HMS Yarmouth (F101): Rescuing Ardent's Crew and Firing Over a Thousand Shells in the Falklands

The First Modified Rothesay

HMS Yarmouth was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 29 November 1957, launched on 23 March 1959 and commissioned on 26 March 1960, the first modified Type 12 frigate of the Rothesay class to enter Royal Navy service.

First of the modified Type 12s is worth a word of explanation. The Rothesay class were the second generation of the same hull: nine ships built to the Whitby design with the faults ironed out, a Seacat missile launcher in place of one of the anti-submarine mortars, and, after the mid-1960s refits, a flight deck and hangar aft for a Wasp helicopter. What made them matter is that the hull underneath was the best seakeeping form the Royal Navy ever drew, which is why it went on to become the Leander. That story starts in HMS Rothesay (F107).

A Collision With a Submarine and a Gunboat

Yarmouth collided with the submarine HMS Tiptoe in 1965 before undergoing major modernisation between 1966 and 1968 that added helicopter capability and Seacat missiles.

During the Third Cod War in February 1976, she collided with the Icelandic gunboat ICGV Baldur, severely damaging her bow and requiring repairs at Chatham Dockyard, an early taste of the confrontational duty that would define so much of her later career.

Two collisions in eleven years is a striking record and the two could hardly be less alike. Running into a submerged submarine on exercise is the sort of accident that happens when two ships are deliberately trying to occupy the same piece of sea, one of them blind. Running into an Icelandic gunboat in February 1976 was not an accident at all: it was the Third Cod War, and ramming was the tactic on both sides, with British frigates trying to put themselves between the gunboats and the trawlers, and the gunboats trying to get past. She came off worse, with her bow stove in and a passage home to Chatham to show for it.

Towing Sheffield and Rescuing Ardent's Crew

Arriving in the South Atlantic in late April 1982, Yarmouth was extensively engaged throughout the Falklands War.

Twenty-Nine Hours With Sheffield Astern

Provided anti-submarine protection and later helped tow the crippled destroyer is a very flat account of the week that made her reputation.

On 4 May 1982 two Exocets were fired at the picket group south-east of the islands. One hit HMS Sheffield. The other missed, passing close to Yarmouth and HMS Arrow before going into the sea. Both frigates closed the burning destroyer at once. Arrow went alongside and fought the fire and took off survivors; Yarmouth's job was to keep the submarine away, and she spent the next hours prosecuting contacts and dropping charges around a stopped, blazing ship while the men aboard tried to save her.

Sheffield was abandoned but did not sink, and on 9 May Yarmouth was ordered to tow her east, out of the exclusion zone, where she could be looked at and perhaps salvaged. Consider what that means. A frigate of two and a half thousand tons, with a four-and-a-half-inch gun and a Seacat launcher, dragging a burnt-out destroyer of well over four thousand tons on a wire, at three or four knots, in the South Atlantic in May, unable to manoeuvre, unable to zigzag, unable to run, much of it in broad daylight and inside the range of Argentine aircraft, for twenty-nine hours.

It ended with the weather. On the morning of 10 May the wind got up to gale force, the sea got into Sheffield through the hole the missile had made, she heeled over and went down. The first Royal Navy ship lost in action since 1945 sank on the end of Yarmouth's tow wire.

She provided anti-submarine protection when HMS Sheffield was struck by an Exocet missile and later helped tow the crippled destroyer, and during the San Carlos landings she rescued the crew of HMS Ardent after Argentine air attacks set the frigate ablaze, taking off her entire surviving ship’s company while the fire worked aft towards Ardent’s magazines. Twenty-two of Ardent’s people had already been killed.

Alongside a Burning Ship

What happened at San Carlos on 21 May is the thing she is remembered for, and it deserves the detail.

HMS Ardent had been sent into Grantham Sound, on her own, to bombard the airstrip at Goose Green and to draw Argentine aircraft away from the landing ships going into San Carlos Water. It worked, which was the problem. She was attacked repeatedly through the afternoon, hit by a succession of bombs aft, and set on fire. Twenty-two of her people were killed.

Yarmouth went alongside her. Not near her: alongside, bow to stern, while Ardent burned and the fire worked forward towards her magazines, and while the air raids were still coming in. Ardent's survivors came across onto Yarmouth's deck, and the last man off was Ardent's captain. Yarmouth then pulled clear, transferred them to the liner Canberra, and went back on patrol.

The judgement involved in that is worth stating plainly. Putting your own ship alongside a burning one with fire spreading towards her magazines is a decision to accept that if the magazine goes, you go too. There is no clever way to do it and no equipment that makes it safe. You go, or you do not, and the people on the other deck find out which within about a minute.

A Thousand Shells and a Skyhawk

On 23 May, Yarmouth engaged the Argentine coaster Monsunen with gunfire, and two days later claimed credit for downing an Argentine A-4C Skyhawk using her Sea Cat missiles.

Across the conflict she fired over 1,000 shells from her main guns in shore bombardment missions, and after the Argentine surrender took part in recapturing the South Sandwich Islands, a properly exhausting and consequential war for a single frigate.

The Only Ship-to-Ship Gun Action of the War

The Monsunen engagement of 23 May is a genuine curiosity, because it is the only occasion in the whole campaign when British and Argentine surface ships fought each other with guns.

Monsunen was not an Argentine warship. She was a small coaster belonging to the Falkland Islands Company, seized after the invasion and used by the Argentine garrison to move supplies between settlements at night, because the roads on East Falkland barely existed and the air was no longer safe for them. Yarmouth and HMS Brilliant caught her west of Lively Island and opened fire with the 4.5-inch. Her crew ran her aground and got off. She was recovered afterwards and spent the rest of the campaign working for the British instead, which is a small and satisfying piece of arithmetic.

The bombardment figure is better understood by weight than by count. Over a thousand rounds is roughly thirty-two tons of shell fired into Argentine positions, mostly at night, mostly from a few miles offshore, called down by observers ashore. Naval gunfire support is the least discussed and most consistently effective thing the Royal Navy did in that war: it went on almost every night for three weeks, it was accurate, and it was one of the things Argentine conscripts on the hills round Stanley found hardest to bear.

On 12 June, when HMS Glamorgan was hit by an Exocet fired from an improvised launcher on a trailer outside Stanley, Yarmouth was one of the ships that went to her and helped fight the fire. That is three burning British warships she went to in six weeks.

Operation Keyhole

Recapturing the South Sandwich Islands is the last line of her war and needs unpacking, because it is a very strange footnote.

Argentina had put a small party ashore on Southern Thule, the southernmost of the South Sandwich Islands, in 1976, six years before the invasion, and had maintained a station there ever since under the description of a scientific base. Britain had known and had said very little, because Southern Thule is a volcanic cinder in the far south Atlantic sixteen hundred miles from the Falklands, with no inhabitants and no conceivable value, and making a fuss about it would have cost more than ignoring it.

After the surrender at Stanley on 14 June, the Royal Navy went and got it back. Operation Keyhole, on 20 June 1982, was a landing by Royal Marines from ships including Yarmouth to remove the Argentine party, and it was the last act of the war. Ten men surrendered. She then carried prisoners back to Stanley, which is a reasonable summary of the entire campaign in one sentence.

Sunk as a Target

HMS Yarmouth was decommissioned on 30 April 1986 and sunk as a target during a SINKEX exercise by HMS Manchester on 16 June 1987, bringing to a close the career of one of the most consistently active British warships of the entire Falklands campaign.

She was paid off in April 1986, four years after all of that, and expended as a target the following June. There is a certain grim symmetry in a ship that towed a sinking destroyer, went alongside a burning frigate and helped fight the fire on a bombed cruiser being sunk in her turn by HMS Manchester, a destroyer that had herself been sent south as a Falklands reinforcement.