Sheffield had no automated close-in gun capable of shooting down a missile that got this close, no chaff fired that day to lure it away, and only two hand-aimed 20mm cannon dating from the Second World War as a last line of defence; the Phalanx system that might have stopped an Exocet outright was still being rushed into Royal Navy service in the weeks that followed.

The Myth About Her Superstructure

One thing needs saying because it is repeated constantly and it is not true. HMS Sheffield did not have an aluminium superstructure. She was built of steel throughout, and the Board of Inquiry, which did suspect a magnesium-aluminium alloy of feeding the fire, established from the ship's own plans and build records that no such material was there. The story took hold anyway, and it has been retold in newspapers and documentaries for forty years.

The reason it is believable is that it very nearly belongs to a different set of ships. The Royal and United States Navies had both been moving away from aluminium alloy after serious fires elsewhere, and two Type 21 frigates with aluminium superstructures, Antelope and Ardent, were lost in the same war within weeks of Sheffield. Three British warships burned in one campaign and the aluminium explanation attached itself to all three. What actually killed Sheffield was a fire in a ship whose firefighting main had been cut by the impact, fed by cabling, furnishings and paint, in a hull with too few and too small escape routes, and those are the things that were changed afterwards.

Twenty Lives Lost

The missile strike started a fierce fire that Sheffield's crew fought for around four hours, hampered by damaged firefighting systems and thickening smoke, before Captain Salt gave the order to abandon ship because of the risk of the fire reaching the Sea Dart magazine. Many of those aboard showed real courage in that fight, later commended for actions that helped shipmates escape a ship whose formica wall panelling, undersized escape hatches and standard-issue nylon clothing all proved, in the post-war analysis that followed, to have made a desperate situation still more dangerous.

Of the 281 men aboard, twenty were killed and dozens more injured, only one body was ever recovered, and the survivors were taken aboard HMS Arrow and other ships nearby, some by helicopter to HMS Hermes.

It was the first Royal Navy ship lost to enemy action since the Second World War, and the names of those twenty men are remembered still. HMS Sheffield was taken under tow by HMS Yarmouth, but continued flooding through the hull breach caused her to roll over and sink on 10 May 1982 in around 1,800 metres of water.

An Inquiry, and a Reassessment

A Board of Inquiry convened on 7 June 1982 found that the ship's principal warfare officer and anti-air warfare officer had been negligent in failing to act on the warning from HMS Glasgow, though no court martial followed. Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, commanding the task force from Northwood, judged the failures a collective one, born of exhaustion and an institutional focus on other threats rather than individual negligence deserving public punishment, a decision some historians and Sheffield veterans still debate today.

For years it was widely believed the Exocet's warhead had failed to detonate and that the fire alone caused the loss, but a Ministry of Defence reassessment in 2015 concluded that the warhead had in fact exploded, a correction to the historical record more than three decades after the event.

A Protected War Grave

The wreck of HMS Sheffield lies on the seabed of the South Atlantic and is protected as a war grave under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. Her loss remains one of the defining moments of the Falklands War, a stark demonstration of the vulnerability of modern warships to anti-ship missiles, and a sobering reminder of the human cost borne by those who served aboard her.

The lessons learned from her loss were acted on quickly: within weeks the Phalanx close-in weapon system was being rushed into Royal Navy service, and later in the same war HMS Glamorgan survived her own Exocet strike by staying alert and turning into the missile's approach, keeping it from reaching her main magazine, a small measure of consolation bought at a very high price.

Almost every ship named in that account has its own here, and several of them are written from the other side of the same afternoon. HMS Arrow (F173) came alongside a burning destroyer to take her people off; HMS Glasgow (D88) was the ship that saw the attack coming and could not get the warning acted on; HMS Yarmouth (F101) took her in tow; and the survivors flown off went to HMS Hermes (R12) and HMS Invincible (R05), the carrier whose radar had picked up the incoming aircraft nineteen minutes earlier.

The lessons cost more before they were finished being learned. HMS Coventry (D118), another Type 42, was lost three weeks later, and HMS Glamorgan (D19) survived a land-launched Exocet in June by doing what Sheffield never had the warning to do, turning hard into the missile so that it struck the ship's side at an angle instead of going in level. The name went back to sea in 1988 in a Type 22 frigate, HMS Sheffield (F96).