HMS Tartar (F133): Rammed Twice in the Third Cod War

Laid Down at Devonport

HMS Tartar was built at Devonport Dockyard at a cost of £4,140,000, launched on 19 September 1960 and commissioned on 26 February 1962, one of the postwar Tribal-class frigates built specifically for East of Suez colonial patrol duties, entirely distinct from the wartime destroyer that had carried the same name a generation earlier.

Hurricane Relief and a Cuban Arms Cache

In 1963, Tartar provided humanitarian assistance to Trinidad after Hurricane Flora struck the Caribbean, and that same year apprehended nine armed Cubans along with a cache of weapons near Cay Sal in the Bahamas, a notably dramatic interception for a frigate more usually engaged in routine patrol work.

Facing Down Iran in the Gulf

Deploying to the Persian Gulf in 1968 alongside HMS Intrepid, Tartar patrolled the Greater and Lesser Tunbs in an effort to deter Iranian occupation of the disputed islands, part of the delicate late-colonial diplomacy Britain was managing in the region during its withdrawal from East of Suez commitments.

There is a sequel to that Gulf deployment which is worth following, because the collection contains both halves of it. Britain announced in 1968 that it was giving up its commitments east of Suez, and Tartar was among the ships sent to sit off the Greater and Lesser Tunbs to make clear that the islands were not simply going to be taken while the withdrawal was under way. It did not work. On 30 November 1971, the day before the British protection treaties lapsed and two days before the United Arab Emirates came into existence, Iran landed on the islands and has held them ever since. The flagship of the fleet that did it was a rebuilt British destroyer sold to the Shah four years earlier, and her account is here: HMS Sluys (D60). Two ships, on opposite sides of the same argument, three years apart.

The class she belonged to is worth a note as well. The Type 81 Tribals were seven ships built for exactly this sort of work, long single-ship deployments in hot climates a long way from a dockyard, and they were unusual in several ways: air-conditioned throughout, which was almost unheard of in the Royal Navy of 1960, fitted with a hangar and a helicopter at a time when frigates did not carry one, and driven by a combined steam and gas turbine plant that let them get under way in minutes rather than hours. HMS Ashanti (F117) covers the machinery, and HMS Zulu (F124) and HMS Gurkha (F122) were both rammed in the same fishing dispute.

Rammed Twice in the Cod Wars

Tartar's most memorable service came during the Third Cod War with Iceland, spending six weeks on fishery protection patrols in Icelandic waters during 1975 and 1976.

In that time she was rammed by the Icelandic gunboat ICGV Tyr on 1 April 1976 and again by ICGV Aegir just over a month later on 6 May, two of four collisions she was involved in during this uniquely combative fisheries dispute between Britain and Iceland.

Finding a Downed Airliner

In 1976, Tartar located the wreckage of Cubana Flight 455 in the West Indies, a passenger aircraft brought down by a terrorist bombing, and the following year took her place at the Spithead Fleet Review marking Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, a proud public moment amid an otherwise operationally varied career.

What She Found in the Water off Barbados

The airliner deserves a great deal more than a subordinate clause, because it is one of the defining crimes of the Cold War in the Americas. Cubana de Aviacion Flight 455 left Grantley Adams airport in Barbados at a quarter past five on the evening of 6 October 1976, bound for Jamaica and Havana. Nine minutes after take-off a bomb went off in a lavatory; the captain turned back for the airport, a second device detonated, and the aircraft came down in the sea a few miles off the Barbadian coast. All seventy-three people aboard were killed.

The passenger list is the part that stays with you. Fifty-seven Cubans, eleven Guyanese and five North Koreans, a great many of them under twenty. Twenty-two of them were the entire Cuban junior fencing team, flying home from the Central American and Caribbean championships, where they had won every gold medal in their events. Five were Guyanese students on their way to Cuba to study medicine. Only eight bodies were ever recovered from the sea, which is where a Royal Navy frigate on West Indies guardship duty comes into it: Tartar found the wreckage.

It was the first terrorist bombing of a civil airliner anywhere in the western hemisphere. Two Venezuelan men, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo, were arrested in Trinidad within hours and confessed to placing the explosives, hidden in a camera bag; they named as their employers Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, both anti-Castro exiles with long and well-documented histories with American intelligence, and the fifty years of legal proceedings, escapes, acquittals and asylum arguments that followed are still a live grievance between Havana and Washington. Barbados commemorates the dead every October. Tartar's part in it lasted a few days and is a line in her record, but it is the reason she appears in somebody else's history.

A West Indies Rescue

During a West Indies guardship deployment in 1982 and 1983, Tartar rescued the crew of the stricken vessel MV Spearfish before sinking the abandoned ship that June, standard but particularly useful maritime safety work carried out far from home waters.

Sold to Indonesia

Placed in the Standby Squadron in 1980 and briefly reactivated during the Falklands War without deploying south, Tartar was finally decommissioned in March 1984.

Following a refit by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston, she was delivered to Indonesia on 22 January 1986 and commissioned into the Indonesian Navy as KRI Hasanuddin, named for the Sultan who resisted Dutch colonisation, serving on until she was finally stricken in 2000.