Tag Archives: HMS Yarmouth (F101)

Tales of the Crazy Y

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The humble 2,800-ton modified Type 12 (Rothesay Class) frigate HMS Yarmouth (F 101) was the oldest of the 24 escorts sent to the South Atlantic to retake the Falklands in 1982.

Laid down in 1957, she entered service in March 1960, and the only surface warship older than her in the 43-vessel task force was the light carrier HMS Hermes, which had commissioned just four months earlier in November 1959.

The Type 12 Frigate HMS Yarmouth (F101), photographed shortly before the Falklands Conflict. IWM (FKD 590)

When the orders came to join Operation Corporate in April 1982, Yarmouth was in the Mediterranean, headed to the Far East, and many of her crew’s wives and families had gone ahead to Singapore to greet them there.

Singapore would have to wait.

HMS Hermes (R12), HMS Broadsword (F88), and HMS Yarmouth (F101) anchored off Ascension Island and conducted VERTREP on April 17th, 1982, while en route to the Falkland Islands.

Nicknamed the “Crazy Y” and “The Rubber Duck,” Yarmouth was seemingly everywhere in the Falklands theatre over the next four months and did everything.

She conducted anti-submarine patrols, naval gunfire support for troops ashore (she fired 1,441 rounds from her twin 4.5″/45 Mark 6 turret at Argentine positions), and anti-air warfare (her Seacat launcher is credited with a kill against A-4C Skyhawk C-319, flown by Teniente Tomás Lucero, over “Bomb Alley” in San Carlos on 25 May).

Yarmouth lobbed 58 warshot Limbo mortar rounds against sonar contacts, including at the ARA San Luis on 1 May

Photo taken from HMS Yarmouth (F101), a Type 12 Frigate, at San Carlos. An Argentine A4 Skyhawk flies by during an attack on the British ships.

She landed SBS and Royal Artillery observers who promptly sneaked ashore to call in fire.

Yarmouth famously came to the assistance of the Exocet-stricken destroyer HMS Sheffield and took her under tow, only to have to cut the line.

HMS Yarmouth attempts to tow the damaged HMS Sheffield to South Georgia for repairs. During the voyage, the weather worsened, and early in the morning of 10th May, Sheffield had to be abandoned – 1982 (IWM)

She also came alongside the bomb-stricken frigate HMS Ardent and the Exocet-damaged Glamorgan.

HMS Yarmouth (right) comes alongside the sinking HMS Ardent to take off her crew. HMS Broadsword is behind HMS Ardent while a Sea King 4 helicopter approaches her starboard side. IWM (FKD 69)

Survivors of HMS Ardent wearing “once-only” survival suits, on the flight deck of HMS Yarmouth after abandoning ship in San Carlos Water on 21 May. HMS Ardent had been damaged in two Argentine air attacks. Note Yarmouth’s Seacat launcher over her hangar, credited with shooting down an Argentine Seahawk four days later. IWM (FKD 145)

Yarmouth also fought a surface action against the Argentine armed coaster ARA Monsunen, engaging the 300-ton vessel with her 4.5-inch guns west of Lively Island until the latter ran aground in the shallows in a failed escape attempt in what is now remembered as the Battle of Seal Cove.

She usually conducted NGFS at night. Among her fire missions were 300 4.5-inch shells in the hills around Port Howard on 27 May, 187 shells into Argentine positions in the mountains and around Stanley and Moody Brook on 7 June, 124 on 8 June, and another 164 the next night. On the final push for Stanley on 13/14 June, she supported the assaults on Mounts Harriet by 42 Commando and Tumbledown by the Scots Guards with 261 rounds of 4.5inch.

She fired the last angry shots of the war, being sent 1,200 miles further south as the “muscle” of Operation Keyhole with the guard ship HMS Endurance, oiler RFA Olmeda, and the tug Salvageman to the South Sandwich Islands, where Argentina had established a small military base in South Thule in 1976, the week after the liberation of the Falklands.

Following a demonstrational bombardment among the icebergs by her 4.5s, the 10-member Argentine naval detachment threw in the towel on 20 June without firing a shot, taken into custody by Royal Marines.

Operation Keyhole 19-20 June 1982, recapture of disputed South Thule Island by RM and SBS, bringing the Falkland campaign to a close

Sea King helicopter from oiler RFA Olmeda, Operation Keyhole 19-20 June 1982, landing Commandos on South Thule Island

June 20th 1982: Lieutenant Enrique Martinez, Argentine Navy, signs the formal act of surrender of South Thule on board HMS Yarmouth.

On the way back, the short-legged Yarmouth was refueled at sea by Olmeda (her 50th of the campaign!) noted as perhaps the most southernly such evolution in Royal Navy history, performed just two days sail from the Antarctic coast.

In the end, she fired more shells than any of the 14 British frigates and destroyers that released their main battery during the conflict.

Yarmouth, “The Fighting 101,” returned to her home port of Rosyth on July 28 after 120 days at sea, a bit rusty but unscathed and with no casualties to report.

The frigate was decommissioned in 1986 and disposed of in a SINKEX the following year.

Her skipper during the epic Falklands deployment, Capt. Antony Morton, DSC, passed recently, aged 84.

Originally a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm, Morton was a Buccaneer driver and c/o of 809 Naval Air Squadron aboard HMS Ark Royal, then went to Yarmouth after his carrier was decommissioned, the Royal Navy out of the Buccaneer game.

Post-Falklands, he went on to be naval attaché in Paris and captained the Broadsword-class frigate HMS Beaver (F93) in the Persian Gulf, where he was remembered as “a calm presence but also demanding in terms of the standards he set and expected from others.”

As noted of his time on Yarmouth in the Falklands, he said it was all a matter of good fortune:

“A lot of ships were hit around us. We had seen quite a lot of disasters, and obviously, people were worried, but generally, morale was amazingly good.”

Pour one out for Capt. Morton, and the ghost of the Crazy Y, an example to frigates and frigatemen eternal.

Operation Tornado ’82

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The naval combat in the Falklands War of 1982 was hugely influential for today’s fleets as it reinforced just how hard modern ASW is, underlined the relevance of light aircraft carriers (England was set to dispose of them before the conflict), pointed out the danger of aluminum superstructures (although this is now falling on deaf ears it seems), and highlighted the nightmare of fighting even laughable quantities of anti-ship missiles.

Another thing it did was point out that naval gunfire support for ground combat troops operating in the littoral was still very relevant.

With the British deploying two light brigades (3 Commando and 5 Guards including three Royal Marine Commando battalions, two Para battalions, and a battalion of the Scots Guards, another of the Welsh Guards, and a Gurkha battalion) to retake the islands from upwards of 10,000 Argentines, the Brits had very little in the way of organic artillery the task force was able to bring with them 8,000 miles south.

While the Argies had access to modern 155mm guns, the Brits were handicapped with only five batteries of 105mm light howitzers (three from 29 Commando and two from 4th Field Artillery) which, with a precious handful of helicopters on hand, were slow to move forward to support the front line.

For instance, in one operation against Goose Green, where the Argentines had 30 guns emplaced and well-supplied, just 12 RN Sea King sorties were allocated to move artillery forward enabling 28 British artillerymen, three guns, and 1,000 shells to stage for the battle.

Likewise, the 40 or so Harriers flying from two carriers offshore had their hands full with attempting to secure local air superiority and could divert precious few sorties to support the Marines, Paras, and Guards ashore.

That’s where the assorted 4.5-inch Mark 8 and QF Mark VI naval guns of the British task force’s eight gun-armed destroyers and nine gun-armed frigates came in.

Chilean Frigate Almirante Condell (PFG-06) working her 4.5″/45 (11.4 cm) QF Mark VI in 1999. Two Leander frigates were built by Yarrows in Scotland for the Chilean Navy during the 1970s. The twin 4.5 is of the same type mounted on two RN frigates— HMS Yarmouth and HMS Plymouth– during the Falklands, each firing about 1K rounds during the short war. U.S. Navy Photograph No. 990705-N-5862D-001.

4.5″/55 (11.4 cm) Mark 8 Mod 0 on HMS St. Albans F83. Royal Navy Photograph. The Mark 8 was fitted to most of the gun-armed British frigates and destroyers in the Falklands.

Capable of delivering a 55-pound HE shell to targets up to 18,000 yards away (24,000 for the longer Mark 8), they also had a very high rate of fire, with even the older guns capable of 12-14 rounds per minute. With these small warships (most of the frigates hit 2,500-3,250 tons while the destroyers only went about 5,000) often still able to carry 800 to 1,000 shells in their magazines and able to operate in as little as five fathoms of seawater, they were called inshore to deliver the goods.

At Goose Green, HMS Arrow (F173) fired 22 pre-dawn Mk 8 star shells and 135 rounds of 4.5-inch HE in the course of a 90-minute bombardment. She would have fired more had her gun not jammed and put her out of action.

Dubbed Operation Tornado by the Royal Navy, individual frigates and destroyers were soon dispatched on nightly gun runs to plaster Argentine positions with harassment and interdiction fire (H&I) then fall back to the relative safety of deep water during the day. In their mission, they received shot correction from buried and heavily camouflaged commando patrols from SAS and SBS as well as ANGLICO teams from 148 Battery. Slated for disbandment just before the Falklands, the 30 or so gunners and observers of 148 (Meiktila) Battery Royal Artillery proved invaluable, calling very accurate fire down on Argentine bunkers, trenches, and guns.

At first, the “strafe” would only send less than 200 rounds downrange but this would soon double and even triple, with as many as 750 shells being the norm three weeks into the campaign.

One Argentine remembered after the war:

We were very demoralized at that time because we felt so helpless. We couldn’t do anything. The English were firing at us from their frigates and we couldn’t respond.

HMS Yarmouth (F101), an older modified Type 12 frigate laid down in 1957, fired over 1,000 shells from her main guns (twin 4.5s), mostly during shore bombardment that included supporting the Scots Guards during the Battle of Mount Tumbledown.

The Royal Navy Rothesay-class frigate HMS Yarmouth (F101) underway during the Falklands War on 5 June 1982. Yarmouth´s unofficial nickname was “The Crazy Y”. CC via Wikipedia

Her sister ship, the circa-1958 HMS Plymouth (F126) fired 909 4.5 inch shells and was the first British warship to enter liberated Port Stanley harbor.

In one harassment mission of Port Stanley’s airport, the destroyer HMS Cardiff (D108) fired 277 shells.

Besides shore bombardment runs, the frigate HMS Alacrity (F174) used her 4.5-inch gun to engage and sink the 3,000-ton Argentine supply ship ARA Isla de los Estados, which blew up after a hit ignited her cargo of jet fuel and ammunition. Likewise, Yarmouth intercepted and engaged the Argentine coaster ARA Monsunen with her twin 4.5 guns west of Lively Island, driving her aground.

These offshore bombardment missions also enabled the RN to set up Mirage/Skyhawk traps by taking a Type 42 destroyer delivering NGFS ashore and adding a Type 22 frigate to it which stood a further 10-20 miles out to sea. The idea was that the Type 42’s 4.5-incher would bring out an Argentine airstrike the next morning, which would be downed by the combined Sea Dart/Sea Wolf missiles of the two warships. This was known as a Type 64 group and was credited with bagging at least two Argentine Sky Hawks.

The missions, close to shore, proved dangerous. On 12 June 1982, the destroyer HMS Glamorgan (D19) was attacked with an MM38 Exocet missile, fired from an improvised shore-based launcher just after she supported the Royal Marines’ capture of the Two Sisters hill outside of Stanley. The Exocet claimed 14 of Glamorgan’s crew.

Nonetheless, the mission continued.

The frigate HMS Ambuscade (F172), according to her war diary, fired 58 rounds in the area of Port Stanley airfield on 30 May, went back for a second run on the night of 7/8 June during which she fired 104 shells. On the night of 13 June, the frigate fired 228 4.5-inch shells in support of 2 Para’s assault of Wireless Ridge in company with fellow tin cans HMS Active (220 rounds fired) and HMS Avenger (100 rounds fired). Not bad considering Ambuscade suffered from a cracked hull and broken stabilizers throughout the war.

Sadly, the only British civilian casualties of the Falklands War came from naval bombardment, with the frigate HMS Avenger (F185) landing shells on a residence just outside Argentine-occupied Port Stanley, killing three locals and wounding several others. The forward observer had not been aware of their presence in the area and, in post-war analysis, it was found that the ships’ gun beacon MIP radar malfunctioned and was set on the wrong datum.

4.5″/55 (11.4 cm) Mark 8 Mod 0 on HMS Avenger F185 in January 1992. U.S. Navy Photograph No. DN-SC-92-04971.

In all, some 8,000 4.5-inch shells were fired by Royal Navy escorts during the two-month Falklands Islands conflict, compared to some 17,000 105mm shells lit off by the Army’s gunners. In many cases, the larger naval shells, fitted with proximity fuses that detonated them 10 yards off the deck rather than after they were buried in the soggy sub-polar moss of the Falklands landscape, were considered more effective. 

Still, the lesson was learned and the Batch 3 Type 22 frigates, constructed after the Falklands, were designed to carry 4.5-inch guns whereas their preceding classmates were missile-only. Further, instead of disbanding, the elite forward observers of 148 Battery are still very much active as part of the Commando Gunners of 29 Commando.

Importantly, the Royal Navy today still mounts 4.5s on all of their frigates and destroyers– a factor the U.S. Navy, with its preference for a 57mm main gun on everything smaller than an Aegis destroyer, could probably learn from.

For more information on artillery used in the Falklands, see the relevant section in Firepower in Limited War by Robert Scales and the 27-page scholarly paper Under Fire: The Falklands War and the Revival of Naval Gunfire Support by Steven Paget.